by A. L. Moore
The room he took me to was rectangular and as bright as it was empty. Light poured in from a large window across the back wall. A small, metal, folding table and chairs were the only furniture. My knees shook as much as my hands when I pulled the chair out across from the man in the black, button-up shirt. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, showing off his beefy arms.
I wasn't sure what Tonya had said, but I didn’t care. I wanted out of here and lying apparently hadn’t gone so well for her.
The man did most of the talking, introducing himself as Agent Mick of the FBI. He told me about the drug cartel Tom and Tyler had been operating. He’d been on the case longer than I’d been out of middle school. I acted indifferent, not letting on that I knew anything about it. After all, I had transported to Marco, too. Tom’s picture hung on a bulletin board next to me, along with pictures of John, Alec, Liam and Jayson. There were several pictures of the store and a few of the warehouse. As I studied the pictures, Agent Mick ran through each of the guy’s profiles. I almost vomited when he said Tyler’s age. I’d thought Tyler was in his twenties at the most.
Agent Mick never asked me a direct question. He knew everything already. I squirmed in my seat when he laid a picture of me, dealing with Jayson on the table, but he didn’t pause. He spread several others across the table. There were pictures of me in Robyn’s driveway and in the alley behind The General Store. There was even a shot of Liam’s bike pulling out of Robyn’s drive the first day he’d looked at me. My whole summer was practically staring me in the face. There was no need for me to say anything. Mick had enough evidence to put me away with everyone else.
Here I’d been worried about senior year, and I would never see it.
The next envelope Mick dumped out was of girls I didn’t recognize. Most of them looked my age. Two were blondes like me, there was a red head and the rest were brunettes. There didn’t seem to be a theme other than age. One girl had big green eyes set back in a pale face, and another was tanned with dark, almond shaped eyes.
When Agent Mick said that Tyler had passed off all the girls to Marco in the last five years, I did vomit. I barely made it to the wastebasket before I saw my breakfast for the second time today.
It was dark outside of the picture window before I was led to a room with a phone. I was well beyond tired, and my stomach was running on empty. The pack of peanut-butter crackers Mick had given me, worn off. My first instinct was to call Liam. For all I knew, he was locked up with everyone else, but I didn’t want to call him from here. It would look suspicious. I picked up the phone to call my parents when the door opened. Mick stepped inside. He was followed by the most welcoming sight I’d seen all day. My mom’s eyes were red, and my dad was shaking, barely looking in my direction. Seeing their reactions made my dry eyes leak again.
“Why don’t we all take a seat,” Agent Mick said, his demeanor the complete opposite of the anxiety around him.
“Now, Justice,” he started. “Your parents are aware of the situation. I just need to ask you a few questions.”
I sat down next to my dad and put my hand on his where he gripped the arm of the chair. “Am I going to jail,” I asked, glancing to my parents and then back to Agent Mick.
Mick spread the same photos from before out in front of us. The look on my dad’s face made me wish for the cold holding-cell. Dad drew his hand from mine to his mouth.
“We do have enough to charge you, but we’re offering you the same deal we did the girls. If you sign this paper, corroborating everything we discussed, you can walk out of here with your parents,” he said, turning his notepad around toward me.
I hesitated, my nails digging into my thighs. What if he was lying? What if I signed the paper, and they threw me inside, too? I couldn’t testify against Liam. I wouldn’t do that to him.
“What is there to think about?” Mom insisted, wringing her hands. “Sign the paper, Justice.”
There was a lot to think about. Tyler and Tom would kill me, and I hated to think what they would do to me first.
“Will I have to testify?”
“So, what if you do?” Dad said angrily. “You’re not protecting these people, Justice. They’re the worst kind of garbage.”
“You don’t know what they’re like,” I pleaded. “They’ll come after me.”
The detective leaned across the table; his eyes soft. “Did they hurt you, Justice?” The tears started heavily, betraying me. “You can tell me. We won’t let them get away with it. Was it Mr. Brooks?”
