When I Lied

by Michelle Kemper Brownlow

  “How old were you?” I didn’t want to interrupt him but I did want to help him fully regain this memory so he could let all of it go.

  “I’m not sure. We didn’t celebrate birthdays so I kind of lose track when I think about my childhood. I was almost as tall as my mum so I had to have been eleven or twelve, possibly.”

  I tilted my head back a little so I was looking up at him. I wanted to be able to read his expressions so I knew when to coax and when to back off.

  “Don’t stop.”

  He pressed his lips against my forehead and squeezed me into his side. “Kate, I just don’t feel right putting all this baggage on you.”

  “Oliver, listen, maybe if you tell me you can one day feel comfortable telling a professional. Someone who can help you. I have a feeling each story you struggle with will get easier each time you tell it.”

  “It will never be easy.”

  “No, Oliver. Never easy, but easier.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I’m a psych major. I’m being trained to help people through the things in their lives that cause them pain. And without judgment. Let me be your safe place, Oliver.”

  “There’s no doubt you have already earned that title.” He smiled and then tilted his head toward the ceiling and closed his eyes.

  “My mum prostituted herself out for a while but when the men she entertained turned their attention toward me, she quit. Not because it was her job to keep me safe from the hands of grown men, but because she was jealous that she didn’t hold their attention longer then the three minutes it took them to get off.”

  He snickered and shook his head, seemingly disgusted at his mother’s ignorance.

  “So, one night, she told me she was taking me out on the town. I was starving and hoped she would surprise me with dinner out. She was manic. One moment she’d talk of getting clean, getting a real job and together we’d make plans for that house in the nice part of town she promised. Then next she was shoving a needle in her arm to end the pain.”

  “She didn’t take you to dinner.” I silently prepared myself for the hell he was about to unload.

  “No. We walked away from town through side alleys to an old dilapidated warehouse. There were cars parked all around the property and I could hear people yelling inside. Men, mostly, I assumed because most of the voices were gruff and deep. When we walked in it was so dark but there was a glow coming from behind a frayed, oil-stained tarp that hung from the I-beam above. My mom told me to wait by the wrecked carcass of a car while she went to find someone.”

  “Who?” I drew in a breath and held it in preparation for something I knew had to be worse than anything my mind could dream up.

  “I don’t know. But the huge bald man she spoke to pointed and waved his hand around as if directing her to the person she was looking for. I heard a voice cry out from the other side of the tarp. My mother’s head spun and our eyes met. Some transparent kind of apology wafted in my direction. The cry I’d heard was a child’s.

  “I turned to run but there was a man behind me and I ran right into his chest, which was covered only by a torn, dirty, sleeveless shirt. He smelled like alcohol and a fat cigar hung from between his nasty teeth. He took hold of my arm and looked up at the guy talking to my mom, who nodded toward the other end of the curtain that hung like a dirty secret. He walked me over and pushed me through to the other side.”

  “What was there, Oliver?” I was terrified, and if I was being honest, I didn’t want to know. But, Oliver came before my fear of what was on the other side of that curtain.

  “It appeared to be an underground fight ring.”

  I gasped. I couldn’t help it. I knew that in my profession I would have to appear unshaken by whatever hell my clients told me but I wasn’t there yet. I wanted to hold my ears and tell him to stop. But I couldn’t. He needed to get it out.

  “That’s when I remembered that one of her regular johns ran an underground fight ring and always bragged about how much money he made doing it. But, what I didn’t know was the ‘fighters’ those lowlifes were betting on…were children. That fact was obvious after taking in the scene on the other side of the tarp. Before me was a room filled with mostly men waving money in the air and chanting the name of what I could only assume was the child they were betting on.

  A bloodied child stood in the ring, which was just a circle shape scratched into the dirt floor. He stood over a smaller child lying in the fetal position. Someone counted to ten and the room erupted into a vicious sound, a celebration of one child beating the life out of another. I was sure he was dead.”

  “Oh, Oliver. Please tell me you got out of there.”

