The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

  “Do you ever shut up?”

  “No. Get used to it. It’s gonna be a long trip to Florida.”

  “One more word and I’ll knock you out. When you come to, you’ll be choking on exhaust fumes in the trunk of my car and you’ll stay there until we get to Florida.”

  I make a mental note he said car, not truck. “Fine,” I say. I stretch my legs out, folding my booted feet on top of each other. “She’s not gonna let me go without a fight,” I mutter.

  It takes a second for it to register; I guess I have to factor in the whole blood-loss stabbed thing. “What are you talking about?”

  “I thought you wanted me to stop talking.” I’m full snot-monster right now, and it’s working. He’s getting agitated. He’ll be all wound up by the time Red Cap gets back.

  He glares at me, pressing my shirt harder against his side.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Who . . .” His eyes narrow. He hates not being in the know, especially on his own job. I need to keep making him feel small and unsteady. It makes him dangerous because it makes him angry, but it’ll make him slip up so I can slip through.

  “Who did you think you’ve been talking to on the phone this whole time?” I tilt my head, the sarcasm grating. “Did she say she was a deputy?”

  “You know her.”

  I settle back in the chair, all comfy and as relaxed as a girl can get with a bruised throat and mashed-up face. “Um, yeah. I live with her. She’s my marshal. I lied before. I don’t have an aunt here in Clear Creek. The FBI handed me over to witness protection after the whole thing with Raymond and the marshals stuck me up here with her. She is such a pain in the ass.”

  “She’s a marshal?”

  “You didn’t smell the Fed on her? Are you sure you’ve been in prison?”

  He shifts against the wall, wincing and pressing my flannel harder against his shirt. It’s getting redder. He’s bleeding again. I try to twist my wrists against the tape in a subtle way, testing my range of movement.

  “I knew she wasn’t a deputy. She talked too smooth.”

  “That’s her,” I say. “She’s gonna chase you if you manage to get away with me. She has to. This is a shitshow for her. All she’ll care about is getting me back.”

  He’s looking for a trap in my words, but they’re just the truth. There is nowhere in the world he could take me where my sister won’t follow.

  I need to paint a careful picture of Lee for him: the bitch of a career woman who’s got tunnel vision. He’ll buy that. He’ll want to get away from her, and it’ll make him screw up. I just need to be there when he does.

  “She can’t be very good at her job, if she’s got a shithole posting watching a kid like you.”

  “You’ve totally ruined her day with this stunt, which normally would make me happy, but this kind of sucks for me.”

  Every time he blinks, it takes a little longer for his eyes to open again. He’s starting to drift. The pain and blood loss and coming down from the adrenaline is getting to him. Maybe he’ll slide into shock and I can get the gun off him.

  “This sucks for you?” He laughs, a far too long, drawn-out thing that bares his teeth . . . and is that blood on his lips or just wishful thinking?

  He coughs, holding his side. Then he coughs again, and crimson bubbles from his mouth. He reaches up to dab at it and his eyes widen.

  “Oh no, did I snip something important?” I ask, digging my own shallow grave because I need to see how far I can push him. “Better hope it’s your spleen or something you can live without. Organs are kind of hard to come by.”

  “You—” He lunges like he’s trying to get up, and lets out a surprised grunt of pain instead. More sweat trickles down his face, but there’s no more blood from his mouth. Whatever I hit, it’s not slowing him down too much, but the pain’s starting to kick in. If he stays still, he’ll probably be fine.

  Maybe I need to make him move. A lot.

  I’m weighing how fast I could get to the door and out into the hall versus how fast he could raise the gun and aim well enough to hit me when the decision’s taken out of my hands.

  Duane tries to get to his feet again, and this time, the pain gets the better of him. He gets halfway up and then lets out a string of curses and his eyes roll back and bam, he’s down, and suddenly, the ground’s tilted back toward me.

  Plan #4: Get gun. Get Iris and Wes. Get out.

  — 41 —

  Katie: Spirited, Sweet, Smart Katie: Scared, Violated, Traumatized Katie: Talking, Learning, Healing

  Almost Four Years Ago

  “How do you want to spend our time today?”

  That’s what Margaret always asks me first. I could lie and say I’ve lost count of how many times she’s asked me, but she would call that not being productive and falling into bad habits. (It’s eighty-nine times, because it’s been ninety sessions and she didn’t ask me the first session.)

  Therapy didn’t start well when Lee first brought me two counties away to Margaret. It wasn’t even that I was resisting; it was that I had no concept of how to tell the truth about anything, especially myself. I had all the tools of a liar and nothing else.

  Margaret knows a lot, but she also knows nothing. I’m an optical illusion, where one person sees the old lady and the other sees the young woman. Margaret gets to see slivers of both, but never either of them fully. She has my truths, but she doesn’t have Raymond’s name. She knows about my mother, but thinks she’s dead. Little lies, not just to keep me safe, but Margaret, too.

  Stumbling toward carefully picked-over truth into healing has taken longer than I’ve liked. I like being good at things. I’m not good at the truth or opening up or asking for help.

