That was my sixth time being raped.
Brenna
Nothing but a whore.
Nobody else will ever want you.
Your parents would be ashamed.
Nowhere for you to go but here.
I heard it all. Every day. I was a worthless whore.
After a while, when you hear something long enough, you start believing it.
Within a couple of weeks they were letting me out of the room and into the remainder of the apartment—though not close to the front door. I’d even been able to watch some television, enough to see the news of Dad’s arrest for beating up Chase, along with the coverage the media gave of my own disappearance.
Rick snickered during one of the news stories about ten days after they abducted me. “If they only knew, they’d never want you back. I should send them your movie, huh?”
I gasped and ran out of the room, into the bathroom—which I wasn’t allowed to visit without permission—and vomited. The movie Rick referred to was a porn film—I guess you could call it that—though I don’t know who could ever get off on watching a sixteen-year-old being raped by three men. He made me watch it after.
I hated him. But so much more than that. I despised him, but he’d somehow become the very center of my life. Whatever mood he was in, it controlled me. When he was angry, I was afraid. When he felt expansive, I was relieved. It was like I wasn’t even a person anymore, just an extension of his rage and lust and greed.
I didn’t know where we were. But after three weeks, without warning, Rick ordered us to pack our things. We were leaving.
“Where are we going?” I asked Nialla as I packed my meager belongings. All I had were some awful clothes Rick had bought. My own clothes were long gone.
“Atlanta,” she said. “Rick’s got a place he works with. It’s okay. We don’t ever stay anyplace too long.”
So we moved out. I rode in the back of the Mustang during the drive to Atlanta. As we pulled out into traffic, Rick began to lay down the rules.
“You don’t look at anybody. When we stop at the rest stop, we walk in holding hands. Nialla goes with you into the bathroom. If you talk to anyone, you’re dead. Understand? Don’t forget, I know where your parents live.”
I nodded.
“You’re going to wear sunglasses at all times. Between that and the hair, I think you’ll be mostly invisible. You make sure you stay that way.”
I told him I understood. But I was planning to run the first chance I got.
It was a cold and wet day outside, and the drive was punctuated by the sounds of the windshield wipers with their monotonous motion back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, a hypnotic rhythm that lulled me into a vacant stare.
I wanted to go home, but I didn’t know how.
We were almost halfway through the trip when Rick pulled the car into a truck stop in the middle of nowhere.
Despite the rain, he parked at the opposite end of the lot from the main building. I was in a lot of pain by then—he’d refused to stop until he was ready. Across the hundred yards between us and the building, a lake of a parking lot spread out before me, raindrops drumming against it.
Rick turned toward me. “You’re going to try to run, aren’t you?”
I froze, my eyes instantly on him. Of course I was going to try to run. I had to escape. I had to get away from him, get back to my family, call the police, run away. It had been just a few weeks and I felt like I was dead. I didn’t see how I could possibly go on any longer. I didn’t see how I could survive. But like always, every bit of my attention was locked on him.
“You see this?” he asked in a casual tone. He took out the pistol that he sometimes played with. “If you run, I’ll kill her. Understand?”
“Rick—” Nialla started to say.
“Shut the fuck up!” His shout was like a gunshot in the interior of the car. She went silent.
“Do you fucking understand me?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Are you going to try to run?”
I shook my head.
He slowly rested the muzzle of the pistol against Nialla’s forehead. “Say it,” he said. “Out loud.”
“I won’t try to run,” I whispered.
“Very good. Remember the rules I gave you.”
“I will.”
I didn’t run.
Twenty-One
Sam
Mrs. Mullins took one look at me and motioned for me to sit down in the chair nearest her unkempt desk. “What happened?”
I knew this was going to happen. I knew it. “Nothing, really,” I said. “It’s no big deal.”
“You didn’t get that black eye from nothing.” She raised one carefully shaped eyebrow as she said the words.
I looked down at the floor. I didn’t have a good answer. But I wasn’t going to snitch. They’d never let me live it down if I did. If they let me live at all.
I thought bitterly about Billy’s words to me on the first day of school. Don’t mess with the populars. Instead, Billy was the worst kind of brownnoser. This morning, right before homeroom, I’d passed him talking with Cody. Cody was laughing, and as I passed I heard someone mutter, “Faggot.”
Mrs. Mullins sat back in her seat, studying me. “Just tell me this,” she said. “Did it happen on school property?”
That I could honestly answer no to, so I did. Or mostly honestly. It wasn’t at the school.
Her eyes seemed to be looking right through me. She raised an eyebrow. “On the school bus?”
I looked away. Christ. Now she knew. I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t going to lie to her. Other than Hayley, she’d been the only thing good in my life this year.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll let it go. For now. You ready to run?”
I was, and we did, and thankfully she didn’t bring it up again. At least not then. An hour later, I sat down in biology next to Hayley.
“Let me see it,” she whispered. Mr. Bernard was already calling the roll. I turned my face toward Hayley and she winced. “Billy didn’t kid around, did he? Asshole.”
“It looks worse than it is,” I whispered. My eyes dropped to her wrist. Her forearm was marked up with an ugly set of bruises.
