Mia Pirelli attended St. Christopher’s Catholic School. The school year began a few weeks ago and Mia had always been a good student, usually getting straight A’s. She was just beginning eighth grade and it didn’t escape her notice that she was in the same grade her mother had been in when she had become pregnant.

Mia was generally well liked at school and had a lot of friends with the same interests. Her best friend was Carly Flemming. They had been inseparable since the first grade. Carly lived two blocks away from Mia and when Mia wasn’t at her own house, she was usually at Carly’s house. They had other friends, but their loyalty was to each other first and foremost. That’s why Carly felt a strong obligation to let Mia know about all the rumors she had been hearing.

“Now don’t get upset Mia,” Carly felt the need to preface her news.

“What is it Carly?” Mia asked. She hated when Carly was dramatic and kept her waiting like this.

“I don’t want you to be upset,” Carly said slowly.

“For God’s sake spit it out,” Mia said impatiently.

Carly suddenly wondered if she was doing the right thing, but she reasoned that it was better for Mia to hear about this from her than someone else. “I heard from Brandon, who heard from his mother’s friend April, that well, your mother might be back in town.”

Mia’s jaw dropped open. Of all the things Mia had been expecting Carly to say, this wasn’t one of them. She thought perhaps Carly was going to tell her something trivial such as a boy liked her, or that she had failed her last test, but not that her mother had come back. Mia wasn’t quite sure how to react. Carly had been one of the few people Mia had talked with about her mother over the years because the subject was off limits at home.

Carly went on to explain what else she had heard, “I guess she got really drunk the other night at Red’s Barn, and well, caused a scandal.”

As the story unfolded from Carly’s lips, Mia thought she was going to be sick. She stared straight ahead as Carly continued talking about how her mother had danced around naked at the bar. That wasn’t the truth, but it happened to be the story that was currently circulating.

Carly wished in her heart of hearts she hadn’t been the one to break the news to Mia because Mia had been silent ever since she began talking.

“Hey I’m sure it’s just a rumor,” Carly said as they reached the point at where they each went their separate ways.

Mia knew her friend was just trying to make her feel better, “No big deal,” Mia shrugged, and she tried to laugh it off. “I’m sure it’s just a rumor, plus if my mother was back in town who would care. She’s never meant anything to me,” Mia said.

Mia bid Carly goodbye and continued on her way home. She paused as she walked through the back door because there hanging on a nail near the back door was the old black leather belt. It had hung there Mia’s entire life, and although it seemed like something she would have gotten used to over the years, she never had. She always deliberately took her friends in and out of the front door, even though her grandma would sometimes scold her for doing so. But she didn’t want her friends to see the black leather belt hanging near the back door of the house.

Mia’s grandfather had only used the belt twice to punish her. Once when she was about eight years old and made up an elaborate lie to cover up the fact she had stolen some perfume from the drug store. She had been forced to return the perfume to the store, and if that wasn’t humiliating enough, her grandfather decided to use the belt to make sure the lesson sunk in.

The second time her grandpa used the belt to punish her had been less than two years ago. She had been twelve years old then and she and her friends had vandalized a nearby house that was being renovated. The owners were out of town. It had all been done in fun, and none of them had meant to cause any damage, but they had gotten carried away and broken a couple of windows and spilled paint and plaster. All of them had been fingered as culprits when Mary Brenner decided to make a full confession to Father Lionel at weekly confessional.

The two times her grandfather had used the belt to punish her, he had doubled it over and made her bend over and place her hands behind her knees. He then told her to lift her skirt so he could strap her over the top of her panties. He had given her one lick per year of age. The first time he had hit her eight times, which she thought was bad enough, but the second time he had given her twelve licks, and that had been nearly unbearable.

She had heard stories about her grandpa’s belt as she grew up, it was legendary. Uncle Frank had once let it slip that her mother had been a frequent recipient of the belt and so when Mia had to be punished with the belt, she had decided if her mother could take it, she could too. But the truth was, Mia had never forgotten the sting of the belt and it was an experience she worked very hard at avoiding. It wasn’t difficult because Mia had always been a very good girl at heart.

