14. Phantom Menace

FOURTEEN

Phantom Menace

I had assumed that Marcus didn't actually want to watch Star Wars—since he had used it as a blackmailing technique—but most of Saturday night and all of Sunday was spent in their den, crawling our way through the movies while Alicia tried to keep Satan away from the curtains he kept trying to climb.

I wasn't really paying attention to the movies, but at the end of each instalment, Marcus and Smith launched into a new debate about which was the best Star Wars film, so I didn't want to risk being thrown out by asking if I was allowed to leave the den.

Not that I had anything better to do.

Alicia was giving me space and Jean had retreated back into herself. It wasn't an uncomfortable environment—Smith asked too many intrusive questions for me to feel unwelcome at any point, and I was beginning to realise that Marcus' forced joviality wasn't really forced at all. He was genuinely happy all the time.

I slept on the floor of Jean's room, where Alicia had set out a mattress. Satan stole my pillow every night, pretending to stretch out his half-clean body while simultaneously kicking my head until he had the pillow all to himself.

Marcus had the room next door, and Smith had the smallest room, which was beside the main bedroom. He told me that it was originally a walk-in closet, but they had put a door on it so that he could share Alicia's bathroom, while Marcus and Jean shared the other bathroom. He said he didn't mind the lack of space, because he was going to take over Marcus' bedroom when Marcus moved in with his dad.

It went quiet after that, and I wasn't brave enough to bring it up to Jean at night. I could have brought it up the next day, on the way to school, but there was a sick feeling low in my stomach, distracting me.

I was nervous.

The feeling plagued me all through first period and into the second. It grew worse until lunch, when I walked on autopilot to Nicholai's office. It was locked, and the lights turned off. I backtracked down the hall, stopping beside the receptionist's desk.

"Where's Mr. Fell?" I asked .

She was on the phone—I hadn't noticed. She held up a finger and continued speaking quietly as I shifted from foot to foot. The nervous feeling was descending into panic. I could feel it digging into me, climbing and clawing its way up my body.

"Miss Grey." The receptionist drew my attention back to her face. She had returned the phone to its cradle. "You weren't notified about Mr Fell?"

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I shook my head to indicate as much.

She frowned and clicked at a few things on her computer. "Oh—you weren't scheduled in. I suppose he stopped scheduling your appointments once you started to come in regularl—" She cut herself off, pulling back from the screen.

I could see her shutting down, could read past the pursing of her lips. She was embarrassed, or she was afraid she was embarrassing me.

"He's not coming in today?" I prompted her. My voice was a croak.

She smiled, her transformation into a cool-faced professional complete. I glanced at her name badge. Helen . She had her hair up in a bun, and she was wearing pumpkin-stud earrings. The other receptionist glanced over noisily, shattering the fa?ade of careful privacy that Helen had momentarily laboured over .

"Mr. Fell no longer works at the school," Helen told me calmly. "We will have a substitute counsellor coming in tomorrow, to cover any emergencies before the holiday. Would you like me to schedule an appointment?"

I stared at her. The panic grew hot, boiling up and applying heat to every solid thing that I had believed in. All the steel beams I had built up around me—an infrastructure I hadn't even noticed until now—were beginning to fail. The molten metal dribbled, and my safe house collapsed.

"He quit?" My voice sounded so far away, almost completely drowned out by the pounding of blood in my ears.

Helen cut me a sharp look. "I said that he no longer works at the school. I'm sorry, Miss Grey, but I'm not permitted to discuss the affairs of the other faculty members with the students of the school."

The affairs . It was almost funny, the wording that she had chosen. Or it would have been funny, if I wasn't sure that liquid steel was now running into my bloodstream, poisoning me with hysteria as I stood there quietly, staring at the receptionist. I suddenly felt so alone, but it was a strange kind of ‘alone'. The kind that puts you in a box with thin glass walls all around you. You can still see everyone, you can hear their muffled voices, but you will be stopped if you try to reach out to them. It was a fragile, transparent kind of loneliness.