She met my eyes, looked away and pulled her sleeves down to cover her forearms. I didn’t ask her where she got the bruises. I knew the answer to that. I thought about Mrs. Mullins the other day. Sam … if something ever put Hayley in danger … would you tell me? To protect her?
“Here,” I responded when Mr. Bernard called my name.
I didn’t tell when Brenna was saying mysterious things about being gone. Not until it was too late.
Hayley would never forgive me if I told.
I’d never forgive myself for not telling. What if something happened to her? What if next time, instead of twisting her arm and bruising it, what if he broke it? What if he got drunk and killed her? It’s not like that kind of thing didn’t happen all the time.
It would be my fault.
“You need to tell someone,” I whispered.
Hayley recoiled. “Like who?” she replied.
Mr. Bernard’s voice boomed from the front of the room. Normally he was one of my friendliest teachers, but today he had a pugnacious look. “Mister Roberts. Miss Briggs. Is there something you’d like to share with the rest of us?”
Hayley gave me a death glare, her eyes narrowed, her chin set. “No, sir,” she replied.
“Good. Then please, turn your attention to the board.”
We did. But moments later, Hayley scribbled a note. What the hell are u talking about? She slid the paper toward me.
I wrote on it: I’m worried about u. What if he hurts u? Like RLY hurts u?
She responded in a scrawl so hard it tore the paper. He WONT.
I sighed. Closed my eyes. Then wrote, Okay. Sorry.
She wrote, You won’t say anything?
No.
Slowly, she took the sheet of paper and put it into her not
ebook.
After class, as I was walking out into the hallway, I saw Mrs. Mullins standing there. She had a sour expression on her face.
Uh-oh. She didn’t look happy at all. “Sam, can you come with me, please?”
I looked at Hayley, then back at Mrs. Mullins. “I’ve got … class…”
“I’ll send you with a note. For now, I need you to come with me.”
I felt like a prisoner being led to the execution chamber as we walked down the long hallway toward the offices. The other students crowding in the hallway parted as if by divine intervention. We were halfway there when I heard the word snitch.
This was a disaster.
My stomach was a pool of acid by the time we finally reached her office.
“Sit down.” She closed the door behind her and took a seat at her desk. “Since you wouldn’t give me any information, I had to look into it myself. I’m told you were in a fight with Billy Townsend on the bus yesterday.”
I nodded. Miserable. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t ‘yes, ma’am’ me, Sam. You don’t seem much like the fighting type. You know that I’m required by school policy to bring this to the attention of Mr. Flowers. And then they’ll have to drag in Billy and maybe the other students on the bus, and pull the video from the bus. I’m hoping this isn’t that big of a deal, but you were really hurt.”
I felt tears pricking my eyes. “You heard them in the hallway. Calling me a snitch. All this will do is get me in trouble. It will make it so much worse.”
She looked sad, and her eyes had love in them. “Sam, I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s going on. Are you being bullied?”
That provoked a bitter laugh. I’d never been anything but bullied in school. “Not really. Billy had a picture on his phone that upset me and I grabbed at it. I didn’t let go when he asked me to, and he started throwing punches.”
“Do you have a copy of the picture?”
I shook my head violently. “No.”
“Can you tell me what it was?”
I shook my head. No way was I telling.
She sighed. “Sam, you know that your safety … everybody’s safety at the school … is part of my responsibility.”
I nodded, thinking of Brenna and Hayley. Thinking of responsibility and having to do things that might seem to hurt someone in the short-term in order to help them in the long-term. “Yes, ma’am. I do understand.”
She smiled at me. “Wait here then. You can read something or do homework until I get back.”
Cole
When my boss stalked into the restaurant with a manager trainee in tow, I was startled. I hadn’t been expecting him, although he often dropped in unexpectedly. But today he was in no mood to chat.
“Take over the grill.” His words were directed at Jim Ryerson, the manager trainee. “Cole, come with me.”
He barked the orders like the retired Army officer he was. I quickly showed Jim what I was cooking then followed Brian to the back. He walked right past the office to the stockroom, then approached the cabinet that contained the security computer.
“What’s going on?”
Brian didn’t answer. Instead, he logged into the computer and quickly changed the time on it to the previous night. He was fast-forwarding through the videos captured by the six cameras mounted throughout the restaurant.
I watched on the cameras as I walked into the restaurant and began doing my inventory the night before. There was Linda coming to the back, and Dakota crying near the office door. Brian paused the video on a frame showing me standing at the table talking to the two men.
Brian shook his head in apparent disbelief. He looked at me and pointed at the screen. “Do you know who that is?”
I shrugged. “I know it’s a guy who was harassing one of my waitresses with racist comments. Both Linda and Dakota reported that those two do it routinely.”
Brian shook his head, his teeth showing. “That is the mayor of Oxford and one of the town council members. Need I remind you that you run a restaurant in Oxford? Last night you kicked out the mayor of this town from your restaurant.”
A rush of anxiety flooded through me. What did this mean for my job?
