by H Hunting
I try the door again, but it’s still stuck, and I’m still here, all alone.
I don’t know how long I’m in the dark, but after a while, I think I hear someone calling my name. I hear it again, more than once this time, and it sounds closer. I press my ear to the cool metal.
I think I hear Kodiak and my daddy.
Someone bangs on the door, and I stumble back, falling to the floor.
“Lavender?” There’s banging and banging, and then suddenly the door folds in and Daddy and Kodiak are right there.
I don’t know where Mommy is, and all my words are trapped in my throat because the fear is holding on to them.
“Oh my God. Thank God. What happened, baby?” Daddy scoops me up, and Kodiak’s eyes are so, so wide. He’s holding the candies I dropped on the ground and my glasses. “I have her! I found her!” Daddy’s running, and it makes my tummy jump and twirl. Kodiak runs after us, and we burst out from the darkness, back into the noise and lights of the carnival.
“Oh thank God!” Mommy wraps her arms around me in a hug so tight, I feel like a jelly donut that’s being squeezed too much. “What happened, baby? Where did you go?”
Daddy tells her where he found me, and finally my words start to work. But all I can get out is “a man” before I get all choked up again.
“A man took you?” Mommy’s voice is a siren.
I nod, and then there are more questions and my head is so full. I’m still scared he’s coming back. I cry and cry.
Daddy finds security, and they call the police.
Kodiak’s daddy comes and takes him and my brothers away.
There’s a policewoman in the room with me, and her eyes are soft and kind and sad. Mommy has to explain that I’m shy and have a hard time talking around people I don’t know. I just want to go home, but they ask me questions about the man, and I try to answer them.
They give me a blanket, but it’s scratchy on my legs.
I have an apple juice box and a sugar donut and an apple. I don’t like apple juice, because it tastes like metal, but I’m thirsty, so I drink it anyway.
The policewoman asks me questions that make my tummy hurt.
I throw up the donut, and that makes me cry even more.
Mommy tells me it’s going to be okay, but I don’t feel like it is.
Finally they stop asking questions. I’m glad because I don’t like them. Then someone takes pictures of all of my bruises. I don’t really know how I got them all. Daddy is angry, and Mommy tries to hide how sad she is.
I’m glad when they finally say we can go home.
Daddy carries me out to the car, and Mommy sits in the back seat with me. I snuggle into her hair, breathing in her shampoo, trying not to let the memories or the smells come back. I want to put on my favorite pajamas and hug my stuffed beaver and never leave my house again.
I want to feel safe.
Daddy carries me upstairs, and Mommy starts a bath for me. Daddy sets me on the stool beside the bathtub and kneels in front of me. I only have one shoe on. I don’t know what happened to the other one.
My dress is filthy, covered in smudges of dirt. Kodiak’s hoodie has a tear on one side, and there’s crusty brown stuff all over the sleeves. I start to cry again, because everything is too much. I dig my nails into my palms, so I don’t make any noise.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Mommy pries my hands open. My palms are crusted in dried blood, and fresh blood wells in the cuts I’ve opened up. “Lavender, honey, who did this?”
“He said if I made a sound, I’d never see you again, so I screamed into my skin.”
“I’m so sorry, sweetie. We’ll never let anything bad happen to you ever again.”
“What if he comes back?” I whisper. “What if he takes me again?”
“He won’t, honey. I promise that’s not going to happen.”
I want to believe her, but the memories are still there—like a bad dream that doesn’t go away. He lives in my head now, the biggest monster in there.
Later, after I’m all cleaned up and in fresh pajamas, Mommy makes me a snack. But I’m not hungry, and all I want is my bed and to make sure River is okay. I want to tell him it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t keep hold of me.
I want everything to be the same as it was before.
But it isn’t.
And I don’t think it ever will be.
Present day, age 19
“HEY, LAV!” MY brother’s fist slams against the bathroom door, and half a second later it flies open, scaring the living shit out of me as it bashes into the wall.
