“We’re going to burn them.” He grabbed her by the hair, pulling her up, and Lindsey flashed back to the woods and fought the urge to scream. “And you are never…” He shook her, holding her shoulders now, his fingers digging into the tender, broken flesh of her back. “Ever!
He shook her, his face inches from hers, teeth clenched so tightly it was hard to understand him through the sneer. “You know just what you did, you teasing little whore!”
“It wasn’t me!” Lindsey shook her head, incredulous. “It was you!
“You asked for it.” He dropped his hands from her and went over to the bed and started throwing her journals into a box. He was going to burn them, as if he could rid himself of her and everything that had happened, sweep it away and pretend it never existed.
“Maybe I’ve deserved every horrible thing you’ve ever done to me.” Her voice shook as she watched him stacking the scarred and pained words of her adolescence into a cardboard box. “I just hope it was worth it. Did it make you feel like a man-
fucking your twelve-year-old stepdaughter?”
He turned to her, his face red with anger at the words, but Lindsey didn’t stop.
“Oh right, I’m not supposed to talk about it-and who would believe a little slut like me, anyway? Certainly not my own mother. Not after the stories you told about me.” Lindsey paused to take a shaky breath, remembering the slow erosion that had happened between her and her mother over the years as he started to harp on Lindsey about her clothes, her developing body. “I wasn't a slut until you made me one… going on and on about all the boys I’d fucked at the ripe old age of twelve… when the truth was, the only one who ever touched me was
“Shut up!” He came toward her, his posture threatening, but she couldn’t stop.
Something had cracked open in her tonight. Maybe it had happened in the woods, when they tied her up, forced her down, worked her cunt as if that was all she was, holes to be filled, something to be used and tossed away. It had begun seeping out then, like the blood from her lip, but now it broke open, a flood.
She remembered that in a flood, too, a deluge, and the memory tasted bitter, like copper on her tongue. Even that memory was unsafe. It came in a flood, like the blood between her legs had flowed when he forced himself on her, in her, and she couldn’t do anything but endure. The moon had floated in a square patch of window, and she had gone away then-
“You knew I was a virgin!” Lindsey screamed, the ache in her chest bursting as she sobbed, not wanting to but remembering everything she’d been hiding, covering, holding back-everything she had poured into those journals. “And you left me… in all that blood… so much blood…”
Her voice cracked and she spat the last at him. “I had to throw the sheets away and turn my mattress over so my own mother wouldn’t see what you’d done to me!” Lindsey grabbed the edge of the bed and shoved it toward the wall, tipping the twin mattress up, revealing the darkened stain underneath as it slid off the box spring.
She pointed to it, trembling, remembering how she had scrubbed and scrubbed, tears and snot mixing with the blood on the mattress, wishing she could just melt away, erase herself, until she became transparent.
“Get out!” He reached past her for the doorknob, his voice shaking. “I want you out of my house.”
“Oh I have no intention of staying.” Lindsey turned to go, and they both saw her mother standing just outside the door, hand raised as if to knock, her face pale, eyes wide.
Lindsey just brushed past her, not saying a word. Her whole body ached as if it was on fire, beaten, broken, but somehow she felt lighter as she walked, barefoot, down the street, looking for the nearest pay phone where she would call Zach and ask him to come for her. Maybe, she whispered to the rising moon, just maybe, there was finally someone in the world who might believe her.
She wouldn’t have done it for anyone else, and her eyes sought Zach’s after every question. Yet she still found the words sticking in her throat as the officer scribbled on her pad, trying to look unbiased and nonjudgmental. Lindsey didn’t think she was doing a very good job, and she thought sending a woman was just cheap-as if she would feel more comfortable with a female? Not likely.
“So did you know any of your assailants?”
Lindsey cleared her throat. “I…no.” It was the first time she’d lied, and the first time she didn’t lift her eyes to Zach’s.
“And you obviously resisted, fought back, told them no?”