Mia had also been thankful St. Christopher’s had done away with corporal punishment by the time she became a student there. She was not a trouble maker by any means, but there was a certain comfort in knowing that being paddled at school wasn’t even a remote possibility.

Mia had learned the tradition of corporal punishment had been in full effect when her mother had attended St. Christopher’s Catholic School because Sister Agatha, who had apparently been there since the dawn of time, recalled with fondness a few stories about Mia’s mother and had shared them with Mia. Apparently her mother had been a bit outspoken and mischievous and had made several trips to Father Tom’s office to receive swats with his big wooden paddle. Apparently Father Tom had been quite strict, according to Sister Agatha.

Even though her grandpa had used the belt to punish her twice, Mia still loved him with all her heart. She knew the belt was his way of trying to teach her obedience, but she hated the belt and the fact that it hung out in the open at their house for all to see.

She had always called her grandpa “Popoff,” which was odd she supposed, but as a baby she could never say grandpa, so as she grew up the name Popoff somehow stuck. He wasn’t her father, he was her grandfather, and his own children called him Pop, so Popoff seemed like a good substitute.

Mia hadn’t dared to suggest to her grandpa that he should take the belt down and not hang it out for all to see, but the older she got the more it bothered her. She didn’t know anyone else’s parents who hung a belt up in their house as a reminder to behave. For that matter, she didn’t know any other parents who used a belt to punish their children. Most of Mia’s friends cracked jokes about the belt when they saw it, and she knew they didn’t think much about it because her grandpa was from the old school, but it still bothered her.

“Hey Grams,” Mia said as she walked past the belt into the kitchen. Her grandmother Claudia was leaning over the kitchen sink peeling potatoes.

Claudia smiled warmly up at her granddaughter, “How was school?”

Mia had long ago learned not to be transparent when it came to her feelings, especially about her mother, so she pretended all was well, “Oh the usual,” Mia said quickly, “But I have a ton of homework, so I’m going up to my room to get started on it,” She grabbed an apple out of the bowl on the table and headed up the stairs.

“Good idea to get your homework done early,” Claudia called after her granddaughter.

But when Mia was alone in her bedroom with the door closed she didn’t study. Instead she placed her books on the floor and lay face down on her bed. The tears began to sting her eyes. She cried silently as she stared at the faded pink flowers on the wallpaper lining her room. She had adored that wallpaper as a little girl, but now that she was a teenager, she hated it.

Mia couldn’t understand why her grandpa hated her mother so much. None of it made any sense to her. Uncle Frank often tried to help Mia understand her grandpa’s reasons, but he was always afraid of saying too much, so his information never seemed to help any.

Mia’s heart ached. If what Carly told her was true, it meant her mother was nothing more than a cheap harlot. But there was a part of Mia that didn’t care. She just wanted to see her mother. She longed to know what her mother looked like. Mia had only seen one picture of her mother and it had been a long time ago. Her Uncle Frank had shown her a picture that he had nabbed before all the pictures of Angel had been destroyed. But her mother hadn’t been very old in that picture, so there was no way of knowing what she looked like now.

Mia couldn’t stop her tears. She loved her grandparents, but the way her grandfather was when it came to her mother broke her heart and confused her.
***

Angel dried her tears after her recent encounter with Jordan Parker. It was time to go back to Frank’s apartment. She nervously lit a cigarette and pulled her car back onto the road with the intention of going back to Frank’s apartment. She couldn’t believe the old Ford Mustang still ran as well as it did. She reasoned that someone must have given the car some love because it had carried her a very long ways.

Angel’s intention was to drive straight home to Frank’s apartment, but instead her car veered along the streets until she reached Elgin Avenue on the other side of town. Almost without thinking she made the sharp right turn onto Elgin Avenue and drove down the street. She slowed down when she saw the old house looming as big as life on the right hand side of the road. It was where she had grown up.

The house hadn’t changed much, except the trees and shrubs had grown up more. Other than that, the little white house looked exactly as she remembered it, at least from the outside. She drove past it at first and then flipped her car around and parked across the street, looking out her car window at the house.

