When wil the gun go off in My Absolute Darling, and who will be the victim?

Still moving along with Gabriel Tallent's My Absolute Darling (actually, only 1/3 of the way thru, contra yesterday's post), and at this point the14-year-old Julia/Turtle/Kibble is interested in inviting a h.s. boy (Justin, I think) to the dance at her middle school - which leads to the most direct and brutal confrontation with her abusive father. When he learns that she wants to invite a boy to this dance he beats the young girl w/ an iron bar, possibly even breaking her shoulder, and threatens her, saying he's the only one in her life. This is horrifying - and the only ray of hope, it seems, is Turtle's English teacher, Anna (teachers go by first names in this loosely hip and nonconformist school system in Mendocino). Anna tries talking to Turtle/Julia - she can see that the child has all the signs of abuse - but Julia has been so demented by her father, she's so terrified, that she can't issue a plea for help; in fact, she continues to call Anna a bitch, and worse, for probing into her life. There's no doubt that this child should be visited by protective services; a social worker would find the girl living in a rundown cabin in the woods (maybe that in itself is not so unusual in Mendocino), in a house with many guns and knives. They might even discern that for breakfast this child eats several raw eggs, washed down with a swallow from her dad's beer bottle. They might find on the child's body signs of various beatings, even knife wounds. But so far all systems are failing her, and, though she's extremely strong and self-reliant, she is a victim and likely to be a dead victim if her father's behavior goes unchecked. Everyone knows one of the oldest dicta in story writing or playwrighting is that a gun in the first act has to go off by the end of the fifth act; so what will happen w/ all the guns in this nove;'s first third? Will Turtle be a victim, or will she shoot someone - and if so who? But this point in the novel GT is letting loose on his narrative style - we know longer need to know every flower or weed in bloom by name -as the plot tightens and accelerates.

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