On nights when I had come home from school with my hair mussed and my faded cotton dress torn from the playground, I would remember thinking that Jenny was possibly the most glamorous woman in the world.
She had bleached yellow hair, blood red nails, and a boyfriend who rode by our house on a motorcycle to pick her up. I was supposed to be asleep by then, but I always peeked through the window, wondering if I would ever be half as beautiful as she was.

After mom died, Jenny was over a lot. At first, she comforted me and my brother, put us to bed with tales of princesses and ninjas and happily ever after. It was just like old times. But that night when I woke up to the sound of heavy breathing, I crept down stairs and I saw Jenny's naked back obscuring my father's bulging body. I heard her sighs and moans, but I remember my father's eyes - bathed in a blue light. I saw his dead eyes focused on the flickering screen where two bodies writhed on top of one another. I wasn't sure if Jenny and dad were simulating the couple on the screen or the other way around.
It didn't matter.
The woman on the screen, with her petite body, her permed hair and her crooked nose, looked just like my mother.

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