empower: fight like a girl (words empower Book 1)

by Amy Berg

  “I’m sure this has been a shock to you both,” Erika said. She had to tread lightly. She wanted to find out if there was abuse in the house, but her priority was caring for the emotional well-being of Toby and Claire. “Was Angela having any problems?”

  “She said everything was going to be all right,” Claire said, her voice choking. “She said she’d take care of me.” She buried her face in Toby’s sweater. It was clear Toby and Claire cared for each other, which made the possibility of splitting them up now that much worse.

  “What would be all right?” Erika asked.

  “Life, I guess,” Claire answered, her voice muffled. “But it never is.”

  “Did Angela leave a suicide note or an explanation?” Toby asked, hugging Claire tighter.

  “We’re still looking. Was she worried about anyone in particular? Did she mention if anyone made her feel uncomfortable? Was she in trouble?” Erika asked. Claire’s face snapped toward Erika.

  “Angela was perfect! She was the perfect sister! Everyone loved her,” Claire said. Erika absorbed Claire’s anger. She’d seen it many times before – people in pain lashed out at the ones who tried to help them. Toby rubbed Claire’s arm and she subsided.

  “She could be a little moody,” Toby said. “One week she’d be happy, the next she’d be . . . “ He let it drift, searching for a word.

  “Irritable? Depressed?” Erika suggested. While these could be signs of suicidal ideation, they could also indicate sexual abuse.

  “Well, yeah,” Toby said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “She was not,” Claire said, pulling away from Toby a little.

  “You weren’t with her for the past year and a half,” he said gently. “You just got here. I’m not saying she was bad or anything. She was just a teenage girl.“

  “Boys think just because it’s shark week, girls get bitchy,” Claire said.

  “Shark week?” Erika asked.

  “You know, your period,” Claire said. Erika nodded, understanding. Claire looked up at Toby. “How can you say that about Angela? She loved you.”

  “You and Angela?” Erika asked Toby.

  “No, it was nothing like that,” Toby said.

  “No, he took care of her,” Claire said. “He took her places, bought her clothes, got her nails done pretty. He’s going to take me next.” Claire brightened a bit at that.

  “Well, that was really nice of you, Toby,” Erika said with a sinking feeling. She studied the boy. “It sounds like you and Angela were close.”

  “He was going to take Angela to the St. Valentine’s dance tomorrow,” Claire said. Her face crumpled and she began to cry in earnest as she realized her sister wouldn’t see another tomorrow, much less a Valentine’s Day.

  Erika recalled the martyrologies of St. Valentine. The most popular myth involved a priest, who, under the reign of Claudius the Cruel, married young lovers in secret. Secrets could bond, but they could also doom. Erika needed to excavate some secrets, and she might have to get her hands dirty. She just hoped learning these secrets wouldn’t be too cruel.

  Toby rubbed Claire’s back as she shook with quiet sobs.

  “Gonzaga High,” Erika said.

  “Yeah,” Toby said, half-apologetically.

  “’Forming men for others,’” Erika said, quoting the motto of the prestigious school.

  Toby shrugged.

  “An all-boys high school. Must be difficult to meet girls.”

  “Not for Toby. He’s famous,” Claire said proudly.

  “No, I’m not,” Toby said, waving his hand as if brushing the idea away.

  “Famous?” Erika asked.

  “He’s on TV,” Claire said.

  “Just a couple of commercials,” he said. “And I booked a small gig on a show that shoots out of Baltimore. It helps pay for school.”

  Now Erika knew why he looked familiar. She’d seen him on television. He was a child actor. She wondered just how good of an actor he was.

  “You must have lots of girls who’d go to a dance with you. Why were you taking Angela?”

  “I thought she’d enjoy it,” he said.

  “What about you? Would you have enjoyed her?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  “A freshman bringing a foster sister to an elite high school’s function. That was pretty risky for your reputation – TV star or not,” Erika said, pushing him now.

