Love Under Glasse

by Kristina Meister

  “The arresting officers don’t care. They’ll hand you the bail the warrant says you’re granted. And if she managed to convince a judge that you’re violent, a flight risk, or that you committed felony level theft, you’re fucked.”

  Riley buried her face in her hand. “What do I do?”

  “I’ll call my lawyer.”

  She didn’t want him going through this again, digging up all those bad memories. She didn’t want him drawing any of Mama’s attention to himself. “No! I swear . . . I think . . . I can handle this. Don’t worry about me. Just call the tattoo parlor and talk to Happy about Aella. She seemed cool, but make sure she knows someone is coming for the bike.”

  “Rye—”

  “I’m fine! I’ll call you when I’m out.”

  “Rye, goddamn it! You don’t always have to be hard. Do you understand?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She could see the terror in El’s face all over again, see that image of her on the ground of that broken-down shack in the woods. El was counting on her. Riley was the only one who could do anything. She didn’t have time to cry.

  He sighed when her silence grew too long. “Is there anyone in holding with you?”

  “No.”

  “When you hang up, I want you to go into a corner and let out what you feel. The cops see it all the time. They won’t care. It won’t change your situation for the worse, okay? Do you hear me?”

  “Dad—”

  “Do it!” he commanded.

  He was seldom stern, but when he was, she could hear the prisoner, the gang member, the survivor. If she didn’t obey, the consequences wouldn’t come from him. They’d come from the universe, because he was sharing a hard-won truth with her.

  “Okay.”

  “Call me when you’re out.”

  “I love you.”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  Her laugh came out oddly emotional. She dragged her hand over her face and stared at slippers they’d given her in place of her massive boots. “Yeah? For being a chip off the old block or for getting arrested?”

  “For standing your ground. You’re strong enough. You can handle this. I’m not worried. But you gotta feel it, Rye. Get the emotions outta the way, so the mind can work in peace.”

  The shivering intensified. Riley could barely grip the receiver. Finally, the goodbyes came, and she could hang up and fall to pieces. With her back to a corner, knees to her chin, she sobbed. Each shudder brought her closer to the ground.

  How could she have been so stupid? She’d been so caught up in El that she had failed the girl. It was more than that, though. So much more. In two weeks, she’d skipped out on graduation, her job, traveled nonstop, nearly killed a man, found love and lost it, all to end up in a jail cell with her newfound self-worth crushed under the stiletto heel of an entitled racist bigot. Things most people saw as a lifetime of events, she’d crammed into one week, and given herself absolutely no time to feel any of it. All at once, it tumbled out, and she didn’t try to stop it.

  The sounds of her weeping echoed off the cinderblock and down the corridor. Before long, a female deputy turned up. She leaned against the wall, imperious despite her frumpy uniform, and cleared her throat meaningfully.

  “You okay? The phone is there for you to use.”

  “I used it.”

  The officer extended a few brown paper towels through the bars. Riley scrambled to her feet and took them.

  “First time in here?”

  “Yeah.”

  The woman dropped her chin and eyed Riley. “Last time in here?”

  Blowing her nose, Riley shook her head. “Fight the power.”

  “Joking only gets you so far, kid.”

  Riley fixed her with a glare. “Who’s joking? I’m only in here because a privileged racist with a Senator for a husband lied to the sheriff.”

  The officer raised her brow. “Well, at least you got the innocent act down.”

  “I can prove it dead-to-rights in about five minutes flat, but so what, right? I’m a hoodlum, right? Who the fuck cares? Just give me my bail so I can go to court. Then they have to listen to me.”

  The deputy rolled a mint around her mouth as she seemed to search Riley’s aura. She mimicked, dragging the tongue ring back and forth across her teeth, hanging from the bars like a caged animal. The woman’s demeanor remained relaxed and confident. She had the look of a mother about her, with an unnerving gaze. Given her age, she had probably been at this job for a while.