“Who?” I asked, wiping my eyes on the back of my hand.
“Liam Brooks?”
How did I not know his last name? That made me cry even harder.
“No, Sir,” I sniffed. “It was Tyler. He…” I paused, glancing nervously at my parents.
“Go ahead, Justice,” Mom insisted. Dad clutched my hand in support.
“He raped me.”
My dad gasped, and Mom started sobbing, her face in her hands.
“When?” The detective asked, reaching for the phone on the polished table.
“This morning. Just before you got there.”
“Crystal, we’re going to need a rap kit. Room 3B.”
“I don’t want to do it,” I said adamantly. I’d been touched so much by so many people in the last few days. The thought of someone else poking and prodding around in me was too much.
“We need it for evidence,” Mick said, his pensive eyes not giving an inch as he sat the phone back in the cradle. “It’s standard procedure.”
“I don’t care about your standard procedure. Forget it!” I crossed my arms over my chest. “No one is touching me."
A petite, brunette tapped on the door with a plastic container in her hand. The detective dismissed her with a disappointed scowl and said, “These assholes get away with murder.
“You realize that by not taking the test, Tyler gets away with it.” His frown deepened, his five o’clock-shadow protruding when I shrugged and stared absently out the dark window. “Let’s hope the next girl is as lucky as you were."
He'd already gotten away with it. He'd done exactly what he'd wanted to do to me, and no test was going to take that away from him. No test was going to take it away from me.
“Now, back to the matter at hand,” he said, his chair scrapping up to the table as he reached for the notebook. “We’re going to need your signature.”
“Did you offer this deal to Tonya?” I asked, my arms still stubbornly crossed in a silent stand against authority. I’d had enough men telling me what to do today. “Is that why she was being fingerprinted, because she turned you down?”
He shook his head. “I can’t discuss Ms. Smith’s case with you.
“If you sign this,” he said, passing me a pen, “I guarantee you will never have to step foot in a courtroom.”
“And Tom? Tyler?” I asked heatedly. Did he think they would forget? They knew where I lived, where I went to school and the kind of car my parents drove. “What about when they get out?”
“Being afraid is understandable, but they’re going away for a long time,” he insisted, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt as if he could feel my tension. “If you don’t sign, they could be back on the street in less than a year.
“I see it all the time,” he said, looking to my parents.
“Don’t you have enough evidence without me?” I asked, glancing at the picture of Liam. He wasn’t looking at the camera. His eyes focused on something the camera didn’t capture, something hidden in front of Mason’s pick-up. Me.
“We do for the drug charges but not the human trafficking?” Mick said, anger crinkling his grey eyes as he watched my hesitation. “The other girls won’t talk. With your signature, we could potentially add a life sentence to their conviction. They’d never know which girl pointed the finger.”
“Human trafficking.” The words repeated in my head. I'd known why Marco wanted me, but I’d never thought about it in those terms. Tom and Tyler ha
d sold me off like cattle. I felt like I was going to pass out. I scribbled my name on the paper and reached for the wastebasket.
Chapter 19. Outside
I was grounded indefinitely. My phone and laptop were taken away. I would get the laptop back when school started, but my phone had met a worse fate. My dad smashed it to smithereens, but only after reading through every text I’d sent in the last two months. There were so many lies in that phone, not to mention private conversations with Liam. I’d never put my private life in print again.
I did manage to see that Liam had called several times before the hammer hit the plastic, but I still didn’t know if the calls came in before or after the bust. I felt lost without him. Visions of his brown eyes snuck into my dreams so vividly at night that I woke in tears. It was torturous not knowing what had happened to him. Was he in jail? Had Tyler hurt him when he came after me? Why wasn’t he coming around? My parents couldn’t stop him from driving down the street.
Then, there were the words Agent Mick said, “Mr. Brooks is a bad man.” Robyn said the same thing weeks ago. It wasn’t true. Deep down I knew it wasn’t true. Liam felt something for me. He had to. He’d saved me this summer. He'd saved me from Tyler's wanton hands and Tonya's jealous wrath. Almost. But with each passing day, and no contact, I started to doubt him, myself.
