Ordinary Girl

by Pamela Gossiaux

  Thug Two jumps on the bed and pulls my arms down against my sides. Then he pins me down by putting his knees across my midsection, blocking my arms as well.. The pressure is cutting off my breath. With his hands he reaches in and pulls something out of his coat pocket. It’s a rubber tube.

  He’s going to strangle me.

  I fight harder, but he’s too strong for me. Then instead of wrapping the tubing around my neck, he wraps it around my arm. The vein in my arm bulges. It’s the one in the crook of my arm, on the other side of the elbow. They one they use to take blood when you go to the doctor’s.

  Then he pulls out a syringe and vial and fills the syringe. I suddenly realize what he’s going to do. He’s going to inject me with heroin. It’ll look like I died of an overdose.

  “No!” I scream. “I’ll be good. I promise. I promise!” I’m begging him now. I don’t want that drug. I don’t want any drug. And suddenly I don’t want to die.

  But I can’t stop him. He plunges the needle into my vein and pushes the fluid into me.

  It doesn’t take too long before it works. I feel a rush in my body, of warmth and sleepiness. But not death. Not yet. Suddenly the fight goes out of me, and I wonder why I’m even trying. By the time Thug Two releases me and leaves, I’m floating in a world of high, and I don’t even care or count how many men I see.

  Dennis came to high school during our sophomore year. He was instantly targeted as a nerd, dressed in button-up striped shirts and glasses that he always pushed up on his nose with his index finger. He didn’t make too many waves, and I didn’t really notice him. I was busy getting good grades and hoping my mom didn’t get swallowed up by her depression.

  But I guess Dennis thought it would be fun to try out for a sport, and he picked basketball. It made sense, in a way, because he’s tall. Almost six-feet. But he’s super skinny and not really that athletic.

  He tried, though, I’ll give it to him. Brit had her eye on Aaron then, so we kept track of practices, sometimes sitting in the gym to watch practices from the bleachers. I did homework, my nose always in a book, and Brit did, too, but she also watched Aaron.

  “Do you think he’ll ever ask me out?” she said.

  She and Aaron had a “thing” going for the past several months. He flirted with her in the hallways between classes, and she smiled her charming smile. But it was always a game, a dance, and so far nothing had come of it. Some of our friends said that Aaron was shy, which it turned out he is. Not super shy, but shy around girls. And Brit is drop-dead gorgeous, so I can see why he would be afraid of rejection.

  Although if he had any sense he could see that she liked him by the way she acted.

  But we watched Dennis at practices, and he was always dropping the ball, or if he got it up to the basket, his shot didn’t go in. The guys cut him some slack, but you could tell he wasn’t really “one of them.”

  “Brainiac has slippery fingers today,” Mark Cosak said one afternoon, so loud that we heard it in the bleachers.

  “Just today?” one of the others said, and most of the other guys laughed. Brit and I glanced at each other, and I could read her mind: Immature idiots, she was thinking.

  I nodded in agreement and went back to my work.

  Aaron never made fun of him, which is another reason Brit liked him. We decided Aaron must have some class.

  And he did. Because for Sweetest Day that year, Aaron bought Brit a dozen roses and a ticket to go with him to the homecoming dance. He was waiting with both for her in the parking lot one morning when I drove her to school. He was standing near the front entrance to the school, looking nervous. When he saw us, he turned a few shades of pale.

  “What’s he up to?” Brit asked. I could tell she was one part worried and one part excited. Were the flowers for her?

  Turns out they were. The two went to the dance together and have been together since.

  Later that winter, basketball tryouts came, and of course Dennis didn’t make it. He went back off my radar for a while. Until that dreaded day in class when he told the players’ passwords to everybody.

  I remember the talk in the hallway. “I’m gonna kill him.” “Nerd boy has gotten himself in too deep.” “I’ll use his face for a goal post.” “Idiot.”

