The Orange Bottle
My father thought throwing me out into a freezing October storm would teach me a lesson.
Three hours later, a police officer called our house and asked him a question that made his blood run cold.
“Mr. Walls, are you aware your fifteen-year-old daughter was found nearly four miles from home?”
But that wasn’t the worst thing the officer told him. The worst part came a few seconds later. And by then, my father couldn’t even stand up without holding onto the wall.
My name doesn’t matter as much as what happened to me that night. Not yet, anyway. I’ll tell you my name at the end, when it means something.
What matters is that I was fifteen years old, soaked to the bone, and about to learn that the people who are supposed to protect you can sometimes become the very reason you need saving.
It started with my older sister, Karen.
It was a Tuesday night in late October. I was at the kitchen table doing algebra. Systems of equations. Two lines on a graph, and you had to find the one point where they crossed.
I remember that because I was stuck on number fourteen when Karen came down the stairs.
She was nineteen. She had straight auburn hair like our mom used to have, and she wore it down over one shoulder the way Mom did too. She was holding something in her fist. A small orange prescription bottle.
She walked right past me into the living room, where Dad was watching the Weather Channel. The storm was coming in from the west. A big red and purple blob on the map.
“Dad,” Karen said. “I need to show you something.”
I put my pencil down and went to the doorway.
Dad looked up from his recliner. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders, with graying hair he kept cut short. He drove a delivery truck for a beverage company, and his hands were rough and always a little bit cracked.
Karen held out the bottle. “I found these. With her stuff.”
She tilted her head toward me.
I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
Karen wouldn’t look at me. She kept her eyes on Dad.
“In her backpack,” she said. “In the front pocket. I was looking for a phone charger.”
My father stood up slowly. He looked at the bottle in Karen’s hand. Then he turned toward me.
I had seen my dad angry before. I’d seen him yell at the TV during football and slam the truck door when it wouldn’t start. I’d seen him go quiet and hard when Mom was sick, the way a wall is quiet.
But I had never seen him look at me like this. Like I was something he’d stepped in.
“Drugs?” he said. “You’re bringing drugs into my house?”
“They aren’t mine.”
“Don’t you lie to me!”
His voice slammed through the room. The picture of Mom on the bookshelf actually rattled.
Karen shifted behind him, still holding the bottle. She had it turned so the label faced her palm. All I could see was orange plastic and a white cap.
Dad never asked to see it. He never reached out and turned it around. He never read the name.
That should have told me something.
Because two days earlier, on Sunday afternoon, I had come downstairs and heard Dad on the house phone in the kitchen. He was talking low.
“No, she’s not available to discuss a prescription,” he said. “She’s fifteen. Yeah. I’ll look into it.”
When he hung up, I asked him what that was about.
“Insurance mix-up,” he said. He didn’t look at me. He went out to the garage.
I’d never been prescribed anything in my life. Not even allergy medicine.
Now, two days later, Karen was standing in our living room saying she’d found drugs in my backpack.
And somehow, Dad wasn’t interested in putting those two things together.
“I have given you everything,” Dad shouted. “Everything. A roof over your head. Food on the table. I work fifty hours a week. And this is how you pay me back?”
“Dad, I swear to God, I’ve never seen that bottle before.”
“Your sister found it in your bag!”
I looked at Karen. She was standing near the hallway now, half in shadow. Her face was pale. She looked strange. Nervous. Like she was the one in trouble.
“Karen,” I whispered. “Tell him the truth.”
Her lips parted.
For one second, I really thought she was going to do it. I could see the words right there, behind her teeth. Her chin was shaking.
Then she lowered her eyes to the carpet.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
That was all. I’m sorry. She didn’t say what she was sorry for.
Dad took it the way he wanted to take it. Like she was sorry she had to turn me in.
Chapter Two: The Deadbolt
Dad pointed at the front door.
“Get out.”
I froze. I honestly thought I’d heard him wrong.
“What?”
“Get out of my house.” His face was red all the way up to his hairline. “I don’t need a sick daughter. I already watched one person I love waste away in this house. I’m not doing it again.”
The words knocked the air out of my lungs.
He meant Mom. Mom had died three years earlier, of ovarian cancer, in the hospital bed we set up in the dining room. She was forty-four. At the end she weighed ninety pounds and she couldn’t remember my middle name.
And now he was saying I was like that. Sick. Wasting away. Something he had to get rid of before it ruined him again.
I waited for him to take it back. I waited for his face to crack and for him to say, I didn’t mean that, kiddo.
He didn’t.
I looked toward the window. Rain was coming down so hard it bounced off the porch railing. The wind was bending the little maple tree in our front yard almost sideways.
“Dad,” I said. “It’s pouring outside.”
“Should have thought about that before you brought that garbage under my roof.”
I was wearing a navy sweatshirt with my school’s name on it, faded jeans with a hole in one knee, and my old Converse sneakers with the laces I never tied right. My dark brown hair was up in a messy ponytail.
My phone was upstairs, charging on my nightstand. My winter coat was hanging in the hallway closet. My wallet, with twenty-two dollars and my school ID, was on my desk.
“Can I at least get my…”
“Now!”
Karen flinched like he’d hit her. 