by Hart, Rebel
I keep my eyes glued to the passing nurses and doctors in the hall, hoping one of them will barge in and stop him, but of course to them he looks like a caring guy, merely comforting me.
His lips sink down to my ear. “But the fucked up part is…you’re wondering what I planned on doing to you. And not just in a terrified way…but in a curious way, huh?”
I struggle to push him away, “Fuck off!” But his grip is too tight. I barely move a muscle.
“You’re dying to know how I would have hurt you in all the right ways… How I would have had my way with you, not giving you a choice…then you wouldn’t have had to feel guilty about wanting it. You wouldn’t have had to blame yourself for not trying hard enough to get away.”
“Obviously,” I retort sarcastically, barely able to get the words out as he tightens around me like a boa constrictor. “That’s why I was willing to risk our lives and slam us into that telephone pole before you could get away with me. Because I was so excited about whatever sick shit you had planned.”
I crash my foot down onto his, brutally pinning his toes beneath my sneaker. He winces and accidentally loosens his arms, giving me the chance to run to the other side of the room.
We’re both panting like wild animals by the time he stands up and starts to close in on me. His eyes and nostrils flare with rage with each slow scary step he takes. Like a lion about to pounce.
And he does pounce. Too quickly for me to react. But just as soon as his arms are around me again, his lips are against mine. I tense up, refusing to melt into his kiss. I turn my head away as much as his grip will allow and crash my hand into the side of his face.
The slap only encourages him. He glares into me, burning on nothing but fumes of adrenaline, anger and lust. I take in the sight of those gorgeous plump lips, sickened by the fact that I only find them to be more enticing with the giant gash from the accident.
An urge to fight back surges through me, but it’s coupled with longing. Before I know it, our mouths collide once more.
The doctor barges in, ignoring our teenage horniness, rattling off directions for leaving the building and filling prescriptions.
I can’t stop thinking about the kiss as we walk through the halls and ride on the elevator. I shudder to think what I would have let him do to me if we had been alone on that elevator. I wonder what will happen when we leave. Will we run away together?
But just outside the elevator doors, we’re met in the parking garage by his stupid posse.
Vivian races to Emmett’s side, pummeling him as far away from me as she can get him.
“Oh, you poor thing!” she squeals in an alarming display of concern.
I was beginning to think the two of them didn’t know how to feel and express genuine emotions like concern for others. Even each other.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly, her hands gripped tight into his face, shoving her tongue down his throat before he can even answer.
My heart pangs. I want him to shove her away, but instead, he kisses back even harder, flashing his eyes to mine to make sure I was watching. I did it again. I keep forgetting who I’m dealing with.
Vivian’s humanity quickly shatters as she whips around to me like a viper. “What did you do to him, you stupid fucking bitch!?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” I quip back, hoping she tasted me on his lips just then.
She’s unbothered, stomping toward me, venom practically spewing from her clenched teeth.
“Listen here, you little cunt,” she sprays, getting so close to me I catch the spit of her rage on my cheek. “You stay the fuck away from him. I’ve had about enough of your skanky white trash ass always getting in the way.”
Before I can respond or expect Emmett to defend me in any way at all, another car pulls up. My mom and Brendan, thank god.
My mom races toward me, sending Vivian recoiling into the sweetest body language she could muster – her shoulders drawn up, her hands clasped to her side like a precious little doll. It was so over the top. She didn’t even know how to pretend to be decent.
Mom and Brendan fawn over me incessantly, asking a million questions.
Emmett watches me closely, waiting to see if I’ll corroborate with the bullshit he fed to the police. I do for fear of what will happen if I don’t, and because some demented part of me wants to please him. Wants to leave myself in his good graces enough to see what could come after that kiss.
“Emmett was just picking me up from practice,” I lie. “We were goofing off. His car hit a light post.”
“Well, I hope you learned your lesson,” she scolds. “And at least you’re okay.”
I am filled with joy to see Brendan’s eyes dart over to Emmett’s. He’ll let him have it. He’s about to tear him a new one, and then maybe, just maybe, the only thing Emmett will have left for me will be any remnants of sweetness he may have buried within him. Enough to make me feel okay doing all of the things I want to do with him.
But Brendan’s papa bear rage is cut off before it can even erupt past a dirty look.
“Trey!? Vincent!?” my mother’s voice squeaks in surprise, stopping my heart cold.
They both smile and nod to her like schoolboys sucking up to their teacher.
“Oh my gosh! Your mom and I were friends in high school!” she squeals. “How is Cheryl!?”
“Mom, you know these people?” I ask, half terrified, half heartbroken. It feels like a betrayal.
She completely ignores me, making her way over to them to chit chat. Vivian hangs on every word, inserting her own bullshit fake niceties when she can. I am forced to stand there and watch as my worst enemies win over my mother.
My concussed head tries to work harder than it should to process what this all means. If this twisted hierarchy system has been around for ages, and my own mother was best friends with someone at the very core of its roots, does that mean she once played these games too? Was she one of them?
I try to stick close to Brendan, who now feels like the only person left on my side. I am still hoping he’s going to pounce across the parking lot and tackle Emmett.