I jab myself in the eye with my mascara wand, and coffee sloshes down the front of my white tank. I was attempting to multitask. I should know better. “Ow! What the hell, Mav!” I cover my burning eye with my palm and drop my mug in the sink. The handle breaks off. “Goddammit! That was my favorite freaking mug. And I could’ve been naked!”
Maverick makes a gagging sound. “I just ate breakfast. Don’t say things like that if you don’t want me to hurl.”
“Screw you, fuckboy.” I try to close the door on him, but it’s useless, since he’s a damn giant and standing in the middle of the doorway. “And looking at your face makes me lose my appetite.”
Much to my parents’ dismay, Maverick is a certified manwhore. A monogamous one, but a manwhore nonetheless. Based on what I’ve learned from the girls who like to stop by our house—there are many—he hangs out with the same girl for exactly four weeks. And by “hang out,” I mean, bones as often as possible.
My brother is not an ogre—far from it. Maverick looks like a damn supermodel with his wavy dark hair and ridiculously chiseled features. Girls and women fawn all over him. It’s annoying.
“What are you doing busting into my bathroom at seven freaking thirty in the damn morning? I’m trying to get ready for class.” Even though I’m a sophomore, it’s my first day at a new school, and I’d like to start my second year of college on a positive note. Poking myself in the eye with my mascara wand is not very positive.
“Riv has to be at football practice, and I need to be at the arena in like, twenty. Have you seen my car keys?”
“Why would I know where your car keys are?” I drop my palm and glance at my reflection in the mirror. Awesome. Now it looks like I’m part raccoon with the mascara smeared around my eye.
“Mav, we gotta roll out or we’re gonna be late,” my twin brother, River, yells from somewhere in the house.
Maverick runs his hand through his hair. It falls back into place as though it’s made of perfectly obedient soldiers. “Where are your keys?”
“You can’t take my car.” I prop my fist on my hip. “Take River’s.”
“Some chick puked in the back seat last night, and it needs to be detailed.” Mav taps on the doorframe, impatient.
“And that’s my fault, how?” I do not want to know the how and why regarding the puking girl. River isn’t quite as bad as Maverick, but he still has a ridiculous number of girls fawning all over him at any given time—and that’s even with his less-than-glowing personality. Or possibly because of it.
Maverick glances to the right, just outside the bathroom door, and a sly smile turns up the corner of his mouth. He snatches my keys from my dresser and dangles them from his finger. “We’ll owe you one, sis.”
I jump up, trying to grab them back, but my brother is over six feet, and I’m five one and a quarter—that quarter is very important to me—so there is absolutely zero chance I can reach my keys when he’s holding them over his head. “You can’t leave me without my car!”
“You can walk in a straight line, Lav. You’ll be fine.” He strolls down the hall, and I scale his back in an attempt to reclaim my keys, but my contact lens is burning. It’s distracting and means I can only hold on to my brother with one arm while I press my palm against my watering eye. He hits the first flight of stairs and takes them at a jog, bumping me around on his back.
I somehow manage to jam my big toe
into one of his belt loops, and it gets stuck there.
He drags me along like an awkward sloth he can’t shake. “My class is all the way across campus. It’s a half-hour walk, and it starts at eight thirty!”
“It’s not that far. You’ll be fine.”
The doorbell rings as we pass through the living room.
River stands in the kitchen, shoving half a bagel slathered in cream cheese into his mouth while texting. He frowns—this is his most common facial expression—and glances from the door to Maverick to me still hanging off his back. He crosses the room in two angry strides and throws the door open. He spins around, pinning our older brother with a disgusted look and thumbs over his shoulder. “This asshole has to sit in the back seat so I don’t have to look at his face.”
Standing in the doorway is Kodiak Bowman, more commonly referred to as Kody by everyone other than me. We all grew up together, basically, and probably know one another better than we should. Like the place he was conceived, Kodiak possesses a rare kind of arctic beauty. His hair is almost black, his eyes a pale green that doesn’t look quite natural, and his features hover between severe and exotic. But when he smiles, there’s a dimple in his left cheek that makes him look boyish and melts the panties of anyone with double X chromosomes. And a lot of XYs as well.
