Chapter Three

Diana

I WASN'T RIGHT .

I couldn't have been more wrong if I asked a Magic 8 Ball to predict the future.

Something is WRONG with my mother ever since Mike moved in. She's spacing out, eyes dull, even her voice is listless.

In fact, the only time she has looked and sounded alert was one day when Mike was out at work and she was at home. She took me aside and said in the patented Mom Voice (you know the one), "When you hear Mike's friends come by, I need you to lock your bedroom door and go to sleep with your headphones on, okay? Do you hear me?"

I nodded then, scared at the nearly frantic look in her eyes.

What is wrong with his friends?

The feeling of wrongness, of something horrible waiting to happen, follows me every day.

A few months later, I stop putting my headphones on, curiosity getting the better of me. I hear them laughing, sometimes cursing, and moaning. I hear Mom cry. I hear Mike saying, "Told you even her sloppy cunt was a perfect fuck. Nothing better than a live-in whore."

And I don't know what to say or do. Is … is this what he has had Mom doing? Why she's looked like shit for all this time? It's not office work, he's turned my mom into a prostitute.

That night, and every night after, I cry myself to sleep, but sometimes sleep doesn't come and give me a blissful respite.

Like tonight.

There are no men over, but I can hear Mike and Mom arguing. Rather, he's yelling. She's crying and saying unintelligible things.

The slap is so loud it echoes in the night and I cringe.

"I fuckin' told you what the consequences would be if you got too fucked up for me to use you or sell you at night, didn't I?" Mike shouts.

Fucked up?

That explains the rest of what my immature mind wouldn't grasp. He got her hooked on something illegal.

Bastard. I can't do anything now, but when I grow up, even a little, I vow to make him pay.

I close my eyes and stop myself from crying now; it won't help anyone, but then my bedroom door opens.

"Mom?"

"No," Mike says, his voice low.

His friends weren't over. I didn't lock my door. I thought it was safe.

"Is she okay?" I ask.

He shuts the door behind him and locks it from the inside. "She just has to sleep it off. But, you see, there were set rules I made when I took her on. One rule being, she has to be able to service me and my clients whenever we ask. No exceptions. She knew what would happen if she broke that rule.

"Looks like drugs are now more important than her precious little girl."

He gets on the bed and I try to leap out and run, but he's fast for a fat man and I'm trapped, pinned.

My nightgown tears and I scream.

"No one is going to come help you," he says conversationally as his big, gross hands part my legs.

"Please! Don't do this to me, please!" I'm just a kid, dammit.

"Now now. If you are good and be quiet, it will all be over soon," he says. "Begging won't do you any good. No one hears. No one cares."

Still I scream as the pain is unbearable, but he's right.

No one comes to help me.

And no one ever will.

The worst part about being a loner is having no close friends. And the worst part about not trusting your teachers is being unable to confide in counselors.

I'm trapped in Hell, my mom is trapped in Hell, and I don't know what to do. If I go to the cops now, they will arrest my mom for drug use and prostitution too, not caring she was forced to do both.

Mike comes to me whenever he feels like it. Once he made Mom watch, as listless and strung out as she was, as he raped my throat for nearly an hour.

"This is your fault," he told her as I cried and gagged. "Remember that."

I want him dead. I need him dead. But I'm too small, too weak, too pathetic. All I can do is pray and suffer as time passes by as if someone slowed it down like a YouTube video.

A few days after my fifteenth birthday, that's when everything comes crashing down around me like a house of cards.

"Miss Diana Hill, please report to the principal's office," comes over the loudspeakers, earning me the required jeers from the others, as if I did something wrong.

I didn't, not that I know of anyway.

When I get there, the principal, vice principal, school counselor, and a police officer stand there, all of them somber.

"What happened?"

"Diana, you might want to sit—"

"I said what happened?" I interrupt the principal, looking at the officer instead.

He sighs, mustache jiggling in the breeze.

"Miss Hill, I am very sorry to tell you this, but your mother passed away this morning due to heart failure from the usage of illegal substances."