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over. They took me to their Level 1 apartment and stuck me in a tiny back room, expecting me to get to and from my new school on my own. I’d never been to Level 1 before, and I wished I was anywhere else. Auntie and Uncle worked at the sewage treatment plant. It seemed everyone on Level 1 worked at some treatment plant or another, making things better for the levels above them. Auntie worked the day shift and Uncle worked evenings. I think being apart so much was the only thing that kept their marriage together.
    I cried some the first week there, and got a smack in the head for it. I learned then to keep it all inside.
    I was too young to work legally, but I managed to bring in some cash by cleaning rooms at the old folks’ home down the street. It was a place full of cranky old women who bitched and complained about everything and men who leered at me every time I bent over to pick something off the floor. The smell of old people still makes me sick to my stomach. I kept as much of the money as I could, hiding it from my aunt.
    Uncle Stan was strange. He was tall and thin, and all his bones stuck out at weird angles, making him look like a broken mannequin that had been glued back together by a small child. He always had a bottle in front of him, when he wasn’t sleeping or working. When he got drunk, he got mean, and I quickly learned to stay out of his way.
    It started happening just before my fourteenth birthday.
    The first time, he accidentally walked in on me while I was taking a bath. He apologized really quick and left, but I saw him take a furtive look at me in the mirror before closing the door. I caught him looking a lot more after that, but never when my aunt was home.
    The second time was in the bathroom again. The door didn’t have a lock on it, and I started making sure to be in there only when Auntie was home. She went out for groceries, and he walked right in on me, his eyes red and bloodshot from too much booze. He just stood there and stared. I remember trying to cover myself up, reaching for a towel to pull over me. Then he just turned and left, went into his bedroom and closed the door. I got up out of the tub and closed the bathroom door before drying off and getting dressed. When Auntie got home, I got in trouble for the wet bathroom floor.
    After that, he got braver. He would help me with my homework,always managing to touch me when he did, his thigh on my shoulder, his arm on the front of my shirt when he pointed stuff out to me. I tried to talk to Auntie about it, tried to convince her what Uncle Stan was doing, how he made me feel when she wasn’t home. But she just called me a slut and pushed me out of the room.
    The next time he did something, it was a cold and dark Saturday. The Ambients had failed that morning, and the work crews hadn’t arrived to fix them up yet. Uncle Stan cracked open his bottle about five minutes after Auntie left. I stayed in my room pretty much all the time now, the homework I used to do at the kitchen table spread out on my bed instead.
    He just walked right into my bedroom, not bothering to knock on the door. I sat up, the pen still gripped in my hand. He took the pen away from me and shoved my hand into his pants. I just sat there, scared and confused. I was fourteen, I knew what was in my hand, knew what was happening. I felt the fear creep up my spine and settle in the back of my brain, cold and hard like the steel fence around the schoolyard. I remember the strong reek of alcohol, and my homework had been corporate history—the First Corporate War in 2074, big corporations fighting amongst themselves to control more of the world. It’s strange how memories associate themselves with events.
    When he was done, he pushed my hand away and zipped up his pants. His words were slurred almost beyond recognition, but the threat was as clear as could be. He stumbled from my room, leaving me to throw away the destroyed homework and to start again.
    I took the memories