  So they waited in the gym to give him a swirly. And to his good luck, Aaron was there to save him. Because he was the co-captain of the basketball team, he had earned some respect, and the other guys let Dennis go, although regretfully.

  The next day Dennis wandered over to our table.

  “Hey,” he said casually to Aaron.

  Aaron looked up. “Hey.”

  “I um…hey, thanks for yesterday.”

  I glanced up. A lot of people were staring at us. The entire table of football guys, some of them with their necks cranked around to see. The cheerleaders were looking our way and giggling. Aaron’s team members… most of them had stopped eating or talking to see what Aaron would do.

  “No big deal,” Aaron said, and took a bite of his sandwich. I saw his eyes dart around, catching what was going on. But Aaron wasn’t one to care what others thought. He was popular enough, strong enough, and confident enough that he could pretty much do what he wanted to do. So he made a big choice that day

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing with his sandwich towards the seat across from him.

  Dennis glanced around nervously. “Are you sure?” he said quietly.

  “Sit,” Aaron said firmly.

  Dennis did. And that’s when we found out what a nice guy he really is.

  — — —

  Tommy won’t say what he did with Chloe’s body, but Reg has ideas.

  The three of us girls are huddled in Serena’s room, sitting on her bed. None of us can sleep. Not after what happened to Chloe. It’s about 4 a.m., and the men are all quiet. Tommy went in his bedroom and shut the door when we got home around 3 a.m. We haven’t heard from him since. I have no idea where the thugs are, but the last time I looked, one of them was on the couch snoring. Probably still is.

  So Reg and I decided to sneak into Serena’s room to talk. The heroin Thug Two gave me wore off long ago, and I’m left with a pounding headache, which could be from all the stress.

  Reg is smoking something new. She hasn’t cried yet, but she has new, hard lines around her eyes that I haven’t seen before. “He burned the body,” Reg says confidently.

  The thought horrifies me.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  “That’s what he did with the last girl.”

  “What last girl?” I ask. I’ve been crying for hours. Not hard tears, but small ones keep sneaking out and running down my face. I can’t seem to stop. My nose is all snotty, and my ears are plugged from all the blowing. I’ve used up a lot of our toilet paper because we don’t have tissues. Oddly, Serena is quiet, wrapped tightly in her blanket and rocking a little bit. I’m worried about her.

  “The one that was here before you came.”

  I hadn’t thought of someone being here before me. Was I a replacement?

  “Why would he burn the body?” I hear my voice shaking when I speak. “How? Where?” These are questions that I don’t really want to know the answers to, and yet somehow I need to. I need to know that Chloe’s body isn’t somewhere rotting in a garbage dump.

  Reg shrugs, and I’m once again frustrated at her lack of communication. I can see her in the dim light from her joint, and also from the weak light around the window shade. The moon is out tonight. It’s an unseasonably warm evening.

  “Serena? Are you okay?” I ask for the fourth time in the past twenty minutes.

  She nods but continues rocking.

  “Here,” Reg says. She offers Serena her joint. After a moment, Serena reaches out for it and inhales. She holds the smoke inside her for a while, then slowly exhales. Then she does it again. When she’s finished, she hands it to me.

  I glance at Reg, and she nods. My head is pounding, and my heart is breaking. I thin
k of the merciless men who refused to let me grieve today. I think of Tommy pushing me away and slamming the trunk on the body of my one and only friend in this dark place. And I think of my mom and friends back home. Chloe is right. No one is looking for me. I’ve been here a year, and no one has come for me. They’ve given up. They probably think I’m dead.

  This is now my life.

  So I take the joint and inhale. Almost immediately I feel the drugs lifting me up. Reg usually laces her joints with heroin. None of us ask where she gets it. She just always seems to have some.

  Within seconds I feel better. The pain goes away, in both my head and my heart. I take another drag, holding it in my lungs for a while, like Serena did. Then I exhale, and hand it back to Reg. She smiles a little bit.

