by Laney Wylde
Terror froze me. Jake had a temper. He was the one who yelled and fought dirty like me. Cash’s fuse was long. Whatever I did was bad enough to burn it all up and detonate him. And I had yet to see the explosion.
He held the yellow lined paper I had addressed to him clutched in his other hand and started, “You wrote me, and I quote…” His voice sharpened with rage. “‘I love you. I am so grateful for you and all you’ve been to me. I’ve never deserved so much. And I can’t begin to express how sorry,’” his emphasis, not mine, “‘I am that I met you and spent the last several months hurting you. I hope you are relieved by my decision and can have an incredible life now that I can no longer interfere with it.’” His fingers slid to my hand, which was colder than I thought now that I felt the heat of his, and squeezed it tight. Then he pierced me with his gaze, his blue eyes burning with rage like a driftwood flame. “Don’t you ever apologize for being in my life. You are not allowed to destroy something beautiful that I love.”
I turned my face back toward the window to wipe away the tears gathering in my lower lids, but he cupped my chin to force me to look at him.
“Do you hear me? You cannot take you away from me like this.”
That lump in my throat rose, and my hot tears poured over his fingers and thumb. There was nothing I could do to stop them. “I’m sorry,” I choked out. And I was, because I shouldn’t have invited him to study that day. I should have left him in the hall. I’d always feel bad for what I had become to him.
“No, Sawyer.” He shook his head. “That’s not good enough. You’re never going to do something like this again, understand?”
I nodded.
His hand moved to brush over my tangled hair. He whispered, “Why would you do this?”
But I just wept. He should have asked why I didn’t do this years ago. Maybe Simone would still be alive. Jake would have been spared from loving me. So would Cash.
Cash kept stroking my hair and holding my hand until my crying broke up just enough for me to say, “Simone.”
“Okay?” Cash dipped his chin, trying to track with me.
“It’s my fault.”
“No, no,” he said, his voice gentle. “It’s not. How can you—”
“No.” I sniffed. Cash handed me a few tissues. I wiped my face with them. “I’m why she killed herself.”
“Sawyer,” he said softly, tilting his face and running his thumb over my hand. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
I jerked my head up and down. “I can, Cash.” I took a deep breath to calm the shaking in my chest. “We didn’t know about the videos and pictures. I mean, not how it really worked. Like, we knew Jeff filmed everything and that we’d do weird stuff like hold notes up to people while naked, but we didn’t know it was going anywhere outside our room. I didn’t figure out until later that we were probably taking requests most of the time.
“Anyway, Jeff went to prison when I was ten for lewd conduct with this seven-year-old girl in our Sunday school, this girl he was grooming to replace me since I was hitting puberty fast and awkward. Apparently, pedophiles don’t like that so much. Simone and I thought it was over once he was in prison.
“We were in ninth grade when this asshole basketball player, Jeremy, found one of the videos online and showed it to three of his friends, also jocks, real big guys, you know? They told us they wouldn’t show anyone if we did what they wanted.”
Cash pulled in his breath, eyes darkening with fury. “So they blackmailed you into sex?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Simone said no, that we should tell our parents. She was a really good Christian girl.” She’d kept going to church after Jeff’s arrest. Although, he’d always told her how much Jesus loved her and how pure and sinless she was and how she’d go to heaven. Unlike me, of course.
“What did you say?”
The tears started falling again as I stared out the window. I couldn’t face Cash when I said, “I told her she needed to grow a pair and just deal with it, that she could fuck up her life but not mine.” I took a deep inhale and shuddered out, “The four of them took turns raping us the night Jeremy showed us the video.” I closed my eyes and shook my head. “It was so much worse than I thought it was going to be. I could hear Simone crying and begging them to stop, but I did nothing.” I settle my tortured gaze on Cash. “It was like I raped her.
“When it was over, I thought we were done with them. But they kept texting us and cornering us at school. So we were on call. But Simone wasn’t the same after that night. She shut down and wouldn’t talk to me or anyone else. And a week after that, she killed herself.”
