Ruin You

by Molly O'Keefe

  They got caught making out at school today.

  I know, right? So dumb. So Romeo and Juliet.

  The Pastor and The Wife are not going to let that stand. The punishment is going to be nuts.

  Food here at St. Joke’s is shit and they give Tommy less of it than anyone else. But tonight, they fed him until he was full, and he fell into a food coma almost the second we got put in our rooms.

  More proof that there is an ill wind blowing.

  Tommy’d do better to keep his head down like me. Count the days until he turns 18 and go far, far away.

  Not get distracted by things like…love. Or friends. Or trying to do the right damn thing all the time.

  Do not, I remind myself the same thing I’d been reminding myself since I landed in this place six months ago, get involved.

  This shit is none of my business.

  My business is getting out of this place.

  But still, I can’t sleep. I can’t study. Fear is in the back of my throat like a rock.

  I wrestle open the warped drawer of the desk that Tommy and I are supposed to share, but that he has no interest in. Or if he does, he doesn’t say anything about it.

  A small snow globe rolls forward, the scene inside obscured by the swirling glitter blizzard on the other side of the heavy plastic. But I don’t need to see it. I’ve seen it every day of my life.

  It’s a family; a man and a woman and a little kid holding hands and looking at a sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. My father bought it from the hospital gift shop when I was born.

  It sat on my bookshelf my whole life. Mostly unnoticed. I mean, it was a snow globe.

  But when my parents died and we got rid of the apartment, I couldn’t take much. Anything really. My aunt’s house was so full already.

  But I grabbed that snow globe and it’s a good reminder that I had parents. That they loved me. That they wanted to be proud of me and that I fucked that up, but good.

  When I got put here, my aunt packed it in my bags. And the comfort is gone. Now that snow globe is just a knife. Reminding me of things I lost. Things I can’t get back no matter what I do.

  I push the snow globe into the back of the drawer, where its snowstorm rages but I can’t see it. I can’t feel it.

  What I want is in the front of the drawer; my fat, red notebook of Dale Simpson newspaper clippings.

  My revenge notebook.

  I open it and comfort myself with my anger.

  This simmering, seething curiosity I have about Dale Simpson’s daughter — the blonde with the birthmark and the rage — hasn’t gone away over the last few months.

  It’s gotten worse.

  There were a few minutes that day, sitting in a jail cell, staring at my shaking hands through my broken glasses, when I blamed her, and that rock, but I quickly let go of that.

  What happened was my fault.

  The knife was what really got me in trouble.

  But my curiosity about her is endless. It is non-stop. And I would have made a Dale Simpson’s Daughter Notebook, but I can’t find anything about her. Like absolutely nothing. Not on the internet, not at the public library. Nothing.

  There was no birth certificate. No woman coming forward claiming she had Simpson’s illegitimate child.

  And I’d think, maybe she’d been lying about being his daughter. But her rage. And her grief. And her guilt. It felt as real to me as the rock she’d thrown.

  But she is a dead-end.

  Without a connection to Simpson, she doesn’t matter.

  Except to me.

  I put the notebook at my elbow, a familiar thing reminding me of all the reasons why I can’t get invested in the dramas of my roommates.

  The physical, tangible reminder of the goal.

  Graduation, journalism school.

  And revenge.

  I scoot my chair up tight to the desk, and I continue the non-linear algebra equations I’m working on.

  And then, just as I’m getting back into things, just as I’m letting the calm of advanced math settle over me, there’s a sound in the hallway. The jingle of keys.

  My blood stops in my veins. Sweat floods my armpits.

  The Pastor.

  Tommy, in his bed on the other side of the room, wakes up with a start.

  “Did you hear something?” Tommy whispers, all alert and worried, like his spidey senses are tingling.

  I bend over my books, because I am not getting involved in this.

  “You,” I whisper back, our voices barely audible. “Having a wet dream.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I see him check the blankets around his crotch then sigh with relief to find them dry.

