Point of Control Read Free Page B

day, and her teacher had let the kids out to play for the last few minutes before the adults arrived to take them home. Puffy clouds drifted across a blue sky, and she felt happy to be outside.
    Jack’s mother was the first to arrive. He picked up his backpack and waved at her. “Bye, Andra. My mom’s here.”
    “Bye.”
    She saw her babysitter’s car pull to the curb outside the playground fence. She would have time for one more ride down the slide.
    The boy in front of her in line, Mark, turned to face her. “Why don’t you have a mother?”
    He’d asked her several times before, and she didn’t want to talk about it. “You already know.” She decided not to get on the slide.
    As she walked away, he grabbed her arm. “My dad says your mom ran away.”
    What? Confused and angry, she shouted, “That’s a lie!”
    “Don’t call me a liar! Just because your mother’s a cheat.”
    A cheat? Not her mother! Her mother was dead. Bailey decided not to get mad or hurt, because she hated those feelings, and they didn’t fix anything. But she had to put a stop to Mark’s meanness about her mother. She pulled her fist back and punched him in the face as hard as she could.
    He staggered back, holding his nose as blood gushed from it.
    Intense feelings pulsed in her body. She didn’t understand them, but she liked them. “Don’t ever say that again!” She stepped forward to hit him in the stomach.
    Their teacher was suddenly there and grabbed her arm. “Andra, no! We don’t hit each other.” The teacher bent over to look her in the eye. “Tell him you’re sorry.”
    She rarely regretted anything—except not having a mother—and didn’t understand the concept. “I’m not sorry.”
    “You should be. We don’t solve our problems with violence.”
    That didn’t make sense. She’d solved her problem with Mark with one punch to his mean face. She pulled free of the teacher’s grip, ran through the opening in the fenced yard, and climbed into her babysitter’s car.
    Later at home, she asked her father, “Why did Mark say Mom left? He called her a cheat too.”
    Her father sat quietly for a long moment, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Finally, he said, “Your mother did leave us. But I didn’t want you to know. I shouldn’t have lied.”
    Her mother hadn’t wanted to live with them? An ache she’d never felt before filled her stomach. “Why? I don’t understand.”
    “It’s complicated. But it was mostly about me. I’m hard to live with.”
    Mostly? “She left because of me too?”
    For a moment, he looked hurt. “She just couldn’t handle being a parent. She loved you.” He hugged her, a rare moment. “I love you.”
    Her father went off to make dinner, and confusion set in. Her mother loved her, but had walked out of her life anyway. Her father loved her, but had lied to her. Adults could not be trusted. Love could not be trusted.
     
    She’d been expelled, and her father had explained how, in the next school, she would have to obey rules even when she didn’t understand them. And she would have to apologize even if she didn’t mean it. It was her first realization that she was different from other kids. Eventually, she learned not to be violent. If you hit, you sit— in the principal’s office, grounded in her room at home, or in jail. Confinement was the worse consequence of all. That early incident with Mark had also been her first exposure to the internal conflict she would face her whole life—should she do what came naturally to her, or what was socially acceptable? Her own perspective always seemed more logical than others’, but when she acted on it, she usually ended up alienated or in trouble.
    Later, in college, when Bailey had studied the literature on sociopaths, she wondered if her condition was based purely on the genetics passed down from her father or whether a lack of bonding with a mother had stunted her emotional growth. Or maybe her own lack of