I backed away from the desk and quickly turned for the door, pushing my way outside. I was surrounded by glass, but I was a ticking explosive, and no amount of glass would contain what threatened to spill out of me. I walked out to the parking lot and started toward the train tracks before pulling up short. I couldn't run away. I couldn't disappear. There were people who would worry if I did. That was a strange realisation. I wasn't sure what to do with it, or how I felt about it.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket, searching for Jean's contact. She had programmed in hers, Marcus', and Alicia's numbers, texting each of them from my phone so that they would be able to contact me. It felt so accountable . I quickly wrote her a text, letting her know I was going to hang out with Duke, and then I started walking again.

She wouldn't be happy, but at least I wasn't disappearing. Give and take. Accountability . Sort of.

I started running as soon as I hit the tracks, and I didn't slow down until I was standing in front of Duke's trailer. I was doubled over, my hands on my knees, gasping in air. I had outrun the notion of accountability with every ounce of ability I possessed. The door popped open after a few minutes and Duke appeared, his arms crossed over a black tank. He watched me, his dark eyes blank.

"Grey-girl," he eventually greeted. "You run all the way from school?"

I straightened, tugging the band out of my hair and re-gathering it, since sweat was beading across the back of my neck and shoulders, and the strands were sticking to my skin. I tied off a messy bun, ignoring his question.

"Trip threatened to burn down your trailer," I told him. I wasn't sure why. It was simply the first thing that came to mind.

He arched a brow. "I know. He spilled gasoline everywhere and left me a note beside a lighter. He's lame like that."

"Actually, the gasoline was me."

He pushed himself from the doorframe, where he had been leaning, and stepped down to the landing. His expression had the same glimmering effect that heatwaves made on the horizon. I could see the flickering of emotion there—amusement, annoyance, confusion—but they were buried so deep that I wasn't sure if I was imagining all the tells. He stepped over to me, stopping when our shoes were only a few inches apart.

"Might want to explain yourself a little better," he cautioned. "I could start making assumptions. "

The calmness emanating from him was starting to annoy me. "You can make assumptions."

"I can do anything," he clarified, one of his hands moving quickly to cup the side of my face. The motion was too erratic, and the spark of satisfaction in his eye too obvious. He had intended to frighten me—to make me flinch. I had barely even blinked. "Anything," he repeated. "And you'll let me. Won't you, Grey-girl?"

"Why won't you get angry at me?" I rushed out.

"Is that why you did it?" He started laughing, his hand moving to the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair to grip tighter. "Damn, you're fucked up. I can be mean to you, babe. All you need to do is ask."

I nodded. It was my only answer, because I knew that it was the only answer he needed. I hadn't actually decided anything. I hadn't completely thought about what he had said and what it would mean for me. I only knew that I needed to punish myself. I needed to feel something. Preferably something bad.

I was still standing there, thinking about whether I should allow myself to actually think this particular thing through, when Duke began tugging me through the door and into his trailer. When we were standing in the kitchen area, he stopped and released me, his eyes on the hem of my dress. It reminded me of the first time he had kissed me. I had stood in the same spot, in a similar dress, with him looking at me in the same way. The small box television was even playing again, droning at a level too low to really make any sense of the words being spoken. It surprised me that Duke always seemed to be watching a news program, because he really didn't seem like the sort of person who would care about what was happening to every other person in the world. Not unless it impacted him in some way. Maybe he was waiting for something that would impact him. Waiting for something relevant, something specific.

I focussed, then.

I watched the screen while he undressed me.

The straps slid from my shoulders, and I watched a man standing outside a shop, talking to the camera. The shop had been severely damaged by a fire of some kind. I couldn't hear his words, but the screen showed pictures as he spoke. Pictures of other, similar stores, all damaged by fire. When the dress caught at my hips, and my bra fell away, I saw the sign for Dunn's Meats. There was nobody standing outside that particular store in that particular photo. No forlorn owner picking through charred rubble. No family arm-in-arm surveying the disaster. It was an empty ruin captured in a single shot, full of uncomfortable meaning.

