AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Everything will be—”
Machines are beeping like it’s the end of the goddamn world, but it’s getting harder to hear them above the pleasant buzz in my brain. I can see the panic in Will’s chameleon eyes as he runs out into the hallway, shouting for help, but he doesn’t need to worry. I feel — fine. That’s the word.Fine.Better than I have in a while, actually.Everything will be fine. The sharp edge of reality has faded again, and a far away thought comes to me. In the edges of my consciousness, I’m vaguely aware of machines beeping frantically, and this is what the nurse warned me about: Narcan, the drug that reverses the opiate overdose, sometimes wears off faster than the opiates themselves.I’m going to be fine.I’m in a hospital. They’ll pump me full of a fresh dose, and I’ll be fine, but Rome? The cop told me he’s in prison. Is anybody taking care of him? Does anybody care that this exact thing could be happening to him right now? That’s the only thing that keeps me hanging on to the tiny shred of consciousness the drugs afford me, as I feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into an endless fucking abyss. I can’t breathe. Can’t form words. I focus on Will’s eyes as a nurse pulls him away. A doctor stabs a fuck-you sized needle deep into my forearm, and I know that’s going to hurt later on. I’ll just add it to the list of my war wounds.
I feel the cold sting spread through my muscle, seeping into my body like ice-cold lava that burns and freezes all at once.
Narcan. It’s a fucking miracle drug. I’ve watched paramedics use it on Nathan twice over the years, back when he was putting every cent of his generous Capulet allowance straight into his veins, and it really does justripyou right out of that marshmallow cloud of drugged inertia and deposit you back into reality with a sharpness I can’t accurately describe. I bolt upright in bed, take a giant breath of air, and puke down the front of myself.Lovely.
“Sorry,” I mumble, wiping my mouth with my arm, the one that isn’t fucked up, bleeding and in need of fresh stitches.
Will shakes his head, a relieved expression spreading across his face. The nurse beside me tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and pats my shoulder.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a live one.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AVERY
“Feet up in the stirrups,” the female doctor says. She is gentle, her voice warm and comforting like maple syrup and warm pancakes. I don’t know why I’m thinking of food when I look at her — maybe because the adrenalin is starting to wear off, and thealmost dyingshock waves that have been buzzing inside my stomach have morphed into rabid hunger. I feel like if I don’t get some food soon, I might rip somebody’s shirt off and start eating it to appease my growling stomach.
The detective from earlier shifts slightly in the seat beside my bed. I don’t know why he has to be here while this is being done, but I sure am happy he’s next to my head and not down where things are happening.
When I don’t move my feet, the doctor does it for me. She’s wearing plastic gloves, and when she touches my ankle and lifts it to place in a stirrup, those first moments waking up in that hellhole come rushing back. The guy’s hands on me, the way he made a big deal out of taking the gloves off before he cut me and made me bleed.
I gasp, my entire body starting to shake.Hello darkness, my old friend. I wondered where you’d gone.
And that’s it. The numb shock I’ve been safely enveloped in whooshes away, replaced by an insidious shivering that overtakes me. One strangled sob escapes my mouth, then two, until I’m sobbing, my hands over my face.
The doctor takes my foot back out of the stirrup and covers me with a heavy blanket. I don’t know how she knows to do this, but it works. It soothes me. I am a small girl hiding from the world, needing that heaviness to cover me, to help me feel safe. I am like one of those dogs that needs a weighted vest in a thunderstorm. Right now, I feel like I might drift away, become a ghost, leave my body and this place. Suddenly, I can’t bear that I have survived, that I was rescued from that place before I could take my last breath in this world, that I have to now suffer the horror of after. I am unspooling from myself, my soul trying to press the eject button and exit my body, and I don’t know what to do to help me stay tethered to this earth. Because as much as I do want to leave - this building, this bed, this body - I can’t. Rome needs me. I need him.
“I feel like I’m losing my damn mind,” I say to the room. There are just three of us - one cop, one doctor, and one almost dead girl - and I can’t stop this horrible feeling inside me. “I feel like I’m falling and falling and nothing ever stops me. Am I going to feel like this forever?”
The doctor swallows with difficulty. I can tell I’ve struck a nerve with her. I wonder how many raped and beaten girls she’s had pass through these halls. I wonder how many of them felt like this.
“You won’t feel like this forever,” she says haltingly.
I clutch my stomach, dizzy and cold. “I can’t stopfalling.”
The cop beside me - Elliot, that’s his name - places a hand on the bed beside me, palm up. “Here,” he says, “if you need something to grab onto. I won’t let you fall.”
I seize his hand immediately, turning to look at him. “Thank you,” I whisper. He nods, his kind smile at odds with the concerned frown furrowing his brow.
“One day you’ll find a way to compartmentalize what you’ve been through,” he says. “You’ll come to a day when you can take all of this, put it in a box, and put it up on a shelf. Sometimes there might be an earthquake, and the box will fall and hit you out of nowhere. Sometimes you’ll choose to get the box down and open it and look through every piece of pain, every drop of blood, every waking nightmare that you’ve stored inside the box. But one day, you’ll get to the evening and realize that you’ve gone a whole day without thinking about it. And you’ll feel bad at first. You’ll feel so terribly guilty. You’ll feel like by letting it stay up on the shelf, you’re betraying yourself. Eventually, though, it will get easier to keep on the shelf.” He puts his other hand on top of mine, so both of his hands are warming my skin. It really does feel like he’s tethering me to the earth, making sure I don’t drift away into oblivion. I want to believe him. I do.
“How do you know that?” I ask through my tears.
Something dark passes over his eyes before he blinks it away. He smiles encouragingly at me, a smile marked by sadness and knowingness. “I knew a girl once,” he says. “She was a beautiful girl. Fifteen years old. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and something terrible happened to her. A man - a horrible, evil, despicable man - punished her to get back at her father. He raped her. Six other men raped her. They beat her so badly, she couldn’t be identified at the hospital. She died in the emergency room as they were trying to stabilize her.”
I blink. “That doesn’t sound like a story with a happy ending.”
“Ah, but that’s not the ending. See, the doctors did manage to bring her back. Some young cop broke the rules and smuggled her out of the hospital before the men who almost killed her returned to finish the job. The cop got her out of town, out of the state, far away.”
“Did the police ever catch the men?” I ask.Say yes, I plead. Fucking lie to me if you have to. It’s the only way I’ll ever be able to sleep again.
“No,” Elliot says. “She came back, six years later. New name. New identity. She killed all seven of those men. All by herself. But first, she made sure they suffered.”
The doctor stiffens as he delivers that last line, but Elliot doesn’t pay her any attention. Right now, his entire attention is on me. He acts as if I am the only person in the universe, and somehow, his magical story works on me. Perhaps he can tell I’m the kind of person who would value retribution over forgiveness.An eye for an eyesounds much more appealing to me thanforgive those who trespass against us.
“Sounds like a bad daytime movie,” I say, but my small smile betrays how impressed I am.
