by Inda Herwood
The group quickly loses interest in the race below, and instead begins to watch the new drama unfolding before them.
“I’m watching illegal racing with my friends. What are you doing?” Moon looks down and sees the unopened drink in my hand, asking seriously, “Would you like me to help you with that?”
I’m in front of him in a single breath, the soda dropping to the ground as my fist flies through the air and connects with his face. Instantly he’s bent over, clutching his nose, which I’m pretty sure I felt break under my hand.
The girls gasp.
“Shit,” he says, voice nasally.
“Here,” Cyvil says, having grabbed a handful of ice from the cooler and making Moon hold it to his nose. She turns to glare at me. “What was that for?” she hisses, eyes practically on fire.
“How could you bring her here!” I yell at him, ignoring her words as I feel either Rosy or Ra’Sean grab my shoulders, hauling me back and away from the traitor.
“She deserved to see a part of your life, just like you’ve gotten to see hers,” he says just as heatedly, wincing when it aggravates his nose.
“I don’t care about that.” I throw off whoever has me and advance on Moon again. “She could have gotten hurt. Have you forgotten that these are dangerous people? It’s a damn illegal speedway for heaven’s sake, you jackass!” I’m about to take another swing at him when Cyvil suddenly steps in the way, grabbing my hand before it can move, and twisting it behind my back in a really painful way.
“Gah,” I grit between my teeth as she pulls it a little harder.
Everyone around us sucks in a quick breath of surprise.
“Have you forgotten that I’m not some delicate little wallflower?” she says to me, her voice full of quiet anger. “Now back off, or I really will snap your wrist.”
All I can do is give a quick nod of my head, but it’s enough. She releases my arm and it goes back into place. I shake it out to return feeling, staring her down the entire time. “Was that really necessary?”
“I don’t know,” she says sarcastically. “Was that?” She points at Moon, now standing upright and looking at Cyvil, eyes watering; blood splashed all over his lips and down his neck.
“This was none of your business to get involved in.”
“You’re right,” she says, taking a step forward. “I have no good, logical reason to want to know what you do with your life other than pure curiosity. But you want to know something? The entire time I’ve been here, I’ve been worried about where you’ve been, if something’s wrong with you. I had no idea that this is what you did for a living until about five minutes ago, and I was the one that figured it out. Moon didn’t tell me anything. All he did was bring me here, because he knew I wasn’t the happiest either, and thought it would cheer me up. He was being a friend, like I thought we were!” She shoves her hands into my chest, and I stumble back a step, more from surprise than anything. The longer she talked, the angrier she got, until it finally exploded from her hands.
“If you’re going to be mad with anyone, take it out on me. Not him.” She’s huffing now, her chest moving rapidly up and down under her large sweatshirt, a giant contrast to how most of the girls dress around here.
Everyone in the circle has been quiet, watching on in confusion and shock at what just happened. To them, they probably have no idea why I would be mad that my fiancée showed up at one of my races. But if they knew the truth…
“Cyvil, I didn’t –”
Whoop whoop!
I, and most everyone else, turn at the loud cry of sirens and cop cars crashing through the forest, rampaging into the sad excuse for a parking lot; the red and blue lights illuminating the field in color. Just like that, the place goes into a panic, people screaming and running for their cars or the trees like ants avoiding a shoe.
Not thinking, just acting, I grab Cyvil’s hand and drag her with me as my friends split up without a word, having done this before. Rosy grabs Hanna, Ra’Sean takes Kat, and Ellie latches her hand around Moon’s, all evacuating for their cars which I hope they smartly parked on the outside of the field, beyond the range of the police for the time being.
“What’s going on?” Cyvil shouts above the yelling of police and the returning cries of the crowd.
“We have to go! This is illegal, remember?” Running in the direction of where I left the Camaro, I don’t give Cyvil any other option than to follow me, dodging bodies left and right as I try to keep us out of the cops’ way. She keeps quiet and struggles to maintain my pace as I haul us around the small tent where Finn O’Malley does his calling of the races, finding the Camaro at the back, in the shadow of the trees.
Unlocking the passenger side, I open the door for her and she quickly slips inside. I jump over the hood when I see a cop twenty yards to our right spot us, his hand going to his radio as he starts to run in our direction. Falling off the other side, I unstick the door I’ve been meaning to fix and hop in, slamming the key into the ignition.
“Jagger…” I hear Cyvil say nervously, her eyes having noticed the cop, now only two dozen feet from reaching us.
“Hold on,” I say, cranking the engine and slamming my foot on the gas until the pedal hits the floor. I watch as the grass and mud we kick up behind us spray the stoutly cop in the face. Slipping into gear, we swerve around the other sputtering cars and dive into a small opening leading onto a back road, the one near the end of the field that people seem to have forgotten exists. Whoever created this place knew that raids would be inevitable, and smartly created this escape route. But over the years, weeds and overgrowth have made it nearly invisible to the naked eye.
It has saved my ass on more than one occasion.
The only downside is that it’s a bumpy ride, filled with potholes and large rocks, careening the Camaro this way and that. Looking out of the corner of my eye to see if Cyvil is okay, I see her eyes are shut, her hand gone white around the safety strap above her head.