  Toby’s hazel eyes grew flinty. A crafty intelligence rose from within him. Erika had sensed this presence in other adversaries. It was a malicious gene, something imprinted in human DNA since our ancestors headed east of Eden. In some people it was recessive. In others, dominant.

  “I might be a freshman, but my friends are sons of diplomats, senators, and CEOs,” Toby said. “Class means an entirely different thing at my school.”

  “Why bring Angela into it? It wasn’t exactly her world. In fact, it was a pretty big leap from her lowly background of group homes and hand-me-down clothes,” Erika said. “Did you just want to rub her face in it?”

  “I thought she might learn something. I thought she might make friends,” Toby said. With a lightning bolt of understanding, Erika knew the truth.

  “You didn’t have trouble meeting girls, but your friends did. You were taking Angela for them,” Erika said.

  “No, it wasn’t like that,” Toby said, trying to regain his innocent appeal.

  “Stop it!” Claire said. “Both of you stop saying mean things about Angela.”

  “Tell her, Toby. Tell her why you invested in that mani/pedi for Angela. Did you buy her a special dress, too?”

  Claire looked up at Toby. Her eyes swam with tears.

  “What’s she saying? Tell her you just wanted to be nice to her. Tell her you loved Angela,” Claire pleaded.

  Toby’s face fell. He quickly turned away from Claire.

  “What? What’d you do?” Claire asked Toby.

  “You didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt,” Erika coaxed. “But Angela did get hurt, didn’t she?”

  “She found out I showed her picture at school,” he said. “Some of the guys thought it would be, I don’t know, they called it slumming. They wanted to hook up with her.”

  “You were going to pimp her out?” Claire’s voice rose to a wail.

  Toby looked at Claire anew. He’d always seen the sweet side of the girl, but her anger suited her better. It suited a girl who had been discarded, disappointed, and dismissed too many times in her young life. Claire launched herself at Toby. The fingernails he had planned to carefully groom into enticements dug into his chiseled cheek and drew blood.

  “Little bitch,” Toby yelled as he shoved Claire away. He was stronger than he looked and she was small for her age. She careened into the glass-and-chrome coffee table. Her head hit the tempered glass with a teeth-jarring thud. The glass shattered beneath her as she tumbled onto the floor.

  Toby touched his face; his fingers came back red. Hatred flared on his handsome features. He was an angry angel, ferocious and unforgiving. He loomed over Claire, who lay in the litter of glass shards, a field of dangerous stars. His hands balled into fists as he readied to descend on the girl.

  Before he could move, Erika was on her feet and moving toward him. At the speed of thought, she’d covered the few feet between them. She planted her foot behind Toby’s, the back of her calf perfectly placed for her next move. She slammed her fist into his sternum. Toby rocked backward, tripping over Erika’s braced leg. He gasped for breath, still reeling from the punch. As he fell, Erika thought of Angela struggling for breath, for her life, in a bloody bathtub.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah Beckett yelled as she pelted down the stairs. Carter, Edison, and Reginald Beckett followed close behind.

  “Toby, are you all right?” Sarah asked, striding past Claire. She kneeled next to her son. “Oh my God, your face.” Sarah turned on Erika. “I’ll have your job for this.”

  “I don’t think so,” Erika said, her voice as
clear and cool as a running stream.

  Carter stepped toward Erika, his hand outstretched as if he were directing traffic. “Let’s all take a deep breath.”

  Edison grasped Carter’s arm.

  “Watch,” Edison said. And with that one word, a hush fell over the scene.

  Erika locked eyes with Sarah Beckett. “When did Angela come to you? When did she tell you what Toby wanted from her?”

  “Sarah, what’s she talking about?” Reginald asked. He’d once been an attractive man, but something more than the years had worn him down. Erika guessed it was his wife’s ambition – her ambition for him and for their son. Erika knew he was about to see ambition taken to the extreme. What would a stage mother do to protect her son from scandal?

