And pain I felt.
I was in my room. Jake’s room. Our room. That was all I could make out before having to shut out the harsh rays of daylight. My mouth was dry and cracked, and seemed glued shut. One of my nostrils was clogged. I couldn’t catch my breath. I used my swollen purple fingers to pick the dried blood and scabbing from my lips so I could open my mouth to take a deep breath. It felt like glass shattering inside me.
How did I get back here?
Did someone save me?
No, someone hadn’t saved me. Someone moved me.
He moved me.
A wave of nausea came over me. Unable to stand and run to the bathroom, I tried to wretch onto the floor beside the bed, in the process unclogging a dried blood-filled nostril, sending chunks of black and streams of fresh red into the bile on the side of the mattress.
So much for puking on the floor.
Exhausted from what couldn't have been more than a few minutes of consciousness, I drifted back off to sleep lying upon the mess I just created.
The next time I awoke, it was night, and I needed to use the bathroom. My legs wouldn’t cooperate. The second I tried to stand, I started to go down again. I tried to catch myself on the nightstand, but my arms weren’t strong enough. I fell chest-first onto the floor. A tingling sensation in my spine erupted into a tearing sensation from my neck to my ass. There was no way I was going to be able to walk the twenty feet or so to the bathroom.
So, I crawled.
With only the support of my forearms, I slowly dragged my own meat-bag of a limp body across the cold ceramic tile floor inch by agonizing inch. I left a bloody dirt trail from my bed to the bathroom. I don’t know how long it took. It seemed like days, years, an eternity. In another turn of universal cruelty, once I finally got there, I discovered that the bathroom door was shut. I summoned every inch of determination I still had to reach a shaky, nearly-useless arm up to the door handle. I leaned on it, forcing the door open and falling to the bathroom floor like a broken rag doll.
I needed to see what he’d done, to know what I was dealing with.
I gathered my strength and slowly pushed myself to my knees. In one huff, I launched myself up onto my feet, grabbing the countertop to regain my balance and hold myself up. I had to lean into the counter so far my chest was almost in the sink. I used my elbow to nudge the light on.
What I saw in the mirror, the girl staring back at me, wasn’t me at all.
My eyes were both as black as night, with smudges of purple and yellow. My usually-pale skin was unrecognizable under the red stains of blood. Blue and yellow bruising extended all the way down my cheeks along my jaw. My copper hair was slicked back and caked with dark crimson chunks. I ran my fingers over my lips, flinching at my own touch. The tank top I wore was smeared with dirt and vomit. I was naked from the waist down. Streams of red ran along the inside of my legs, like thick veins that spilled over onto my feet. I opened my mouth as much as I could in order to press a finger inside to feel for my teeth. As far as I could tell, they were all there.
I need Jake.
When I was eight years old, my mother’s drug dealer beat her to within an inch of her life. She looked very much like how I looked now, except she was unconscious and in a hospital bed for over two weeks. When she was released, I was so happy to finally have her home. To have her all to myself, sober for once. That had to be her rock bottom. Almost dying had to be reason for quitting and even more of a reason to start being a real mom to me. I convinced myself it was going to be a new start for all of us.
I sat in the front of their yellow station wagon on the bench seat, between my dad, who was driving, and my mom, who was in the passenger seat, on the way home from the hospital. I was beaming. After everything we had been through, I had reason to believe that we were going to be a real family.
We were three blocks down the road from the hospital when Mom asked me to hold one end of a rubber tie-off while she shot up right there in the front seat.
That was the first and last time I allowed myself real hope for a family…until Nan.
Nan...
I let out a scream that could have woken the dead, igniting the fire of pain within every cell of my body. I didn’t care. Pain was what I was used to. Hurt and disappointment and fucked-up-ness were normal for me. I screamed louder. Something in my throat felt like it popped, and blood rose in my throat and into my mouth. I sank down onto the floor of the bathroom and curled up into fetal position. The blood, too much to swallow, flowed out from my mouth and onto the tile, creating rivers of red in the grout. I wasn’t throwing it up. I was just releasing it.
Dragging myself up onto the toilet wasn’t an option. I had no strength left. Urine came out of me in burning waves of agony, causing me to see what looked like TV snow behind my eyelids.
