by SM Johnson
When only her throat, face, and neck hadn't been drawn, she suggested a brief shower, but Jeremiah shook his head.
"Will you at least wash my hair? Please?"
He'd looked startled at the idea, and then thoughtful, and then left for awhile. He returned with a square plastic container, a bucket, and a bottle of shampoo. He filled the bucket with warm water, then helped her onto the table, positioned so her head hung over the edge. Then he spent a long time washing her hair, scratching and massaging her scalp, being infinitely careful to keep soap out of her eyes.
And, finally, he started talking.
"Three people," he said. "Do you remember?"
Of course she did. It was one of her clearest memories of them all.
He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them, watching her face when he said, "The other two are dead."
She composed her expression, not wanting to look horrified or shocked. Was he telling her he'd killed them? Was he telling her he would hurt her, hurt her until she no longer had breath or heartbeat?
"What happened?" she asked, her voice choked and pitched high.
His laugh was cold, his eyes colder. "I didn't murder them outright, if that's what you're thinking."
It wasn't reassuring.
"Three kills makes a serial killer, though, did you know that?"
His eyes stared into her, and then his finger traced a line from her lower abdomen all the way up to her throat.
"You're fucking with me," she said, and tested a half-smile.
He nodded. "Some. But before I can tell you what happened to them, you need to understand why they're important to me. And maybe even why I had to take you."
That caused her to suck in a breath. Both his hands were in her hair now, folding and smoothing shampoo in, her hair hanging over the plastic box that rested on the seat of a chair positioned beneath her head.
She wasn't tied and there was no music.
"Did you take me? Is that how you see it?"
He nodded.
"Against my will?" Did he not remember? Was he crazy, or on drugs?
He no longer met her eyes, but picked up a cup and rinsed her hair with warm water from the bucket, letting it stream into the plastic box, watching his own hands.
"You were coming with me that night," he said finally. "One way or another. I didn't know if it would be easy or hard. I was prepared for either."
A plethora of sudden quick thoughts stormed through Pretty's head, marching one on top of another, the hours of guilt she'd suffered here, thinking it was a choice.
"Bastard," she said, but it was a soft cuss, and she didn't mean it.
He grinned then, and it was as real of a smile as she'd ever seen. And then he laughed, just a little, very briefly, before he said, "What, you thought you had a choice?"
Jinx, she thought to herself, but didn't say out loud. Instead she asked why. Why me, why now?
"That would be getting out of sequence," he said. "And I don't want to do it that way."
He finished rinsing her hair, and pulled something out of his pocket. He let her see it, a tiny bottle of conditioner.
She closed her eyes as he worked it into her hair, and then he cupped his hands under the back of her head, cradling it, giving her neck some relief.
His hands were strong, and she felt more safe now than before she'd realized she was his prisoner.
She could only guess the reason for all this time of silence, but she had a strong feeling all that was over, and now would come his real purpose.
He talked.
"Her name was Corrie McKnight, and she saved my life.
"I had no trust in women, none, ever. My mother took off for parts unknown before my first birthday, and I don't remember her. I know she was a talented sketch artist, and I think she would have loved me if she'd have stayed, but she didn't stay.
"My father's endless stream of girlfriends were addicts or alcoholics, strippers, and cocktail waitresses, all hardened and bitter with their lots in life, and if they paid attention to me, it was to ridicule me for being an odd child. Or pretend to be nice to me because they thought it would impress him.
"I was odd, there's no doubt about that.
"I was… observant and exceptionally bright. Don't laugh – I know I was going to graduate at the bottom of my high school class, if I managed it at all – but that was a choice, right up there with refusing to conform with anything else about society. You know how I was. How I am, even. Surely you remember."
"I do," Pretty said, as he picked up the cup to rinse the conditioner away. "You were all 'Fuck Them, fuck society, fuck expectation'."
His smile was quick. "Terrified you a little, didn't I? Because you were all good girl, conform, meet every expectation and make them proud. You had no idea what to be. You had no opinion that was genuinely your own. Until I came along. Taught you how to think beyond what They were feeding you."
The way he said it made it sound like she was stupid, and as he wrapped a towel around her hair and helped her sit up, still on top of the table, she felt herself flush with anger. "I would have learned in college."
"Maybe," he said. "But maybe not. Admit it, you were – and always have been – glad that I opened your eyes. It's even in your poem."
Oh. That again.
But he was right, in a broad sense. "I thought you were fascinating. So brave."
He shook his head. "I wasn't brave. I was scared all the time. I got the shit kicked out of me constantly. What you don't understand, never understood, was that I had no other way to be. If I conformed, I would die. That's what I knew."
"You couldn't wear jeans and t-shirts and tennis shoes?"
He rolled his eyes. "Did you end up in black boots, black eyeliner, and black fingernail polish? Because I kept waiting for that, pseudo baby punk."
She shook her head. "It didn't suit. I'd have felt ridiculous."