Cash just stared at me and held my hand. “What happened to you after that?”
I narrowed my eyes and cried, “What?”
“Did they keep raping you?”
I threw my hands half in the air. “Why does that matter? Did you listen to anything I just told you?”
“But don’t you feel bad for her?”
“Yes! Cash, that’s what I’m—”
“Not for Simone. For you—four years ago, ten years ago.”
I rolled my eyes. Shrink talk. Everyone wanted to talk about that little girl. “No. Why would I?”
Cash pressed his fingers into his eyebrows, trying to summon some patience or think of a different angle. It was hard to tell. “Sawyer, could you trust your mom when you were a kid?”
“What does this have—”
“Just answer.”
“No.”
“Would she have listened to you?”
I let out a shaky sigh. “No.”
After Jeff went to jail, I tried to tell her what he did with me, but her response was always—I’m sure that’s not what happened, sweetie. Or—Did a cop tell you to say that? Or—That’s a lie. Don’t bring this up again with anyone. Do you hear me? God forbid Jeff spent any more time in prison.
“You were both in an impossible situation. And probably mortified. I mean, that’s how you found out that, what, hundreds of thousands of people saw you get molested? And now these guys at school found out. You had to have been terrified.”
Cash’s view of me was wearing on my patience.
“Right?” he pressed.
I nodded, but only to end this conversation as fast as I could.
“Simone made a choice. She could have told her parents. You didn’t point a gun to her head to stop her.”
“But I bullied her into it.” Bully: that magic word. Anyone could be absolved of their actions if they were bullied into them. Using, drinking, sex—slap bully before that and the perp became the victim, and the bully the villain. Come on, Cash, see me as the villain.
“You did. And that was wrong,” he agreed. “But you didn’t kill her.”
“That’s debatable.”
He spoke over me, “And killing yourself won’t bring her back. Right?”
I started searching for the give-me-more-morphine remote—anything to get me out of this conversation—but I couldn’t find it.
“What are you doing?”
“I need more drugs. Where’s the button?”
Cash pointed to the wall behind me. I craned my neck to see a clear plastic box with the drug drip locked inside.
“I don’t get a button?”
“No! You just tried to off yourself. You’re lucky I got them to remove your restraints.” He grabbed the remote with the button to call the nurse and held it out of my reach. “Answer my question, and I’ll get you more morphine.”
I glowered at him and grumbled. “No. It won’t bring her back.”
“Good.” He called the nurse, and then dropped a note on my lap. I leaned forward to see it was written for Simone’s parents. “Two down,” he mumbled. What did that mean?
After I got another dose of opioids, Cash reached into his pocket and took out another yellow paper. The letter was Jake’s. My stomach tightened as Cash read, “‘Jake, I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.’” He
folded the note, rested his elbows on his knees, and regarded me thoughtfully. “You’ve lectured me enough about Hemingway and his famous use of ‘and’ that I suspected this was either inspired by him or plagiarized. Turns out, it was plagiarized.”
“You know…” I smirked, my eyes still swollen and teary. “It’s not polite to read other people’s mail.”
“You never told me why you guys broke up.”
“Actually, I think it’s illegal—”
“Yeah, well, you had no pulse. And I wanted to know why.”
Damn. I was close.
“Really?” I asked a little too enthusiastically.
“I guess, technically, you had a pulse, but they couldn’t find it. And your breathing was so weak the nursing student who found you panicked and started CPR.” Ah, that explained why my ribs were cracked. “If this,” he held the paper in front of me, “has anything to do with last night, you need to talk about it.”
Again with the talking. “Cash—”
“I’m not saying it has to be with me. Just someone. You’re supposed to see a psychiatrist here, right?”
“I don’t want to talk to anyone else.” Please don’t leave. Don’t leave. Don’t.
He took my hand. “Okay. Can you tell me what happened?”