“It’s not much longer,” I tell her, checking the rearview mirror to see if we have any company. Luckily, all seems clear. No following headlights, just the sound of blaring sirens dying in the distance.
The headlights to the Camaro bob up and down over the rough terrain until we finally come out onto the curb of a dirt road, the back tires spinning out as they adjust to smoother footing. I take a left, going in the direction of the city, which is a minimum hour-long drive on a twisty back road like this.
The deafening silence in the car spreads over the next ten minutes, neither of us speaking a word. At least she has her eyes open now, but the white-knuckle grip, once on the safety strap, is now on the handle, as though she’s getting up the courage to bail out.
“I’m sure this isn’t what you imagined when Moon promised you a fun night,” I mutter, another wave of anger going through me at the mention of him.
Silence.
Wiping the sweat from my forehead with one hand and steering with the other, I admit to myself that I really effed this up. Majorly.
Another minute goes by and I give her a longer, cursory glance now that we aren’t being chased, and my eyes don’t have to be aware of every root and bump in the road. I start at her hair and go down, past her face, neck, arms, thighs, and then calves, and that’s where they get stuck. In the dark cabin, I catch sight of a patch of darker liquid spreading over the bottom of her jeans, only realizing now that she’s missing her shoes. They must have come off when I dragged her to the car.
That’s what the grimace and finger numbing grip must be about.
Swerving the Camaro over to the side of the road, I turn off the engine and start digging in the back, looking for the first aid kit Ellie made me get last year. I distantly hear Cyvil shift in her seat.
“What are you doing? We shouldn’t be stopping, should we?”
Ah, there it is. I grip the small white box in my right hand and bring it up over the seat and into my lap. Opening my door, I let it stay open so the lights k
eep on. I can feel her eyes watch my every step as I go around the front of the car and over to her side, opening the passenger door. Bending down, I say, “Give me your feet.”
Her breathing becomes labored again, the whites of her eyes consuming her irises as she stares down at me, and then her muddy socks, refusing to move. “They’re fine. I’m fine,” she lies. “We should really be going…”
“Cyvil,” I say gruffly, closing my eyes to keep from letting my worry show. “Please, just let me see them.”
Thirty seconds of tense energy passes between us before she even moves a pinky toe. But slowly, seeing that I’m not going anywhere until she at least lets me give her a check-up, she begrudgingly takes her feet and puts them on the edge of the doorframe. Being careful, she removes each sock, her face trying not to wince with each one. When I see the damage, my stomach does another guilty flip.
It’s not so much the current injuries that bother me as much as the old ones. She has maybe half a dozen small, shallow cuts along the tops and bottoms of her feet, the blood I thought I saw earlier mostly just mud that dried on the hem of her jeans, mixed with small spots of red. What has my throat drying up is the obviously deep ones she must have suffered long ago, because they are bleached white and raised in jagged lines, as though they had time to heal, but not completely.
All over her toes, ankles, the tops of her feet, and even the bottoms, have even more shallow scars, scored across her skin, just like the ones on her hands and neck. Not being able to help myself, my hands roll her jeans up further, all the way to her knees, and it’s all I can do not to choke at the sight.
Not a single inch of her flesh escaped the blade of a knife. I can only assume the rest of her is covered, too.
I fall back on my butt in the dirt, eyes glued to the shadow of her past in the lousy light of the car. My body feels numb.
Totally forgetting I’m supposed to be nursing her injuries, she instead grabs the kit and opens it, finding some alcohol and cotton swabs. She doesn’t even wince when it connects to her open wounds. I suppose that would be nothing compared to the pain she must have felt with…with…
“I’ve been making bets with myself,” she says, now finished with sterilizing, and moving on to Band-Aids next. “Bets on how long it’ll take you to finally ask. When we met the second time, I figured twenty minutes. And then at Serendipity, I guessed two weeks. After a while I figured you just didn’t care to know the truth. But now,” she murmurs sadly, still looking at her cuts, “I’m guessing it’s eating you up not to ask. And after discovering one of your secrets, I guess it’s only right to divulge one of mine, isn’t it?”
I don’t say anything, because I can’t. Yes, I’ve been dying to know what happened to her, why her life has turned out like it has. And I guess that makes me a hypocrite, since I’ve criticized her more than once for wanting to know the same about me. But what makes our circumstances different is that it’s never a right time to ask someone how their life and body simultaneously got destroyed.
Apparently, though, she is going to do it for me, and the moment is right now.
“I was seven. My father’s business had just taken off, and there weren’t many people that didn’t know about it. He was very boastful about his success back then, having come from nothing as a boy in Harlem. He bought boats, vacation homes, expensive cars – neon signs of success.” She closes her eyes, head minutely shaking in disgust as she continues to work over her cuts. “He flashed it for everyone to see, and the ones who notice it the most are the ones who know they’ll never have it. He never thought about that back then, how envious and jealous people can get.
