Ammabella and I are best friends. We love Star Wars, play hide and seek, build sand castles together and play with Harry the Hippo, our school stuffed animal. Chole Mackenzie, Max and Josh Wright and Skye Carlson are there too, but Ammabella Klien and I are best friends. We keep each other’s secrets; I protect her, I laugh with her but I’m also the bad “influence” in her life. I “hurt” her and “bully” her to keep our secret safe.

The other kids at school have been told not to play with me, but that doesn’t bother me as much as it does Mom. Sometimes when I wake up early in the morning I see her cry, throw things at the wall or just dance like a Chewbacca with her earphones on. She says its nothing, but I know she is sad moving into this town, sad that she doesn’t have a husband like other moms at school have and sad that she doesn’t have a nice house overlooking the beach like them. Sometimes I wonder if she’s sad that she has me.

I told her I don’t hurt Ammabella, she believes me, so does Chloe’s, Sky’s, and Gabrielle’s moms but all the other moms don’t believe me. Ammabella did point at me when Ms. Barnes our teacher asked her about the marks on her neck in front of all the parents, but this was all part of the plan. Otherwise, he would hurt her more. I promised Ammabella I would never tell anyone her secret, not even Mom, she said that if I told any grown-up, she might get killed. I feel sad when I see that mom’s jogs are getting longer, the music louder and the dance weirder, I want to help, but I can’t because I don’t want Ammabella to die and I’m scared of him too.

When we did our family tree homework, mom said she gave me the name Ziggy because I looked all squiggly when I was born. She refused to put my dad’s picture because she said I have no dad. He is not dead or in another country, he’s just not there, that is all she tells me no matter how many times I ask her or throw tantrums.

Ammabella said that her mom and dad think I look squiggly too, like there’s something off with me and hence don’t like me. They don’t invite me to play at her house, they even didn’t invite me for her birthday party. Mom jogged for longer that day. Even though Ammabella has told her parents that she and I are friends, they refuse to believe her and feel that I’m feeding her lies.

I haven’t see what he’s done to her but I have seen Ammabella’s sad eyes and marks on her hands and neck. She said that he had pushed her, choked her and even hit her and I believe her. She doesn’t cry but she looks sad all the time. Her eyes remind me of Mom. I know who he is, but I stay away in case he makes those marks on her again. She says it doesn’t hurt all that much now, but I know she’s not fine.

It’s the day of the school play. I feel sick. I don’t have a fever but I feel yucky and don’t want to leave the bed. All the secrets, all the lies, I feel very sick. I tell Mom and she lets me stay in bed but I don’t have a fever and so she knows that something is wrong. She tells me that there is a party in Ammabella’s house, when I told her I know, she seemed surprised. She’s even more shocked when I called her my friend and told her that I’m not the one to hurt her. Mom is smart, she understood that I know who’s hurting my friend. I refuse to tell her, I even told her I don’t want to talk about it but she finds a way for me to let her know by not breaking the promise, she makes me point at him on the school picture. I don’t know what she did with that information, I only saw her grab her car keys.

Today, as I wait in the car to pick up my best friend of 30 years from rehab, my mind keeps whirring back to the first day of school when Ammabella pointed at me as the boy who choked her while Max Wright looked on. I also remember the day she said I do, looking deep into his eyes, smiling 6 years ago. I remember the day she covered her bruises with make-up on her face, neck and torso when she was getting ready for a job interview, ever since she has looked artificial to me.

She always insisted that he loved her and all that he did was out of his passion and intense love for her. It was her fault that sometimes she forgot to do and keep things the way he liked, that his over-protectiveness was nothing but him being a good husband. Max hated me, always calling me Mr. Brother “Influence." Ammabella Wright and I hung out only when he was away on work which means for months together I wouldn’t hear from her. There would be days when I would wonder if she was dead or in the hospital, but there was no way of knowing.

We had discussed at length about her leaving him, but she never had the courage to do so as he was a good father to their son Perry. When he was not angry, she insisted that he was gentle and sweet, although I knew better than to believe her and knew that her definition of sweet and gentle had come to mean other things over the years. “He’s like his late dad Ziggy, he had seen how his dad treated his mother and is just emulating that,” she would say with earnest in her voice whenever the topic of Max would come up. She, however, did promise that the day he laid a hand on her son would be the day she left him.

This time had been the longest, 8 months I hadn’t heard from her. I even drove past her house a couple of times, but saw his Bentley in the garage and would drive off. I regretted being a coward, but I was protecting her just as I was in first grade. I was scared what he could do to her, death not being the worst of it all.

Not until long when I got a phone call from the Monterey Women’s Rehabilitation Clinic saying there was a call for me from one of their patients, what a sigh of relief I breathed when I heard Ammabella on the other side of the phone asking me to pick her up. She wouldn’t say anything else, but I knew her calling me was a good sign.

She gets into the car looking like her old self—sans makeup and the high heels; she was 1st-grade Ammabella all over again to me. Sad but not scared anymore, she said that she was in the Rehabilitation Clinic as part of her sentence, she had 6 months of community service left and then she would be truly free of Max, literally and figuratively.

There was a long silence between us.

I put the car into drive and took the long route home along the Monterey Bay. I grimaced as I thought how fitting it was that my half-brother, like my father, had both received what they deserved at the hands of these very women they “loved.”