Pranked (68 page)

Sarah didn’t say anything at all in return. She just sat there, looking at me. And I had to watch as that recognition in her eyes, that familiarity, faded away until she stared at me the way she would a stranger. She had no idea who I was anymore. And neither did I.

Without Sarah, I was lost. Even to myself.

She was on her feet in an instant, sweeping through the room, up the steps, and into the bedroom we’d shared. She slammed the door, and a moment later, I heard it lock.

I covered my face with my hands. The silence around me felt so heavy, like the walls were closing in. Like at any second, I would be crushed. I was an animal, cornered by my own shortcomings. Shit, maybe I always was, but until this moment, I hadn’t been able to see it.

All I was seeing now was red. I had to hit something. Anything. I had to destroy something besides me and Sarah.

The wall closest to me ended up with such a deep hole in it I was damn lucky I didn’t hit anything electrical. But I couldn’t help thinking that if I had, it might’ve been the best thing for me. Maybe the shock would’ve snapped me out of this downward spiral—the same one that always put distance between me and anyone who had ever ventured to give a damn.

I was letting my pride ruin my life. Again. And without Sarah, I had no idea how to stop it.

I
couldn’t believe
what was happening to me. No, actually—I could believe it. Because this was everything my family, and my gut instincts, had warned me about. But I wouldn’t listen to them. I’d listened to Hannah. I’d let myself believe that the English world wasn’t so bad. Certainly not as horrible as all the stories we’d heard in our youth.

And she was right. It wasn’t as bad as all that. It was so much worse.

Almost an hour ago, I’d called her from the bedroom I’d let Reid defile me in. I’d told her, through a sudden onset of sobbing and tears, what had happened between us. I’d told her about the bet. About how Reid had fooled me into allowing him to forever strip me of my virtue, and my value to a future husband, just to win. Of course, I knew that Hannah and Ash had already had sex, so the irony was that Reid didn’t even win, but I wasn’t about to bring that up to him. That was none of his business, although I was sure it would come up as he and his twisted brothers sat around and compared notes. What kind of world had I stepped into?

Now that the curtain had been pulled aside and I saw Reid for who he really was, it was easy to forget the illusions that had made me believe returning to my village was a bad idea. He and Hannah, and even Beth, had made the English world seem so tempting. But that was the problem with temptation—it never led to anything good.

I’d known that, going in. Reid had made me forget for a little while, made me question everything I’d been taught, everything I held as true. Now the truth was out, though. I should have trusted my heart, my religion, and my family—the parts of it who hadn’t up and left for no good reason, never to return.

Hannah was on her way to pick me up from the cabin now. I had no idea what I was going to say to her when she arrived, but I had nothing nice lined up. I supposed, in this instance, it was probably better to say nothing at all.

I did my best to hold them in—all the cruel, nasty feelings swirling in my gut. All the rage and pain, and even hate, that coursed through me at the mere thought of what Reid had done, tightening my chest and filling me up with darkness so thoroughly I could feel it weighing down my fingers and toes. Like some demon had wormed its way inside me and was stretching to fit my skin. By the time Hannah arrived, my efforts to contain it had tears stinging my eyes. I couldn’t look at her as I got in the car.

I couldn’t look back at the cabin, either. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of it; the place where I’d lost the courage of my convictions and so much more. I also couldn’t risk seeing Reid’s face. Would he be watching from the window? I doubted it. He hadn’t even tried to stop me from leaving. Hadn’t said a word when I emerged from the bedroom, fully dressed, to sit outside and wait for Hannah.

Part of me was relieved. But another part of me was bitter. I’d thought he would fight for me—but he just let me go.

Stop it, Sarah,
I thought.
You don’t want him to fight for you. You
want
to leave this all behind. To get on with your life as best you can. Maybe no one besides Hannah has to know…

The idea of lying had once disgusted me. Now, though—now that I’d committed another, perhaps graver sin—it seemed as viable an option as any. I could return home from Rumspringa and never speak again of my time with Reid. Not to my parents. Not to my future husband. Not to anyone.

Or I could seek solace another way. I could give up on the idea of marriage and a family altogether. Perhaps it was the pain, the guilt, and the shame talking—so fresh still, these wounds—but the notion of ever trusting a man with my heart again made me nauseous.

And it wasn’t just that. I knew, in some deep, dark place I didn’t want to acknowledge, that I would never feel anything as intense as what I’d felt when I was with Reid. I’d never desire another man in the same way ever again. I’d never extract that much pleasure from performing my wifely duties, or even just lying next to him in bed. Reid had ruined me for anyone else in more ways than one, and I hated him for it with a fury that was almost blinding.