  “Tell me the story,” she said finally.

  “Don’t you have better shit to do?”

  The deputy tilted her head sardonically. “It’s a slow day.”

  “Just let me post and get the fuck out of here.”

  “I came in to do just that. You got a spare three hundred bucks lying around?”

  “Yeah, actually.”

  “It stolen too?”

  Riley made a face and wrapped her arms through the bars. “Naw, it’s the salary I was paid by the bitch who put me in here, after I signed a fucking contract not to legally disclose. So let me post.”

  The deputy was frowning and finally, she moved away from the wall. Unbuttoning a pouch on her belt, she withdrew a tiny notepad. “Spit it out.”

  “You miss the bit about the NDA?”

  “If this woman filed a false police report to put you in here, then she’s committed a crime. NDAs can’t legally conceal criminality. So . . . spit it out.”

  Stunned, Riley gripped the bars as if dangling above the gaping maw of hell. It wasn’t until her hands went numb that she thought to reply.

  “Why do you care?”

  The deputy shrugged nonchalantly. “Like I said, it’s a slow day and I was young once. Back when dinosaurs roamed.”

  “What the hell?”

  Happy’s voice was all wrong. El sat up in alarm and swung her legs off the table, the plastic dressing on her tattoo crinkling. Heavy boots trampled the tile. A huge shadow loomed over the curtain and a massive arm jerked it aside. Looking up, she saw a face she recognized.

  In one shallow breath, her soul momentarily evacuated her body, realized it was still tethered, and then slammed home painfully.

  “Well, here we are!” The man had a mean look in his eye. “Wow, you just went full-on freak, didn’t you? Your mama’s gonna be pissed.”

  El took a deep breath and tilted her chin. Mere days ago, she’d been afraid, but that was because she hadn’t seen anything of the world. It seemed ominously large and full of threats. Now, she’d met some of those threats and survived them. As she glared at this man sent to force her into submission, she realized that she’d survived every terrible thing that had ever happened to her. Nothing she’d ever experienced had defeated El.

  Mama would never have power over her again.

  “I don’t give a fuck what she thinks.”

  He put his hand on his hip. Beneath his windbreaker was a bulky shape she was sure was a gun. Behind him, Happy was grappling with the man she’d seen try to board the train. A third stood at the window seemingly keeping watch while the fourth was talking on the phone in a hushed tone. All of them were smiling like jackals.

  Happy struggled. The man holding her swung back an arm and slapped the woman so hard that she stumbled, then hurled her against a wall. Happy let out a grunt as she slid to the floor, holding her face in her hand. El leaped to help her, but the man took hold of her hair and tugged. As she thrashed and kicked, he wound her hair up tight around his fist and twisted a well-muscled forearm around her waist.

  “Leave her alone! She doesn’t have anything to do with this!”

  No one paid her shout any mind. Happy’s guard picked her up and dragged her kicking and thrashing to the closet. A chair was propped against the doorknob and held despite the woman’s banging.

  The man on the phone hung up. “Let’s go.”

  Before she could get another word out, El was picked up and thrown over his shoulder, the wind com
pletely knocked out of her. Gasping and writhing, she was carried straight out the front door in broad daylight. The trunk of the SUV was open, and the three back seats were folded flat. A length of chain was coiled on the ground. Spotting it and the handcuffs beside it, El let out a shriek and brought her knee down into the man’s chest. With an oof, his arms went slack. El landed hard on the concrete, for an instant knocked senseless. It was all the time needed for the man to recover. Though she screamed and bucked, he dragged her back by her ankles and lifted her over his head.

  El scanned the street for help, just in time to spot Riley fighting traffic across the street. The girl came to a dead stop, breathing as if she’d torn down the street at top speed. Their eyes met for one charged breath, long enough for El to shake her head.

  Riley couldn’t win this fight.

