CURLED on my side in his bed, with my knees up to my chest and my cheeks tight with tracks of tears, my body trembles like a pebble.
Clay’s arms are banding my legs, pinning the little ball of my body to his. His fists are clenched, working, the sound of his knuckles cracking under the pressure, not unlike a direct promise of carnage.
Clay…
The most powerful man in the city is holding his pretty little burden. It’s pathetic. The feel of him, though, dowses the painful prickling of my skin. The skin that seems to have evoked the feelings from that night—the incident. It seems to have remembered, showing me, now that my mind has caught up, just what it feels like to be in that room with those boys. To have been alone. To have a dissonance with my own flesh. It has manifested to life in my reality.
My.
Reality.
I whimper. My entire body is shuddering and sore, emotionally burnt out and confused.
So confused.
Debating with my mind, which wants to cower, to hide in a dark place inside me, and with my body which wants to drown or… Fuck. To feel something intense that doesn’t burn. To remember, it’s mine.
Because right now, my body only feels the incident. Like it has only just been dragged along the cushions, has only just been punctured so brutally I’ve bled all over my thighs.
It is clinging to all the gruesome details that my mind forgot, or maybe it’s filling in the blank spaces that were lost forever. Either way, I’m experiencing the aftermath. Right. Now.
The pain.
The ache.
The recall.
“That’s enough. Her virginity is mine. You promised.”
You promised. You promised.
As those two words poke at me, I bunch in further. Clay’s fist tightens harder. I am here for Benji. This is all for him. In Clay Butcher’s house, having been on a mission to bring him justice and all the while, he… he—
The deceit expands in my throat. The naivety stabs my empty womb. The agony fists my heart. Did they bet on my virginity? Spoke about it. Discussed it. He promised Jake my virginity as though it was his to offer up with the chips and beer and marijuana they used to trade amongst themselves. Was I worth a car? A bike? What was my virginity worth to Benji? If I had loved him for his smile, for his charm, and for the moments he handed me the popcorn, that ‘love’ has collapsed into piles of debris in my heart. I could draw the lines of his smile, but now I want more than anything to take an eraser to his entire memory.
I hate him.
Bad things come in three:
Her suicide: number one.
His murder. The incident: number two.
My miscarriage: number three.
And those things shine a blinding fiery light on everything about my existence. No matter how hard I try, no one wants to choose me. My mum chose death over being my parent. Benji chose whatever item was worth more than my virginity, and my body… it doesn’t even want to grow, to create, to offer the world something special for all my suffering.
Nothing in my life… works for me.
Nothing chooses me.
Lastly, of fucking course, my dad. The man who doesn’t know me. The man who I came here to see, to seek shelter from. The one who ‘is not worth my considerations.’ The one who sent a boy to give me a recording of my trauma detailed in visual nightmarish horror with the knowledge I would watch it. He didn’t choose me either.
He chose himself.
He chose to hurt me—us. Chose to leave me a grass flower instead of being my thorns.
My eyes widen on that harrowing truth, staring broken, swollen, sore, at the leather sofa against the far wall. All the fairy-tales I have told myself, the moments where I twisted the crumbs of affection into mountains, where I accepted handing over the popcorn as a sign of love, where I saw a dreamcatcher as a visual representation that my mum cared…
It.
All.
Fractures.