  I turn my head and smile. Tommy’s not a bad guy. He’s pretty funny. But all that goddamn hope around him makes me itch. His selflessness makes my selfishness look criminal, despite my reasons.

  “You heard something in the hallway,” he says.

  “No.”

  “Did someone knock? One of the girls?”

  “It…wasn’t a knock.”

  “Is it Beth?”

  “Jesus,” I mutter. “What is it with Beth?”

  But I know. We all know. They love each other. We could all recognize it from our old lives. When we took those kinds of things for granted. Love. Happiness. Though I’d never had a girlfriend like Tommy has with Beth. I’d never seen that before. Like they spoke a language with each other that no one else understood.

  “You’re going to get all of us in trouble,” I say and his silence tells me plenty about his agreement. And the fact that he knew he would get in trouble and still he couldn’t stay away from Beth, is stupid, sure.

  And completely Tommy.

  But it’s also…I don’t know…noble, too. Brave.

  Makes me think of my dad who loved my mom through all that pain.

  I don’t care, I think. I even sing it to myself. Not my fight. Not my problem.

  “She might be having another nightmare,” he sneers and I ignore him.

  Beth has nightmares. We all fucking have nightmares. We don’t talk about it. We lock those fears far, far away. We say we’re fine when someone asks, because we aren’t fine. We are miles from fine. But admitting it might put all of us on our knees.

  I can’t bring down Simpson from my knees.

  Carissa, in the room next to us, knocks quietly on the wall and Tommy answers, talking in the secret knock code they’ve created. The knocking stops and, for a moment, there are no sounds. But my ears were hyper-tuned and I can feel Tommy across the room, vibrating with adrenaline and fear.

  “It’s after one, dude,” Tommy says, picking a fight.

  I do the right thing and ignore him. The last thing we need in this place is to fight each other.

  “You know we share a room,” he whispers. “How am I supposed to sleep with your fucking lamp on all the time?”

  “You were sleeping just fine—”

  The sound comes again and we both shut up, blinking at each other.

  Not a scream.

  It is the sound of a scream cut off before it could get started. It is a sound a thousand times worse than a scream, and all the hair on my body stands up. A door shuts and there are footsteps walking down the hallway away from our room. Away from the girl’s room next to ours.

  There is a heavy thump. The footsteps stop for a second and then start back up.

  “That is from Beth and Rosa’s room, wasn’t it?” I whisper, even though I know.

  Tommy says nothing, staring out the window at the bright white light of the streetlamp. And I know this is worse than if The Pastor had come for Tommy. If The Pastor came for Tommy, he’d take the punishment and move on.

  But The Pastor has come for Beth.

  And he is taking her to the office. The office is a fucked-up place where fucked-up shit goes down. The Pastor is an Old Testament kind of guy. Spare the rod, spoil the child. I have marks across my back. Tommy has them all
over his body. No one knows that shit over in the court system. The people who keep putting kids in this man’s care couldn’t know what happens behind all these locked doors. Or they would stop it. Right?

  Someone would stop it?

  The first time it happened to me I wrote a letter, nearly mailed it to the newspapers from school. My back throbbing in pain, I imagined police officers storming the house, taking The Pastor and The Wife away in handcuffs. I imagined justice and public outcry and something so bright and hot rose up in me, I nearly cried. Something like pride. Something like vindication.

  But then I imagined interviews and court cases. I imagined another foster home, my life in limbo for months and I had the SATs coming up. I imagined what might happen if no one believed me. I imagined jail.

  And there is no way to bring down Simpson from inside jail.

  I couldn’t do what was right and still have my revenge.

  I didn’t send the letter. Tore it up. Cried in the bathroom, wondering if my father was proud of me when I was so disgusted with myself.

  There is another thump in the hallway and then a sob.

  Silence.

