Dare Me

by Stella Rhys

  I started full on hating her by the time I was at FIT. I quit Facebook by then and lied that I wasn’t going to college. I said Caroline had no money because of the divorce and I had to work. But Trish always found a way to contact me and somehow remind me, if I was acting distant, that she knew my nice rich lady’s address. And since she did know where Caroline lived, I just tried to keep her happy and quiet however I could, realizing that it was my fault for even opening up the Pandora’s box in high school, and being grateful that Trish sometimes gave me up to four months between contact.

  But things went haywire when she found out I was in college. She was furious and her logic pinballed everywhere. I was wasting the Pike’s money, I should be giving her the money, I was having the time of my life while she was trying to run for hers. She said I could probably afford to give her more money than I was sending. Some of it was meant to appease Dean, after all, so he’d be nicer. But most of it was for her savings to run way. She accused me of using my funds to date and drink and have sex when I should be donating every penny I could to her cause. Dean was getting worse and worse and I was just letting her suffer through it because I thought I was better, that only I deserved a good life. Every email grew more hysterical and they started coming with more frequency, so desperate and unhinged that after every one, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  Worse, I couldn’t unload it all on Callum and let him comfort me in the way only he could. I’d hidden Trish and my stupidity from him for so long that I was afraid of how he’d react if I finally told him and he finally realized the crazy I’d let into my life. Our lives. At the points that I truly couldn’t handle the stress without feeling like I might die, I’d call Callum and, under the guise of being late on an assignment or being the worst sewer in class, would have him comfort me. It helped to hear his voice and sometimes, on that fire escape, see his face. But of course, we were never talking about the same thing because he never knew. I was lying to him so hard and I felt like complete shit about it. But thanks to him and friends and the fact that I lived in a city packed with twenty-four-hour distraction, I survived every email.

  Until the one that sent me my own dorm address.

  It was Dean’s work. He had found out I was in college. He had found out that I’d been sending more money than he had been seeing. He was ready to kill, Trish said. He was bitter about the life I was living while I let my family toil in poverty. He was furious that Trish was hiding money from him because he was entitled to that money.

  He was threatening to come to New York and get me.

  I tried my best to do damage control. I called. I sent money and I scrambled to get everything they asked of me like I was on a high stakes scavenger hunt playing for my life. But in the end, they weren’t satisfied. They said I didn’t deserve to live the way I did. I was one of them and if I wasn’t going to take care of them, I didn’t deserve what I had. I was bad and dirty. An evil, selfish person. I was going to be the reason the Pikes got their nice things taken away.

  The demand for me to go to Virginia went on for months and as terrified as I was, I still refused.

  But then Dean called one night. It was summer by then and I was spending time with Callum at the townhouse, so we could be near Caroline. Trish had been the one to call at first. She was in hysterics, pleading, crying things I couldn’t understand before she screamed and got the phone ripped from her. And that was when I heard the voice of the man she’s been telling me such awful things about for so long. It was throaty, gravelly and it warbled out at me with such fire that half of what I heard was spit hitting the receiver. “You’re going to come back here, little girl, and you’re going to stay here or I swear to God, I’m going to kill you and that fairy godmother of yours. I promise. I will do it with a smile on my face unless you get your ass back here with everything I asked for, you ungrateful little bitch.”

  I was shaking so hard the phone just trembled out of my hand when the line went dead. I don’t think I even hung up. I sat there with no air in my lungs and my jaw rattling in my head. I didn’t have any coherent thoughts for what felt like hours but when I finally did, they were of no relief.

  I imagined what I’d do if Caroline or Callum were ever hurt. I felt my soul shatter to pieces when those four men attacked Callum in the park and that was already my fault. If I let him get hurt again, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I let my dark mind imagine the worst of what Dean could do and when I saw images of Caroline and Callum in pools of their own blood in their bedrooms, I thought about killing myself.

  I brought this upon them. I was born from trash and I was, piece at a time, flinging that trash into their lives without them even knowing. I should’ve never spoken to Trish. I should’ve never entertained her demands. I was an idiot sixteen-year-old when it started and I’d let it go on for so long because I couldn’t bear to tell anyone about the colossal mistake and massive web of lies I’d been caught in from the day I started living in the Pike townhouse. They didn’t deserve any of it. Because of me, they were going to be punished for being good. I couldn’t let that happen.

  So after they fell asleep that night, I left. I collapsed to my knees twice as I walked away from my childhood bedroom and with my tear-streaked hand, stifled the sound of my hysterics down that hall of once-perfect memories.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Lake

  Trish didn’t look the way she did in her pictures. Her brown hair was dry and reddish now. She’d done the dye job herself and I couldn’t unsee it after Hunt whispered in my ear one morning that it looked like bacon. She was only forty-one but her skin hung loose off her bones and her eyes sagged, like the bags under it were adamantly pulling them down. The fact that you could still tell that she was once completely stunning just made her appearance all the more startling. But over time, I got used to her. And sometimes, depending on how she acted that day, I thought she looked pretty. Or maybe I just really wanted to think she looked pretty.