"And that's the answer to your own question, Sunshine. No, I couldn't walk around wearing a suit that wasn't me. It was enough that I had to conceal my hatred of all of Them all the time. Just that took most of my energy. So long as I stuck with Chill, the two oddballs together, things seemed to roll along a bit more easily. But then you…"
His words trailed away, and this sense of, well, Pretty wasn't sure what it was exactly… pride, somehow, rose up in her, warming her. She'd pushed her way in. Bullied her way in, even, and he'd let her stay. Pretty Loberg. No one else.
And it didn't matter if no one else wanted in, if every one of the assholes dismissed him as unimportant. He hit her radar of want. And what Pretty wants, Pretty gets.
"Yes?" she asked, quirking her lips at him and batting her eyelashes.
"You were fascinated and delightfully unafraid."
"You just said I was terrified."
"Not of me. You were terrified of being different, of standing out, of being noticed."
He was too close to the mark. She had to correct him. "Except I wanted you to notice me, so that doesn't even make sense."
His eyes went flat. "Don't lie to me. Don't ever lie to me. I wouldn't lie to you, what would be the point?"
"Am I going to leave this place alive?"
He looked completely startled by the question. "Yes. Of course. I can't believe you even have to ask that."
She shrugged, looked down at herself, lines and lines and lines, and for what? She looked back at him. "Well, you said I've been kidnapped. It's a fair question."
He nodded, and his expression was serious. "I didn't bring you here to kill you. I am going to hurt you, though, and more than you can imagine. I'm sorry about that, if it helps any."
A chill almost like a seizure tore through her, and she raised her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, tucked her chin down, and rocked like a scared little kid. She almost started to cry, but knowing he'd take her tears stopped them. It was still… just so uncomfortable and weird, they way he did that. It made him seem like a stranger.
He tugged the towel away from her hair and finger combed it, then started braiding it.
"Why?" she asked, voice muffled against the flesh of her arms.
"Why am I sorry? Because I love you."
A different kind of chill, quicker, more straight into her heart. But that wasn't the question. "No, why are you going to hurt me?"
"It's the only way to do it."
He was exasperating her now. "Do what?"
"Give you my Dark."
He wouldn't answer any more questions after that, saying she would understand by the time they were finished. He wouldn't even tell her finished with what, except his eyes burned into her in a way that said You know. This.
But she didn't know, not really, and was a little more scared than she'd been before.
She gave up. "You were telling me about Corrie," she prompted, by way of subject change, her way of telling him she was done struggling against his logic.
"No, I was telling you about you, first. I'll get back to Corrie, trust.
"You were… so wide open to me, so transparent, and at the same time so filled with shame. For me, it was like being presented with a blank canvas and a Sharpie.
"You'd present your ideological ideas – none of them your own, by the way, and you'd be all prepared with arguments – again, none of them your own, and I'd ask, 'Cui bono?' And your face would freeze in surprise as all your arguments flew away like dandelion fluff on the breeze. Poof. Silence. It was about the only time you'd shut up, as you worked it out in your head, testing lines of logic against what you'd been told, what you'd always believed. Sometimes your logic was flawed, but one of my favorite things about you was that you always recognized when it was, and readily asked, at that point, for more information. And you never pretended to know something you didn't. Well, not after you got used to me, at least."
"And never again, my whole life," she said.
"Meaning what?" he asked.
"Meaning you taught me to stop pretending. Maybe more than you taught me anything else."
He shrugged, but the corners of his lips twitched up, not quite a smile but almost. "That look on your face, the shock and surprise when you realized everything you thought you knew about some big issue was wrong. Sometimes my only goal for the whole day was to see that look."
"Mean bastard."
"It wasn't mean – I didn't think less of you. You couldn’t help your life. It was… I enjoyed your openness, your lack of defense."
Even as he said these things, Pretty's tight little ball of rocking was loosening. Her arms had drifted further down her calves, her knees relaxed and fell apart.
"I didn't get time back then to address your shame, but I would have liked to. Some of this," he made a gesture that encompassed the entire room, the entire place, perhaps their entire relationship – "has been to correct that. Do you see?"
She shook her head, but it wasn't a 'no,' it was that she didn't want to talk about it. In fact, she so didn't want to talk about it that she wished he could finish this in silence.
"You should put on music," she suggested. "But quieter, so you can tell me who the bands are, what they mean to you."
"You're changing the subject."
And yet… he walked away from her to put on music, turning the volume down to a level they could speak over. If they wanted to.
He had her move to a chair and sat behind her, his pen drawing what felt like dozens of intricate lines in the tiny, ticklish space at the back of her neck.
He turned her chair, drew on her ear, of all places, and behind it, then her jaw line, the left side of her neck.
At first he talked about the music. And he talked about Corrie.
Chapter 17
She.
She's a bit wide-eyed, looking at me, waiting.
I think she's ready to listen, but I can't stand her eyes on me, so I roll my chair behind her.
The back of her neck... might be the most perfect canvas of skin as any I've seen.
It's cruel of me to make the lines this fine, to draw this many of them, but I can't seem to help myself.
I'll be glad of it, after I tell her about Corrie. The lines there will remind me that punishment will come, that there is a price for her listening, and that she'll be making noises of sympathy soon enough.
A sigh. Yeah, she needs to know. This.