My life was my pain, and there was so much more to come.
It was then that I made the decision. A decision I always knew I might have to make at some point in my life, but had somehow doubted I’d ever have the strength to actually carry out.
Owen was going to die.
When Jake returned, I was going to tell him what happened. Every explicit, gory detail. I was going to awaken the monster within.
It wasn’t like I could call the authorities. In Coral Pines, Owen’s family was the authorities. The mayor, the DA, the county judge, the lowly sheriff— all were Fletchers, born and bred. They wouldn’t help me.
Jake would.
My breath quickened – not from the pain anymore, but from the dark satisfaction of my decision. A small maniacal laugh escaped my lips, and I clutched my ribs that felt like they were being broken again and again with each sound I made.
I let it all come.
Jake is going to kill Owen.
In between the throws of unbearable agony and the fits of insane laughter, the thought was comforting. It made the pain almost bearable.
Almost.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK P.M., and all of the lights inside Coral Pines High School were off. I didn’t want to turn any of them on for fear of drawing attention to myself. What I was there to do didn’t require light, anyway. The red glow from the exit signs above every doorway and my tiny keychain flashlight allowed me to see just enough for to find my way through.
Even in the absence of students, the school still smelled the same as it always did: like chemicals from the dry erase markers mixed with stale air and a faint smell of body odor wafting from the gym. It would be another couple of months before the students returned to school. I felt as if I’d hear the bell ring at any moment, the sounds of the students’ laughter echoing through the halls as they spilled from their classrooms, slamming lockers and shouting over one another.
I navigated my way down one dark hall and then another. Most of my soreness was now replaced with a constant state of ‘uncomfortable’ that I felt in each and every step.
The towering locker system looked very much like rows of silent soldiers lining every open section of wall from the floor to the ceiling. When I reached the closet-turned-darkroom that Mr. Johnson had built for his photography class, I used the knife from my boot to flip the flimsy latch.
When I was sure the room was light-tight, I turned on the safe light and went to work pulling the negatives from my camera and filling the trays with processing chemicals. It took longer than I thought, but when I was done, twelve black-and-white photos hung on clothespins on the drying line across the room, each one a different angle of the same subject.
Me.
Looking at them made me feel as if not even a second had passed, let alone a few weeks. I was right there again. I closed my eyes to fight off the intruding memories, but they wouldn’t relent.
Again, I felt every blow, every bit of force he used when he pushed himself into me. I felt a sudden panic rise in my chest that radiated down my body to my toes.
I was afraid to leave the apartment in those first couple of weeks, not just because Owen was out there somewhere, but because I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’d called Reggie and told him I was violently ill and didn’t want to get the rest of the guys sick so he slipped invoices and receipts under the door of the apartment for me to organize at home until the bruising on my face faded.
When I did make it back to work, I’d heard that all the Fletchers were spending the rest of the summer at their cabin up in Jackson Hole.
Owen would be gone until Jake came back.
I could breathe for the first time in weeks.
The smell of the chemicals in the small space, mixed with the heat of the non air-conditioned room, must have been too much for my fragile state of being. I grabbed an empty mop bucket from the corner and threw up the contents of my stomach until nothing was left, and I was just dry heaving.
I’d come to develop the pictures knowing in advance how I would feel. I knew what my reaction would be. I didn’t want to remember what happened. I didn’t want to acknowledge it at all. But, this wasn’t for me. This was for him. I would be strong for him. I had to show him everything. He needed to know.
I barely had the strength to hold my camera when I took them. My wrists had shaken under its seemingly enormous weight. That shake could almost be seen within the photos themselves, causing fuzz around the edges instead of solid lines.
I saw so much more in them than I’d expected to.
In the first, I was staring straight ahead, as if I was looking at someone else’s reflection. I held the camera down by my side so I could capture all of my naked body. Every bruise, every bit of dried blood, every swell and scratch was picked up by the camera’s lens and magnified in the truthful light and shadow of the black and white image. The next was similar. In that one, my body was turned as if I looked over my own shoulder at the spreading bloodstains under the skin that covered my ribs. The next was similar, just slightly different.