  “I wish I could, Kate.”

  My heart was breaking. I never even knew there was such a thing. It was scary to me that there was a foreign world most of the earth’s inhabitants would live their whole lives knowing nothing about. Sex trafficking, slaughter, gang rapes, all part of underground societies’ norm, and no one was there to help the innocent.

  “Who were the kids?”

  “I assume street kids. Homeless and looking to make a couple bucks.”

  “The kid on the floor?”

  “Don’t know. Another big guy carried him over and laid him in the dirt right next to me, almost like he was warning me that could be my fate. I bent down and wiped the blood from his face with the corner of my tattered flannel shirt and he moaned a little. His eyes fluttered open for a split second, then he spit in my face. I found it so sad that he’d obviously been hurt and abused for so much of his life that he didn’t even recognize the help I was offering. Someone walked over and helped him up. I didn’t see where they went because before I knew it, I was being pulled into the circle.

  “When I looked toward the tarp I looked right into my mom’s eyes. For the first time in my life I saw a hint of remorse in her expression. But just a hint. The big burly man handed her a stack of money secured with a rubber band and she left. That’s when I realized she wasn’t betting on me to win the fight. She’d sold me to the men who ran the ring. There was no use hanging onto the hope that she believed in me enough to think I’d win. Because she didn’t even stick around to see; she sold me. I called out to her. I yelled her first name at the top of my lungs but she never came back. I won my fight. Luckily it was the last of the night or I’d have had to keep taking on contenders. My new brothers and I piled into a huge box truck and travelled to the next town to fight a new group of boys.”

  Oliver went on to describe how harsh Ricky, their owner, was. He didn’t even know the boys’ names. He gave them meaningless names, which I knew was a way to keep them like pets to stave off any emotional attachment. He called Oliver Dog. Oliver told me how arduous it was to purposely hurt someone who’d done nothing to you. He told me how the other boys within the ring simply became callous, which served the purpose of letting go of the guilt of practically tearing someone limb from limb. But, Oliver wasn’t capable of being callous; the dear Lord had built him in a way that he absorbed the pain of those around him. The news articles of abuse and insidious acts, the stories of torture during war he’d spoken to me about as things that kept him up at night were mere slivers of pain compared to what he felt when he was the one inflicting it.

  And then he told me of Pierce Sunderland. And I knew I’d never be the same.

  “There was a boy in Dagenham.” Oliver stood so fast my body lifted with his but then fell back to the bed when he walked to the futon. He sat in the glow of my vanity lights with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting on his clasped hands. His legs bounced.

  The whole time Oliver told me about that first night, his mother basically selling him into slavery, he was intense, his voice broke a couple times, there was a tear or two, but he mostly spoke robotically. Like he was trying his hardest not to let those memories cut too deep. But, he was having a harder time with this. This Pierce Sunderland.

  “Fighting was not in my nature.
I hated every blasted second of it. I had a lot of anger in me, Kate. I could do a lot of damage if I’d let myself. And, Ricky knew that. He could see it in my eyes. So he pushed my buttons, knowing if I’d snap, I’d win and he’d walk away with fistfuls of cash. But, I just wasn’t made to be cruel. I don’t have that switch some people have. I can’t turn off the empathy I feel for people. I even had empathy for my mum, for Christ’s sake. Even after all the things she’d done to me or allowed other people to do to me. Even with all that anger and hurt, scars on my heart, I still sometimes let the weaker guys win so I wouldn’t have to hurt them so badly.” He hadn’t moved. He was still on the futon, bouncing his knees. “The bigger, stronger guys…I fought like hell but that was merely to survive. I wasn’t hurting them. They were pure evil. They had a switch.”

  “But you didn’t run.”

  “Are you kidding? Kate, I was warm; we were fed well to keep us growing and strong. My mother wasn’t killing my pets, beating me or fucking some stranger in the same room I slept. Brawling seemed like the better of all the choices I had.”