Hannah and I drove in silence until we reached the highway. That was when we came back in range of the local radio station and she turned it on, bombarding me with a myriad of sounds I did not want. A snap of my wrist turned it off again; she looked at me hard, but didn’t immediately say anything.

When she did, I wished to God she hadn’t.

“Did you use the condom I gave you, at least?”

My stomach turned so hard I thought I was going to vomit. I rolled down the window, letting the cool air slap my face. It was enough to hold back the bile, but just barely. Closing my eyes, I took deep breaths through my nose. The car exhaust and baked asphalt scents weren’t terribly helpful, but they were distracting, at least.

Hannah gave me a few minutes before she prompted, “Well?”

The muscle in my jaw twitched. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I’d been grinding my teeth.

“No,” I said through them. “We did not.”

Hannah groaned. “Goddammit, Sarah…”

“He promised me he was ‘clean’”, I protested, although I was only about ninety percent sure what that meant. “And he withdrew.” My pulse was pounding in my head, almost loud enough to block out all the other noises that were still so foreign to me. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Well, you only have, like, an eighty-something percent chance of being right,” she muttered. Out of my periphery, I could see her shaking her head. “Okay, you’re not going back for another few weeks, at least. Not until we know if…”

Hannah trailed off, and in place of her voice, a headache arose right between my eyes. Now, on top of everything else, she wanted me to worry about the possibility of being with child? Wasn’t my deflowering enough? Weren’t the lies, the deception, the heartbreak, and the betrayal
more
than enough? And why wasn’t she just as angry as I was about this whole bet business? Is this just a normal occurrence here?

“Sister,” I whispered in our native tongue, “could you do me a favor and please
shut up
?”

“English while I’m driving, please,” she replied. “I can only focus on so many things at once.”

“Everything is English with you!” I cried, ignoring her request. This was the language that felt most comfortable for me right now, and I was going to put my comfort first for once. “Your world, your faith, your family, your morals—you traded them all for the English! What about them is so special to you, Hannah? What is it that appeals to you? The vices? The sin? How can you call this fresh hell home?”

“That’s not all there is to it,” Hannah began, but I cut her off with a shrill, almost hysterical, bout of laughter.

“No? Are you sure about that, sister? Because everywhere I turn, it’s all I see.” I shook my head at her in both disbelief and disgust. “Look at you. You’re in so deep you don’t even realize you’re wading through filth anymore. You can’t smell the polluted air. You don’t feel shame at the vast gulf between your throat and your neckline. You sully your reputation and your bed with English men as it suits you, letting them steal pieces of your soul in exchange for fleeting pleasure.”

Hannah’s eyes darkened. “Careful, Sarah,” she said, her words morphing into our village’s brand of Dutch. “It sounds like you’re calling me a whore.”

“I’m not,” I sneered at her. “I’m calling you a slut. You obviously don’t get paid for it, judging by your apartment—”

I shrieked as Hannah slammed on the brakes, yanked the wheel, and pulled us over onto the shoulder of the road. My bones vibrated as our tires skidded on the pavement’s raised texture, the one that made it sound like we’d hit a goose whenever we rolled over it. We came to a stop so abrupt the seatbelt left a red mark across my neck. I turned to Hannah, eyes wide, as she put us in park.

“What are you doing?!”

“Look,” she growled, “I get it. Okay, Sarah? I do. The time you spent with Reid didn’t go as planned. He wasn’t the man you thought he was. You did something you regret. And that
sucks.
But your grief doesn’t give you the right to make everybody else’s life a living hell. You don’t get to blame me for what he did, and you sure as hell don’t get to judge me because I’m comfortable with who I am and what I want. I don’t deserve it.”

“Don’t you?” I choked out, tears welling in my eyes anew. “You’re the one who pushed me to be with him, Hannah! You’re the one who not only told me everything was going to be okay, but that I could trust him—that he was a good man. You put a condom in my hands and speechified about how I shouldn’t be afraid to use it!
You’re
the one who pushed me and Beth toward these boys in the bar, and
you’re
the one who has been pushing us into their arms ever since. Why, Hannah? Why is it so important to you that we abandon our identities like you did? Why do we have to become you—is it so you won’t feel so alone? So you’ll have someone to share the misery of your choices with?”

“The only choice that ever made me miserable was staying in the village for as long as I did,” she shot back. She was clenching the steering wheel so hard her knuckle bones seemed ready to burst through her skin. “You want me to mourn the loss of a place where I had no free will and no voice? Fuck you, Sarah. I’m not doing that. Not even for you.”

