by Beth Goobie
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SKEY WOKE IN A TINY ROOM with a single bed and a small wire-crossed window. Daylight poured through the glass. As she rolled over to look at it, exhaustion lapped at her body like an inner ocean. Through the wall beside the bed, she could hear muffled voices—staff joking with Monica, who had come to the office to ask for a tampon. So, thought Skey, looking around herself, she had finally made it into the Back Room, where they kept the crazy girls. Skey Mitchell had finally lost it so bad, they didn’t even trust her in her own bed.
Every fifteen minutes, staff checked in on her. When they saw that she was awake, they brought her some clothing and she got dressed. Mid-morning, Larry came to see her. He brought a gray-cushioned chair with him, nothing his weird fashion sense could argue with. Mrs. Mitchell would have been pleased.
“I hear you took a walk last night,” he said, sitting down. “You want to tell me about it?”
Seated on the bed, Skey closed her eyes and worked her way through the possibilities. Staff must suspect that she had been waiting for someone at the side entrance, but they wouldn’t have any proof. The Dragons probably hadn’t left any noticeable tracks last night—it hadn’t snowed recently, and a zillion people walked in and out of that door every day.
“I was sleepwalking,” she said, flashing Larry a glance. “I had a nightmare.”
Larry gazed back at her as if he had time on hold. “Do you remember your nightmare?” he asked finally.
The first thought that came to her was the tunnel of light. “I was in a hallway where it was too bright,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t see anything, because my head was filled with this burning light. I was trying to get out.”
She thought it sounded like the right kind of nightmare, but Larry’s eyes weren’t buying it. “You timed it well,” he commented. “Not a single night staff spotted you. How did you get down all those creaky steps without a sound?”
“I dunno,” said Skey. “I was sleepwalking, remember?”
Larry leaned forward, his eyes intent. “Skey,” he said, “something terrible happened to you last night. You were very frightened when staff found you. Screaming. You wouldn’t let anyone touch you. We can help you if you let us know what’s going on.”
The faces of seven Dragons appeared in Skey’s mind, lit up and hissing like the tunnel of light. “I feel sick,” she mumbled, hugging herself. “I think I might throw up.”
Larry backed off immediately. “Okay,” he said, picking up his chair. “I’ll let you rest now and come back later.”
After he left, Skey sat on the bed, staring at a line of trees outside the window. In the late morning wind, they were bending and swaying, rowing into the wind and the sky. Keep going, keep going, she thought, the words heavy and old in her head. Staff continued to check her at fifteen-minute intervals. At noon, she heard the girls return to the unit for lunch, then leave again for school. The afternoon shift came on. Muffled scraps of conversation leaked through the wall, something about Ann and her birthday tomorrow.
“...probably the reason for her acting out,” said someone, and Skey stiffened. What did staff think was the reason for Skey Mitchell’s “acting out”?
She had left the rock in her jeans, which were hanging in her room. It was no longer necessary for her to be touching it before connecting with the dark tunnel, but all she could seem to manage was sitting on this bed, staring out at the empty swaying trees, while she kept her heart beating and her lungs taking in air. It was so much work just to stare.
AFTER SUPPER, staff moved her back to her own room. Every half hour or so, one of them would knock on the door, poke in a head, and try for a bit of chitchat. Seated on her bed, Skey simply stared out the window. Over the past hour, the sky had grown noticeably darker and the trees quieter. The stars were beginning to show. As free as the moon and the stars, she remembered, watching them. What Jigger had meant, she now realized, was dead, her soul gone out to sing with the stars. Well, even without the Dragons’s help, her soul was out there singing with the stars, because she was empty, a blank staring shell. The Dragons were gone, and so was she.
She left the rock in her jeans, hanging in the closet.
On the other side of her door, the unit was unusually quiet. There had been a party for Ann, with a few girls from Units A and C attending, but they had left a half hour ago. Contrary to what staff had predicted, Ann seemed to be behaving for her fifteenth birthday—no yelling, no door slamming, no “acting out.” Staff must be relieved.