He kept my dress on when he pushed me back against the table, but my panties were tugged down my legs as the caption along the bottom of the television screen began to scroll.

Harbourside Wholesale, the fourth in a series of locally-owned establishments destroyed over the last month, has been condemned. Authorities are treating this as a deliberate case of arson, and suspects are being questioned.

My panties were on the ground, and his fingers were around my knees, pulling my legs open. He straightened up and stepped between them, and I closed my eyes against the image of the television screen. I didn't want to know about what was happening to everyone else in the world.

I didn't even want to know about what was happening to me.

He was pulling at his belt, jerking it halfway through the loops and then working his pants over his hips. I was pushed further back onto the table. He wasn't saying anything. We weren't kissing. I wasn't sure what this was anymore, but I was under no delusions that it was romantic in any way.

His hand was at my throat, and I felt him between my legs. He was bigger than I had expected, even though I had seen him naked before. The hardness of him was oddly threatening. I might have been afraid as he began trying to push into me, but I couldn't feel anything at all. He grunted, the sound a mixture of pleasure and frustration. If I could have made a sound, I imagine that it would have been one of disgust.

Or perhaps it would have sounded like a cry for help.

I didn't want this.

What the fuck am I doing?

The question burned through me as he forced himself deeper. His hand grew tighter against my neck at the same time, as though he had forgotten that he had put it there. Sensation rushed back into me, chasing away the numbness. I didn't want it to feel, but I couldn't hold it back any longer. I had lost the battle.

I was no longer numb.

I had become a receptacle of pain.

It was sharp and sudden enough to scare a sound out of my mouth, and then another as my head collided with one of the cupboards above the dining table. I heard the bang , and felt the collision all the way through my body, rattling something from the darkness of my mind—where things hid—to the brightness of my subconscious.

Bang .

The memory assaulted me with the same force as the actual thud against the back of my head, and I toyed with the idea of fighting it off. I didn't want to welcome any of the darkness into me. I wanted it to stay locked up tight, where nobody could touch it—especially not me. I wanted to light a match, set it on fire, and reduce it to a photograph on a news program until my memories were only still pictures that might have told a story if you knew to ask the right people. I wanted to be that empty possibility of something that once was, and I wanted it desperately.

Unfortunately, I wanted even more desperately to be as far away as possible from Duke and the solid length pushing in and out of me. It didn't occur to me to shove him back and run away. It didn't occur to me to ask him to stop. It seemed that I had only two options. I could dive into the moment, or I could dive into the darkness waiting inside my mind.

I didn't want to be with Duke, so I chose the darkness.

"Mika!" My mother was screaming again.

I didn't need her to scream anymore. I was right there. Standing only a few feet away, the scene spread out in front of me like some kind of complicated game of strategy—except that I didn't have all the pieces. I had a King, and I had a Queen.

What did that make me?

The chess master or the pawn? The orchestrator or the sacrifice?

Bang .

The bottle smashed into the side of my head, raining glass down over my shoulder. I watched the pieces fall, though I quickly pressed my hand to the part that hurt the most, to see if it had cut me. It had, but it wasn't serious, and it wasn't the first time.

Bang.

A box this time: small, ornamental. A wedding present for my parents, from my uncle. I looked up, then back to the game.

"Mika, do something!" My mother was screaming again, but I looked away from her. I looked to my father.

He was trying to appear calm. Trying to keep himself under control. Trying not to make me panic.

"Mika …" He lowered his voice, but it still trembled on the last syllable. "I need you to get the gun."

Get the gun.

The gun.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang .

It was my head against the cupboard, colliding repeatedly with the small indent in the cheap wooden surface. Duke was grunting—I didn't think he actually noticed. I could see it all, then. I could see how far I had fallen, and it was surreal in a way: as though I had zoomed all the way out of my body, out of my life, and was dispassionately examining the graph of my human experience, following the line of my progress going down, down, down. At each sudden drop, I could feel a bang , until I came to the place where I was. The table in Duke's trailer, my thighs aching and a fire between my legs that had tears streaming down my cheeks. I was crying and he didn't seem to care.