  You’re good at applying the help is what Margaret says when I tell her that. Once you get over the obstacle of the asking.

  Sometimes it’s so hard to ask.

  “He wants to kiss me,” I say, because it’s been on my mind for weeks, ever since I noticed.

  “Who does?”

  “Wes.”

  Margaret looks like she’s trying to suppress an indulgent smile that might come off as condescending. I’m not supposed to break her down like that; Lee told me that therapy was about listening to the therapist and puzzling out myself, not her.

  “This is your friend?”

  “My best friend.” And then, digging for that truth: “Kind of my only friend.”

  She takes me in. “You’ve talked to me about other friends, too.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wes knows. I mean, no. He doesn’t know. He just . . .” I swallow. It’s like the first few times in here with her all of a sudden, and I hate it so much, it heats my face up. “He knows I got hurt. He . . . got hurt, too.” I’m betraying him, telling her. I’m betraying something else, by putting the abuse in the past instead of the present.

  She can’t tell anyone, I remind myself. She wouldn’t.

  “I’m impressed that you were able to share that with him,” Margaret says. “That shows a lot of progress.”

  “He figured it out,” I tell her, unable to take credit that isn’t earned. “There are scars,” I continue. “He saw them when we were swimming.”

  “And you didn’t spin a story for him?”

  “He would’ve seen through it.”

  She waits, in that maddening way of hers. She’s got a whole thing about drawing me out. It didn’t work for a long time, and then it did, and now we’re here: surrounded by that tricky trust thing. We built it, she and I. Bit by bit, over ninety painful sessions. She helped me lay brick on the tilting ground, weighing it down so I could walk steady.

  But I don’t feel so steady anymore.

  “I didn’t want to lie to him,” I finally say. “He’s got scars, too. To lie
about it . . .” I just shake my head. It had felt so wrong. Like stepping away from something sacred and into something sticky-hot and putrid.

  “So he knows more about you than most people,” Margaret says.

  I nod.

  “Do you want to kiss him?”

  I can’t look at her or move. The answer’s not just yes or just no. It’s just . . .

  “It’s okay to have a crush.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I mutter before I can stop myself, because of that tricky trust thing. I’m used to speaking about stuff in here, but I don’t talk about some things out of choice rather than protection. And I’ve never talked about it because of that swirl of shame and the sour taste of bile that rises in my throat every time I think about it. Yet I find myself on the edge suddenly, like I’d planned to tell her today, even though I hadn’t. “I’m not good with that stuff,” I say, paddling desperately away from it like a kid who never learned how to swim but jumped into the deep end anyway.

  “What stuff?”

  “Kissing. Flirting. All that stuff.”

  “Well, considering you’re just getting started with all that stuff, wouldn’t you say that’s acceptable?”

  It lies there like a dead animal: assumption roadkill. And I don’t know how to ask her what I want to ask. The blood is pulsing in my face, and I am lost in the wanting to know and not knowing how to ask.

  How to admit it.

  “I don’t want to hurt him.”

  She’s spent enough time with me—ninety sessions’ worth—to see the buried truths beneath those words.

  “Why do you think you’d hurt him?”

  “Because I want to kiss him, too.”

  Her eyebrows twitch—the closest thing I’ll get to a frown her placid-like-a-pond face can muster up. “You’re not talking about emotional hurt, are you, Nora?”

  I can’t look at her, so I stare down at my hands. I rub my pointer and middle finger against the pad of my thumb, back and forth, back and forth.

  The silence stretches, and she lets it. She waits in this little pocket of trust we created for me to find the words, because I’ll never find the strength.

  “Before my stepdad, there was a mark. Joseph. He owned a bunch of car dealerships. My mom had him moving us in two months after they met.

  “He was always looking at me. And then he didn’t just look, he . . .” I twist my fingers in the air, this helpless, shameful little gesture, a shrug that says what I can’t. It’ll take until session 117 before I can say the words he molested me, but I don’t know that at the moment. All I know is that I can’t say it, even though I need help with it, because I’m scared what it makes me. Because I am terrified of how I might react if Wes gets too close before I’m ready or prepared. “At first, I just froze. It was like it was happening to me, but not to me. I could see it, I could feel it, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. I was . . . not there. And then, outside, someone’s car alarm went off. It was like I’d been playing dead and that sound woke me up.”

  Margaret waits. I still can’t look at her. If I tell her, what will she think?

  She’s not normal. That’s what the last woman exposed to the results of my fight-or-flight instincts said.

  “I tried to pull away. He was too strong. My mom’s knitting basket was sitting next to the couch. It was the only thing close enough to grab. I had to get him to stop.”

  Margaret can’t keep her pond-placid mask from slipping as the realization fully grasps her. “You defended yourself with knitting needles?”

  “It made him stop because he had to try to pull them out of his leg,” I say, and it’s a very simple, very neat way to talk about it when there had been nothing simple or neat about it. It’d been bloody, and the needles were thin because they were from Mom’s delicate work, but they were still knitting needles, so they were dull and I wasn’t very strong. I’d dragged them up his thigh as far as I could and hit something that had made it gush. He’d howled in pain, and I’d been so sick and scared at once, an overload of adrenaline as the shaky run, hide, fight got reversed to fight then hide then run.

