by Adams, Lucia
CHAPTER 12
Divulgences
Jared could smell Hannah’s stupidity. She believed the whole bit about the dog and didn’t even question him. Girls and puppies, puppies and girls—they were interchangeable. Usually. Except for Hannah. She might be a bird—a little blackbird in her long shirts and pants, hiding something he was eager to see. But first—first, he wanted inside of her in every way possible. She had secrets and he wanted to make them his before he heard her chirp.
Matt was a prick. Jared didn’t mind taking all of the responsibility for Danny, fuck, it was his idea, but Matt could show his gratitude. He could share. Living in a group home made getting laid almost as hard as it had been when he spent his entire teenage years in near solitary confinement. The doctors didn’t trust him. His blood tests frequently showed he wasn’t taking his anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers. They labeled him as uncooperative and either shot his medicine into his ass, or made him drink it. They thought they were smart, but Jared was the one living on the outside now.
The group home sucked. He shared a room with Ben, who he kept catching masturbating into a hole he had cut into his stuffed teddy bear. It was disgusting. He told him to blow his load into tissues like everyone else did, but he just kept fucking the bear. The bear’s insides had to look like a Jackson Pollock painting with the varying shades of dried cum.
The worst part was the staff. They were such fucks; they made him forget about the rules. He only had an hour long window to take his medication three times a day. They still didn’t trust him to medicate himself. He missed his afternoon dose on Sunday when he was with Hannah, so they restricted his privileges for ten days. Because of this, he couldn’t visit Matt or Hannah. He had only missed his medication by fifteen minutes and the staff woman, Carla, refused to give it to him. She was a fat bitch with three chins. He called her ‘jowls’ and it made her hate him even more. She had toothpick legs with a beach ball belly and she smelled like a mixture of cheap perfume and shit. Her arms were kind of short and he figured she might not be able to reach her ass to wipe properly. She brought in video recordings of soap operas and sat on the couch watching them when she should have been working for her pay. She wasn’t the laziest, there was a tall skinny woman named Susan. She kept her hair in cornrows and started and ended her shift on the couch. At least Carla passed meds to the residents.
The everyday routine consisted of chores and day treatment, which was a circle-jerk version of group therapy. The day therapy was six hours long, so it consumed most of his time. Attendance was mandatory, so he went. He followed the rules because he didn’t want to return to Oakmont. He hoped he could get his own place in a few months like Matt had done. Matt had left the group home in record time, but he wasn’t court-ordered there like Jared was. Jared would live there for at least a few more months, depending on how well he played the game.
His time in Oakmont taught him about people and games, secrets and need. Want was a forbidden candy which tempted people to make mistakes. He could read others well—it was one of his strengths. The remainder of his time at Oakmont was spent as a watcher; nurses, orderlies, patients and doctors all operated on the same habitual matrix. People didn’t change. Everything was a game and the trick was to not get caught, but to play better than everyone else. Every person kept secrets, and these were to be used to be a game player. Jared knew he needed things. He needed to satisfy his wants. And what he wanted was Hannah.
When he met her, he knew she was special. He could almost see her heart fluttering under her blouse. She scared easily and couldn’t hide that she hid things.
Matt resisted giving Hannah to him. He asked if he could have her there, on the couch, like Matt had done in Hannah’s apartment. Yes, he admitted to having watched them that night. Matt turned him down, saying he didn’t want anything to do with it—that he had done enough to Hannah. Jared knew what Matt had done to her. They’d whispered their stories to one another, and since they only gave one and shared one, it was the only thing Jared had, so he remembered it well: Matt had crushed Hannah’s legs with a cinder block. It wasn’t Jared’s thing; he didn’t like messy middles to sandwich between clean beginnings and final endings. Still, the story was a lollipop in his mind, and he sucked it for almost six years.