Mason apparently wasn’t part of my punishment. He’d been waiting on the steps when we’d pulled in from the police station, hugging me as if the last two months had never happened. I’d cried into his shirt. Glad for the first time in a long time that he was here. Mom said he’d been over the night before looking for me. He was the one who’d spilled that I wasn’t at Anna’s. I’d known it all along, but I was too relieved to be mad at him.
My parents gave me a full week to sleep and find my bearings, before the real questioning started. Their questioning put the hours with the Agent Mick to shame. It made it worse that Mason was there for all of the sorted details. I could tell he didn’t enjoy hearing about Liam. Especially when I admitted I’d been with Liam all of the times I’d said I was with Robyn. Dad saw red when I talked about getting on the bikes and how Tom had covered for me. He’d trusted Tom without question. Like myself, I could tell he would never be so gullible, again.
I didn’t have to explain about the drinking and drugs. It was in the police report from the cabin. Mom had already raided the drugstore for drug tests. She’d also made an appointment for me with her Gynecologist. I told her she had nothing to worry about, but she wouldn’t listen. Mason was as white as a ghost during that conversation. I felt so bad for him. I was a horrible person for allowing him to stay, but I was done lying.
I tried to paint Liam in the best light possible, explaining how he’d kept me safe from Tyler, watching out for me when I drank, and even coming back to the cabin that first night Tyler had tried to seduce me. It didn’t help. The fact that Liam was twenty-four, and sleeping with their high school senior, was enough in my dad’s eyes to make Liam just as bad as the rest of them.
Dad threatened to press charges against Liam for statutory rape until I was hysterical. Mason walked outside for most of that conversation. Dad would’ve pressed charges, too, if I’d been a year younger, but since I was seventeen, there was nothing he could do, legally. He was still threatening to beat Liam to a pulp if he ever saw his face. Thankfully, he didn’t know Liam from Jayson.
When they stopped yelling at me and started in on each other, I found Mason in my room. I didn’t understand why he was sticking around. He didn’t like Robyn, and my summer’s ambition had been to be just like her. I’d tragically succeeded. For all Mason knew, I was worse. It baffled me that he could even look me in the eyes. Especially after the way the cabin was described in the report. It was disgusting, a picture of drunken drug-pushers and partying. There was a list of guns and drugs a mile long removed from the cabin. Not to mention the guys’ ages alongside mine looked even worse on paper. I was the youngest by seven years. Nearly a decade. On paper, I still looked like a kid. It was almost as weird to see the guys’ names on a police report as it was to see my own. I knew so little about them. No last names. No addresses. Nothing other than what their grimy hands felt like on my skin.
“Is that what you want?” Mason asked, rereading the report for the third time. “This Liam guy.”
I lost it again, crying into my hands. Yes. I wanted Liam, but how could I tell Mason that. How could I make him understand that Liam was different? Not like the others. That Liam wanted out as much as I did. It would crush him. After sitting through all the sorted details of my horrid summer, I couldn’t bear to put more pain in his eyes.
“Let’s just forget it,” he said, letting me bury my face in his chest.
Forget it. As if it were that easy to do. As if the memory of Tyler’s boney fingers didn’t wake me screaming in the middle of the night. As if Tom’s voice didn’t echo in my every thought, “Keep it together kid.” As if Liam could ever be forgotten.
“Just one more thing, and I’ll let it go.” I wiped my eyes and peered up at him. "You’re done with those guys? With Liam?”
I nodded in answer to the first part of his question. Was I finished with Liam? The thought was more than I could bear. I’d revisit that question another time. When things were back to normal, I’d have an answer.
Mason lay next to me staring at my speckled, white ceiling tile. “I don’t love Anna, Justice,” he said. “It was purely revenge. I wanted to hurt you like you hurt me.”
I sighed, dropping to my pillow. “Mason, don’t tell me that. Anna is my best friend." At least she was.