I did. I told him Jeff raped me and that I left Jake so I could kill my baby. I told him Jake wouldn’t take me back even though I begged. I told him I started stripping when I couldn’t find work.
He leaned toward me and took my hand. “You went through all that alone?” he asked with that classic Cash compassion.
“Cash, I deserved—”
“Shut up.” He stood over me and pressed his lips into my forehead. Then he stared in my eyes and swept his fingers over my bandage. “Stop punishing yourself.” He hugged me carefully to avoid pressing his weight into my battered sternum. I buried my face in his chest, lifting my hands to his waist.
He straightened up and let my letter to Jake fall to the covers. Cash’s hand reached into his pants pocket again to retrieve my final letter. The one to Jeff and my mom. They lived in the same place, and theirs were each short and sweet enough to fit on one page.
Cash read, “‘Jeff, fuck you, you vindictive son of a bitch. The only reason I’m going to hell is so I can watch you burn in agony for eternity.’”
Whoa. Never heard Cash swear before. It was shockingly sexy—that sugary Georgia inflection over my bitter words. Damn. I could listen to him curse all day. Too bad I couldn’t provoke him to do it on his own.
“‘Mom, you should have listened. I hope the images of your precious husband raping your only child haunt you until you die, hopefully longer. Dad wouldn’t have let that happen.’”
Cash swung his eyes to me, his lips curving into a smirk. “Sawyer, you moron.”
21
JULY 2018
I thought I’d feel like a badass walking through those doors with the “High AWOL Risk” signs tacked to them, like one of those moments when someone quits a job where they hated all their coworkers and leaves telling their boss where to shove it as they flip the bird high and proud.
But it wasn’t like that at all.
I stepped out into the stuffy July sunlight shaken and scared with a new puffy scar on my wrist, as well as a half-dozen bottles of pills for anxiety and Major Depressive Disorder, Single Episode, which was what I got for hacking away at myself with a plastic spoon. Released back into a world that was still too big and too bright and too sharp to handle. It wasn’t the same few faces anymore: therapists, patients, nurses, doctors. There were millions again, any of whom could have known my face, my body, and I couldn’t tell. As much as it irked me to admit, that hospital was the safest place I’d been since Jeff was released from prison.
But now Jeff was going back behind bars, and I was supposedly getting a say in how long. The FBI got their arrest, and Simone and I got our conviction. Jeff’s trial had been going on in Oregon while I finished serving the rest of my sentence in LA.
Three days after Agent Holt told me they had Jeff in custody, I worked up the nerve to call my mom. Cash held my hand while I listened to her phone ring through the free patient pay phone. With each ring, I prayed she would see the unfamiliar California number and ignore the call. My heart stopped when her weary voice answered, “Hello?”
I swallowed hard and forced out, “Mom?”
Weeping broke out on the other side of the line. “Sawyer?”
I sighed. “Yeah, it’s me.”
But she didn’t say anything. I sat there watching the phone timer tick away three whole minutes as she sobbed. What was she crying about? Maybe she saw the pictures the feds showed me and felt guilty. No, that was far too optimistic. It was probably because her lovey-dovey was in jail again.
Mom only saw Jeff as the carefree, kid at heart. The acoustic-guitar-playing Sunday school teacher with those cute thick-rimmed glasses. He was just too darn gentle and charming and kind to be capable of harming anyone, let alone a child. How could anyone even imagine he’d hurt a kid? The police had to have been wrong that first arrest. She was convinced the mom of that little girl had some vendetta against him. Maybe that mom tried to get Jeff into bed, and he resisted so she set him up. I guessed denial was that form of delusion people didn’t get locked up for.
My mom wasn’t alone, though. He did seem sweet, benign. Plus, he was cool and charismatic, so people were eager to please him, to be part of his inner circle. Even Simone was. Her parents hadn’t had any problem leaving her with him every day after school. Of course, Simone kept her mouth shut when Jeff raped her repeatedly. Because even in the horror and the disgusting pain, she was in his world. He made her feel special. He made her feel saved.