But am I ready to re-live this? Corrie leads to Jamie, and Jamie leads to now...
They'll never meet, Corrie and Sunshine, and I'm sad about that. They weren't the same, no, but they were both important to me.
Corrie saved my life.
Sunshine - well, I can't say she saved my life, but perhaps my sanity, and she can learn my message and carry it forward. Teach it to her children. Sunshine could be my immortality.
"Corrie," I say out loud, gathering my thoughts, trying to decide where to start. "I guess she was something of a legend in juvenile detention."
I meet Sunshine's quizzical look with my own solid stare. "Four weeks in lock-up, yeah, when I was fifteen. But Corrie fixed me. Or more... taught me how to navigate my life so I could stay out of the system, at any rate. She taught me new masks to wear, socially acceptable ones.
"How did you land in juvenile detention?" Sunshine wants to know.
"Funny story, that."
But no, it isn't funny at all. But I'm going to tell her.
This would be everything she'd always wanted to know, everything I couldn't tell her before. When I was young, it was all too close, too humiliating. I wanted her to believe I was a pacifist on purpose, not because I was powerless. But powerless was closer to the truth, back then.
I tell her all of it: How my dad got reported to social services because there was no food in the house and my clothes hadn't been washed in weeks. How I attacked the social worker who tried to pick me up from school, and landed in the juvenile justice system rather than the foster care system. This was all in the three or four months since my uncle first raped me, and I felt like I was living in a nightmare. At least my father didn't do that, and I was getting pretty savvy at finding ways to avoid him.
They told me when I'd finished four weeks in Juvie, I'd go live with my uncle, since he'd expressed an interest in keeping me out of foster care.
That time, I didn't react at all. I didn't attack anyone, not even the social worker who brought the bad news.
It was a co-ed juvenile facility, but the girls and the boys stayed in separate wings and only interacted during meal times and staff facilitated groups.
Our wing had a TV room and a commons area. The TV room had a slew of one-armed chairs. When we pushed them together, each chair arm formed a barrier between it and the next chair, naturally prohibiting physical contact. They were orange and blue and hideous. The majority of them were plain orange and plain blue, but a couple were a compilation of the colors in a paisley design. They smelled like bad onions and old body odor. The carpet was baby blue, the walls faux-painted, rag rolled or sponged, in different versions of blue and orange. The TV was on all the time. It was loud to the eyes and the ears.
One foot in the doorway and I wanted to run away screaming. It assaulted all my senses. No way was I going to spend any time in there.
The commons area, which was also the dining room, wasn't better, with its tile floor and glassed-in staff office. Voices carried and echoed, as well as pen-tapping, and, at the far end of the room, the nerve-wracking crack and slap of an air-hockey table.
This place might be tolerable when buried beneath music from my headphones, and I wasn't allowed to have them. I wasn't allowed to have anything from my backpack, and all my best stuff was in there, and if I never got it back… well, I couldn't even think about that. The idea of losing everything was as intolerable as the thought of sitting on a smelly chair in that obnoxious room.
It didn't take me long to get a ball-point pen.
It was nothing fancy, just a plain blue Bic or whatever was standard in institutions back in the day.
I took it apart and broke it in half, so I ended up with a piece of plastic with a jagged edge.
I'd never tried to kill myself before, but we all knew someone who slashed at their wrists and didn't get the job done, right? So. I didn't go that route.
I tore open my own throat.
But I'd underestimated how tricky it would be to rip my own jugular out. I had no idea how hard it was to rip open skin with any precision using a broken pen. And I hadn't been much prepared for the layers of flesh between dermis and major veins and arteries.
They didn't even take me to the hospital, just the facility nurse, who patched me up. Then came a quick and dirty march down a long hallway, no pleasant chatter, no laughing, no reassurance. Just a muttered comment from one supervisor, 'Now you've done it. You're Cory's problem now,' and a sharp bark of non-laughter from the other along with a verbal rendition of music from the Twilight Zone and a whispered, 'Good luck.'
"What?" I asked. "Cory deals with the bad kids?"
"Oh, ya'all bad," the first supervisor said. "Nah, Cory deals with the special kids. The ones that need a bit more than the others to straighten up. You'll see."
I didn't like the sound of this person. Didn't like the sound of being a 'special kid', not at all.
The supervisor opened an office door and pushed me through it.
The nameplate on the desk read 'Corrie M.' followed by the letters 'MSW.' Not Cory, but Corrie. Not that that made any difference. He had one of those corner desks like half an octagon, only it was set in the middle of the room, so the person sitting in front of the monitor faced the doorway. There were four low bookshelves under the window behind him.
This Corrie guy was doing something on a computer, and didn't even look up at me. Probably playing Tetris. All I could see of him from around the monitor was short black hair, narrow shoulders, and damn fine gym-buffed arms. He was white, but that was no surprise, because so was I and ninety-five per cent of the rest of everyone who lived in this town.
He didn't look at me, say anything, or acknowledge me at all, just kept doing his computer thing (that was probably Tetris). And he kept doing that, as if I wasn't standing just inside the door, waiting. As if he didn't even know I was there. But he had to have heard me get shoved into the room.