He’s not paying attention to my twin, because he’s too busy staring at his phone. Probably arranging a lunchtime blowjob.
Both he and Maverick are here at school on hockey scholarships. Not only is Kodiak an incredibly talented player like his dad, he’s also a genius, like his mother. But unlike his mother, who is a saint, Kodiak is an asshole.
My twin harbors a particularly severe disdain toward him.
Because of me.
Something happened involving Kodiak two years ago, which was so devastatingly embarrassing for me that I wish I could scrub the memory from my brain. River received the stripped-down version of events, and I made him promise to never, ever speak of it. He never asked any more about it, and I never offered any further details. However, now River can’t stand Kodiak, and he wasn’t his biggest fan in the first place.
Kodiak ignores River. “We gotta roll, Mav, or we’re gonna be late.”
Maverick peels my fingers from his shoulder. “Can you get the fuck off me, please?”
My toe is still caught in his belt loop, so I fall back, and because I have no coordination or balance—thank you so much for that, Mom—I smack my head on the floor. I also shriek because my toe is bent at a very unpleasant angle. Maverick stumbles back a couple of steps, trying to figure out how I’m still attached to him.
“My toe is caught! Oh my God! You’re going to break it!” I scream at the top of my lungs.
It’s ironic, because when I was a kid, I didn’t talk much. River used to do a lot of the talking for me because I was shy and got all tongue-tied around people I didn’t know. He was trying to be a good brother. Unfortunately, it made me reliant on him for a lot of things for a lot of years.
I’ve also been highly insulated by my family. It’s like living inside a bubble, viewing the world from behind a screen and never fully participating in it. For someone raised in a highly stable, incredibly supportive, loving—albeit weird—family, I’m pretty damn messed up.
Maverick manages to get me untangled from his belt loop without breaking my toe. I jump to my feet, and because my embarrassment hasn’t hit epic levels yet this morning, my boob pops out of my tank.
“For the love of God, Lav! Put your tit away!” Maverick yells.
“It’s not my fault it fell out!” It’s genetics.
Kodiak glances up from his phone as I tuck my boob back inside my tank. His expression remains flat, as if he’s completely unaffected by the fact that my nipple was just eyeing him.
Because he is. Completely unaffected.
Unlike me. I can’t even form a full, coherent sentence around him anymore.
I’m sure my face is red and blotchy with humiliation. Again.
Kodiak always seems to have a front-row seat to these awful moments.
“I hope you all sprain your groins at practice.” I spin around and head for the stairs.
“I’ll find you in the quad after your first class, okay, Lav?” River calls after me.
“Whatever.” I stomp my way back up to my room.
I should’ve fought harder for on-campus housing. Even the all-girls dorm would’ve been better than living with my damn brothers. But there was no chance my parents would ever let me live in a dorm—too many unknowns and uncontrollable variables. And River, being the overprotective twin that he is, had a meltdown over the idea that I would even consider the dorms as an option.
The only reason my parents conceded to me moving away from home is because I’m living with my brothers, and I’m only about an hour away. Once high school was over, we packed up our house and moved to what used to be our cottage on Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, which is much closer to Chicago than Seattle was. And don’t be fooled by “cottage”—it’s really a huge house on a lake.
And now, after years spent avoiding Kodiak—apart from that one, horribly mortifying incident—I’m going to have to deal with him again. Probably on a regular basis.
So I’m here, feeling a lot like I’m moving backward instead of forward. Because instead of fighting for what I wanted, I’ve let everyone else’s fears dictate my choices.
Present day
THANKS TO MY brothers, I have to rush to get ready for my first class. I also end up having to wear my glasses instead of my contacts because the eye I stabbed with my mascara wand won’t stop watering.