A rash of thoughts ran through me all at once. I remembered how Erin had stood up to my father all those years ago about his racist attitudes, and how ultimately that had transformed the man. I thought about the search for Brenna, and how Erin needed me to be earning enough money to support her search. I thought about all the months of unemployment, the hundreds of interviews, the humiliation and fear of losing my career and not knowing if I was going to be able to feed my family.
Then … I thought about Dakota crying in the back room because of those two men.
I took a deep shuddering breath, trying to calm my inner turmoil. In an outwardly calm voice, I said, “When you were training me, you made it very clear that our company policy is to never tolerate harassment of employees. I didn’t know that was the mayor, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s no longer welcome in this restaurant.”
Brian’s hand slapped down on the computer console with a loud snap. “I think you’re forgetting just whose restaurant this is, Cole.”
I needed to de-escalate this. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. But I was severely troubled and … what? Disappointed? Yes. My respect for Brian had just fallen a long way.
“Unfortunately, I already told him to leave. What exactly is it you want me to do?”
Brian studied me. “This is a business we’re running here. I thought you understood that. What I expect you to do is to personally apologize to the mayor, tell him it was a misunderstanding, and invite him back. Is that clear?”
I couldn’t believe this. “So you’re telling me our zero-tolerance harassment policy doesn’t apply to local political figures?”
Brian shook his head. “It’s not that cut-and-dried. There are grey areas, and maybe you aren’t the best judge of what’s racist and what isn’t.”
“It was harassment, Brian. Dakota was back here crying.”
“When I took a chance and went to bat for you, I expected you were going to maintain some loyalty.”
Christ. When I went to work for him, I expected him to be someone with some integrity.
“Brian, please rethink this. I know he’s the mayor, though I didn’t then. If he wasn’t the mayor we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
Brian frowned even more. “You’re going to apologize.”
I’d never been a praying man, but at that moment I wanted to pray for forgiveness from my family. “No, I won’t.”
Brian’s face went bright red. “Jim is going to take over for you for the rest of the day. I’d like you to go home and think about what you’re doing, Cole. And then come back tomorrow and do the right thing.”
That was rich. Brian wanted me to do the right thing. At that moment I felt like the right thing would be to punch him in the face. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. In half a second a childhood of occasional casual violence ran through my mind. Hitting Uncle Bill with a baseball bat. The assholes at the Metroplex running at Jeremiah. Chase’s agonized screams.
I had violence in me. But if I were to respond to that instinct I’d land myself back in prison.
I took another deep breath to compose myself then opened my eyes. “I’ll go home if you want, sir. But I’m going to ask you to reconsider as well. I know I’m a brand-new manager in this company. But you are asking me to basically throw one of my employees under the bus. Do you know what they said to me? Linda and Dakota? They said they hadn’t thought I would do anything about it, because their previous managers had ignored it. Is that really who we want to be?”
Brian’s face was red, his mouth set in a straight line, rigidly controlled. But his rage was clear enough from the red spreading across his cheeks, the narrowed eyes, and the hand he raised to point at my chest. “You are going to have a very short career if you don’t learn some loyalty. Go
home.”
The energy of anger seemed to drain out of me. I felt exhausted. “All right.”
I took off my apron, balled it up, and threw it into the laundry bag. Then I walked to my tiny office, grabbed my car keys, and headed for the door.
Sam
It was almost forty-five minutes before Mrs. Mullins came back. This time, she was accompanied by Mr. Flowers, our assistant principal. They both took seats facing me.
Mr. Flowers was a trim man with close-cropped hair, slightly longer than the buzz cuts most of the male teachers favored. His olive complexion was pockmarked with acne scars, and he typically had a frown on his face. Everyone I knew avoided him as much as possible—he had a reputation for handing out Saturday detentions and suspensions at the drop of a hat.
“Sam, I’m Mr. Flowers. I don’t think we’ve met before?”
“No, sir.” I’d learned that here in the Deep South, “sir” and “ma’am” was the preferred mode of address for adults, whatever the circumstance.
He continued. “Sam, we saw the video from the bus yesterday, and as you can imagine, we pulled Billy in for questioning and the bus driver as well. That led us to question the other students on the bus, which led us back to Cody Hendrix and Ashley Prichard. Have you had some kind of run-in with them recently?”
My eyes darted to Mrs. Mullins. I hadn’t told her about what had happened the other afternoon. I nodded and reluctantly spoke. “Yes, sir.”
“Can you tell us about it?”
At this point there wasn’t a lot of point in trying to keep anything secret. I told him about the incident in the hall the other day.
Mr. Flowers nodded. “It appears that Ashley Prichard did the Photoshop job. That’s a nasty little bit of revenge. Was the bus the first time you saw it?”
Ashamed and unable to look at Mrs. Mullins, I looked away and nodded.
Mrs. Mullen said, “Sam, I’m sorry that happened. As far as anyone else is concerned, it was the security video that prompted us to ask the questions.”
Yeah, right. I could hear the whispers now. Snitch.
“What happens now?”
Mr. Flowers’ response was quiet. “Obviously I can’t talk about the specifics of the punishment for another student, but let me assure you we’re taking this seriously. Ms. Prichard is unlikely to do anything like this again in the future.”
Winter Flower Page 27