She lit a cigarette as memories of her childhood began to flood through her mind. Her childhood had been a happy time. She had spent her summers running through the sprinklers, playing with her friends in the yard, attending birthday parties, and enjoying backyard barbecues. They had gone sledding in winter and played kick-the-can in the late summer evenings. In many ways she had the ideal childhood.

She had been popular in school and was pleased when she became a cheerleader in seventh and eighth grade at St. Christopher’s. Those were happy times and she could remember coming home and seeing the pride in her father’s eyes as she told him stories about what had gone on at school that day. Every day seemed like a new adventure back then and Angel had been full of life and love.

Then one dark afternoon she went to see Coach Wiley Bills alone in his office and her meeting with Coach Bills had forever changed her life. He was the best looking coach ever to come to St. Christopher’s

Unfortunately, Angel had been a bit of a troublemaker in school without really meaning to be. She was always being summoned to Father Tom’s office because of her ongoing list of demerits. After five demerits she was usually sentenced to three swats with Father Tom’s paddle.

The paddle swats weren’t that bad usually, because although Father Tom had a reputation for being strict and mean, he was a softy when it came to Angel. A lot of times he didn’t swat her nearly as hard as he could have swatted her and eventually the swats seemed like nothing in comparison to her father’s belt. She had been spanked by her father as far back as she could remember, and he always used the thick black leather belt that hung on the nail near the back door of the house.

Unfortunately when she got paddled at school by Father Tom, her father felt it necessary to punish her at home as well. She never could quite understand the reasoning behind that, but over time she came to accept it.

She laughed to herself as she recalled the few times she had tried to hide the fact that Father Tom had paddled her at school, so she could avoid her father’s belt. It had backfired every time because it seemed that no matter what strategy she used, her father always found out the truth and gave her an extra lick or two for trying to be sneaky.

Her father always delivered one belt lick per year of age. As she got older, the extra lick really began to make a difference. But Angel had to admit that even though the licks of the belt hurt, the thing she hated more than anything else was being made to retrieve the belt from where it hung on the nail near the kitchen so she could take it to her father. There was nothing worse than carrying that belt in her hand as the feelings of dread consumed her with each step she took.

But always after he used the belt to punish her, her father would hug her and explain why he had felt the need to punish her and how much he hated to do it. She had loved her father more than anything back then and although she didn’t enjoy his punishments, she enjoyed her father and loved and respected him and they had a good and loving relationship. He cared about her and only punished her in an attempt to teach her right from wrong. It had all been done out of love.

On that fateful afternoon when she had been only fourteen-years-old, Coach Bills had told Angel he would take some of her demerits away if she met with him in his office after school. That offer provided a lot of incentive for her, because by then she was fourteen and three swats with the paddle at the hands of Father Tom coupled with fourteen licks of her father’s belt was nothing to sneeze at.

But it had turned out that Coach Bills wasn’t the man she thought he was. During her afternoon visit on that fateful day things began to go horribly wrong for Angel. She soon realized he had something else entirely on his mind. He covered her mouth with his hand as he pushed up her skirt and ripped down her panties. She tried to call for help, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that he had raped her or the burning pain and bleeding that occurred before and after he had raped her, but it was the betrayal. She had trusted him and he had taken advantage of her trust. He was supposed to be the responsible adult.

Prior to that day Angel had been a virgin, untouched by anyone. Coach Bills had been very smooth in his persuasions that it was in her best interest never to tell anyone what had happened and she had believed him and then she found out she was pregnant. She didn’t even really understand what being pregnant meant back then, and she was confused and alone as she faced her fears of the unknown.

Her father could never understand or accept her pregnancy. In his mind she had been forever ruined. He felt she had betrayed him and all he stood for. When she had refused to name the father of her baby, her father had become livid. It was the only time she ever remembered being truly afraid of him. Instead of sticking to his rule of one lick per year of age when he went to punish her that time, he used the belt repeatedly in an attempt to extract a confession from her, finally stopping after he realized what he was doing and that his efforts were proving futile.

