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“What?”
“Regular people say things like it’s nice to meet you,” Utah said.
“It’s alright,” I interrupted. “I don’t think there’s any room left in this house for regular now.”
“Hey, team of misfits, can we assemble?” Memphis asked.
Utah held his index finger up to wave a circle in the air between the three of us to tell us to get moving. Indy sat on one side of Memphis, and I sat on the other while Utah hovered around behind all three of us. Memphis made a point to make eye contact with me for several seconds before she looked back to the computer to play the next video. We all watched in silence that time while they set Jersey up at that table again, while Bryce asked about the tattoos, and picked up a potato peeler. Jersey looked worse than I ever could’ve imagined a man like him looking, but something about him shifted after the first couple swipes from Bryce’s potato peeler down his arm. He wasn’t reacting to the pain anymore. He wasn’t reacting to anything. He was awake, but he wasn’t there. We watched until there was blood everywhere, until Jersey’s body gave in and slumped forward.
“They cut the sound out here,” Memphis said. “I’m going to go back in a couple minutes to try to recover it, because Jersey takes part in the conversation actively once he’s awake again. And he’s super pissed about something that’s said.”
They brought in someone else who started to treat the wounds covering Jersey’s body while he laid against the table without moving. I dropped my face down into my hands and forced myself to breathe, until I felt a hand squeeze my shoulder. I don’t know why I expected it to be Memphis. She acted like physical contact actually burned her pasty white ghost skin, but I was surprised to find the hand on my shoulder attached to Utah.
“You don’t have to watch,” he said quietly. “We can do this part.”
I only shook my head. His hand never moved. I went back to watching the screen. We watched through the part Memphis described, where Jersey burst to his feet suddenly and whipped around to look at Bryson with pure rage on his face again. The way Bryson continued to smile through their conversation made me feel sick. I’d seen that smile on more than one occasion. It was the same way that he looked at me years and years ago, when I first tried to tell the family what Dalton had been doing to me. Nate insisted that we make it a giant family discussion. A fucking spectacle for everyone to take part in, where they could take turns calling me a liar, calling me a whore, calling me anything they pleased because I dared to accuse one of his sons of such actions.
I hadn’t even realized I was sobbing again until I watched Jersey lunge at Bryce. I couldn’t imagine where the power or the strength came from. He was able to get Bryce to the floor underneath him before two other people rushed in to drag him off. The camera shifted suddenly when someone bumped into it as Bryce got back to his feet and went right back to mercilessly attacking Jersey. The brief look at a small blonde woman who was looking right at us with eyes just like mine before the camera was readjusted again sent me straight to my own feet, in a desperate attempt to escape the video, the laptop, this place. The stool toppled while I tried to get away and the sound echoed through the house like an explosion before I crashed right into Utah’s open arms. They locked around the upper half of my body and squeezed until he was holding me so tight that my body was physically unable to shake because of it.
“Oh okay, but when I say she’s hot, I’m being inappropriate. You just look for any chance to Indy me, but you get to do this,” Indy said.
“Indy,” Utah hissed.
“I think maybe it’s your timing, my man,” Memphis whispered to Indy.
“You don’t have to take his side just because he’s got arms like that, you know? He wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing on his own. Absolutely useless if he isn’t told exactly what to do.”
Memphis chuckled a little. “Yeah, I’ve got one of those too.”
“Can you two maybe shut up?” Utah asked. Snapped, really. “He’s still alive, Trista.” I felt his chin directly on the top of my head. I knew he was alive. I just watched him get pummeled and still manage to look back at the camera another time, but seeing my mother’s face wasn’t something I was prepared to deal with in addition to everything else today. I tried to push away from Utah and his arms tightened once more.
“You still don’t have to stay in here,” he whispered before he let go. I tried desperately to wipe the tears from my face before I turned back toward the others, and Utah just stood there and waited, like he was entirely prepared to go right back to squeezing me to death if I were to need it.
“I need to figure out where they’re keeping him,” Memphis spoke up first. “That’s the holdup. Once we know, we can just take our chances on using runner up Jersey here and go for it,” she said and waved her hand toward Utah.
“Ouch,” he mumbled. “Right in the pride. Y’all can see him too, right? He’s got to be a good fifteen years older than me. I can do whatever he can.”
“Easy there, cowboy,” Indy chuckled. “You can tone down the y’alls. We’ll wait to measure dicks until he’s at least back here where we can all watch, okay?”
“Jersey took the tracking device from you when we found you at that creepy house in the woods?” I suggested.
“It’s not transmitting,” Memphis said. “I look for it every day.”
“Well,” Indy interjected. “Let’s see if we can make it transmit.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
trista
I couldn’t understand a fucking word of the conversation that was taking place between Indy and Memphis while they were trying to figure out how to recover the deleted audio from that clip, or how they might trace any of it back to an original location. I stuck around long enough to listen to them discuss how Utah and I would make the trip to Philly to break into some place that Nate owned but rarely used, setup some kind of webcam to record a ton of footage of me just hanging out in this place, Memphis would put it out into the world of the internet to make it look like a live feed and send it off to Nate’s people. Then Utah and I would use some form of black magic to break Jersey out of wherever they were keeping him.
I slipped out of the kitchen and out of the house while they continued talking though. I stood just outside the door and watched Kyle’s fire burn for a minute, but I really wasn’t sure that I wanted his company tonight either. Instead, I ended up lying on a lounge chair next to the pool just staring at the stars.
Kyle hadn’t been wrong. There was no noise out here, no light, nothing at all to interrupt the quiet or the dark. It was probably amazing if you didn’t have a lifetime of shitty memories behind you and nothing but anxiety about the future to plague every second of your time. I told myself earlier that I was done crying about this. It never solved anything. It just made everyone stare at you that much harder, until they noticed that you saw them and then they went out of their way to avoid looking at you. I didn’t want to be that person in this weird collaboration. But I had to admit that it was painfully difficult to see my mother’s face when I wasn’t ready for it.
It still hurt. She’d done so little mothering in our short time together, and I really did let go of most of the anger over that years ago. The hurt over it still resurfaced every so often though. She was all I had left in the world when my dad passed away, and I would’ve thought she felt the same way about me. We should’ve been the thing the other counted on to get through it, but I was only six and I couldn’t be the help that she needed.
She tried for a while, until one day I noticed that I had to start getting food out for myself when I was hungry. Hard bread and a single jar of peanut butter didn’t last all that long though. I realized quickly after that that I was able to just stay awake all night in front of the TV in the living room if I wanted, but that left me wanting to sleep during the day and very much awake again the next night. I reversed that routine quickly when the TV stopped turning on and I had nothing to keep me company through the nights. The dirty clothes in the hamper in my closet flowed out into my room and eventually I had to start wearing some of those again because I didn’t know how to do laundry. I remembered very clearly staring at the washer and dryer, but I wasn’t even tall enough to reach the buttons to figure out which ones did what.
