AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘The sun shines bright, but the wind blows cold,’ he says, his hand finding its way back onto my knee and creeping further up. It’s like his fingers are electric and they send tingles upwards towards the part of me that only wants him to keep going.
But I don’t want that. Not now.
‘You really like me?’ I say, trying to figure out how I can get myself to let this happen, so I can have what I’ve always wanted – not miss this opportunity.
He presses closer and his hand slides higher to the inside of my thigh, fingers drawing circles. ‘I like you,’ he says.
‘I-I’m not saying I don’t like you. I just – you have all been really, really…’ Evil. You have made my life pure fucking misery. You put pictures of lesbian sheep orgies up on the walls, pretending they were me.
But maybe it could be like it was, and then, and then…
‘Just not now.’ I start to cry as his fingers reach the elastic edge of my underwear and I push his hand again, harder this time, but he doesn’t move it.
‘You aren’t saying you don’t like me,’ he says, smiling, sliding one finger under the band and a cold thrill of want and fear and lust and hate and shame slices through me.
‘Please, I can’t.’ I push again, and as I do I realise he’s not going to stop. He’s not listening. Panic rises into my chest. I kick so I fall backwards off the stump and it tumbles over and I try to scrabble up from the ground but he climbs on top of me and clamps his hands on my arms.
‘If we both like each other…’ He’s smiling like we’re both enjoying this. He hauls me up and I try to twist away but he puts me back down on his stump and kneels between my legs and reaches for his flies and then I’m being knocked over.
Princess is here, and Spanish and Whip are right behind her, and someone tugs at my hair, someone kicks my ribs, and then I’m up in the air, being carried, my shoe has fallen off, I reach for the grass as it flies beneath me, and then I’m falling, face-first, into the stream and my face explodes with pain as it hits the rocks.
46
NOW
I feel weightless. As I run upstairs it’s like I’m a balloon floating quietly away from the crack in the door, down through the laundry, up, up, up, my hair bouncing on my shoulders.
I notice things I didn’t when showing Bevan and Croft around earlier. A thread has snagged loose from the green stair carpet, leaving a line of bare beige. The scuff mark from carrying up a suitcase is still on the wall right before the top landing.
How is it possible to both know and not know something? It doesn’t seem plausible but I do it all the time. There must be a point at which I make a conscious decision not to see, not to understand: to forget.
I do it to make my life easier, don’t I? To avoid confrontation. But in the long run, what is the cost? And who will have to pay?
Our attic ladder is still down and I pause, my hand on a worn rung.
This is the moment of choice. If I go up, my life will go one way. If I don’t, it will go another. But this time what’s at stake might be my daughter’s life.
Maybe it always has been.
I step up and up, the ladder bowing slightly with each step.
I know what I’m looking for, what Jenna might have had and Rose took from her. And if I can’t find it – what will that mean?
I pull the ladder up after me then knock over the cut-out of Shorthorn Lodge. It wafts down without a sound. I see immediately that the blanket on top of my old Disney TV isn’t the green blanket I put over it when I last sorted things out up here. In its place is an old woollen rug – red and brown.
Why hadn’t I noticed this earlier?
I run over, kneel before the shelves and search the spines of the VHS tapes: Cinderella, Aladdin, Winnie the Pooh, Matilda, then Edward Scissorhands, Sister Act, Clueless.
I’ve been holding my breath. I force myself to breathe.
But then here it is: Pocahontas.
The top of my head seems to fizz. Thank God – oh, thank God! I grab the case.
But it’s too light to have anything in it.
I feel the contents of my stomach rising.