No .

He cared.

He was moving faster, groaning deeper.

He liked it.

"No." The word trembled out of me, fierce and wobbly all at once. There was something sharp and overwhelming building up inside me, pushing against the cage of my ribs and the boundaries of my mind.

Emotion .

Dark, heavy, snow-balling emotion.

" No, " I repeated, louder this time, my voice full of hysteria. I shoved against him, and he tried to push me back again but I pulled my legs up and kicked him as hard as I could.

He was propelled back against the kitchen counter with so much force that the television teetered, almost pitching forward. I slid off the table as he stared at me, his dick still standing up straight out of his pants. I didn't want to look at it. I was disgusted, repelled, sick to my stomach. Awake. Alive.

There was blood on it .

"Fuck you," I muttered, grabbing my bag and moving toward the door. I had other things to say, too.

You're sick.

You're twisted.

You need help .

The words wouldn't rise to my tongue, though. They slid back in a cowardly retreat as I started running away from his trailer. I knew exactly why I didn't want to say those things to him, but I couldn't admit the reason to myself until I heard his voice shouting out after me.

"You're sick , Grey! Don't even pretend like you didn't want that! You were practically begging for it! You fucking wanted it, you twisted fuck!"

I shook my head, fighting off the oncoming numbness. It wanted to break through and comfort me, to wrap me up in a protective embrace and force all the emotions into a neat little cave where they wouldn't hurt me … but I couldn't do that anymore. I needed the emotion. I needed to start thinking . To start saving myself.

I ran to the road and pulled my phone out of my bag, searching for Alicia's name. I hit her number and pulled the phone up to my ear, the sound of each ring seeming to ricochet through my brain.

"Grey?" she answered, sounding concerned.

I shoved a metaphorical fist behind my words and punched them out, afraid that they would cower in my throat forever. "Can you please come and pick me up? I'm really sorry. I'm stuck."

"Of course, honey." The concern melted away, but it was replaced with something else. Some kind of grim realisation. A terrible expectation. "Where are you?"

"Outside Summer Estate."

"I'll be there in ten minutes, okay? Can you hold on that long?"

"I'll wait. Thank you."

"Thank you for calling me, Grey. Hold tight."

She hung up and I stared at my phone, turning it over in my hand as though it had a secret of some kind to reveal to me. The screen eventually turned off, and I could see the reflection of my face staring back at me, the sun lowering behind my head. I didn't even look the same—the past months had changed me so completely. I didn't recognise that person. I was afraid of that person.

I needed help.

I tapped my phone's screen to light it up again and found myself typing his name. I found a listing for the clinic that Nicholai worked at on Thursdays and Fridays—the clinic with the yellow couches and the odd little waiting room. I hit their contact button.

"Hello?" I murmured, when the receptionist picked up. "I need to make an appointment with Doctor Fell."

"When would you like the appointment?" She was a brisk sort of woman, but there was an underlying understanding to her voice.

She understood that she was required to sound somewhat considerate, since she was the receptionist at a mental healthcare clinic.

"Do you have anything available tomorrow?" I asked.

"Doctor Fell had a cancellation at 2 pm on Friday—are you already a patient of his?"

"I'm a new patient."

"I'll need you to book through our website if this is your first consultation. It saves you filling out all the forms when you're in the waiting room. There should be an option for a 2 pm appointment."

"Thank you."

I hung up after she forced out a considerate goodbye and filled out the booking request on their website. It didn't take long to answer their questions.

No, I didn't have any history of mental illness.

No, I wasn't on any medications.

No, I hadn't had any thoughts of self-harm.

Yes, I had harmed myself in the last twenty-four hours. Without thought.

Yes, this was an emergency .

Yes, I understood that I should visit the hospital in the case of any emergencies.

Yes, I still wanted to make the booking.

I clicked the submit button and then turned my face up to the sky. That's what I was doing: submitting. I was handing myself over to the people who told me that they knew better. I was giving up, giving in, giving it all away.