When I was twelve, my father found out that my mother has been cheating on him. I never did discover how he’d found out, but then, I’d never actually asked. It was irrelevant, really. The important part was that we were leaving, again, but this time he was sober and we were actually bothering to pack.

Well, he was. I was rolling my eyes to myself and shoving random clothes in a duffel bag under the pretence of obedience. This was so not the right time to be defiant.

I sat in the back seat and counted red cars. I tried to find words in license plates. One said DIK. Heh, DIK. That wasn’t even spelled the right way to be funny. I decided to just be grateful he wasn’t drunk and that his insane ramblings had so far been limited to him mumbling to himself.

I found it pretty fucking rich that he was so pissed off about my mum cheating on him when he fucked prostitutes. I’d figured that one a few months after I’d witnessed it and frankly, I doubted it was either the first or the last time he’d done it. Still, he had always been a man of double standards. Rich it may have been, but surprising it was not.

We drove all day, stopping only once for gas and lunch, or rather, his lunch. I didn’t really feel in the mood to make a fuss about not being fed, but I did hope he planned to feed me at some point. I did require food to live, or so the world would have me believe. I’d never actually tested that particular theory – the stakes were rather high.

We didn’t stop at a motel until dark and, more than anything, I was just annoyed at how far we’d have to drive back again the next day. No way I needed another full day in the car with that bastard.

My father left almost immediately after we’d checked in. I decided, as I went through a list in my head of all the places he could have gone, that this could not possibly be a good thing. Still, I hadn’t exactly been looking forward to spending more alone time with him. Maybe he’d blow off whatever steam he needed to elsewhere.

It took him well over an hour to return, but when he did it was with a six pack of beer under one arm and a woman wrapped under his other. My father gave me a challenging smile, like he was deeply interested in what I would do. The woman’s smile was suggestive when she looked at me, and that was what really did it. I took the key to the room and, without a word, went for a walk.

It was cold. It was really fucking cold, and I hadn’t exactly thought to bring a jacket out with me. I’d been hungry, too, but now I just felt nauseous. I really didn’t want to be thinking about what was going on in that room, but I couldn’t help it. Besides, I would need to have the situation figured out by the time I went back in there.

Last time, having sex had mellowed him out, but this time he had alcohol and that did the opposite. I wondered which one had the stronger effect. Probably alcohol, but it could also make him sleepy, so maybe he’d just tire himself out. Yeah, that was probably what would happen.

I didn’t have a watch, but it seemed like a long time before the door to the room opened and the woman appeared. My father pulled her back for a moment and gave her a rough kiss on the lips. I cringed.

He stared at her ass as she walked away, this big stupid grin on his face that didn’t suit him at all, then turned towards me. “Jude!” he said, more loudly than necessary, and I jumped because I hadn’t realised he’d noticed me. “Come on in now, it’s cold.”

I hesitated. He certainly didn’t seem tired, but he didn’t seem angry, either. Too happy, if anything, too… something. He called out to me again and I caved. It was cold out.

“Woman are great,” he announced as I entered the room. I raised an eyebrow to myself as I went and got a jacket out of my duffel bag. “Well, except your mother,” he continued, scowling and running a hand through his hair as he sat down on the edge of the bed.

I didn’t respond. We both preferred it that way, really – I was just an excuse for him to listen to himself talk.

“Do you like women yet? Well, I mean girls, I guess. Twelve year olds aren’t really women, are they? Have you hit puberty yet?” he cocked his head to the side and examined me with his eyes. It made me uncomfortable. “I think you shoulda by this age, but you don’t look like much of a man.”

That was one of his favourite things to do – insult my masculinity. Not that I cared much, to be honest. I wasn’t half as concerned about being macho as he was.

He flopped back on the bed and then sat up again quickly, for no apparent reason. “But then, you’ve always been kinda pretty. Are you sure you’re not a girl?” He laughed and it wasn’t even malicious, just stupid. I would have assumed he was drunk if this was anything like how he acted when he was.

And what the fuck? I was so not pretty. Or girly. I was just twelve, and I looked no less masculine than any other boy my age. I had my father’s blonde hair and light blue eyes, but beyond that, we looked nothing alike. Combined with the less bulky figure I’d inherited from my mother, the features I shared with my father tended to make me look innocent. They had no such effect on him – he just wasn’t built in a way that allowed any such façade.

He reached over and grabbed himself a beer and I noticed as he cracked it open that it was his first. Huh. He patted the bed beside me. “Come sit with me.”

I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously and stayed seated in a wicker chair near the door. “No.”

He laughed like I’d made some kind of joke. “We should get along,” he said, and that was almost laughable. “It’s just gonna be you and me from now on, so we should get along.” He walked over to me and knelt in front of me, which was weird, considering how much he loved to tower over me. He placed a hand on my knee and I strongly considered punching him in the face. I was fairly sure I could have, at that moment. I possibly wouldn’t live to tell the tale, but it would have been very satisfying.