  Margaret’s quiet, and it’s not a waiting-quiet this time. I don’t know if I’ve thrown her or if she’s just adding this to her Nora’s fucked up file.

  “I know it’s messed up,” I say.

  “What he did to you is very messed up,” Margaret agrees, and when my face twists, she lets out a little sigh. “Oh.” And she can’t stop the sympathy leaching into it that’s more like pity.

  She folds her hands together, leaning toward me. She wears an oversized moss agate pendant on a long chain, the way older, elegant ladies sometimes do. It glows against her gray sweater, and I can’t stop staring at it because if I don’t, I have to look at her and receive a truth I’m not sure I’m ready for.

  “You defended yourself, Nora,” she says quietly.

  “I’m violent.” She’s not normal. It echoes in my head.

  “What was done to you was violence,” she corrects. “You met violence with defense. There is nothing wrong with that.”

  When I don’t say anything, she continues, “Have you ever initiated a fight? I know you’ve been in a few. We’ve talked about them in the past.”

  I shake my head.

  “Have you ever engaged anyone that wasn’t in defense of yourself or someone else?”

  I shake my head again.

  “And you’re not going around school, conning people into throwing the first punch?”

  “I mean, I could . . .”

  “But you don’t.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you’re violent, Nora. I think that you react a specific way when you have no way out. Some people freeze. You fight. Neither of these reactions are wrong.”

  I have to say it. I have to ask her. Because I’m scared. I’m scared that the flutter that I feel when Wes catches my eye for too long will turn into something else when he gets too close. When his hands slide around my waist or eventually under my shirt. I want to be able to have this. I want to have this. I want this to be the thing that isn’t warped or taken from me because of the girls before.

  “What if I react that way with Wes? What if when we kiss, my body reacts like it’s bad instead of like it’s good?”

  “If kissing is something you and Wes both decide you want, then maybe you start slow. Holding hands. Going on a date. Or hanging out. Whatever you kids call it these days.”

  “We hang out all the time.”

  “Good. Then you can talk to him,” she continues. “You said he knows you’ve been abused. Does he know about this part?”

  I shake my head.

  “Talking is important in any relationship. And you two talk a lot, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe the best thing to do is tell him you want to kiss him, but you need to do it in your own time. That way you’re not waiting for him to initiate anything and it’s not a surprise. Would that take some pressure off?”

  I never even thought of kissing Wes first, but now that she’s suggested keeping the power in my hands, the possibility seizes hold of me. No breathless waiting for it to happen to me, but instead being breathless in anticipation because I could choose the moment.

  “What if he laughs at me?” I don’t think he will. Wes is not like that. But it’s scary, thinking about being so blunt about what’s been unspoken and said in glances and barely there touches and bodies that get closer and closer each week, sitting in front of the TV.

  “Then you’ll know he’s not a boy who deserves to kiss you,” Margaret says, and that makes me laugh, because she’s the kind of honest I wish I knew how to be.

  We fall into a silence that’s not uncomfortable, but heavy. Like the air before a rainstorm: You can smell it on the wind, feel the possibility of the fall of wa
ter in the atmosphere, and then it just breaks and the skies open.

  “How do I keep this from ruining my life?” I ask her.

  “By doing exactly what we’ve been working for here,” she says. “Look at you and how you’re moving forward. That’s not ruining your life, Nora. It’s healing it. Seeing obstacles before they become roadblocks.”

  I want to believe her. That this is just an obstacle, not a roadblock.

  But I have lived so many lives already. Been so many girls. I’ve learned things from each of them. Katie taught me fear. Not of men. I already knew to fear them, because don’t all girls learn, in the end? I just learned faster and earlier than some, and later and slower than others.

  Katie taught me a new fear. She taught me to fear myself. Because she was the closest to me I’ve ever played at being until Nora, and something about that drew Joseph in, didn’t it?

  Once I finally find the words to ask her, Margaret tells me that nothing about it was my fault. That I didn’t do anything wrong. She repeats that he was a predator. That I trusted myself. My instincts. I reacted the right way for me.

  So why do I still feel so wrong?

  (She’s not normal.)

  It’s an answer I don’t have. But I’m still looking.

  I’ll keep looking.

  Part Three

  Freedom . . .

  (The Last 45 Minutes)

  — 42 —

  Ashley (Age 12): How It Ends (In Three Acts)

  Five and a Half Years Ago

  Act 1: Help

  I’m in a hotel suite. My sister brought me here, through the back entrance and service elevator. The second the door shuts behind us, she shoves me into the shower, closing us into this artificial bubble of clean linens and expensive hotel smell.

  “Rinse all of it off,” she orders. “Wash your hair twice. Scrub yourself down three times. Use this under your nails.” She gives me a toothbrush still in its plastic. “Put your clothes in here.” She holds out a bag, and I’m numb enough to obey her.