  I quickly started to crave the days that she’d plop onto where I slept on the couch and ask me to tell her a story from New York. Her laugh was grating on my ears but I still wanted it because it was better than what she was like most of the time. All she ever talked about was money. The first thing she asked me when she first saw me was how much the cab was from the airport. She couldn’t believe I took a cab. She wanted to know how much money I even carried around in my wallet on a day-to-day basis and when I wouldn’t answer right away, she asked if she’d just been offensive, and if I found her offensive.

  That first day together, she took a bit of time to admire my hair and my clothes and the shiny ballerina flats on my feet but after that, it was nonstop interrogation. She asked if I had money for her and I said I had Caroline’s necklaces and rings, which pissed her off because she said I’d have probably gotten more money hocking it in New York than where we were and we’d just waste gas money on driving to one of the bigger cities to pawn the jewelry, so it wouldn’t be as good a profit. “You screwed up on that one, baby girl,” she said, trying to sound like she was joking but I knew that she wasn’t.

  She never stopped talking. She talked more than Hunt and Dean combined. Then again, Hunt didn’t talk much and Dean rarely ever said a word.

  The first time I met him, my muscles were clenched so tight that it felt like I was going to give myself a six-pack. He was the manager of the park and he sometimes slept in his office next to the moldy-looking community center where the little kids played. Sometimes he didn’t come out of it for days. That was what happened when I first arrived. I was grateful that I didn’t see him for the first few days at Sunstone but at the same time, his absence only heightened my stress and fear for the moment we actually met.

  His appearance alone had me trembling when I first laid eyes on him. I was sitting on the bright red stool in the kitchen. It had a ripped cushion that scratched my thighs. Hunt had apparently stolen it from a diner. I was eating a waffle that was still half frozen at
the center and hurting my teeth when Dean walked in. He was a tall, gruff-looking man in his mid to late-forties. Most of his face was covered by the same straw-like hair that stuck up straight and at the sides of Hunt’s head when it wasn’t peeking out from under a dirty Marlins cap. He muttered everything he said under his breath and what he didn’t, he barked suddenly, like you’d just asked him to repeat it for the tenth time.

  He said not a word to me the first time we met. Or the second, or third, or fourth or fifth. He glared at me, grunted, shook his head and walked out of the room. I froze over like a statue whenever he passed by or came near because I couldn’t predict what he was about to do. I didn’t know what he was thinking or anything about him aside from the fact that he threatened to kill me and the people I loved. I could hardly fathom that I was living most days under the same roof as him. The day after he finished an argument with Trish by screaming, “You’ll fucking burn in Hell!” and flipping the kitchen table over with a swipe of his hand, I went and got a second job. I was five months in at the point and I needed to get out faster than I was moving. I’d already been waitressing at what was technically a strip club along the highway and averaging a sad eighty dollars per shift, but I lost a good fraction of it to gas money, so I also got a job at the liquor store next to the place. That way, I could go from one shift straight to the other, in just a matter of steps.

  “Too bad you ain’t willing to strip. You’d make a killing with that tight little body.” My boss at the liquor store said that to me just about every day as I pulled on the black tank top and shorts to get ready to leave for my other shift. Her name was Aggie and she was old enough to be my grandma – maybe even my grandma’s grandma – but she kept pushing me to be a stripper, which I found hilarious because it was better than finding it irritating and adding to my increasing list of things to be depressed about.

  By eight months in, I confirmed that Trish was using a lot of the money I gave her for drugs. So was Hunt, but from what I gathered, he sold more than he used. I knew it was bad when I was trying to use that to reason that Hunt was an okay guy. I questioned how far my standards had dropped when I appreciated the fact that Hunt at least cleaned up his mess of needles. I practically admired that he could remember to do that in whatever state he’d just shot himself up into. I wasn’t sure anyone did that but him. But I’d seen surprising things in him from the beginning. He always tried to balance out whatever grief Trish or Dean was giving me. He spoke only a bit more often than Dean did, but what little words he used were often a means of trying to make me laugh or feel better. Every time he did it successfully with some one-liner, I’d wish he had more for me. I’d ache to hear something else funny from his mouth. But he’d have reached his speaking quota for the day and I’d find myself straining comfort from the fact that I enjoyed what he had to say enough to actually want more of it. And that in itself was something to celebrate.

  At least it was at Sunstone.

  I took what I could get, especially as Trish starting spending whole days, sometimes two or three, completely strung out. I used that time to open up a personal bank account in secret. But I still came home with enough money for her that she didn’t make my life a complete living hell. Not that random things wouldn’t still set her unpredictably off. We were eating outside on the plastic table one night, just her, me and Hunt. I didn’t want dressing on my salad and she went completely berserk. She accused me of looking down on her, thinking she had bad taste or bad judgment and lived a bad lifestyle. She threw her salad in my face and stormed so hard through the door of the trailer that it fell further off its hinge. I stared at it and almost yelped when I saw her howling face appear suddenly through the screen door again. She jabbed her finger into her chest and then into the cheap mesh.

