by Nicole Thorn
Layla’s apparent rage went away when she saw me, and Adalyn’s knee stopped tapping. They both were on their feet in a moment, and we rushed each other. With a quick and hard hug, I felt like a stone was removed from my back. Air came easier, and tension started evaporating. I handed Adalyn my ice cream, and she happily ate it as we all squished together on two and a half of the metal and cloth seats in the corner.
“How’d they tell you?” Layla asked.
I rolled my eyes. “They got me that.” I pointed to the ice cream. “And then we came here instead of home.”
Layla looked offended for me. “Bullshit on them. At least my mom told me this morning over breakfast. I’ve been texting you all day.”
“Sorry,” I said guiltily. “I was ignoring my phone.”
“Wilson?” Adalyn asked with a full mouth.
I cleared my throat. “Stuff happened…”
“Ooh.” Layla grinned. “Sexy stuff?”
When I blushed and sank down, the girls gasped and each smacked one of my arms. Rude.
“Ow…”
Adalyn licked the spoon, and her blue eyes were wider than I’d ever seen. She whispered, “Did you have sex with him?”
“No!” I said, too loudly.
My lips pressed together as I told the girls what did happen. Adalyn’s mouth hung wide open while Layla was somehow ecstatic.
She grabbed my arm. “Oh my God, that is wonderful. You snagged yourself a pretty one, didn’t you?”
“He doesn’t want to be with me like that. He says it’s too soon.”
“Garbage,” Adalyn said, shockingly.
When we stared at her, she was a deer in the headlights. With the spoon all full of ice cream, she froze.
“What? I can’t be happy someone touched your girly parts? I am. I’m happy for you because you’re not afraid. I wish I wasn’t afraid either.”
I blinked. “Of course I’m afraid. But I like being afraid. It means that I’m actually feeling something.”
Her eyes went to her lap as she stabbed her ice cream with the spoon. “This feels safe. This nothingness. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just closed my eyes and stayed that way until it was all gone.”
Layla leaned over me to take Adalyn’s hand. “Together, remember? If you’re scared, we talk about it, and we find a way through. No nothingness. Nothingness meets you at the end of a bullet.”
he room was chilly as we sat on a red leather couch. It faced another almost just like it, only it was half the size. The window was cruelly not in our eyesight. It was to the left of us while the door out was to the right. I could see a beautiful tree outside that I was sure I would get scolded for staring at if I spent my time doing that. I wanted to watch the birds before they left this place and the trees started shivering.
All of the colors in the large room were neutral. The carpet was a muddy brown while the walls were eggshell white. They were decorated with a dozen framed diplomas and awards that I didn’t care about. I didn’t care about the turned-around pictures on the desk. I didn’t care about the man sitting across from us with gray hair and thick glasses. I didn’t care that my parents thought I needed to talk this out. I cared about my sisters beside me, and I cared about the way their hands found mine the precise second before I would have crumbled without them.
The man was so quiet all this time, waiting for us to speak when I think part of him knew none of us would start this. It was more than clear that we wanted to be far from this place. If we could all run away together, I think we would. Never to be seen again. We could be freaks all alone, but together.
“So,” Dr. Hastings said, tapping a pencil on an old school yellow legal pad. “Which of you girls want to go first?”
Layla, forever the brave one, spoke. “Look, buddy, none of us wanna be here. If you want to make a really easy couple bucks, just let us sit here for a while.”
The old man smiled at her. “You don’t have to say anything at all. I just figured that you wouldn’t want to waste your parents’ money. Or, I thought that maybe you would be willing to talk to me. Since you were so willing to talk to the news.”
Really? Trying to get us to cough something up because we made the mistake of doing that once?
“If you saw the interview,” I started, very calmly. “Then you don’t really need us to talk to you.”
He pointed his eraser at me. “Ah, but that’s the thing. I learned so much by seeing you girls talk, and it gave me a million questions.”
“Is that why you were so keen on taking us?” Layla’s eyes were narrowed at the man.
I wanted to run so far away. I could picture myself doing it, even without anywhere to run off too. Just somewhere green and quiet. I could be alone, sinking into the earth and everything that it was. I wanted to feel wind on this glass skin of mine, and I wanted to be reminded that it was everything that freedom was.
“Admittedly, a bit. I don’t see my reasoning to be a problem. I’d like to help you if you’d let me. Your last counselor didn’t seem to do all that much for you. I think I can make up for that.”
I watched Adalyn’s cautious eyes flicker up to him. “How do you think you can help us?”
The doctor put his pencil down and folded his hands on his lap. “I’ve been doing this a very long time. There’s not much that I haven’t seen or heard. When people hurt, I like to try and help them not hurt anymore. It’s how I feel like my life matters. Now, I understand that you all want more than this. You said it yourselves. Think of me as a garbage can, if you will. Dump all of the icky feelings and secrets and weight onto me. Get it out of you because it’s nothing but poison. Nothing you say will ever leave this room unless it’s from your own mouth. You can tell me your fears, your dreams, your misery. There is no judgment here, and I expect no guilt.”