Coach Bills had made serious threats of harm towards Angel and her family if she ever exposed him, and Angel had been too young to realize his threats were probably empty. She had been terrified to tell her father or anyone else what he had done to her and as a result, her boyfriend James Hillam had been accused by everyone in town of being the father of her unborn child. James adamantly denied it and protested his innocence, but everyone thought it was him, and even though he had nothing to do with it, it had ruined his reputation. He became an outcast, just like Angel.

Her father ostracized her from the family when she became pregnant, treating her like a harlot and commanding that she give her baby up for adoption. When she refused to give up her child, a horrible battle ensued. Finally when the baby was born, Angel was made to take care of the baby day and night by herself without any help. Poor little baby Mia had colic and cried almost constantly, and Angel was beside herself, not knowing what to do. The stress of everything finally drove Angel over the edge and one night she took off and left Mia and everything else behind and didn’t look back.

Now that she was twenty-eight years old, she realized that she had probably suffered from postpartum depression, and combined with everything else, it had taken a huge toll on her. She had only been fourteen, way too young to cope with what had happened to her and to know how to care for a baby. She had fled the small town of Argus Falls and ran away to the city. It was a cold time of year and she nearly froze to death. She found herself hungry and begging for food and eating out of dumpsters. She tried to get back to Argus Falls right away, but she was destitute and couldn’t scrape together enough money to go back.

Then one day near the bus station as she sat there cold and starving she met Rico. He was a predator and she was his prey. If she could take one day of her life back, that day would be it. Even over and above what happened with Coach Bills, what happened with Rico was worse.

Rico had a racket going. He found runaways and set them up as prostitutes. He was well connected and possessive of all the girls after he lured them to his den. Angel had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As it turned out, her father Martin eventually hired a private detective to track her down and as luck would have it the private detective managed to find her, but when her father came to retrieve her, she was under the complete control of Rico and he made her refuse to go home with her father. Rico threatened to kill her if she left, and she knew he would because she had seen him murder someone else right in front of her. Rico also threatened that he would kill her family and she believed him. That afternoon had been another of the worst afternoons of her life as her father had stormed out of the sleazy motel room where she was, telling her he disowned her and that she was dead to him.

Her father couldn’t believe she had chosen a life of obvious prostitution over going home with him to Argus Falls. He hadn’t fully understood her situation and when he tried to force her into leaving, Rico had intervened and sent him packing. Angel feared Rico would kill her father if he didn’t leave, so she was very convincing that she wanted to stay. She often wondered what would have happened if her father had pushed the issue and if he would still be alive today if he had.

No one in their right mind could ever understand about Rico. Even though as it turned out, Rico wasn’t the worst man she ended up serving. She attempted to run away from Rico several times and after her repeated attempts to run away he shipped her to Las Vegas and then to Reno. That’s where Angel met Rico’s boss, Mr. Ethan Parks. She became one of Ethan Parks’ highest paid call girls, starring in porno flicks and doing all sorts of things. She became completely controlled by Ethan Parks, and there were times she gave up on ever seeing her home again. But she eventually knew she had to get away from Ethan Parks or die. So she waited for the right opportunity, and finally after fourteen long years of being forced to prostitute herself she fled Reno and found her way all the way back home to Argus Falls.

Angel continued to star at the house and looked up at the upstairs bedroom window that was once hers. There was a light on and even though the blinds were drawn, Angel wondered if Mia was inside that room where it was warm and safe.

Angel wanted to see her daughter more than anything else in the world. But as she sat outside the house what she was began to sink in and she wondered what child in their right mind would want a mother like her, a former prostitute whose life had been nothing but misery. What child would want to see the mother that abandoned them?

Tears filled Angel’s eyes. Maybe her father was right to disown her. She was nothing. She slowly edged her car away from the curb and rather than heading towards Frank’s apartment as originally planned, she drove to Red’s Barn. It was the only place she had felt at home ever since her arrival and she knew what that said about her. Maybe she should go back to Reno.