  “Tell him, Sarah. Tell him your son was going to pass Angela around to his friends. That he was grooming her for sexual favors,” Erika said, never taking her eyes off Sarah, who glared back defiantly.

  “That’s not true,” Reginald said. “Toby, tell her that’s not true.” Despite his protestation, doubt crept into his tired eyes. He knew his wife, and he knew his son.

  “She liked it, all the attention. She wanted it,” Toby said, his voice shrill. Reginald took a step back as if his son’s words were fists.

  Erika remained focused on Sarah.

  “Angela came to you. You’re the one she would’ve trusted. She wanted to protect Claire. She wanted you to save her, save her sister from your precious son.”

  “Mom?” Toby said.

  “You knew you had the Vicodin,” Erika said. “What’d you do? Tell her you would talk it out over hot chocolate or a cup of tea? We’re going to find out in the autopsy.”

  “You don’t have any proof,” Sarah said, her voice rising at the end, questioning her own confidence.

  “You drugged Angela, telling her all the while everything would be okay. You’d take care of everything. Then you ran the bath,” Erika said.

  “No, Angela committed suicide,” Toby said. “Mom?”

  “You helped her, dazed and drugged, into the tub. You cut her wrists. That was your first mistake,” Erika said. The slightest question touched Sarah’s brow. Erika raised her voice now. “Hey Radar, why don’t you show us what you’ve found?”

  Sarah’s eyes darted toward the basement stairs, but Erika continued.

  “As Angela was bleeding out, she came to. She fought, so you held her down with the first thing within reach, the toilet plunger. We’re going to find bloody water in her lungs. Aren’t we, Sarah?”

  Sarah’s eyes flicked to her son, then her husband. She looked like a cornered animal.

  “You treated Angela like a piece of shit, like she was something to flush away,” Erika said.

  Radar walked downstairs carrying two evidence bags. He shot a glance at Edison, who nodded. Radar lifted a sealed bag containing a white-and-green plastic toilet plunger with a green rubber end. Claire’s face lit with recognition. So did Toby’s.

  “That was in the upstairs bathroom,” Claire said. Then she turned to Sarah, “You killed my sister?”

  Erika stepped between Claire and Sarah. With a look, Erika warned Claire to wait.

  Radar handed the bagged plunger to Edison.

  “We found this in a nearby dumpster. You can see it’s stained with blood,” Radar said.

  “Sarah?” Reginald asked.

  “We also found these gloves,” Radar said.

  Radar held up the second evidence bag. Inside were dainty yellow rubber kitchen gloves with garish red fingernails painted on the outer tips. Their kitschy nature made them that much more obscene. Edison took the evidence bag from Radar. He studied the gloves.

  “I bet they’ll light up like neon at a rave once we hit it with Luminol,” Edison said.

  “I want a lawyer,” Sarah said, struggling to hold on to her defiant edge.

  Detective Carter Hunt – February 13, 10:25PM

  Carter closed the unmarked sedan’s door. Sarah Beckett sat in the back seat, handcuffed. The night hadn’t turned out the way he’d expected. A suicide turned into a murder and he’d met the first person who made his life easier. Someone who created a rhythm between him and his partner. A woman Carter wouldn’t mind creating a rhythm with himself.

  He scanned the dispersing scene. Angela’s body had been removed. The crime scene techs were packing up. Officer Radon was pulling down the crime scene tape. Edison stood on the front stoop talking with a bewildered Reginald Beckett.

  On the street ahead, Erika crouched next to a car door. Claire Dunn sat inside listening, waiting to be taken to Child and Family Services. As the car started, its exhaust spewing a cloud of vapor in the chill night, Claire flung herself into Erika, hugging her, holding on as if she were a lifeline. Carter imagined Erika seemed like the only haven in this tempestuous world. And in his own way, he knew how Claire felt.

  Erika had shown him that he and Edison could be partners. Battle-hardened yet empathetic, she had pushed them to look beyond the shallow surface. She made him feel less alone, less a stranger in this strange land.