“Everyone assumes that all we need to get better is a good long talk. My parents don’t want me with my girls here because they think that they remind me of that place. Well, they do. They also remind me that I’m stronger than I feel like I am. They remind me of why I want to be on this planet. No one else does that for me,” I said.
The man nodded, and I noticed how he didn’t take notes. “Sometimes people can think that if you remove what they believe to be reminders, then you won’t think about the incident in question. That only works for a while at best, and only when that incident doesn’t live inside of you. Or define who you are. At the moment, you’re all defined by this. That’s a prison you put yourselves in. Once you start seeing yourselves as more than broken, more than victims, then you’ll start to heal. You have to leave it behind. Don’t forget. Never forget. But move on.”
“How are we supposed to do that when we don’t know anything about being people?” Adalyn asked.
“Let me tell you all a secret. No one has a damn clue what they’re doing. Not ever. They can pretend, but life is nothing more than a guessing game. Sometimes you guess right, and you move ahead on the board. Sometimes you guess wrong and fall flat on your face. You have to fall down if you want to learn how to pick yourself up again.
“You girls have been put through a hell that I will not for a moment pretend to understand. You have every right to be angry.” He looked to each of us in turn. “Or scared. Or want to feel nothing at all. That is entirely up to you. But there comes a point where you’re doing nothing but using this as a crutch. It’s easy to shut the world out when you’ve decided you don’t belong in it or it doesn’t want you. If you shut the world out, then you don’t have to take risks. Risks are scary. Life is one risk after another, if you like it or if you don’t.”
Layla squirmed and let go of my hand. “Who says we don’t want to take risks?”
“No one. I just think you girls are hiding securely behind what you’ve decided the world is.”
“Meaning?” I demanded.
“Meaning,” he said. “That I can read you all like a book. You and Layla do all the talking. That means that you’ve deci
ded that Adalyn is the fragile one. You may not have done it on purpose, but you did it. That would make me believe that you both are trying to keep her safe. You blame yourselves for Kylie’s choice, and you want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“And?” Layla growled.
“That is very commendable of you, but you’re putting unrealistic responsibilities on yourself, Layla. Saving lives is a heavy thing to take on. Are you doing it because you’re worried that you won’t be able to save your own?” His eyes went to her wrists, and she noticed.
Those marks would follow us to our graves, and sometimes I wonder if it was worth the effort. The look I got from my parents and strangers alike when they saw my… sometimes I wished I could open them up again. I wished I could watch the crimson leave me so I could step away from all of this. But I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. There was no peace on Earth, and I did not believe that peace awaited me on the other side. How could I, after all of this?
“That was a long time ago. I want to live now,” Layla said.
“I can see that.” He smiled kindly. “You all want to be happy. I’m very glad about that want. You wouldn’t believe how many people have given up before even walking through my door. It’s a brave thing you’re all doing. Living through this.”
“Unlike Kylie, right?” Adalyn asked, a hint of venom in her voice.
With a shake of his head, the doctor said, “No. She wasn’t weak. She was just cornered, and in her head, there was no other way out. Kylie didn’t allow herself time to try and heal. It’s a shame, but I would hate to see you girls follow in her footsteps.”
“And how in your infinite wisdom would you suggest that?” Layla asked.
“Tell me what you want your life to turn out like. Don’t think about the impossible or the difficulty. I want each of you to tell me what you want your life to be.”
Layla’s jaw set and loosened, but she did as she was asked. “I want to go to school, and I want to be someone important.”
“To the world?”
Layla’s eyes went to the floor thoughtfully. “No. Not to the world. I’d be happy if I could be important to just one person. Not like my sisters. But I want someone to think of me, and I want them to think ‘how would I have gotten through this without her?’ and I want them to look at me like I matter. Like I’m more than a girl who grew up as a doll. I want to be someone’s everything.” She swallowed and rubbed her forehead. “God, that sounds so gross out loud.”
Dr. Hastings smiled at her. “It doesn’t. Of course you want to matter to someone. You spent so many years mattering in the wrong way. You just want to save people. I think I see that now. You like helping.”
Layla didn’t respond.
“Riley?” The man turned to me. “What would you like out of your life?”
I sighed. “Um…” My eyes went to the ceiling. “I’d like to be able to talk to my family without them seeing me like I’m glass. I want normalcy. I want to be married one day, and I want kids. I want to be what I think I should have been before all this started.”
“Meaning?”
I stared at my laced fingers on my lap. “I want to be human.”
I saw pretty pictures of a fantastical future in my mind. All the silly things that people used to want. A fence and a dog. Bikes leaning up against the house. Food in the oven. I wanted people to come home to. People who saw me as Riley, not as the girl who killed a man. Not as a paper doll. Or china. I wanted my heart to beat in my chest.
When I looked back at the man, he was writing.
“You feel like everyone sees you as damaged goods.”
“Don’t they?”