  Oliver’s phone buzzed. He answered it. Pulled it away from his head and looked at the screen then put it back up to his ear. “Lexi? Lexi?” He shrugged and shoved it back in his pocket and rolled his eyes a little.

  I looked at the clock; it was nearly five in the morning. I was annoyed that she’d call him at five a.m. If she knew the trouble he had sleeping, she’d know it was typically the time he’d fall asleep after wrestling with his thoughts for hours. But she didn’t know Oliver like I did. I was also pissed that, without knowing it, she’d interrupted something deep that was happening between us.

  “Are you coming?” A loud, deep voice in the hall startled both of us. “Hurry.” It was Charlie’s voice; I’d know it anywhere. I prayed he wasn’t going to knock on my door. The footsteps passed. I shook my head and regained my composure.

  “So, who was Pierce?”

  I watched Oliver go to another place. His body still sat stiff on my futon, but his eyes were empty and his face expressionless. I got up and walked over to sit next to him. He moved away when I leaned in to rest my head on his shoulder.

  “Oliver?”

  “Kate, telling you this will be like vomiting battery acid. It’s going to burn both of us. I’m uncertain whether you’ll want anything to do with me.” He shook his head violently and it was as if he’d just re-entered his own body from somewhere else. He stood and started to pace. “I can’t, Kate. I know you want me to be able to share everything with you and I believe that you think it’s good for me to do so. But I don’t think you’ve ever tasted anything as ugly as this. I need to protect you from it.”

  “Shake the damn tree, Oliver!” I knew whatever he was going to tell me would haunt me. I, too, was cursed with having no switch to separate myself from the pain others felt. I knelt before him on the floor and put my hands on his knees.

  “Pierce was a big kid. He had to have been a good two years older than me, and I’ve always been on the slight side. So, he seriously outweighed me. I thought I’d be fighting for my life that night when I stepped into the ring.

  “We circled around one another before the bell rang. I noticed his knuckles were caked with dried blood, which I’d assumed meant he’d been punching the hell out of something to toughen them up for our fight. His head was shaved and he looked at me through the top of his bulging eyes. He blinked a lot and seemed awkward, not too coordinated. I noticed a jagged scar above his one eye that hadn’t been healed all that long. I made a quick mental note to keep from hitting him in that spot. It was a weak spot, and no matter what Ricky said, I didn’t go for their weak spots. To me, that was cheating.”

  Oliver looked right at me and patted the futon next to him. He surprised me when he laid his head in my lap and curled his knees into his chest. Like a little kid asking for forgiveness for a mistake he’d made. I didn’t want him to tell me. I really, truly didn’t. I wasn’t sure my heart could handle it, but he needed to let it out. He needed to make peace with whatever it was he’d done.

  “I was tired that night, Kate. So tired. There were eight of us and four fought each night, but Ricky had me in a fight for three nights in a row leading up to my fight with Pierce. I was ready to just let him win quickly so I could sleep. I just wanted to sleep.

  “He hit me square in the jaw in the split second after they rang the bell and I saw double for the next five minutes. The crowd was extra wild that night. It was louder than usual. I was distracted. He was strong. Each of his fists was the size of two of mine. But I was faster than him. I took him down more than once but his huge body would get back up over and over again. He seemed invincible. But I was wearing him down.

  “The dried blood from his knuckles was gone and fresh blood rose to the surface and smeared on my body with each hit. The crowd was getting restless; they weren’t used to waiting so long for someone to go down and not get up. It was right about then, maybe twenty minutes into the bout, when he kicked me in the gut. A loud snap came from inside my body. I vomited and then tried to stand. Each time I tried to straighten, a piercing pain shot through my midsection. It was hard to breathe.”

  “Your rib?”

  “I didn’t know at the time but it was actually three ribs. Snapped.”

  “Did you let someone know?”

  Oliver chuckled and rolled over so he was looking up at me. “Kate, love, this wasn’t your glamorous fight in Vegas or Atlantic City. There were no coaches tending to your wounds. Hell, there wasn’t even water made available. This was underground. No rules. If you could walk, you fought.”