  I close my eyes, curl my hands into fists. Try to swallow this shame in my throat that wants to come out like vomit.

  In a wild rush, Tommy is up and out of bed, charging for the door. He grabs the doorknob with both hands and rattles the door. He braces both feet against the wall and pulls. Puts his shoulder against the door and pushes.

  Nothing. Not any movement.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, sitting there like I don’t know. Sitting there like nothing matters but these books.

  I feel so wrong inside my skin.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Like you’re being an idiot.”

  “I need to help her. You gonna fucking help me or not?” he whispers.

  Suddenly I remember my mom, sitting at our dining room table, her hair in a gray-red halo around her face. Her glasses on the edge of her nose.

  “It’s not right,” she’d say, putting down the morning paper with a pissed off flourish.

  “Tell me,” my father would say and she would outline the injustice of something she’d just read about. The wrongness. And then she’d open her check book, even though we had no fucking money. Or she’d call some office. Or she’d write a letter to the editor. Make giant pots of soup. She would do…something.

  She’d show up. Time and time again, she’d show up.

  It struck me like the ringing of a bell; my mother would be so ashamed of me right now.

  It’s not right. And this, sitting here while Tommy does the right thing…my mother would not be proud.

  In a wild, panicky rush, more instinct than anything else, I stand up, not sure what I can do. But the fucking relief of standing up…of not pretending. Of doing something. God, it is amazing. It is exhilarating.

  I get up from the desk, the books behind me forgotten. Tommy isn’t thinking. He is mindless emotion. That’s how I can help, I can think. Reason.

  “The hinges,” I say. “They’re on the inside of the door. If we can get those off—”

  “With what?” he asks. “We don’t have any tools in here, Simon.”

  I run the three steps to my desk and book bag.

  “If you have a screwdriver in there,” he says. “I’ll take back every single shit thing I’ve ever—”

  I pull out a metal protractor.

  “Are you kidding me?” Tommy asks.

  “It’s what we’ve got.” I push him out of the way so I can get down on my knees and work on getting the hinges off the door.

  I am on fire with purpose. My hands are shaking, sure, but I am doing something.

  The door slams at the end of the hallway, and I look at Tommy.

  I can’t get the edge of the protractor into the slot on the top of the screw. “The hinges have been sealed with something. I can’t do it.”

  Tommy grabs my desk chair, lifting it over his head.

  “What the hell are you doing?” It’s obvious what he is doing. It’s STUPID what he is doing.

  “I’m going to throw it through the window—”

  “And then what? We’re on the third floor!”

  “I’ll climb down!”

  “You’ll fall and break your neck.”

  “So we do nothing?” he whisper-shouts. “I can’t do nothing anymore! He’s hurting her.”

  “You don’t know that. Not for sure.” Even as the words come out of my mouth they taste like shit. Like a horrible, horrible lie. The kind of things adults say when they don’t want to really contemplate the truth of something. Like Tommy needs something as mundane as proof to understand what is going down in that office.

  “What happened when he took you into the office after that shit with the candle?”

  My face gets hot and my stomach cramps. If I had sent that letter… Jesus, God, if I’d just sent that letter, this wouldn’t be happening. The Pastor would be behind bars, so would The Wife. The rest of us would be scattered around, but at least we’d be safe. Safer.

  We wouldn’t be contemplating defenestration.

  I push my glasses up on my nose, but I am sweaty and they just slip down again.

  The sound of a key in the lock of the door makes both of us go still. I can feel my blood turn to ice, like it is cracking in my veins. We’d been whispering but we’d still been too loud.

  “Fuck,” I breathe. “It’s him.”

  Or worse. Her.

  “I hope so,” he whispers and tiptoes to the far side of the door, the chair still in his hands.

  The door eases open and I stand at the end of his bed, my eyes darting from Tommy to the door and back again. I’m ready to give him the signal. I’m ready to help. To fight.

  Because it’s not right.