“Fuck you, too!” I shouted, and Hannah’s eyes widened. Never in my life had I ever uttered a foul word like that, yet in my rage, it slipped from my tongue so easily. “If you were so unhappy being with us, why did you send for me and Beth? Are you punishing us? Is this some kind of sick joke to you?”

My outburst seemed to have tempered some of my sister’s anger. Slumping back in her seat, she softly answered, “No. No, Sarah, it’s not like that at all.”

“Then what is it like?” I demanded, too consumed with pain and regret to let it go. “Why did you do this to me, Hannah? Why did you set me up to lose my soul?”

One of Hannah’s hands slid from the steering wheel. She looked away from me, out the window, her jaw set tight. The vein in her neck pulsed hard and I waited, shuddering at the roar of every car that sped past us. My throat hurt from trying so hard not to cry and my vision blurred. When I blinked, I lost the fight—two tears escaped down my cheeks, racing toward the corners of my mouth.

Would Reid have kissed them away?
I wondered. Instantly, I regretted it. The tears came easier now, along with a sob wrenched from the very depths of my heart. I could not contain the rising tide of hopelessness inside of me. Covering my face with my hands, I splattered my palms with wet grief.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said at last. When we were children, she would have reached out to touch me, would have bundled me in her arms and held me in her lap, stroking my hair beneath my bonnet. She would have kissed my forehead and hushed me, soothing me with a tender lullaby or a story full of rabbits and idyllic meadows. I wanted her to do that now, even though we had outgrown such illusions. I wanted her to lie to me and tell me it would all be okay as I buried my face in the warm curve of my sister’s shoulder.

She didn’t do any of those things. She couldn’t. I had put distance between us, said things that I was sure would cover us both in thorns for years to come, so that neither of us could touch the other without getting pricked. Without drawing blood.

Now I not only mourned the mistakes I’d made with Reid, but those I’d made with Hannah, too. I had been so unfair, yet I could not find the words to make it right again. They all just seemed… too small.

Minutes passed before I heard her flip her turn signal and take the Toyota out of park. I did not look up when we pulled back onto the highway, or for the rest of the drive back to her apartment, for that matter. Once my tears had begun in earnest, it proved impossible to get them to stop. I sobbed and hitched and trembled for miles, wishing that I had it in me to scream, to let out the poison my feelings for Reid had become—to purge his memory from my mind with the power of my lamentations.

In time, though, they subsided. I met this with both relief and a cruel sense of disappointment. I knew my torment wasn’t over, that in time, I would be in this dark place again, overwhelmed and helpless in the face of what I’d done. What I’d lost. Selfishly, I wished this was the end of it—that these tears would be the only ones I’d shed for Reid Brody. That the pain would pass in the span of a shuddering breath; that I’d forget him just as easily.

But I wouldn’t. And the worst part was that some fragment of me didn’t want to. Some small portion of me, removed from all the rest, couldn’t help recalling not his betrayal, but the lazy tilt of his smile. The sensation of his fingers tracing down my ribs to my waist. His mouth, hot and consuming, on mine. The effortless bulge of his muscles when he lifted me into his embrace and carried me up the stairs to the bedroom where I’d been his, and he’d been mine. Even the flash of murder in his eyes when that man had wound his arm around me at the carnival, our first date, and Reid had been there to ensure no harm came to me. The possessive way he’d put me behind him, a human shield, prepared to defend me from whatever danger lay ahead.

And once I’d started entertaining these bittersweet memories, I could not forget them or push them into the recesses of my mind where they belonged. Reid was gone now; there was no point in reliving that magical moment on the Ferris wheel, when the stars seemed so close and he was even closer. No point in recalling the soft texture of the stuffed penguin he’d won me that day. Whatever we’d had that made those memories so brutally alluring, it was broken now. There was no turning back; all that was left was a bleak and uncertain future.

At least, for me. I was sure that he’d land on his feet, one way or another. After all, he was no stranger in a strange land. The rules of this game were ones he might as well have written himself. And on top of that, he was a man. No one ever judged them harshly for their sins. That was a woman’s burden.

It wasn’t until Hannah parked for a second time that I was able to bring myself to lift my gaze and rejoin her in the land of the living. We’d made it back to her apartment complex, but we weren’t parked in front of her unit. Instead, we occupied a space near the common area. And in front of me, Reid’s brothers, Ash and Wyatt, stood around a barbeque grill, laughing and talking with Beth, perched on one of the picnic tables.