Jared needed time with Hannah. The truth was, he didn’t plan on blowing his load in her after two minutes and then moving on. He wanted to savor her for hours, even if it meant tying her up. The drugs were a great idea—Matt’s idea, but smart nonetheless. If she was unconscious, it would give him time to put the ropes on her…unless she cooperated. Oh, but no! She wouldn’t cooperate with all of it; no, no, no. The ropes would be an eventuality, a guarantee, insurance, a divulgence of her future.
Matt’s anger made Jared laugh. There was no statute of limitations on murder and Jared had Matt by the balls. Matt understood the difference between want and need. He wanted Hannah, but he didn’t need her, so he gave her up. Matt would leave Hannah alone and Jared would have his chance, not only without interference, but with help from Matt.
Jared knew Matt would bend to his will. He spent the previous ten days constructing a plan, and he’d spend the next ten days carrying it out.
The visit to Matt’s house was more productive than he could have imagined. Hannah was asleep, so it was easy for Matt to steal her house key. Jared said he was just using it to go through her house while she slept, and he’d return the key. He said he would leave it on the back porch so Matt could sneak it into her purse before she left. He agreed to keep Hannah there with him until after curfew, so Jared wouldn’t have to worry about her coming home and surprising him.
Jared didn’t go to Hannah’s house right away. At the bottom of Matt’s street was a hardware store. It had already proven to be a great place to purchase other needed things. Jared went there and had a copy of the key made. The extra time allowed him to sneak into Hannah’s house and look around. He stole three things: a picture of her, a pair of her underwear, and an old diary. He would learn her. The key would allow him to return to covet what was no longer Matt’s.
A first skim of the diary revealed to him one of the things she’d been hiding—her scars. She churned about them in her diary a lot; how to hide them and how ashamed she was of them. And she was a cutter. He took delight in that. Knives sang to her, and he was glad something did. He had spent so many hours in group therapy with little girls worshiping the pain they did unto themselves. He experimented with them in the institution—they fell the quickest to pain that wasn’t from their own hands. Hannah would be more than just an experiment in nature, she’d be fun.
CHAPTER 13
Rabbit Hole
Hannah woke up with thistles under her skin. Her sleep was restless. She dreamt a green ribbon snake kept coiling around her body, making her writhe and sigh. Two hours before her alarm went off, she climbed out of bed and went to her bathroom medicine cabinet. She dumped two Percocets into her palm, swallowed them, turned the sink faucet on, stuck her mouth into the warm running water, and drank.
She expected this might happen. There was a summer when she had four surgeries on her legs. First the pills made her itch, and then they made her want, and finally, need.
Despite hiding under her blankets, she couldn’t sleep. Her eyes were squeezed into little slits like a house with its shutters closed in anticipation of a tornado. Hannah was her own storm. Matt’s rejection made her want to cut herself, but she didn’t have the energy.
It was a divulgence to allow her thoughts to linger on Matt, and what his fingers felt like on her skin, but it was like a distant memory, fogged by drugs, with snippets barely blowing in the winds of her mind.
Hannah thought she loved Matt once, before the cinder block. She always believed that if he would love her back, she’d be the wanted one, and the worthy one. Too much of her time was spent thinking about what had happened and there was only one logical explanation: she deserved it. She was ugly, fat, mouthy, and a n
uisance. Like the rats in the neighbor’s barn which swelled from the smorgasbord of the oat bin, she needed clubbed.
Because she was, by most standards, a tall girl, she had grown into her weight by her late teens. Her mother said she had lost her baby fat, but Hannah knew it had more to do with the meals she vomited into the toilet. She wasn’t bulimic, but she didn’t always think she deserved the food she had eaten. In fact, there wasn’t anything Hannah thought she deserved—even life. She found herself to be completely and utterly disposable.
The stress of work loomed and wouldn’t allow her to fall back to sleep. She worried if Donna knew. Maybe Bob had told her, or maybe she’d read the guilt on Hannah’s face. Hannah wondered how she could keep her job if Donna found out. She’d be too embarrassed to work there, and they worked so closely together that it would be bad—very bad.