  Erika stood and watched the car take Claire away from this trauma. Claire would be assigned to yet another new group home. Maybe she’d get placed in a foster family. Maybe she wouldn’t. Once the car was out of sight, Carter watched Erika’s shoulders sag.

  Then, almost as if she sensed she was being watched, Erika turned and pinned Carter with her coal black eyes. As she walked toward him, he felt her pull. He met her half way. She hugged her arms to her body for warmth. Carter wanted to envelope her, to pull her to him. He remembered the brush of her body against his; it left an impression, a desire for more.

  “That was pretty amazing what you did,” Carter said. He immediately wished he was more articulate.

  “It doesn’t change the fact Angela Dunn is dead, or that her sister is going back into the Russian roulette of the foster care system,” she said. “Together, those two girls belonged to each other. Now Claire will always feel singular.” She looked up at the glare of the starless city sky; it still seemed foreign to Carter.

  Erika’s words and the light-polluted sky magnified Carter’s loneliness. That’s what he’d been feeling since he’d moved to D.C. – singular. Identifying the emotion tempered it.

  “How’d you learn to fight like that?” he asked. A sly smile snaked across her face.

  “Girl’s gotta have her secrets,” she said.

  In that moment, Carter wanted to know every single one, every detail. He studied her as she turned her attention to the Beckett house. Violence had changed it into something ominous. Its Victorian Gothic exterior loomed over them. Its double windows were haunted eyes. Toby looked down from one of those windows. He was a ghost. He was a demon. He was a teenage boy.

  “Wish there was something we could get him on,” Carter said, staring up at the boy.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll see him again. He’s his mother’s son.”

  “When we will we see you again?” Carter asked, the boy forgotten for the moment.

  “D.C. is populated with people who do bad deeds,” she said, her breath fogging with each exhalation, hanging like a promise in the air. “Something will bring us back together soon. ’Night, Detective.”

  As Carter watched Erika stride away, the city under the starless sky seemed navigable for the first time.

  About The Author

  Kam Miller is a TV writer who has created pilots for FOX, CBS, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Television, and Universal Cable Productions. She wrote for Fox’s Killer Instinct as well as the long-running NBC show Law & Order: SVU. Her first feature, The Iris Effect, was produced while she was at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Currently, Kam is developing several TV projects and finishing her first novel, Myth of Crime.

  Follow her on Twitter: @kammotion

  You can also find her online at "Glass half-full in Hollywood."

  “Home”

  by Jess Pineda

  Someone once told m
e, “Turbulence is like pothole in the sky, unexpected, but really no big deal.” Well. It’s 2005 and I’m three Xanax deep, in a tiny, vibrating plane to Cuba and it totally feels like a big deal.

  The flight jolts again and I feel that acidy deliciousness slide up and back down my throat. Wonderful. Where was my damn intuition when I booked this flight? Riiiight, it was telling me to experience the world. To give back. To, for once, step outside my comfort zone. Huh.

  As it turns out, I do not enjoy being uncomfortable.

  We shift to the left and a very hairy young man is thrown against me so hard that I can smell what he had for dinner three nights ago.

  “This has got to stop,” I say aloud. The hairy guy mumbles an apology.

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” I assure him. (It’s totally him.) “I’m going to go talk to the pilot and see what’s going on.” (Also I don’t like the smell of fennel.)

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that… ”

  But I wave him off. This is a humanitarian trip to help the needy in Cuba. Everyone on the plane is here to do good. The very least the pilot could do is stop flying like a moron.

  “So, hey, guys. I’d realllllly appreciate it if you’d, you know, chill out with the crazy flying because it’s making it a little hard for me to breathe. See I have these things called anxiety attacks, and every time you pretend that this plane is a bouncy house, a little part of me dies. Right there… and here. Wait for it… and there it is again.”

  “Do you know that it’s illegal to come to the flight deck?”

  “I thought this was the cockpit?”