Apparently, I was the only one who never wanted any part of him. I wanted my dad back, not this slimy replacement. So, while Simone was his pretty little pet, Jeff convinced me that he was holding me by the collar as I hung over the precipice of hell. If only he had let me fall.
I had no idea what my mom had to cry about. I waited for her to blubber an explanation, impatiently tapping my big toe against the sole of my flip-flop.
“Sweetie,” she sniffed. “I’m so sorry. I can’t even—” More crying. Huh. Maybe she did feel bad. She finally choked out, “Where are you, honey? Please, come home.”
“Um…” I raised a brow at Cash before answering, “I can’t until July.” And even then, I didn’t want to.
But I did, the morning I was discharged. Cash and I went straight from the hospital to LAX. We flew into the hardly functioning airport in the prison town thirty miles south of my shit town.
My mom picked us up at the deserted curb, suffocating me with her hug, crying into my untamed hair. I patted her back. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” I muttered the lie. What was I supposed to say? Was it really my job to comfort her for her husband raping me repeatedly and posting it online? How was that my role?
She blabbed the whole ride home on the narrow highway darkened by ominous redwoods, through rolling green farmland, into our beach town with scattered squat buildings and poorly planned neighborhoods. It seemed like she was trying to keep the conversation light by sputtering out questions as fast as she could: How was college? What are you studying? Have you heard from Jake? Did you know his sister’s getting married? I heard Tatum got pregnant. Do you talk to her anymore? Cash, what do you study? How do you two know each other? This last question was accompanied by a sideways glance, code for, He’s cute. What’s wrong with him?
Ah! Shut up! I pressed my fingers into my temples and leaned my aching head, eyes closed, against the passenger window. “Mom, could we just listen to music?”
She muttered a passive-aggressive, “Sure, sweetie,” and stopped talking.
We passed over the bridge with the river on the east and harbor on the west, stopping at the three traffic lights of our town, turning right at the last light. A few more turns and we were on Third Street, driving onto the pavement wher
e my demons clawed and scratched and waited for my return. I stared the street down, ignoring the nightmares flashing across it. None of the men were on the sidewalks. Simone wasn’t here. Jeff wasn’t either. Travis and his friends weren’t at the intersection at the end of the street. And Cash was here. I had Cash. I would be okay.
“Do you want me to order pizza for dinner? Or do you want to go out?” my mom asked as we pulled into the driveway of the little blue house.
Out? No. Jeff was on trial. Our whole town knew by now that he raped me, that I was all over the web. There was no way in hell I was leaving the house. “Could we order in?”
“Yep. Do you want to have any friends over? I heard—”
“No,” I answered too quickly as I climbed out of the car.
I led Cash inside through the living room into my room. After I flicked the light on, I scanned the white dresser, my made bed with the purple down comforter, the window by it. I stepped back at the memories of Jake’s skin in the moonlight, the taste of his sweat, his warmth against me under those sheets. Shut my eyes when I pictured waking up naked, half under the covers, sore and sick after Kyle’s party. I turned around to bolt out when I felt the thick fear in the room from a decade ago, bumping into Cash’s chest. “Uh…” I stuttered as my anxious eyes stared up at him. “You should take my room. I’ll, um…” I glanced past him to the living room. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Sawyer, no, you just got out of the hospital. You should—”
“I can’t sleep in here.”
He nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
After I wheeled my suitcase into the bathroom, I sorted through my belongings. I had everything now, including triple-blade razors that didn’t scrape my skin with the added bonus of no CNAs to supervise me using them, a hair straightener, and all my yummy hair and skin products. I turned the shower on hot and stripped down, then scanned my body in the glaring bathroom lights. It was emaciated and unshaved. The mirror showed my pale skin and hair left natural and wavy, dull from crappy conditioner.