  “Feel better?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I do.

  As a matter of fact I feel a lot better.

  Something in me breaks the night Chloe dies.

  Tommy wakes me up the next morning for work, and I’m hit with the memory that Chloe is gone. The image of the word “revenge” dug into her arm haunts me, and no matter how tightly I close my eyes I can still see her lifeless eyes and the blood on her white dress.

  I get up and immediately dig into my underwear pile, where I’ve stashed the drugs I save to sell. I sort through them. Coke. Weed. Here it is. A small bit of heroin.

  Reg is sitting up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

  “How do I do this?” I ask her. “How do I make it into a joint?”

  She opens her nightstand drawer and pulls out a few tampons. Inside of one, she has stuffed some rolling papers. Inside the other one is some heroin of her own and some weed. Clever.

  She hands me a paper. Then she slowly makes one up out of her drugs. I sit on my bed and watch carefully, imitating what she does. Soon I have my first hand-made smoke. My joint isn’t as neatly rolled as hers is, but it’s not bad.

  I get ready and go out into the living room, rolling the joint in between my fingers. If Tommy notices, he doesn’t care. He lets us have drugs, encourages it even, but I have never made my own and for a moment I’m afraid he’s going to ask where I got the drugs. If he knew I have been stashing what he gives me so I could sell instead of using them, he’d kill me.

  So I light it, and practice smoking in between eating my donut.

  Somehow, with the drugs in me, it doesn’t seem so tragic that Chloe is gone. The hurt is still there, the grief, but it’s buried somewhere deep inside me. It’s like I’m standing on the outside looking at it. It’s weird, but it works.

  — — —

  Three days later a new girl shows up. She’s blond and skinny and terrified. She’s wearing nice clothes, so I don’t think this one came from off the streets. Tommy introduces her to us at noon, just as we’re about to leave.

  “This is a mistake,” she says. “I…I want to go home.”

  I wonder if it was Cory who lured her in.

  Tommy walks into the kitchen for a moment. Kaitlyn glances at the front door, but both the thugs are guarding it, standing there with arms crossed looking like tough dudes.

  “That man—Tommy—he says if I do a job for him it’ll be okay,” she whispers to us. “That I have to do what he asks, and then things will go smoother for me. What…what do you think the job is?”

  Her voice is shaking. I glance down at her carefully manicured fingernails and see that her hands are shaking as well. Her skin is clear, her hair is clean. She’s not from around here. She’s from somewhere else. A family is missing her right now, I’ll bet.

  I think about Chloe, and how she helped me get settled in here. She showed me the ropes and helped me out.

  “Here.” Instead of answering Kaitlyn, I reach my arm out and offer her my joint. “This will make it easier.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t do drugs.”

  “Not yet,” Reg says.

  “Take it,” I say, but I’m pulling my arm back a little bit. It’s the only one I have. I’m not sure I want to share it.

  She shakes her head again, and then Tommy’s back. He takes her by the wrist and pulls her out the door. “Trust me,” he says to her as the door closes, but I hear her start screaming for help. Thug One grins, and I want to punch him. Thug Two goes outside, probably to assist Tommy.

  The car door slams. And I know where Tommy is taking her. He’s taking her to her first day of hell.

  — — —

  Kaitlyn sleeps in Serena’s room, in Chloe’s bed. She came home last night and curled up in a ball and cried all night. I wanted to go to her, but I was too high. And too tired. It seems all I want to do is sleep.

  — — —

  Three days after Kaitlyn arrives, almost a week after Chloe died, I run out of drugs.

  “Can I borrow some?” I ask.

  “No,” Reg says.

  “I’ll pay you back.” I’m feeling agitated and nauseas. And I’m trembling.

  “No,” she says again.

  So when Reg goes into the bathroom to get ready, I open her nightstand drawer and look for the tampons. They’re there, but there’s nothing inside them. She has moved her stash.