OUTSIDE SKEY’S WINDOW, the sky grew darker, the stars brighter. Her soul shone farther and farther away. I’m with my mother now, she thought dully. Nothing and no one can reach us.
Through the wall, she heard Ann go into her room and close the door. Then it was quiet, not even the squeak of bedsprings, as if the birthday girl was standing in the middle of that small narrow space, deciding what to do. How to do it. After a bit, Skey heard the muffled sound of a large object being pushed across the floor, slowly, so no one would hear. Only one thing in Ann’s room was that large—the bed. She was pushing her bed across her door to block it.
Skey came alive as if her brain hadn’t functioned for a long time. Thinking without words, without language or eyes. Instinctively, the lower, darker part of her brain began sniffing out the silence in Ann’s room. In Ann. Without seeing, that part of Skey’s brain understood the soft sound of a dresser drawer sliding open, and the subsequent silence as Ann’s hand fumbled for something among her clothing. Something hidden. Something small with a sharp edge. She had it. The birthday girl had the tiny weapon in her hand, the weapon that would cut her open and call out the blood.
Ann was silent, but Skey was screaming. Grabbing the chair next to her desk, she dragged it onto her bed. She had learned from last night and the riot—the walls and doors of this place were illusions. With another scream, Skey swung the chair at the wall and saw it buckle slightly. She swung again, and a large hole appeared. Dropping the chair, she pulled aside a dangling piece of plaster, then dove through the hole and onto Ann’s bed. Without pausing, she scrambled to her feet and lunged at the girl standing two feet away and holding a small piece of broken glass to her throat. The first small cut was already bleeding.
“No,” sobbed Skey, wrapping her arms around Ann. “No, baby, put that ugly thing down. Don’t do that, baby, you don’t deserve that, baby.”
With an answering sob, Ann began to shake, and the two of them sank together to the floor. Taking the glass from Ann’s hand, Skey threw it across the room.
“No, no, no,” they whispered brokenly to each other. No, baby, don’t do that, baby, you want your skin to live free.
WHEN STAFF CAME crawling through the hole in the wall, Skey started screaming again. Mindless white-hot panic erupted in her, so heated, it blurred her vision and shut out external sound. On the other side of her fear, vague gray shapes tried to calm her, but she backed into a corner, trying to fend them off. Quickly Ann’s bed was shoved aside, and two of the blurred shapes took hold of Skey’s arms. Suddenly hands seemed to be everywhere, grabbing and pushing her toward the now open door. Trapped in the high bright terror of her mind, she bit and kicked, dimly aware that she was being taken down stairs, then carried along the long indoor passageway that led to the school. A door was unlocked, then another, and another. Abruptly, she was pushed into a small quiet space. The hands let go. She was released.
BUT THE SCREAMS wouldn’t release her. Unabated, terror continued to pour its high bright light into Skey’s mind. Trying to get rid of it, to somehow reduce it to human size, she ran herself repeatedly against the padded walls of the room into which she had been placed. Even though staff had retreated and locked the door behind them, hands still seemed to be reaching out to grab her—invisible hands, hands that weren’t really there, hands coming out of nowhere.
There is no one here, she thought, knowing that she was alone in a small locked room with staff monitoring her through a wire-cros
sed window in the door, but she continued to feel invisible hands grabbing her arms and pushing her down, and then a single hand, pressed over her mouth. Screaming and sobbing, Skey slid to the floor. Now she felt her legs being shoved apart and heard voices speaking—Jigger telling someone to be gentle, Trevor telling her to calm down and Balfour laughing. Then Pedro, saying something she couldn’t make out.