  El hit the backs of the raised seats and crumpled onto the floor of the vehicle. A handcuff was clasped around her ankle and through a link in the chain. Instinctively, she reached for the manacle, only to feel a sharp pain in her neck. Instantly, her equilibrium went cockeyed, and before she could fully register that she’d just been injected with something, the world vanished.

  When she next awakened, her head ached in a constant pulsing rhythm. The passing lights of other cars stabbed through her skull and made her nauseous. When her whimper was heard, the oldest of the four men leaned over the back seat and held a water bottle to her lips. Her mouth felt stuffed with cotton no matter how much she slurped.

  “She awake?”

  “Yeah. That shit really knocked her for a loop.”

  “You gave her enough to take one of us out,” another said with a laugh. “Lucky she didn’t die.”

  “Come on, man, they’d give her more than that for a surgery.”

  El worked at clearing her throat, which felt caked with dust. When she lifted her head from the carpet, her face stuck. When she rubbed it, there was a deep, pockmarked impression on the skin of her cheek as if she’d been lying in one position for hours.

  “Why . . . why are you doing this?” she whispered. “I don’t understand.”

  The older man stared at her for a long moment, his face slowly wrinkling up on itself as if he too was bothered by the situation. His apparent misgivings confused her for only a moment, and then suddenly it all made sense. These men weren’t being paid to break the law. They were digging their way out of debt.

  The older man turned away, his voice a monotone. “Worry about yourself.”

  “If you think this is going to change anything, you’re wrong.” El dragged her leaden body upright and rubbed at the mark around her ankle. “Because she’s going to hold this over your heads for the rest of your lives. Every time she wants something, it will be Remember that time I paid you to abduct a child? and she’ll get it, because you all have lives she can ruin.”

  “Shut up,” grunted the driver.

  “Okay, as long as you’re into self-delusion.”

  There was no way any of them were going to let her go. Perhaps it was revenge, a way of making them suffer a modicum of the anxiety she had endured for over a week, that urged her to keep talking. El had no idea what they might do, what Mama had told them to do, but whatever that was, she was outnumbered anyway. She might as well score a few points.

  She’d been afraid all her life. It had never done her any good. The only times anything had changed was when she stopped letting herself be paralyzed by that fear.

  “I lived in a mansion, I had designer clothes, I am good at school. If I ran away, then maybe you should think about why. My mother is a monster and some day, you’re all going to really kick yourselves—”

  The driver seemed to be their leader. When he shouted for her to be quiet, the older man flinched slightly and shifted in his chair so that she could no longer look to him for signs of what the others might be thinking.

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  With a sudden jerk of the wheel and screech of tires, the SUV veered into the shoulder and lurched to a halt. Orange flashers blinked into the night. The driver slammed his door and lifted the rear gate, dragging her toward him by the chain. The highway around them was abandoned. Desert terrain stretched out in all directions, featureless and desolate, dotted with sagebrush. In the distance, a range of peaks jutted from the flat earth, standing out in the full moonlight.

  How long had she been unconscious?

  The locks were opened, but her captor didn’t appear to be at all concerned about letting her go. In fact, he seemed to take pleasure in shoving her toward the ditch beside the road, even going so far as to laugh when she stumbled into the dirt.

  “Go on,” he coaxed, leering at her malevolently.

  So it was going to be humiliation? That was how they thought they were going to keep her obedient. Tears burned in her eyes for an instant, until the chill wind caught her hair and caused a bracing chain reaction in her body.

  As she undid her jeans and squatted down, she grinned at him. Mama really must have fed him a line or two. She must have left out the time she’d had a fit in the crowded pediatrician’s office, charging him with encouraging El to have sex by prescribing her birth control for cramps. Or the time Mama had dragged her through a church potluck covered in vomit, accusing her of purposefully making herself sick so that she could go home. Or the time at the park when she was five and split her face open on a metal slide, and Mama had told her she could just sit there and bleed, because good girls didn’t roughhouse like boys. Perhaps she’d neglected to talk about how there was no crying in the Glasse house. If one tear was shed . . . the punishments were horrifying.