  “I’m trash? You’re trash. You are trash, Lake DePalma! Trash!”

  Her vocabulary wasn’t extensive yet I always let her remarks get to me. Hunt tossed me some napkins to wipe the dressing off my shirt. “You ain’t,” he said with a nod at the door. “She’s the one whose name is a letter from trash.” The joke went over my head for a good five seconds but then I looked up at him with pure surprise and he broke into a grin. “Shit, I knew you didn’t think I could spell.” I rolled my eyes but laughed. Thank God someone could still make me laugh.

  I didn’t particularly like Hunt most of the time. He was friends with guys from the park that I thought were disgusting and he never so much as flinched when they said or did something revolting to me. He’d just look away and drink his beer. I hated the way he yelled, “Fuck!” out of nowhere with volume that electroshocked my heart. It was always over something little, like dropping a fork or being unable to find his lighter. Most of all, I hated that he swaggered around like a zombie when he was on his benders, and once, in a haze of delirious, drugged-up glory, whipped his floppy dick out and told me to put my mouth on it. He’d called me by another girl’s name though, so that was my excuse to give him. He thought I was someone else. He’d never do that to me.

  It was pathetic but I needed to hold onto the sliver of me that enjoyed him. I was so miserable I lived for the moments I had with Hunt that were okay to good. I had nothing else to look forward to. In the beginning, I told myself it would be easy for me save up in my secret bank account and eventually run in the night. But we lived in the middle of nowhere and the placed I worked made barely any money, so neither did I. I had to give most of that money to Trish and Dean so she wouldn’t start talking crazy about him going to hurt my friends in New York, and when the car I used to get to work broke down, my savings were almost fully depleted and I was back to square one.

  I told myself I could always just take a bus away after work and leave forever. But I also told myself that I could just jailbreak Trish and Hunt from Sunstone, cover my bases and then return to Callum in New York. To me, that felt like more of a complete solution. I told myself that at that point, Dean would focus his anger on his wife and son who’d left him, not on the stepdaughter he hardly knew, whose money he only felt entitled to because some of it was going to his wife. I was convinced he’d leave me alone after his family left him. And if he tried anything again, we’d call the cops on him and he’d get arrested without me having to feel bad about Trish or Hunt getting dragged into the mess.

  I told myself a lot of things. Including that I deserved to stay there. For God’s sake, I was starting to fit in. By the time I surpassed the half year mark at Sunstone, I had a tradition of making watermelon margaritas with Shanna Temple on Fridays, and was babysitting the two youngest Schroeder kids every Sunday and Tuesday. Shanna lived right next to us and was a big, boisterous divorcee with boobs the size of my head and the length of my forearm. She proudly showed them off in braless camis that I judged hard when I first moved in, but I grew to love Shanna so much that I eventually didn’t care what clothes anyone wore. I stopped being fazed by most of the questionable outfits people at Sunstone walked around in. It was hot out and they were their own community there, really, so they made their own rules.

  I was sipping the Kool-Aid. Not full on drinking it but just giving myself enough of a taste so that my every day wasn’t completely joyless. It was a give and take I never reconciled. I needed to stay alive enough to stave off complete depression because if I didn’t, I’d never fight my way back to Callum. But if I let myself smile and laugh too often, that meant I was enjoying myself at Sunstone and the Lake that Callum knew and loved would never be nice to people who were essentially holding her hostage. That would mean I was a fool. Or that I belonged.

  I didn’t get myself after awhile. I questioned who I was, where I really belonged and the daily tug of war in my head was so exhausting that it made me wonder if I’d just lost it completely. Maybe it wasn’t even safe for me to go back to New York because maybe I wasn’t even sane or making sense anymore. I’d be unrecognizable and the only reason I hadn’t known it was happening was because I lived every day among people like Trish and Hunt, who s
pent most of their time bumbling, drugged up and strung out. Even Shanna was kind of crazy with the hoarding thing. I just didn’t pay attention to her downfalls because she was the only person who was guaranteed relaxation for me every time we hung out. She usually came over and we’d stream shows and movies on Trish’s computer and look at each other like, “Wouldn’t it be nice?” every time a hot guy walked on screen. A part of me itched to show her pictures of Callum but I never let myself do it.

  On Callum’s twenty-second birthday, Shanna’s pitbull had puppies so I sat outside with her all day, watching them and distracting myself from wondering what Callum was doing. We had an old classmate in high school named Cass Vaughn that was always obsessed with him and was always the first to wish him happy birthday every year. I figured she probably popped by his apartment with some sort of gift and then forced herself into whatever his plans were for the day, till she was in the running to sleep with him at some point. The thought made my lip twitch. Crossing my arms, I ran my fingers over my side and the rib tattoo I’d had finished in my first few months at Sunstone. Callum had dared me to finish that lonely “C” on my birthday and though I had been away from him, I’d still been happy to honor the promise. I’d made sure to find a good shop to do the ink, too, because it was Callum’s name and I didn’t want it to wind up looking off, like Hunt’s big, weird squid.