But, to my horror, Emmett marches confidently over to him and extends his hand.
“Sir, you must be Ophelia’s step-dad. I’m Emmett,” he offers politely.
“You can call me Mr. Lopez,” he replies sternly, tightening my stomach as he graciously shakes his hand.
My eyes dart from my mom playing pals with the twins and Vivian back to Brendan treating Emmett so respectfully. I want to transfer images directly into their brains, showing them flashes of all the things these assholes have done to me.
“Just goofing around?” Brendan finally presses Emmett.
I want to believe this is it. This is the moment he puts him in his place. Scares the shit out of him.
“I feel terrible,” Emmett lies. “I should have never been so careless with your daughter’s safety. I care for her a great deal, and this was a poor example of that.”
He’s laying it on thick. I feel like I might puke again.
Brendan nods in acceptance, but before one word of reprimanding can begin, we’re all interrupted by our doctor coming out from the elevator.
“Mr. and Mrs. Lopez!” he yells as he scuffles across the pavement. “I’m glad I caught you. My nurse just gave me your message about the questions you had. She said you were on your way here so I thought I’d talk with you in person.”
“Yes! So glad you found us!” My mother exclaims, rushing over to shake his hand. “As I said in the message, Ophelia is a runner. She’s on scholarship and on a pretty strict practice schedule. Just wanted to review how it might need to be adjusted.”
My mom and Brendan get swept to the side with the doctor. I try to avoid eye contact with the Elite gang who are circling around like sharks. I stick close to my mom, clinging to safety, but they begin flipping me off so that only I can see.
I want to fly across the parking lot and pummel them. Their faces and attitu
des are nauseating on a good day. But watching them go from sweet talking my parents straight back to their heartless little antics in the blink of an eye takes things to a whole new level of despicability.
They go right back into their fake polite smiles and manners the minute my mom and Brendan turn to say goodbye. But as soon as their backs turn again, the Elites are frantically shooting me every crude gesture they can think of.
My mom and Brendan lecture and fuss over my wellbeing the whole way home. But their words melt into distant buzz. I just stare out the window at the passing houses, which get notably smaller the closer we are to home.
I realize just how many times Emmett has made me fear for my life and I feel like I am drowning. This is too much for me to handle on my own. Even with Lily’s support…I feel like I am completely alone. After all, she never found any relief from their wrath when they were torturing her. She simply had to wait it out. And I’m beginning to wonder if I’m strong enough to do that.
Every few seconds I inhale sharply as if I’m about to start speaking. The entire story is so close to spilling right out of my mouth, but as I review it all in my head…I wonder if they would even believe me. And then what? They go to the police? I am already terrified that any action they might try to take would prompt the Elites to bring our whole family down. The way they tried to with Lily.
More than spilling everything to them, I begin to think I need a therapist. Amidst all of this there is still my lingering attraction to Emmett, which I hate myself for. And somehow the accident and the kiss in the hospital has only intensified my sickening desire for him. That’s not the kind of thing I could explain to my mom. Only a professional could psychoanalyze me through that one.
9
Chapter Nine
I head straight for the stairs the moment we get home, refusing to eat dinner. My stomach is in so many knots I can’t even seem to get down a glass of water. My duffle bag flies from my careless hands, landing across the large chest that sits at the foot of my bed as I collapse down onto the mattress.
I feel like I’m coming down with the flu. My body is still sore from the crash but coupled with a relentless nausea. There is a pain in the back of my throat that swells every time I remember kissing Emmett in the hospital room or how things felt for just a few brief moments when I first followed him into his car. Before I saw his torture tools in the backseat.
I squeeze my favorite blanket against my body, clinging to it for some sense of safety and security, as I rock gently on the edge of my narrow, unmade bed. I feel the conflicting pull of wanting to be far away and out of reach while also close and protected all at once.
The brush of it against my skin sends a shiver of memories washing over me. Emmett’s crushing grip followed by his kiss. My body releases, wishing I could have melted into his lips, but even the stinging recollection of my hand across his face turns me on in ways I wish it wouldn’t.
That look in his eyes, fueled by so much pent up rage and lust, struggling in an all-out internal brawl against one another. Creating tornadoes that tunneled up behind our eyes, before our lids flickered and we kissed once more.
I shake my head and turn to the Bluetooth speakers on my nightstand. With a flick of my wrist, I turn the volume knob to blast over the rage that is rapidly bubbling up inside. Underneath the shroud of blaring music, I clutch my pillow and scream into it at the top of my lungs, wishing the feeling of release was enough to fix the actual problems at hand.
“Ophelia!?” My mom’s voice breaks through my refuge with a light tap at the door, interrupting the muffled scream ripping through my lungs. I should have known turning my music up that loud would bring her to my door. My hands clench at the sound of her voice. All I can hear from her mouth now are the ghost tones of her speaking to Vincent and Trey.
“I want to be alone, mom!” I reply through grinding teeth as my jaw tightens.
“We saved you some leftovers from dinner,” she persists gently. “They’re in the fridge, but I could get them back out and heat them up if you like?”