Skey’s vision began to clear, and she saw that she was descending through a thick white light. Then the thick light faded, and she found herself in the master bedroom at Jigger’s cabin. Immediately she realized that she was back in the May long weekend, six months previous. Music pounded through the walls—everyone was partying in the living room, except her and Jigger. When the rest of the gang had started taking off their clothes, she had panicked, and he had brought her in here. Like he said, he always made an exception for her, he was so good to her, didn’t make her do what the other girls had to do. She was special, his and his alone, and they were making love on the bed, it was so wonderful to have a bed instead of a backseat, the soft sheets encasing them, their bodies moving gently against each other.
The bedroom door opened, and Trevor, Pedro and Balfour walked in naked. “Jigger,” Skey whispered, shrinking down under him, trying to cover herself. But instead of protecting her, Jigger did the unthinkable, lifted himself up and kicked off the sheets.
“This is your true initiation,” he said, holding her down by the shoulders. “We’re together in this gang. Everyone is one. This is the way you show you’re part of the Dragons.”
“No,” Skey whispered, staring up at him. “No.” But Jigger didn’t listen. Turning to the others, he told them to be gentle, just hold her down, she was already wet and ready, they wouldn’t have any problems getting in. Someone held Skey’s arms, someone else pushed apart her legs. When she started to scream, a hand covered her mouth.
Jigger was right. They slid in easily, and then they moved slowly. It wasn’t wham bam, thank you ma’am, it was worse. Each Dragon raped her as gently as true love, slow and easy, swearing ecstasy in her face. “You like it, baby, you like it, don’t you?” they whispered, watching as her body responded, as her screams became different cries. “See, you like it, Skey,” they said, grinning. “You like it, baby, you like it.” Time after time, she came and they came. They rotated on her, took turns, kept going. After a while she stopped coming; a while after that, waves of nausea took her into blackout.
When she came to, she was alone. Someone had covered her with a sheet. Through the wall, she could hear the party still going in the next room. Her first movement sent a raw pain tearing through her groin. She whimpered and felt her throat burn. Bewildered, she looked around herself. What was she doing here? She couldn’t remember. Where was Jigger? Was he...?
Vague memories swung through her head: Jigger, Balfour and Trevor, close and leering. Pedro, panting above her. No, it couldn’t be, she thought, panicking. It couldn’t.
Sitting up, she dragged her legs over the edge of the bed. Waves of pain seared her groin, then gradually began to fade, taking the memories with them. When Skey finally stood up, her body felt as pain-free and numb as rubber. Step by step, her pain-free rubber legs took pain-free rubber steps to the bedroom door. Opening it, she walked her pain-free rubber walk down the hall and into the kitchen, ignoring the party to her left.
As soon as she entered the room, her eyes zeroed in on the bottle of gin on the counter. One quick smash, and she had all the sharp edges a girl could want. Stretching out a pain-free rubber arm, she jabbed at it, deep twisting jabs. Blood poured down her arm, and she felt nothing. Each jab pushed the pain farther away. Each gash sent the vague memories deeper, into a place where she would never find them, where they could be forgotten, where they had never happened, had never been real.
After she switched arms, someone came into the kitchen. Suddenly Dragons were everywhere, yelling and running as Skey stood silently in their midst, letting them wrap her arms, dress her in her clothes, put her in a car and drive her to a hospital, where her arms were sewn up. In the middle of all that medical equipment and expertise, no one thought to check for a wound between her legs. Skey didn’t mention it. She had forgotten it. She had become the still quiet eye at the center of the storm.
SKEY HAD NEVER heard such silence. Lying on the floor of the small padded room, she let her arms splay outward and floated on absolute weariness. For the moment she felt oddly safe, as if something, some terrifying undefined thing that had lived deep within her, had finally been released. With that release came a kind of knowing, an understanding of where she would find her missing part. Returning in her mind to look at the cabin bedroom, Skey saw her lost part still lying on the bed. Above her head, close to the ceiling, was a glowing tunnel of light that traveled through the room, then on into the wall and what lay beyond it. Below the tunnel of light, at floor level, traveled a parallel dark tunnel—two alternate dimensions, one of bright mind-searing terror, the other of night-blind forgetting and safety.