He sighed. “I’ve only spoken to your parents a couple times, so I can’t really say much about them. They want what’s best for all of you because they love you. It’s going to take adjusting for them as well as you to fully see you all as an adult. If they refuse to stop treating you like the child you left them as, then that’s on them. You have to realize that they live with trauma too. It’s not only you girls who were hurt by what happened to you. There was a ripple that damaged a lot of people. Just because you don’t agree with everything they want for you, doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
“As far as the rest of your wants, I think that your hopes are far easier to achieve than you may think. There will be a day where you wake up and the first thing you see isn’t that place you were. You will only see where you are right now. It might be tomorrow, and it might be a decade from now, but I promise that the day will come to you. The hurt will fade and scar over. It’s an old cliché, but time heals all wounds. You’ll meet new people, and they’ll have their own pain. Everyone has something broken inside of them, Riley. We all just wear it differently.”
I let myself think about that for a moment or two. The pain eventually fading from me. Never all the way, but enough to where I could function. To where I could feel something in between pleasure and pain. I ceased to be unless I was hurting or under Wilson. I needed to be someone all on my own.
Maybe that was what Wilson was worried about. He didn’t want to be a crutch for me. He didn’t want me to use him. How could he ever believe that I would do that to him? Yes, I loved it when he touched me. If I could spend a whole day in his bed, I would. But it was entirely because of the man in it with me. I only wished I could have done a better job of explaining that to him. I wanted those other parts of life because he was the one that I could see it with. I could see myself loving him.
“Adalyn.” The doctor gestured to her. “You’ve been quiet. Tell me what you want out of life.”
She was apprehensive, but she answered. “I’d like to be a writer. I want to make children’s books. I draw, and I paint.”
She grinned. Really grinned at the idea. It made something in me ease. There was rare brightness in her soul, and I wanted her to hold onto that for dear life. With everything that happened to us, she needed it.
“I want to make people happy.”
So, in the end, this was who we were. The girl who wanted to save people. The girl who wanted to bring people joy. And the girl who wanted nothing but to be a person. I had no doubt that two of these dreams would come true.
The man nodded at all of us. “Commendable goals. Now that we’ve talked about the future, let’s talk about the past.”
Here we go.
His eyes went to me, and his words were as casual as if he was telling me his grocery list. “You killed a man.”
My chest tightened, and my mouth went dry. The subject that I couldn’t handle. I knew what I was. I knew what I did and why I did it. There would be no discoveries today. I was more than sure of that fact.
“I did. Are you about to call me a hero? A savior? Come on, I’ve heard it all. I hear every day how brave I am. How I did this wonderful thing.”
It was disgusting in the most devastating way. That night, I was nothing more than a hunter. An animal, finding my prey and taking it out so that I could go on for one more night. And it wasn’t even enough to save my sister. Dying when we finally got the chance to be alive.
Dr. Hastings’ face was unreadable. “I wasn’t going to say that at all. I was going to say that what you did was incredibly malevolent. I don’t think it was beautiful or wonderful. You did what you needed to do to survive. That is almost always something ugly.”
Admittedly, I was throw off by him and relieved in the oddest way. I stared in wonder. “You don’t think I’m a hero?”
“That word is true for some people and not for others. It doesn’t matter how anyone sees that act but you. What do you feel when you look back on that night?”
That black night. The one that would have either been my last night or the first night of my new life. And what I had to do to earn that… “I didn’t like it… but it felt good at the same time. I don’t really know what that means.”
He held a hand up. “Did killing him feel good, or the fact that he was dead? Because there’s
a difference.”
Everything fell into place in that sentence. “I was glad it was over, and when I was doing it, it didn’t matter to me how, or that I was the one who had to do it. The only one willing. I would have killed a hundred men if it meant freeing my sisters. I don’t regret it, but it still feels like this ball of hate inside of me was born that night. I wouldn’t have stopped stabbing him if I wasn’t pulled away.”
I tear hit my lap, and I only knew because Adalyn grabbed my hand.
“I know you don’t wanna hear it, but I think you are a hero. You were the only one of us who could have done what you did,” she said.
I stared weakly at her. “What does that say about me?”
“It says whatever you think it says,” Dr. Hastings answered. “You are only ever what you make yourself. In my personal opinion, I think you did the only thing you could do. It was a monstrous thing brought out by a monstrous man. That place made you into the people you are today, for better or worse. But that doesn’t mean you have to remain how you are. If you feel hate inside of you, just let it go.”
I shook my head. “You make it sound like it’s easy.”
“It is. Hate is a thing that you have to holdfast to. It’s not like love or joy. Those just come along, and you can’t force them. Hate is fascinating because it can just drift away into the ether if you let it. But there’s the rub. It relies entirely on you. You have to want it gone. You have to want to get better to actually get better. You want that, don’t you?”
The three of us nodded in time with each other.
“Good. Then you’re one step closer.”
hey just couldn’t wait to fill the prescription. There was no hesitation from my parents. So, now I was staring at a little orange bottle of pills that were supposed to magically make me not sad anymore. How was that fair? I needed to be sad, or I wouldn’t feel anything at all.
I shook the bottle, staring at the pills as they rattled. I wanted nothing more than to dump them all into the trash, but my parents would notice. Just like they would notice if I wasn’t taking them. So I took one and dropped it into the toilet, flushing it out of my life. The shower was running, so no one would hear. Abraham judged me from the floor. I knew I should have just kicked him out.