I pull one of my handcrafted dresses over my head—I make all my clothes and have since I could operate a sewing machine. I slip my feet into a pair of flats, grab my backpack, and speed-walk all the way across campus to get to class on time.
I don’t take Uber or cabs because I won’t get into a vehicle with someone I don’t know. I also don’t like public transit because there are too many people I don’t know in a small space. Most of the time, it’s not a problem because I have a car, or I can get a ride with my brothers, if I need one. Except when my brothers screw me over like they’ve done this morning.
On the upside, I’m starting today with a class I’m looking forward to—costume and set design. Unfortunately it’s at eight thirty on Mondays and Wednesdays. Usually only drama majors are allowed to register for this class, but because of my transcripts, my heavy involvement in both school and community theater, and the letter from Queenie, who is still my therapist, I was able to enroll. I was also granted special permission to take a visual arts class, thanks again to Queenie and my dad’s generous donation to both the school hockey team and the arts department. It doesn’t hurt that my dad is a hockey legend.
Is it nepotism? Sure. Do I feel bad that I’m potentially taking a spot from someone? Sure. But I worked hard for this, and the only reason I haven’t declared my major yet is because my parents thought it would be better for me to stick to general classes until the end of my sophomore year. Had my parents not been so adamant, I would be a theater major already.
I don’t necessarily disagree with taking a little bit of everything if you’re uncertain of your future path. Maverick’s already changed his major twice. He started in physics and then switched to chemistry and eventually decided he wanted to go the kinesiology route. All his courses have really long names, and the textbooks are so thick, they could stop a bullet. I may have forgotten to mention that while Mav is a fuckboy and a hockey player, he too is shockingly smart. Maybe not as smart as Kodiak, but pretty damn close.
But I, unlike my brothers, already know exactly what I want to do. My goal this year is to appease my parents, who are afraid attending college away from home is going to overwhelm me. They also don’t want me to lock myself into something too specific and close any doors before they think I’m ready.
I love them, but the overprotective bullshit can be a lot to handle
. I get it, but it’s still tough to deal with at times.
I jog up the steps of the art building with only five minutes to spare. Of course, because I’m in a rush, I trip halfway up. My glasses, which I try not to wear unless I’m in the privacy of my own home, slip off and land facedown on the steps. It would be fine if my knee didn’t then land right on top of them. The crunch is ominous and telling.
“Crap.”
I scramble to right myself as a pair of hands slip under my arms and someone helps me to my feet.
“Are you okay?”
The voice belongs to a guy. Awesome. Today can suck a set of old man balls.
“Yeah, being top-heavy makes walking tough,” I mumble. Of course those are the first words out of my mouth. Sometimes I wish I were still as tongue-tied as I was when I was younger.
“Pardon? I didn’t catch that.”
“I’m fine, thanks. Just embarrassed.” I smooth my skirt and tip my head back. I’m short. I always have to look up. At everyone. Except for small children and pets.
The guy in front of me is only mildly blurry. It’s possible he may be cute. He’s tallish, maybe around six feet, although to be fair, almost anyone seems tall to me. His dark hair is cropped short and he’s wearing thick-rimmed black glasses. And a Hufflepuff T-shirt.
He bends to retrieve my glasses with a grimace. They’re in two pieces, and the lenses are scratched to hell. “I think you have a casualty.”
“I have spares at home.” Because I’m clumsy and this isn’t the first time I’ve landed on my own glasses—not that the spares are going to help me during this class. At least I have a break between this one and the next, so I can go home and grab a backup pair. I shove the broken glasses in the front pocket of my backpack. I don’t know why I don’t toss them in the trash. It’s not like there’s any hope of fixing them.
“Are you heading in?” My savior inclines his head toward the doors.
“Oh, yeah.” I slip my hand into my skirt pocket—all my dresses have pockets, because it’s convenient and prevents me from hand-talking—and pull out my phone. I have to bring it right up to my face to make out the time. “Crap, I have four minutes to get to class.”