So this was where she had first found the tunnels, thought Skey, staring at them—here in the cabin bedroom, during the rape or after, while she had lain alone, unconscious. The tunnels had been ways to escape, ways to forget what had been too difficult to remember. At the same time, they had become dimensions of searching for what had been lost. Losers were people who had lost something. The tunnels of darkness and light had always existed, they would always be there for the losers who needed them. The tunnels were dreams where losers could go.
In her mind, Skey reached out. Stepping into the memory of that cabin bedroom, she walked over to the bed and took the hands of the naked girl who lay there.
“I love you,” she said quietly. “I’ve come to take you home.”
The girl sat up. Slowly their arms slipped around one another, Skey and her lost part pulling each other close. Closer. Then, like the taking in of breath, the other girl slipped into Skey, and they were one.
“HOW ARE YOU feeling?” asked a voice. Looking up from her position on the floor, Skey saw Terry standing in the unlocked doorway.
“Terry?” she said, squinting at the staff. “Turn out the light, would you?”
“I need to be able to see you,” said Terry.
“There’s light from the hall,” said Skey. “I can talk better in the dark.”
Terry hesitated, then switched off the light. “Where would you like me to be?” she asked. “Would you be more comfortable if I stayed here in the doorway?”
“You can come in,” said Skey.
Quietly Terry entered and sat down beside her. With a groan, Skey sat up and leaned against the wall. She was so tired. Dizziness lifted heavy wings in her head and flew off slowly.
“Terry,” whispered Skey, her eyes closed. “I want to be somebody.”
“You are,” Terry whispered back.
“No,” said Skey. “I’m a thing. A machine. When they did that to me, I didn’t want it. I wanted Jigger, but I didn’t want the rest. But it didn’t matter. It was the dragon’s claw, and I still turned on.” Skey stumbled over her words, frightened at their hugeness. “I’m a thing,” she repeated, her face twisting. “A thing.”
“Skey,” Terry said slowly. “Are you talking about a rape?”
Skey nodded once.
“A gang rape?” asked Terry.
Skey’s breathing snagged. She nodded again.
“And you had an orgasm?” asked Terry.
“Yes,” Skey whispered.
Terry touched her arm. “That happens to many girls and women who are raped,” she said gently. “It doesn’t mean you wanted to be raped.”
Within Skey, something opened—hope, the possibility of being human. “Then, why does it happen?” she asked, opening her eyes.
“Your body wants to give life,” said Terry. “That’s why it gives you orgasms. The body wants to make sex pleasurable so you’ll conceive a child, but it doesn’t always know the difference between making lov
e and rape. It just wants to make sure you keep going until you’ve conceived, so it gives you pleasure.”
“I was with my boyfriend first,” said Skey. “Then the others came in.”
“Makes even more sense,” Terry said firmly. “You were probably in a state of arousal before it happened.”
She’s all wet and ready, Skey remembered, her mouth trembling. You’ll slide in easy.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I was.”
“You weren’t responding like a machine,” said Terry. “You responded to your boyfriend. Then the others came in.”
Behind Terry’s back, the light from the doorway was fading, the room around them going dark. Too much, Skey thought wearily. She needed to retreat into the dark tunnel again and rest.
“Skey,” called Terry, but already Skey could feel Lick’s presence materializing beside her in the dark.
“Weird,” he said. “I can see a blue-green glow when you first come in.”
“First day of a bruise?” she asked.
“Morning on the ocean,” he replied. “Beautiful.”
In the distance, she could hear Terry call her name a second time. Putting out a hand, she touched the tunnel wall and found a long thin wave with sharp nicks.
“Skey,” Terry called again.
“Can you hear her?” she asked, turning to Lick. “Can you hear her calling?”
“Hear who?” he asked.
“Terry,” said Skey, turning back to the staff on her other side. “We’re in the dark now. Can you feel it?”
“Wherever you are, I’m with you,” said Terry.