“I’m not hungry right now! Please, I just want to get some rest!” I try to yell over the emotional cracks in my voice, fighting against the giant lump in my throat. I just want to be alone.
She carries on from the other side of the door with explanations of logistics for the week. Which practices I could and could not go to. A reminder that the doctor says I shouldn’t run for a couple of days. Follow up doctors’ appointments, pharmacy trips and her work schedule. Boring logistics that could all be just as easily reviewed in the morning, but she’s worried and desperate to find some way to stay near me.
I answer her in one-word responses, knowing anything more than that will give me away. If I engage or let on to how upset I am, she’ll barge right in and never leave until she’s convinced I’m okay.
I do want to run to her. To lay my head in her lap and cry as she strokes my hair like a child. But it would only comfort me if I could tell her everything that was going on. And I can’t find a way to play that scenario out in my head that ends in actually helping me or effecting any real change at all.
So instead I stay alone and silent, wishing she would just go.
Once she says goodnight and I finally hear the gentle click of her bedroom door down the hall, I sit up on the bed and cradle my legs in my arms, gently rocking back and forth. Her interaction with the Elites in the hospital parking garage is all I can think about now. Which quite honestly is a relief in the midst of my unrelenting sexual attraction to Emmett.
Even after luring me to his car with a backseat full of evidence that he was up to no good. The yank of my hair jerking me back into the seat, unable to escape. Leaving me feeling safer slamming the car into a telephone pole than to be carted off alone with him. All of that and I still buckled under his kiss.
Shaking it all away once again, I return to my unanswered questions about my mom. I know she keeps a box of her old yearbooks and high school photos in the attic. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to dig into it all sooner. Really I should have the moment I was invited to WJ Prep, but for some reason none of it seemed relevant until I saw her talking to them in the hospital parking garage.
When the house has been quiet and still for a while, I creep slowly toward my bedroom door, overstepping dirty clothes strewn across the floor.
On my way out, I catch sight of myself in my tall bedroom mirror hanging against the wall. Turning side to side, I can see the effects of WJ Prep on my body. My muscles are still firm, but the rest of me is gaunt. As if I’m wasting away. My skin is ashen with dark circles under my eyes, the skin around them is red and bunched up into a pained stare.
The sight only motivates me more as I head for the attic door, taking care to step as quietly as possible around my mom’s bedroom. I’m not going to let these assholes waste me away to nothing. I will not lose everything I have worked for so far on account of their sick and twisted games.
Ignoring their rules and social structures and chain of command hasn’t worked. So now I have to find something that gives me the upper hand in their game long enough to find a way out of it. Suddenly, my mom’s mysterious connection to them seems like a potential light at the end of the tunnel.
I pull down the rectangular hatch door and fold-down staircase of the attic and make my way up, my hand reaching blindly in the dark for the pull string to bring some light. The bare lightbulb buzzes as it clicks on, revealing dusty floorboards that creak as I step across. Pipes and wiring twist up above me in between exposed wooden beams.
The moonlight is filtered through a grimy windowsill littered with dead bugs, casting an eerie glow on the room as I search through the faded boxes labeled with marker until I spot the one I had in mind. My mom’s high school relics, yearbooks included. I push past the smell of insulation and stale air filling my throat as I pull the box down from its stack.
Clouds of dust shoot out from the sides of the box as I shove it with my foot to the l
ight in the middle of the room, causing me to cough into the sleeve of my hoodie from the tickle it creates in my throat. I crouch down to open the box, the masking tape squealing as I peel it from the dusty and bent cardboard.
I pull out the glossy hardcover book and begin carefully flipping through the pages that catch on the stomach of my hoodie as I go. Briefly, I freeze at the muffled footsteps of my mom and Brendan echoing through the air vents, and I hope they can’t hear me in return.
I need to be alone right now. I have no energy for putting on a face for anyone. Not even them. Especially not while I have this rush of persistence to fight back. I need to ride this wave of energy for as long as it lasts and find out everything I can.
I almost flip right past a photo of my mom and have to go back several pages to look at it more closely. There she is in a puffy eighties-style prom dress, complete with permed hair. Standing next to her is a man captioned as Theodore Nickelson.
I race to my feet, shaking the grime from my jeans as I run over to another box of photos. One I haven’t looked at in years. Old baby photos, some that feature my father still lingering behind, though my mom had thrown most of them out.
I find one of him by my mother’s bedside in the hospital, her cradling me in a receiving blanket with him looking down from above, flipping it over to see the handwritten names…Lala and Theo with baby Ophelia.
Theo. Theodore. It couldn’t be.
My body stiffens at the sight of it. It never occurred to me that my mom could have met my biological father at WJ Prep. All she had ever told me about him was that he was complete scum who wasn’t worth her breath to speak about. Anything about him always brings on an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, which only worsens now that I know he also went to WJPrep.
More than that, there is the haunting missing piece of the puzzle. Theo’s full name. I feel like I know it, but I have to see it. My eyes dart between the yearbook and the baby photo of me featuring my dad. I can’t deny the resemblance, but I won’t accept what I fear to be true until I see evidence.