  Mama had been humiliating her for her entire life—blaming her for things outside her control, turning bodily functions into shameful events, transforming all her failures into sympathy credits for being such a long-suffering mother. There wasn’t one thing these men could do that was any worse than what Mama had done. In fact, they were just one more way Mama was trying to hurt her, an extension of that woman’s reach.

  She stood up and fastened her pants with a shake of her head. “She must really have you dead to rights, to make you stand there watching a teenager pee. Did she convince you to watch me take a shit too? Or is that just the kind of thing you enjoy?”

  His face contorted. “I have no qualms about gagging you.”

  “Guess you’ll have to then, because no one is ever going to tell me to shut up again.” She crossed her arms and when he took a step toward her, she stepped back. “I’m not my mother. Whatever she’s done to you, she’s done just as bad to me, I promise you. You’re not going to hurt her by hurting me, because she doesn’t care. I’m not her daughter. I’m her victim, who legally has to sit there and take it until I can get the fuck out of that house.”

  He gritted his teeth and took another step. She backed up again.

  “I’m not my mother. I hate her just as much as you do. In fact, probably more than you do, because she was supposed to care for me.”

  “Get back in the car. She’s told us to use whatever force we want.”

  “So that makes it okay?” She turned her back to him. If he wanted her to get back in the car, he was going to have to put her there. Every time.

  He obliged, storming up behind her with another syringe of slumber.

  Her eyes opened on a plain gray ceiling, blurring in and out of focus. El tried to touch her numb face, only to find that her wrists were restrained. Vision churning from side to side, stomach unsettled, she looked down to her toes. Her arms and legs were all shackled to a hospital bed. There were, however, no machines, no IV. It was just an empty room, with padded, soundproofed walls and a door with a tiny window.

  A cold sweat stood out on her skin as the truth set in. This was the last measure, the only option open to Mama. She couldn’t have El arrested, because that would cast aspersions on the family. But if El was confined to a mental ward for her own good, then no one would ever judge Mama at fault. She was just a poor dist
raught mother, doing her best despite her daughter’s illness. El was just a feather to be worn in Mama’s couture cap. Her feelings, her personality, her desires all meant nothing, and now they’d been equated to a malfunctioning brain. It was a different game now, because her word was now worthless. no matter what she said about her mother, no one would believe her.

  El turned her head and threw up.

  It seemed forever before anyone checked on her. When they did, they said nothing. It was as if she didn’t even merit an introduction. The orderlies just stripped her pillow case and smeared a few wet towels on the floor, then left her to the insulated paralysis of depression and a partially medicated mind.

  At some point, El took up counting. When she’d tallied what she believed to be almost a half hour, her thoughts diving in and out of drowsiness, a man in a white coat appeared. He had a plastic smile and the bedside manner of a sugar-coated tongue depressor.

  “How are we today?” he trumpeted as he took her pulse right over the top of the angry red scab of her tattoo. The skin itched terribly.

  “Where am I?”

  El had no idea how much time had truly passed, how many days it had been since she’d seen Riley in the middle of the street, face pale with panic. If that was to be her last memory of her champion, then perhaps she didn’t really want to know.

  “You’re in a hospital.”

  The chemicals in her blood were an excellent inoculation against giving a shit. Suddenly, all traces of concern vanished, and she was left with the burning resentment. Laws that allowed such things—a system so broken and rigged against any child that didn’t conform—had to be written by men like her father. Unfeeling regulations, based on numbers and forms, legalese and two-thousand-year-old words written by other misogynistic, straight, old men.

  For that long, people like her had been silenced in ways much like this, while those same men talked about how much progress had been made, and their wives smiled demurely and nodded like animatronic embodiments of virtue. Then there were women like her Mama, programmed to preserve her appearance by any means necessary.