  “So, what did you do?” I brushed his curls from his forehead and his eyes fluttered closed again.

  “I saw my mum.”

  “A hallucination from the pain.” I’d heard of this happening.

  “No. She was there in the crowd. I wanted to impress her. For some reason after all that time, I still cared what she thought of me. I still wanted her to be proud. An emotion I wasn’t even sure she could feel. And I knew I’d have a chance to go to her if I ended the bout.”

  “What did you do?” I knew no matter what his answer was, it would make me hurt for him even more.

  “I tore into Pierce. I forgot about the pain in my side. It was like I’d been possessed. When he fell, I climbed on top of him and I bashed him in the face as hard as I could with both fists. There was blood spraying from the old wound above his eye. His blood was all over my hands and arms and in my eyes; everything in my vision had a pink tinge.

  “Pierce’s hands were on my throat in an attempt to push me off of him. I couldn’t breathe. I curled my fingers around his and pried at them so I could breathe. I wanted to get to my mum and as I was suffocating inside Pierce’s grasp, Ricky caught me looking at my mum. He warned us against getting distracted and he had a lot of money riding on this particular fight. So, he went after her. He pushed my mum up against the dirty wall and started pulling up her skirt. He sucked on her neck and squeezed her breasts, like he was going to rape her right there. Right there in front of everyone. She was screaming for him to stop and pounding on his back. Four of Ricky’s employees stood around the perimeter of the ring and didn’t take their eyes off Pierce and me. I knew I couldn’t leave the ring unless the bout ended. So, I ended it.”

  Oliver sat up and moved to the other end of the futon. His body shook. He pulled his knees in to his chest and rocked. Tears poured down his face. His eyes were hollow again. It was classic post-traumatic stress disorder right before me. Oliver was allowing himself to experience the trauma for the first time after having stuffed it so deep for so long.

  “You ended it?”

  “I lost my mind, Kate. I couldn’t stop. It was like every emotional scar I had stood at attention and backed me up like an army of pain that I was to unload on Pierce. It felt like I was ridding my body of all the pain and sadness I’d experienced in my life. But it wasn’t until the crowd closed in on the circle a
nd the spectators yelled at me and tried to help Ricky’s employees pull me off that I realized Pierce’s body had gone limp. I killed him, Kate. I’m pretty sure I killed him.”

  My chest felt as if it was being crushed. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to speak but I couldn’t. I tried to give Oliver some sort of comforting reaction but I was frozen in my seat. It was too much to handle all at once. I physically hurt for both Pierce and Oliver.

  Oliver stood. He was still shaking. He walked to my door, put his hand on the knob then turned to me.

  “Thank you for being my friend, Kate. I’m sorry.” His voice was so quiet I had to read his lips.

  Then he left. I wanted to stop him but I was paralyzed in my spot on the futon. He’d killed Pierce.

  I ran for my trashcan and vomited then I collapsed onto my bed and cried until the sun came up. In an attempt to cleanse my soul of the horror I’d just been made privy to, I wrote every detail down in my journal. The point of my pen cut through the pages under the pressure of my hand. I wasn’t sure I could shake the nausea from the picture Oliver had painted for me of probably the worst thing I’d ever heard.

  Sixteen

  Gretchen and I worked on our psych project in class on Monday but we barely even spoke. She seemed livid at me for some reason and I wasn’t about to ask why. Tuesday afternoon when I got back to my room after my shower, there was a note from Oliver stuck under the edge of my area rug. I assumed he’d been there and slid it under the door.

  Dearest Kate,

  I can only imagine how you feel about me right now. I’m staying away to give you a chance to settle in with this new part of my story. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a few days. I’m fine. More than fine. But I miss you.

  Love, O

  That’s when I knew what had been up Gretchen’s butt on Monday. Oliver probably hadn’t contacted “Lexi” either. Now it was Wednesday and she was still being a complete bitch. If it wasn’t clearly outlined in our syllabus that switching partners before the end of the project was an automatic F, I would have done the whole thing by myself.