Glancing sideways at me, he said, “It’s the truth. You’re the only girl–
“Don’t,” I interrupted before he went too far. “I’m not ready to… I can’t do this again, Mason.”
“You’ve been through a lot. I get it,” he said, rubbing my back. “I just want you to know that I’m not going to let a bad couple of months ruin the past three years.”
Had it only been two months? Standing outside my garage with Mason felt like a lifetime ago. My eyes had seen too much to ever go back to the girl I’d been at the beginning of the summer. The girl on Mason’s arm. The girl too naive to see Robyn and the parade of men around her for what they were. The girl too dumb to realize that she had something Robyn needed. A family who put her first and friends that didn't betray you the second your back was turned. At least the first one was true.
“Can you believe it’s almost time for school to start back?” he asked casually laid back comfortably on my bed as if it were any other Saturday.
“Mason?” I asked, confused at his change of tone. Was he really going to let this go?
He propped on his hand and sighed, sounding exasperated. “Look, I was really mad, Justice. After three years, I see you on the back of some dude’s bike on Main Street,” he paused, his eyes clinching shut at the memory. “I was with my parents. Do you know how embarrassing that was?”
“I’m sorry, Mason." It was all I could do to look him in the eyes. I'd hurt him so much. "That must’ve been awful.”
“Let’s chalk it up to a lost summer for both of us,” he said. “Leave it at that.”
Hope swelled in my chest. I’d lost my job, my best friend, and the first person who’d ever really made me feel alive. Liam. “You would forgive me? Just like that?”
“I miss you Justice. I’d rather be friends than nothing at all.”
Mason wasn't a bad guy. He'd loved me for years after I'd realized that I didn't love him anymore. At least not in the way he loved me. In many ways we'd grown up together. Tackled high school together. Been through acne and braces together. I was there right after his mom came back and through the awkward months that followed. Helping him to readjust and trust his family again. We were so close. But I didn't need Mason to help me fit in high school any longer, and though he would argue, he didn't need me anymore either. He'd see that one day, probably one day soon, but I wasn't a
bout to tell him tonight. No, tonight as selfish as it was, I needed my best friend one more time.
Doing the last thing I'd wanted to do this summer, I snuggled into the familiar crook of Mason's arm and closed my eyes.
***
I adjusted the strap on my backpack and climbed out of Mason’s truck. He took my hand as we made our way to the taco truck. The yellow police tape was gone from the store, but it was still weird to see it dark and empty in the middle of the day. There was a new Help Wanted sign in the window and another, announcing a change in ownership. I peered through the door to see everything just as I’d left it. My white apron still hung inside like it waited for me to put it back on. I shuddered at the thought. New owner or not, there was no way I’d ever go in there again. My parents had barred jobs until I graduated anyway. I was only allowed out of the house now because they were working late, and they trusted Mason more than leaving me alone in the house, especially now that we weren't dating.
Mason and I had finally discussed our relationship, and he'd reluctantly agreed that it was time to move on. We'd started our senior year single.
I sat down at the table while Mason ordered. The wind was beginning to take on the chill of fall, and leaves scurried around my feet. With the start of school last month, and Robyn’s family driving away in a U-Haul, it was easy to pretend the summer never happened. The nightmares had eased off, in large part to Mason who stayed with me until I couldn’t hold my eyes open most nights. I still looked expectantly out my bedroom window at the sound of a loud engine, but I’d grown accustomed to the disappointment I felt afterwards. Even now, my ears instinctively perked up as a motorcycle engine neared the stop light. I shielded my eyes from the setting sun as the bike roared closer. The glare kept me from seeing his face, but there was no need. The familiar sound of the engine resonated through me like a bolt of lightning. I looked quickly to find Mason still three people back in line. He didn’t see the bike pass or notice when the engine stopped abruptly around the corner, but my heart was racing. Despite the urge to run, I managed a normal pace down the crowded sidewalk. When I reached the corner of The General Store, my breath caught in my throat.