He was gross. I didn’t know what he’d done with that woman, but I had some pretty vivid ideas and they were all gross. I was glad I was wearing jeans, but my skin still crawled where his hand rested. “Don’t,” I said, jiggling my knee in an attempt to dislodge his hand without actually having to touch it. I was surprised when he complied.

He didn’t seem to get that I didn’t want him to touch me, though, assuming he would have cared, because he wrapped an arm around me and physically lifted me out of the chair, dragging me over to the bed. He stopped touching me as soon as I was on it, though, so I decided it was best to just stay there and play along with whatever weird father son thing his increasingly obviously drugged up brain had come up with.

I dodged a can of beer that he’d tossed at me and it took me a moment to realise he was giving it to me, not intentionally using it as a weapon. I nudged it back at him. “No thanks.”

“Come on!” he said and threw an arm around me. “You never know, it might make a man out of you.”

“Don’t touch me,” I said with forced but blatantly tenuous calm and attempted to dislodge his arm.

He had me flipped onto my back and pinned down in an instant. “You always have to make everything difficult, don’t you?” he asked and somehow managed to combine anger and good natured humour into a single emotion. It was impressive. “I know your mother let you get away with all kinds of shit, but things are going to change now. You do what I say when I say it, understand?”

I didn’t respond. For some reason, I was more scared of him in that moment than I’d ever been before. He was unpredictable and his pupils were huge and I was trapped and he’d had sex with that woman right there, on that bed, hadn’t he? I freaked out.

He hadn’t been expecting the struggle, or my unyielding determination to get free. He definitely hadn’t expected me to bite him. Somehow – and I would have loved to know how I managed it – I got free. I backed up to the other side of the room, near the door, and stared at him with wide eyes. He looked down at the teeth mark on his forearm and the bruise beginning to form around it, and then back up at me. And laughed.

He didn’t sleep for hours, pacing and ranting and laughing to himself at his own private jokes. I watched him from my wicker chair by the door, thinking of all the ways I could hurt him if I had to. He wouldn’t be expecting it, which was my main advantage. I also had speed and a clear head on my side. I’d probably be best off getting in a quick shot to disable him for a moment, then running. Maybe I could lock myself in the bathroom if the front door would take too long, or was blocked.

He didn’t come near me again that night, though, and though I was relieved I also found myself strangely disappointed. Some part of me had been looking forward to having an excuse to hit him, even just once, despite the danger it would put me in. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my jacket around to cover them, and watched him sleep. At dawn, I went to watch the sun rise.

Afterwards I treated myself to a pancake breakfast, funded by money stolen from my father’s wallet. I felt rebellious and brave doing it, but at the same time I was scared and that made me even angrier. If he fed me, I wouldn’t have been so hungry! I had a right to take it.

When I returned to the room at 9am, my father was still asleep. He snored. The room smelled of beer and sex, and it made me want to wash even though I didn’t smell. I had a shower and changed my clothes anyway. It didn’t help, but at least I felt properly clean when I decided to go and wait outside the room for my father to wake up.

When he finally did emerge just before noon, he came out looking like he was going to get angry. He paused and looked down at me. “Oh.”

I stared up at him cautiously, but he didn’t look like he was about to start anything. I stood up anyway. I didn’t like being any lower than him than I had to be.

“We’re going,” he said shortly. “Get your stuff.”

I sighed. Surprising, real surprising. I did what he said anyway – the sooner we got going, the sooner we would be home. Home was a comparatively good thing.

After he’d started driving, it took me a while to realise: we were going the wrong way. We weren’t turning around and going back. I felt myself start to panic a little. Was he really that upset about my mum cheating on him? That was stupid! He slept with other women. Was it because she got to have sex with someone else without having to pay for it? At least, I assumed she hadn’t been paying.

We stopped for lunch at a pub and I had a burger and fries, so I guess my father had been planning on feeding me after all. Still, he didn’t appear to have noticed the money missing from his wallet. I wasn’t sorry I’d taken it.

While I ate my chips at a table, he sat at the bar, which was a good thing because I figured his company was bad for my digestion. I’d been around enough drunks before that the other patrons didn’t scare me, just made me wary. There were a lot of different kinds of drunks, I’d found: happy drunks, silly drunks, sleepy drunks, horny drunks and angry drunks. It was the last two you had to watch out for, though some would debate that it was only the latter. A man sat down on the chair to my right and I eyed him out of the corner of my eye. If I didn’t acknowledge him, he might go away.

“Hey, kid,” he slurred, wobbling dangerously as he leant over and nudged his shoulder against my. I turned my head sharply and glared at him.