  I’m feeling desperate now. Tommy has taken Kaitlyn out, but soon one of the thugs will come to get us, and I can’t go to that hotel without my high. I can’t. I won’t survive another day.

  Panicked, I creep into the kitchen.

  “Heather, we have to go!” Thug One shouts as I pass by him in the living room.

  “I just need a drink of water,” I say back. Then I glance over my shoulder. No one can see me, so I quickly open the cupboard under the sink. There they are—the coffee cans. My heart is pounding rapidly in my chest as I pop the lid off. I take a $100 bill out and cram it into my bra before putting the lid back on. The I close the cupboard door and stand. I run some water for added benefit and clank a glass.

  Then I go out into the living room. Reg is there, waiting for me. Serena and Kaitlyn are gone.

  “Let’s go,” Thug One says, and we follow him out to the car.

  “I need to stop at the store,” I say.

  “For what?”

  “Tampons.”

  The men don’t like to discuss “female issues,” as they call them, so he grunts, but he does stop on the way to the motel. This is the one that Chloe told me about. The one where I bought my feminine napkins and the ibuprofen that didn’t work. But she also told me it’s a good place to pick up some Smack.

  I walk in. The balding clerk is stacking cigarettes onto a shelf behind the counter. I approach him.

  “I’m here for some Smack,” I say quietly.

  He raises an eyebrow. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The candy bars are over there,” and he nods in the direction.

  I lay the $100 bill down flat on the counter, my hand covering it.

  He looks at it, chewing on his cigarette. Then he disappears into the back room and returns with a small box. He slides it to me.

  “I’ll need some papers to roll it with,” I say. “And I’d like a baggie of those little white pills too.”

  He disappears again and brings back two small baggies. One has papers and the other has pills. I palm the small box and slip the baggies into my bra. He takes the $100 bill. I have no idea if he owes me change, but when he doesn’t offer, I turn to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. Then I go and pick up a box of sanitary pads and add a box of condoms to make it look good if Thug checks what I was doing in here.

  “I need these too.”

  “Pay up,” he says. He holds out his hand.

  I don’t have any more money.

  “I gave you enough,” I say firmly, hoping that’s the truth.

  Our eyes lock for a moment. Then I say, “I’ll be back for more. I can pay you then.”

  After about five seconds a grin spreads across his face, like it took him a moment to realize what I just said. He nods. I leave.

  “What took so long?” Thug O
ne says.

  “Nothing. I had trouble finding them. Then I had to go in the bathroom and put one in.”

  “Okay, enough!” he says, cringing at my words, like hearing about a menstruating woman is the grossest thing in his life.

  Reg raises one eyebrow in question, but I ignore her. I wonder if she knows the real reason I went in there.

  There has been no time all night for me to roll my joint. I’ve had to survive on the little white pills, which are fine “I don’t care” pills, but they don’t last long. And there’s another John on the way.

  So I sit on the edge of the motel bed and swallow the pill that will help me relax. My shaking hand sloshes the water in the glass.

  I am scared all the time.

  Fear is constantly clawing at my stomach. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it shouts at me. The pills help quiet its voice. But it seems like since Chloe died, it’s harder to quiet. That’s why I’m craving the heroin.

  There’s a single knock on the door, and it opens. A man walks in, and my stomach flip-flops. He is here early, and the pill hasn’t had time to take effect yet. The last one wore off already.

  I’ve never seen this man before. Sometimes I get repeats, but he’s new. He’s dressed in wrinkled khaki pants and a button down. He looks cleaner than most, but not by much. His dark eyes drink me in, and he smiles.

  “You’re Heather?”

  I don’t answer him. Instead, I lay back on the bed and hope it’s over quickly.

  — — —

  The man doesn’t stay long. I sit up, waiting for the room to steady before I stand. I’m still sitting there five minutes later when Tommy walks into the room. He opens the door so hard it bangs against the wall. I’m relieved to see it’s him and not a random stranger.