Hannah knew it was her fault. HerFault, HerFault, HerFault. She could have said ‘no’, but she didn’t. Skye wiggled under the covers with Hannah. She sighed. No matter what, the sun would still rise and the sun would still set. Even though the idea appealed to her, she couldn’t hide in her apartment forever.
Unexpectedly, it dawned—the familiar sparkle from the pain killers. Her cells relaxed and she felt relief. Only two pills had done it—not too bad and she knew she could wean herself off of it like she had done before. Since she was in control of her own stash, it would be easier this time. There was nothing worse than having a mother dole your pills out to you and chide you for the missing ones. Addiction was easier when you played alone. Besides, this wasn’t a full blown addiction, just a little scratch.
Her thoughts were like mud on shoes, leaving clumps and tracks as they paced in her head. She recognized they were the sick thoughts—ones she had which weren’t ‘well’ or ‘normal’. In the sparkle, she played with them anyway:
What if she really did become an addict? Would Matt like her more? And Marcus, with his hand down her panties, plunging a long finger inside of her—would he want her as well? Maybe it would be fun—just for a little while—to see if it made her confident. She could be the girl at the party who danced on the coffee table while everyone watched—the girl everyone wanted. But the scars—remembering the scars furrowed her brow. Nothing hid them but long pants or leggings. And the ones on her arms—how her sleeves would inch up when she stretched her arm out to pass money at windows of drive-thru restaurants and the cashier would pause to look down at the slashes in her skin, and then take the money. It was almost a guarantee.
Hiding things was as much of a coping mechanism for Hannah as cutting was. Emotions were things which needed to be stuffed down until she choked on them. The only person she could relax and expose them to was herself. Being alone brought her comfort, just as cutting and abusing her medicine did. She didn’t mind not having friends, she was used to it. Close relationships brought questions Hannah didn’t want to answer. Part of her was like the person she had invented in high school—the better version of herself—the Hannah who lived to her potential. When she was alone, she could feel like the better Hannah was able to emerge. She would turn the music up and dance, make faces at herself in the mirror, and wear the short, sleeveless dresses she kept hidden in the back of her closet. As crazy as she was, even Hannah knew that underneath the dysfunction was someone so happy, they could fly.
*
It was easier for Hannah to go to work high than not. Donna was all smiles and squeals when she saw her. She hugged Hannah, but Hannah didn’t hug back. She was frozen from the numbness of being high, somewhat lost in the particles of the moment.
Donna pulled back. “What’s the matter, hon?”
“Don’t mind me, I’m still sick. And my knee is bothering me today, so I took a few Percs and I think I might have overdone it.”
“Aww, it’s a slow day—perfect for your first day back. You’ll be fine.”
Hannah was fine. A fucking crippled monkey could do her job. Hannah laughed at the thought, for she was a crippled monkey. She was so high that she had to go through the bother of reciting the alphabet in her head so she could find her place: abcdefG! G for Gariety, Robert and his unpaid water bill. Next was abcdefghiJ! For Jameson, Catherine and her application for a choice handicap parking spot right in front of her house.
Filing wasn’t serious business—just a well-used system which the members of city council kept insisting would be transferred to computerized documents in the near future. Until then, Hannah weathered paper cuts and sore fingers.
At lunchtime, Donna said she wanted to walk across the street to a café for a sandwich. Hannah declined lunching with her. Instead, she had apple juice from the vending machine upstairs and two more Percocets. Before her lunch break was over, Hannah had the sudden desire to ride the elevator to the top floor and back. The elevator rocked and jolted as if it was as old as the building. Hannah liked the way her red shoes looked on the black and white checkered floor tile inside the elevator. She concentrated on them so much that she forgot to notice the particular ding which signified she had reached the top floor. Because of this, she rode the elevator three more times to the top before she got the ride just right: alone in the elevator, and feeling the burp the elevator made when it hit the top floor.
