Steve, Steve Baker, was Mother’s second husband, or at lease as I’d always thought, my stepfather, and at first I’d been nuts about him, his tricks that he’d play on me, his singing in the tub, and his jokes. It really started before I was born, but I didn’t know that at first, and so far as I was concerned it started three years ago, when Steve commenced beating me up. But everyone calls me Mandy, and now for what happened to me: Before that I was Amanda Vernick, as I’ll explain. It’s Amanda Wilmer now, after the papers were taken on me week before last. And if it seems funny that I should tell it at all, instead of shutting up about it and letting it be forgotten, I can only say I’m not telling a thing that hasn’t been already told, ’specially in the adoption papers, except they didn’t tell it right, as I’m trying to do. I’m putting it in just the same as the trouble, the whole trouble, has to go in too, or the rest of it makes no sense. But if it’s something special, that’s not exactly my fault, and if it’s partly what caused the trouble, that isn’t my fault either. It’s Mother’s, and I could see what it was like when she walked around and when I looked at myself in the mirror without any clothes on, which I did often enough, perhaps oftener than I should. I am a girl, sixteen years old, five foot two, 36-24-35, 105 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes, with a so-so face and not-too-bad-figure - call it extra good. So OK, maybe I was a jerk, but if so, I was a crazy jerk and not a silly one as the papers made me out. My father, my dreaming about him, my trying to be with him, is what I’m writing about, not so much that other thing, my helping out on the $120,000 holdup - so I don’t look like such a jerk.
But if I actually meant to get on that bus, to leave my happy home (my more or less happy home), for good and all and forever, I didn’t know then and don’t know now. So i went in the jewelry store, bought my ticket to Baltimore, and stepped out onto the street again, on my way to visit my father, to go to his arms and be loved.
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