  But then the bedroom door is pushed open and I don’t have to decide. Because it isn’t The Pastor. It’s Rosa. Rosa who is usually locked in her room, like the rest of us. The room she shares with Beth.

  Tommy lowers the chair when he sees that it’s Rosa. The three of us all blink at each other for a second, like we’re just not sure what to do.

  She has her black hood up over her long hair. The baggy sweatshirt she wears pulls taut over her pregnancy.

  “I’m out,” she whispers. “I’d rather be in jail than here.”

  “How’d you get our door open?” Tommy asks, his voice low. Rosa has a whole history with B and E — that’s how she got put in St. Joke’s.

  She holds up a key ring with five keys on it. “Fucker’s not as careful as he could be when he’s excited about raping teenage girls.”

  My stomach curdles.

  She is saying the words I don’t even want to think. Tommy has gone white and then red. Shaking.

  “He just took Beth,” she says. “You’ve got time before shit gets real.”

  Time to do what? I wonder, but Tommy takes off for the office, the keys in his hand.

  “Wait,” I whisper. “If you try a bunch of keys in the lock, he’ll hear you. You need to know which one is the right one.”

  Tommy nods and starts fiddling with the keys but his hands are shaking.

  “Hey.” I stand beside him, my hand out for the keys. “Let me help you.”

  He drops the keys in my hand and I turn to the locked and empty bedroom beside Carissa’s and start trying them.

  There is a creak on the stairs and we all go totally still.

  The Wife.

  I try to think of the last time I saw my mother. When she was healthy. I try to remember how my dad showed me how to hold a cricket bat. I try to remember who I’d been. Who I am.

  Because I don’t know anymore.

  Tommy, beside me, tenses and I imagine him shoving The Wife down the stairs.

  And I imagine me helping him. Because this is me now. Who I am. It is like I’ve stepped into another life. A different body. I can’t feel my hands even as I curl them into fists to beat my way ou
t of this.

  THREE

  Still that night

  BUT IT ISN’T The Wife coming up the stairs.

  It’s Carissa in her pale pink pajamas. The moonlight coming through our bedroom door turns the long butcher knife in her hand to silver.

  “Open the door,” she whispers, all murderous business. Well, as much as a fifteen-year-old half-Chinese girl in a pair of pink pajamas could mean murderous business.

  Which is a lot, actually.

  I do the circuit with the keys until I have one left that could only be for the office door.

  I lift it in the air. “Got it!”

  My words are practically silent, that’s how low we are whispering.

  “I’m out,” Rosa breathes, her hands over her stomach. And none of us blame her. She is four months pregnant and seventeen years old. She doesn’t need anything else on her plate.

  She and Carissa hug briefly and Rosa is gone like she’d never been there at all.

  “Give me the knife,” Tommy says to Carissa. “I’m bigger.”

  Sure, he’s bigger than Carissa. But he is way smaller than The Pastor. I have the sense not to say that out loud, but we are all thinking it.

  I can tell by our faces we are thinking how bad all of this could go.

  “I’ll get Beth,” she says and Tommy nods. The two of them co-conspirators in murder. Murder? Are we planning on murder?

  I’ve been down this road. It doesn’t end well.

  “You can’t kill him,” I say. Because someone needs to say that. Needs to make that clear.

  “I can’t?”

  “You’ll go to jail.”

  “Dude,” he sneers, “I’m going to jail anyway. Now or years from now, it don’t matter.”

  “Yeah, but murder?”

  “You don’t want to do this, fine. Go back to your books. No judgment, Simon. For real. You helped a lot. But me and Carissa can do this on our own.”

  Carissa has been at St. Joke’s for years, and she runs this shit. There isn’t a thing that happens in these walls that she isn’t fully on top of.

  And she stands next to Tommy at this door like she has no plans on bailing.

  Because what is happening in that office isn’t right. Not by a mile.

  They are badass. There is no other word for it. And I am on their side.