He laughed. Fucking hell, why did nobody take my angry looks seriously? Did I really look that harmless? For that matter, why did everyone keep talking to me? It wasn’t like I exactly invited company. At school, nobody bothered. It was only older people, anyhow – mostly teenagers at the park who saw me as a novelty, I supposed. Maybe I was just a novelty here, too.

“Not talking?” he asked like I hadn’t just given him a look that suggested I’d rather cut off his testicles than have a conversation. “Wanna beer?”

I think I may have actually bared my teeth. “No.”

“It can be dangerous for a kid here, all on your own,” he went on, completely ignoring me. “But you’re not a kid, are you?” He smiled at me in a way that made my skin crawl, though I wasn’t sure why.

I was about to tell him that I wasn’t there on my own when he scooted his chair closer to my own and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. He wrapped. An arm. Around. My shoulders. For a moment, I froze. Then I punched him in the face. It hurt my knuckles.

I was about as surprised as he was by what I had done, and was stunned for a moment, just sitting there and watching the man grip at his bruised cheek. The reflexes that had caused me to lash out had momentarily abandoned me, long enough for him to get a hand around my wrist.

“You little bastard!” he shouted, and by then I think we had the attention of most of the patrons in the bar. He stood up, pulling me with him, and then punched me in the face.

It hurt like hell and my nose was bleeding, but I’d had worse. I instinctively rolled away, just like I’d practised with Jake. My reflexes were back with a vengeance and I used the momentum of the roll to get back on my feet. I wobbled but remained standing, ready for a fight – he wouldn’t be waiting politely for me to recover.

But to my surprise, I wouldn’t have to fight him – a couple of guys had gotten up and grabbed him before he’d had the chance to even try to go for me again. Huh. Another guy had moved to my side and was reaching for me. I leapt back, but when I looked at his face all I saw there was concern. I realised he’d just been trying to help me and felt a little bad.

“Jude,” a deep voice said and I spun around and somehow I’d forgotten my father had been there. I wondered if I was about to get in trouble from him or from that guy’s friends or from the people who worked in the pub, because I had hit that guy first. I hadn’t meant to, but I wasn’t sorry. My father smiled.

He walked over to me and clapped me on the back. I winced. I must have hit it when I’d fallen. “Maybe you won’t be a wuss forever after all, eh?” my dad said with a chuckle.

I frowned. I didn’t feel proud. He never complimented me and he always said I was a wuss, but now he was, in his own way, saying that I’d done something right. And I didn’t feel proud. It wasn’t because I thought I’d been wrong about hitting the guy, or that I was ashamed, either. Somehow, his approval made it less of a victory. Like he sullied it. I let him have his moment and accepted some serviettes to clean up my nose while the guy who’d hit me, the guy who I’d hit, was kicked out.

And suddenly, everyone liked me. Why? Because I’d punched some guy none of them even seemed to have known? Did they even know why I’d done it? I wasn’t sure I did. I’d had drunks touch me before and hadn’t done anything but shoved them off. He was just different somehow. He’d felt dangerous.

My father was acting like I was his awesome son who he was very proud of and who had learnt everything I knew from him. Right. The only thing I’d just put into practise that he’d taught me was how to take a hit. I got free orange juice.

“Why’d you hit him, anyway?” my father asked once we were back in the car, as though it were an afterthought. It had never really mattered to him why I’d done it, I realised – he just wanted me to be like him; a violent prick.

I shrugged at him from where I sat in the back seat, staring out the window as we continued driving in the wrong direction. “He touched me. I didn’t like it.”

“He touched you?” my dad inquired, and it sounded like it was a bigger deal to him than it had truly ended up being to me. “Where?”

“He put his arm around me.”

“Oh,” my dad said, as if that were okay. Where had he thought the man had touched me? “He deserved it anyway. You’re my boy.”

The way he said it made me intensely uncomfortable. It was just a touch possessive, like he was the only one allowed to hurt me. I slept in the car until we stopped at a motel for the night.

I was grateful when my father went straight to bed – I’d been pretty anxious about the possibility of a repeat of the previous night. Despite my lingering fatigue, I lay awake for a while in my makeshift bed on the floor.

We were going to keep going this time, weren’t we? We weren’t going back. He hadn’t said where we were going and I hadn’t asked, but I got the feeling he actually had a destination in mind. It could be a nice place, I told myself. Maybe there’d be nice people there, people I’d like. But I didn’t like anyone, and I’d be with my father and I’d be his son even if I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. I’d be his because he said I was and he was bigger and stronger than me and because, much as I loathed it, I relied on him. Not for much, mind – just money, really. But it was enough. I knew I couldn’t make my own, I knew what happened to runaways. I’d seen them. I’d seen what they did to feed themselves and their other more recently acquired appetites.

I dreamt of running, but mostly of getting caught.