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Chapter Twenty-One – Tank
Needing to get away from everyone, I head to Carys’s room. I see her diary lying on the floor. Picking it up, I open it, knowing what I read is going to send me to purgatory.
But I do it anyway.
Dear Dandy.
It’s ridiculous that I’m naming a notebook. One I got from one of my captors, no less.
It’s day four.
Weird how in four days, your entire life can change. This time last week, I was studying for finals and looking forward to spring break. Now I’m on a ship heading to God knows where.
Garrett brought me this book this morning. I guess my random scribblings on the toilet paper were getting to him. But I had to do something. I had to get everything out before I lost myself and had nothing left. At least this way, I get to record who I am before everything changes. Because I know it’s going to change. I know what they are going to do to me is bound to chip away at who I am. It can’t not. And I know no matter how hard I try, I’m going to crumble, and I might break. This way, I get to see who I was before I did.
So, I’m going to start at day one. And then I’m going to write a good memory down. And when the chips get too big, I’ll be a dandelion. I’ll fly away to the memories.
Day One
I’ve been taken.
God, writing it down makes me want to vomit, but I refuse to give these assholes the pleasure of seeing me lose my stomach contents again. They took me from the parking lot in front of my school. I lied to my security detail and told them I needed to go to my car to get some tampons. When they hesitated, I told them I was about to leak blood all over my white jeans, and they quickly acquiesced. It’s both amusing and pathetic how squeamish some guys get over natural bodily functions.
When I got to the parking lot, a woman with hair the color of the brown dust on Grandpa Jackson’s ranch was screaming about her child choking. I’m pre-med, which means nothing since I think I’d have helped anyway, but I followed her to the SUV while she cried hysterically for her child. When she opened the door to the van, it took me a while to realize the car seat was empty. The few seconds’ hesitation was long enough for her to shove me inside the van and slam the door. I swear it couldn’t have been more than five seconds. Five seconds to change my life.
I tried everything I could to get out, but she pulled a gun and told me to sit still. She also showed me a photo of Emerly at hockey practice. I know it was taken that day because they got new uniforms. A bright cerise pink that Emerly was so excited about even though the color was terrible against her skin tone and clashed with her red hair.
Everything seized up in me in that moment. Emerly was my everything. She was my younger sister. My better half. My life. Even when I wanted to kill her myself. If anything happened to her because of me, I would never forgive myself.
I vomited then. In the backseat of the SUV while some bald guy with a long blond beard drove off the campus and into rush hour traffic. With the empty baby seat and the woman in need of a dye job staring at me like she was watching a documentary on a black hole instead of a human being puking from fear. She handed me a plastic bag and told me to clean up my mess.
I had to scoop up my vomit with my hands while two complete strangers drove me to some unknown place. There are no amount of words in the English dictionary to explain the emotions that run through you during that time. No way to adequately describe what goes on in your body or mind, so I’m not even going to try. All I know is every time I thought of Emerly running on the hockey field in her kit she was so damn proud of while she was unknowingly being photographed by someone who, at the right signal, would do terrible things to her, I shook even harder from fear.
It took us an hour to get to the airfield. In that hour, I went through a gamut of emotions. Different degrees of hot and cold that ranged from hopeful to terrified to numb. Every time we stopped at a light, I had to fight my instincts not to bang on the window or scream. Whenever the urge became too hard to contain, I’d think about what would happen to her. If they were going to do to her what they were doing to me, I couldn’t have that.
God, how I wanted to be doing what I’d planned for this afternoon. More than anything, I wanted to be picking up Emerly from her game. I wanted to tease her about her kit, and I wanted to watch the determination in her eyes when she told me she didn’t care that it clashed, that she did it just to get to me. Emerly was always that way. She never let anyone else’s opinion sway her. I love that about her.
Tears stung my eyes, but I refused to cry. I’d never give my kidnappers the satisfaction. I lifted my chin and stared out the window. I wasn’t going to get away. I knew that without a shadow of a doubt. I needed to figure out how to survive.
The hand tapping me on my arm gives me a jolt, and I drop the diary.
“Shit, sorry. You okay?” Harry shoots me a concerned look, but I don’t answer. “We’ve gotta go.”
I realize the helicopter is back. I don’t know how I didn’t hear it land. I don’t know how I didn’t hear Harry enter the room. I pick up the diary, my hands shaking as I reach for the mint green book. I see then that there’s a smudge of blood on the cover from my thumb. I rub at the stain with the sleeve of my shirt, trying in vain to remove the blood. I needed to preserve the one thing that held Carys’s last memories, no matter how tragic.
I’m the last one to climb into the chopper. I take my seat next to the door and slam it shut. Everyone is silent, trying to process what the hell went down. With nothing else to do but get lost in my own thoughts, I open the diary and sink deeper into the hole.
Day One and a Half
They took me to an airfield on someone’s farm. A crop duster stood abandoned next to a gray hangar, and besides everyone with me now, there was no one else. The people from the SUV pushed me toward a huge guy with muscles the size of the giant oak tree our swing is attached to at home. He took my arm roughly in his basketball-sized hands, and we boarded a small aircraft. One that had nineteen seats in it. I counted the people on board to keep my mind from imagining all the horrors that I’m sure were awaiting me. Two pilots and three guys. Plus meathead and me. Meathead led me to a seat in the back of the plane and sat me down. When he tried to strap me in, I swatted his hand away. I don’t know what possessed me to do that. Why I’d be defiant with a man that looked like he could give Mark Wahlberg a run for his money, but I did. You know Dandy, I totally expected him to hit me, but he didn’t. He just smirked at me and watched me secure my seatbelt, then he sat opposite me.
The aircraft inside was super snazzy. Everything was white. White carpet, white leather seats, white paneling. The cup holders were rimmed in rose gold, and everything shone. Whoever was in charge of this operation was loaded. As in had a shit-ton of money. I wonder what they’d do if I vomited on their stark white carpet. That thought made me smile.
The goon sitting in front of me smiled and leaned forward. He told me then that I should smile while I could. That it won’t be long and I’d forget how to. That’s when I started to really tremble.
We waited a while, and I wondered what was going on when a guy stepped on board. He looked like a young Gerard Butler. He never so much as glanced my way. The goon guy got up, and the new guy took his place while texting on his phone. His fingers were flying over the keys. His shiny light brown shoe bounced on his knee.
I asked him what they were going to do with me. His answer, Dandy… his answer was that I don’t want to know what they were going to do to me. He wasn’t wrong.