The ride made her happy. She bounced to a song in her head as she made her way back to her work space. Donna was already there waiting. She had a tuna sandwich for lunch and the smell had followed her back. It made Hannah nauseated, so Donna tried to rectify it by sucking on a breath mint. Nothing could have been worse than the smell of tuna, except for peppermint tuna. After twenty minutes, Hannah vomited her apple juice into the trash can.
“Gosh, you aren’t pregnant, are you?” Donna asked.
Hannah froze—the expression—absent from her face as she calculated when and with who she last had sex. Luckily, it was easy to remember. She hadn’t had sex in awhile, except for Matt; she had only been passing out blow jobs liberally, and it was too soon for her to be experiencing pregnancy symptoms from fucking Matt.
Hannah and Donna worked in silence for the rest of the afternoon. Hannah dealt with Donna’s tuna smell, and Donna dealt with Hannah’s regurgitated apple juice smell. They were twins of disgust which went un-discussed.
After work, Hannah went to Matt’s house. She stood, pathetically, on his porch, knocking over and over again, but he didn’t answer. She thought he’d be home because after work was a prime time to sell, but she stood there for twenty minutes before she felt ridiculous enough to leave.
She stopped by her house, let Skye out, and then took him with her to drive to her parents’ home. Skye needed time in their yard, and she knew her sister would enjoy playing with him. She decided to pass by Matt’s house, again, in case he came home from work.
She carried Skye to the porch, and only knocked once before Matt swung the door open.
“Hey, c’mon in.”
Hannah stepped through the door and saw a girl sitting on Matt’s floor, near the coffee table, tearing aluminum foil into pieces. She had long, straight, strawberry-blonde hair and a body as thin and flat as an ironing board. She’s cute.
Hannah set Skye down and she ran over to the girl. The girl exclaimed and started petting Skye, who enjoyed the attention a little too much.
“Hi,” the girls said simultaneously.
Hannah nodded in the girl’s direction, “That’s Skye and I’m Hannah.”
“Ohmygod,” the girl laughed. “My name is Hannah too.”
“It is?”
“Yeah, funny that.”
It didn’t look like a typical drug deal; the girl looked too comfortable and she was preparing to smoke up.
“We were going to blaze one, do you wanna join us?” Matt asked.
“Yeah, sure.” Hannah walked to the couch and sat down. She immediately stood up and looked at her hand. “Shit, did you spill something? I sat in something wet.”
Hannah number two bit her lip and smiled. She looked at Matt and the
y both started laughing. “Um…sorry, that was from us, earlier.”
Us?
“You might want to go and wash your hands,” Matt said.
Hannah looked at her palm. Her heart was racing and her cheeks were flushed. She hurried and walked into the kitchen to wash her hands before they could see her starting to cry.
She stood at the sink, panting and trying to calm down. A small scrub brush on the sink’s ledge would serve—she squirted dish soap on it. Hanah tried to scour the thoughts away. She inhaled until her lungs were bursting as she scrubbed several layers of skin from the tops of her hands. It was her punishment—punishment for being stupid, and punishment for not being the one Matt chose.
He fucked her—while she was awake. Hannah blinked the tears back and focused on her hands.
It was a lengthy hand washing session, by anyone’s measure, and by the time Hannah reentered the living room, they were already smoking the heroin. She didn’t want to sit on the couch again, so she sat on the floor next to the other Hannah.
Matt passed her the straw and held the lighter’s flame under the foil.
Four, three, two, one…it was almost all gone—the bad things—facing Donna, vomiting the apple juice, and Hannah number two; they all disappeared with each scant of smoke which she sucked up the straw. She didn’t even pause when she realized Matt had been home earlier.
Everyone was laughing. Happiness seeped into the group until the tension was like a cherry pit spit into a napkin, folded and refolded until it was hidden.
“You know what?” Matt said. “You two side by side gives me an idea.”
“What?” the girls asked in unison.
“How about it’s my lucky day and I get a two-Hannah blow job?”
“What’s that?” asked Hannah.
The other Hannah giggled, “He wants us to both suck his cock at the same time.”