“My sister was home watching me one night while my parents went out to dinner with some of my father’s business partners. She was fourteen then, and figured I would be alright by myself while she went and took a shower upstairs. It wasn’t until later that we discovered that she was actually supposed to be the target, but they settled for me instead.” She puts the last Band-Aid on, her index finger tracing one of the scars around her ankle bone, slowly, gently. I watch the movement, transfixed by it and her story.
“It was an inside job. Our main head of security turned out to be a secret meth head, and told his drug dealers about his new position. They paid him in drugs to keep the security cameras down for five minutes so that they would have enough time to take what they needed. And since I was the only child of Lance Montae that they could find on the main floor, I was my sister’s substitute.
“I was watching cartoons in the living room when a bag was thrown over my head, and then they were taping up my feet and hands. There were three of them, and I was little hassle as a seven-year-old to take down. Atillia never heard my screams from the shower.” As she says this, her hand tremors slightly over her ankle, but she doesn’t stop. “I don’t really know what happened next. I think I was thrown into a van or something and it seemed to take hours before I saw light again. Turns out they had taken me to their drug den, a house out in the Bronx that was thought to be abandoned. They set up a ransom for my parents to pay, and until they got their three million dollars, I was theirs to play with.
“As you can imagine, drugs do terrible things to peoples’ minds. I don’t even think they knew what they were doing to me, or that it was me that they were hurting. I remember once the lady who had helped take me say that she needed to destroy the demon, and I take it that was me. And so…” She breathes heavily, her eyes shut in pain, but I know it must just be remembrance. “They tried to destroy me, but failed before help arrived. They took turns cutting me up with a rusty, dull blade for two days. That’s when a squad team arrived and took them out, since they had guns of their own and weren’t about to go out without a fight.”
She shudders. “The ride to the hospital was a blur, mostly because I had lost so much blood at that point and hadn’t had water in days. I was constantly slipping in and out of consciousness. But I’ll never forget the doctor that helped me in the ER. He did everything to keep me calm when all I wanted to do was panic. I had a horrible fear of people touching me after what had happened, and he did everything to make sure I wasn’t stressed; getting me to laugh with lame jokes, smile by asking me about my favorite toys… He made me feel normal while everyone else made me feel like an animal behind glass.”
A tear leaks out of one eye, and she lets it fall, right where her finger was a second ago, tracing her scars. “He saved more than just my body, my life. He saved my sanity. It inspired me to want to do the same for others.”
“That’s why you want to be a doctor so badly,” I say to myself, not aware that I actually said it out loud until she smiles, nodding.
“Of course, that was just the start of it. There were a bunch of surgeries after that for the muscle damage, blood transfusions, plastic surgery to lessen the severity of the deeper scars. They patched me up as well as they could and sent me home, but…,” she pauses, eyes lost for a moment. “I think the most damage was done to my dad. After that, he did personal background checks on all our security, upgraded the cameras and alarms. He paid the top IT guys in the country to make sure I and my story didn’t exist on the internet, the same with my sister, to protect us from people knowing who we were; that we had money, connections. I had security guards with me when I played outside on my swing set. He went crazy, scared of every move we made, afraid the same thing would happen again, but with different results.” She sighs, turning her head up to look at me now. There’s that tragic smile again. “So there, that’s my sad little story of how I became the bride to Edward Scissorhands. Much to popular belief, and most people’s favorite theories, I did not do this to myself. I never self-harmed, or was attacked by an ex-boyfriend, or fell into a rock quarry.” She rolls her eyes.
I pause, letting that sink in. “People have actually asked if that’s what happened?”
“Yep. Actually, your ex favored that last one. Her friends would make a game out of flinging the most ridiculous ideas at me ev
ery day in class about how I became like this.” She motions to herself, and my eyes get stuck on the scar across her face, the one that just barely misses her right eye. My fingers twitch at my sides when I imagine that scene unfolding, Renee sitting at her desk, snickering as her friends take jabs at Cyvil.
“Please tell me you retaliated.”
She smiles proudly. “Yep.”
“Do I even want to know?”
“Probably not. But I’m sure Moon would be impressed.”
I snort, saying, “If it had anything devilish about it, then you’re probably right.”
Cyvil
He laughs, but his eyes remain heavy, and I regret having instilled that in them with the story of my past. But it felt like I needed to do it, to get past the barrier we both seemed to be keeping up, protecting ourselves. And even if he never tells me his own tale, at least I can relax, knowing he knows the truth of mine.
So much for my hard stance on keeping it hush.
“You’re amazing,” he says quietly to himself, eyes looking at his grease smeared hands. “And that makes me even more of an asshole than before.”
Heart stuttering at what he said first, I clear my throat before saying, “How so?”
“I was one of those people, the ones who thought you did this to yourself, when we first met,” he clarifies, face guilt ridden. The black of his jacket along with his dark hair and jeans makes him blend into the night, a shadow. “I’m so sorry, Cyvil.”
“What, for thinking I’m into self-mutilation?” I ask on a snort.
He shakes his head, eyes looking up into mine now, dark silver against the light of the car. The severity in them has me shutting up. “For that, for acting like a jerk when you asked about my life, for hitting Moon in front of you and causing a scene.”
I laugh, quick and loud. “So you’re not sorry for hitting him, just that you did it in front of me?”