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left to expel. At night, there was the stabbing hunger, so severe she could not be still. Living in Deep Creek with so many brothers and sisters, hunger had rocked her to sleep many nights, but it had never gripped her as it did when her insides churned and groaned as if she’d forever be empty. She drank water, rubbed her stomach, tried to sleep. Nothing helped. The hunger, unwilling to be silenced, prompted her to smuggle slices of bologna into her room and nibble quietly as she listened for her daddy’s footsteps.
    She soon decided the problem wasn’t her body, but her daddy’s home. Its rules had tightened around her like a shoe she’d outgrown. She was newly sixteen, but the time had come for her to travel that same road her brothers, sisters, and mother had traveled. She devised a plan. With only a week to set it in motion, she had little time to be afraid.
    That morning, she stood at the living room threshold, her body bent, hovering over the line that separated her from her daddy.She knocked, though there was no door. He didn’t look at her when he belted, “What you want, Pretty?” The syllables collided as he leaned back in his chair, his legs propped on the coffee table, his eyes turned to the window. His belly, visible from behind the arm of the chair, looked like a sack of laundry. His plaid shirt was splattered with splotches of paint and weld burns that had singed through parts of the material. The legs of his pants were rolled, revealing shins and ankles that resembled swollen pork loins bulging through lines of butcher twine.
    She walked to his chair and stood in front of him, careful not to obscure his view of the window. She held the paper in her hand, the one that announced she was one of a few students, a sophomore no less, chosen to attend the summer Upward Bound Program at Norfolk State University. She inched the paper toward him as he shooed her. His voice, booming, shook her and the paper she held. “What you want, girl?”
    She wanted to turn away, letting what had once been celebratory news die within her, yet she did not move. Everything around her grew quiet. She stood alone in that room, even though her daddy sat in front of her.
    â€œDaddy,” she said to the floor. “I got accepted to Upward Bound. I wrote one of the best essays in class and I was one of the only girls they chose.”
    He grunted, wiped his nose, and leaned back, never turning his head her way.
    â€œWhat the hell is Upward Bound? And who told you to do some essay without my permission?”
    â€œIt was an assignment in school, Daddy,” she responded. “They made us do it. I didn’t even know it was a contest.”
    She prayed he wouldn’t smell the lie on her lips. She’d known they would choose the best ones in the school. That’s why she had written an outline and sharpened her pencils for a whole minute before she began writing. She’d never liked writing before, but she wrote as if she loved words, as if her need to escape could be funneled from mind through pencil to paper.
    â€œThey said mine was one of the best, Daddy. That’s why they want me to go, even though I’m so young.”
    He looked at her then, his stare so sharp one would think he was whipping her in his mind.
    â€œDon’t no-damn-body at no-damn-school got the right to say where you can go and when. Who the hell they think they are and who the hell you think you are?”
    She had no answer, as that question never required one. She was nobody next to her daddy, no more than a portrait nailed to a wall. Whatever opinions she had she’d stolen from him, and she could tell his opinion concerning Norfolk State was not one she wished to possess. She considered retreating before dismissal, but she’d learned earlier in life never to turn head or back to her daddy. He could get from one side of the room to another with one jolt of his body.
    Big Boone stared