Psycho Save Us (38 page)
Authors: Chad Huskins
It held her.
Suddenly Nan’s
voice filled her,
Ward your heart!
it screamed. Kaley jerked her hand
away from the door, and realized she was drooling on herself. When she turned
around, she looked at Shannon and the Harper girl, both staring at her from
where they sat. Kaley wiped her mouth and swallowed.
Wordlessly, she
walked over to inspect the sink. It dripped brown water every ten or fifteen
seconds. A stain on the floor showed that this remained a constant. She
tested the faucet. The water that poured out wasn’t so brown, but there was
definitely a darker hue to it than should be.
Kaley moved over
to the wall where the toilet was. Directly above it was an air vent, no bigger
than Shannon was wide.
Two steps from
her, the Harper girl sniffled.
“Your name’s
Bonetta?” Kaley asked. The Harper girl treated her like a ghost, like she
wasn’t there. “Hand me one of those chairs, would ya?” Bonetta Harper didn’t
move. She held her locket in her hands, shivering.
“I’ll get one,”
Shannon said.
“No, Shan. You
stay right there. Bonetta?” Still, the girl didn’t move. Kaley snapped her
fingers twice. “Yo, girl! Dry it up! I ain’t your babysitter. Now hop up
and grab me a chair.”
“
I ain’t
yours to boss around!
” Bonetta suddenly screamed.
All at once,
Kaley nearly buckled from the girl’s fear and rage. It wasn’t quite as
powerful as the boy’s rage that still haunted this room, but it was close.
“All right, then. Will you
please
grab me one o’ those chairs?”
“Get it
yourself,” she said, trembling. “Get it your own damn self. Just leave me
alone.”
“Givin’ up just
like that, huh?” The Harper girl looked at her. It had been the right thing
to say, as well as the wrong thing to say. “You know they gonna
fuck
you, right? You heard them?” Bonetta looked up at her with eyes wide with
indignity.
Sometimes, you gotta give some tough love, chil’
, she
remembered Nan saying once when she’d been honest with her feedback of a
drawing of MLK that Kaley had done. “You know that, right?” Kaley egged.
“Or what?
What’choo gonna do, girl? Beat my ass? I bet I beat yours.”
Shan stopped
crying, and looked between the two older girls.
Bonetta Harper
rose. In that moment, Kaley remembered where she’d seen this girl. She hadn’t
looked like much while curled up and cowering in the back of the SUV, but now
that she had found some reason to rise to her fullest, she took the persona of
the bully Kaley knew her best as. “Don’t you talk to me like that,” she
warned.
Kaley nodded.
“You go to English Avenue Middle.”
“That’s right,”
she said. “I know you.” It was a haughty, threatening statement.
“You’re that
girl that punched Andrea Kessler in her mouth, took out two o’ her teeth.”
“That’s right,
yeah.” Again, haughty.
Kaley nodded.
“And now you’re stuck in here like the rest of us,” she said. “And you’re
scared.” She took a step towards her, and Bonetta took a step closer in
response. The men outside had, for a time, robbed her of her playground powers,
all the authority she held at EAMS, but now that they were gone and it was just
them girls Bonetta was back. She might’ve been slightly younger and slightly
smaller than Kaley, but she was a firm, wiry girl and everyone knew she would
throw down at the drop of a hat. “I know you’re very scared. So are we.”
“I ain’t
scared.”
Kaley nodded.
“You are. I can…I can feel it.”
“What’choo mean,
feel
it?”
“It’s something
I can do. I feel these things. Fear is real. It’s…it’s an energy. It
spreads fast, like love or hate. It’s viral. Ya know what viral means?”
“The fuck is
this shit?” Bonetta said derisively.
“It means it’s
catching. The less control you have over your fear, the less control my sister
and I have over ours,” Kaley explained, reciting something Nan had told her a
year before she died. “And the less my sister and I control
our
fear,
the less you can control yours. It’s a vicious cycle. We…we have to work
together, understand? And that means—”
“My daddy’s
comin’ for me—”
Kaley sighed.
“You’re daddy’s not here—”
“But he’s
comin’!”
Suddenly, Kaley
felt herself feeding off of Bonetta’s anger. Her haughtiness, her audacity, it
was all just too much. Like the fear, it was infectious. “You keep believing
that,” Kaley said. “Put that hope in your right hand, then shit in your left.
We’ll see which one fills up first.” Now that was definitely one of Ricky’s
lines.
“What the fuck
is that supposed to mean?” Bonetta took a step again, but this time backward,
as though she wanted to keep from catching whatever madness had hold of Kaley.
“It means ain’t
nobody comin’ for us. You heard that bitch Olga. They keep tabs on kids like
us. They scout around, see who is an’ who ain’t watched out for. My mama’s a
meth head, how’s yours?”
“And your dad?
He ever around? He ever miss you?” Kaley knew the answer. No, she
felt
the answer.
Nothin’ cloys like the heart of a battered woman an’ a neglected
child
, Nan used to say. Kaley had had to look that word up.
cloy
v. , cloyed ,
cloying , cloys . v.tr. To cause distaste or disgust by supplying
with too much of something originally pleasant.
And that’s what
she was feeling right now from Bonetta Harper, a cloying of love.
Too
much love for her father. It was the kind of unhealthy yearning that a woman
gets after years and years of worshipping an unavailable man (something else
she would learn in years yet to come). Defenses were built around that kind of
love, walls that protected people from seeing the truth.
That she’s wasted
her life loving an
idea
of a father who’s never emotionally available
.
And defending that idea for no good reason
.
This would not
be an easy wall to penetrate. “You don’t talk about my daddy, bitch,” Bonetta
Harper snapped.
“Will ya’ll stop
fightin’?” Shan offered sweetly. So sweetly, in fact, that it threatened to
cripple Kaley’s heart.
Ward yo heart,
chil’!
“I don’t need to
talk about him,” Kaley said, trying to remain stalwart here. “I only need you
to lose hope.”
“What?” Bonetta
said, her upper lip rankling.
“I need you to
give up. Quit. Stop hoping. And then, I need you to get mad.
Really
mad. And then I need you to
want
to live,” she said. “You found
something awful about Andrea Kessler, something that made you wanna hit her,
made you laugh when she lost those teeth. I need you to think the same way
now.”
“Are you
stupid
or somethin’?” Bonetta said, and quickly wiped away the tear that leaked from
her eye. “Did you see those guns they got? You can’t punch a bullet—”
“But we might be
able to get outta here.”
“How?”
“See that
vent?” Kaley pointed to the vent cover above the toilet.
Bonetta looked,
and shook her head. “Can’t fuckin’ reach it. Too high.”
“Maybe if I had
a chair?” she suggested. “A
couple
of chairs? And someone to give me a
boost?”
For a moment,
the two girls stared at one another, each one weakened by the other’s fears,
and none of their fears was worse than the fear of hoping and then having all
hope dashed. They had to simultaneously give up on all the hope they had and
yet work towards survival. Decide that they were likely going to die, and then
try and do something about it anyway. They would have to do so mindlessly, and
forget that fear ever existed.
Kaley felt the
change in the other girl’s heart. She felt the heart flipping its switch, the
mind doing the same. There was resolution. The same audacity that had once made
Bonetta so formidable on a playground and had given her the strength to knock
out Andrea Kessler’s teeth now returned. She was just about to agree. That’s
when Kaley sensed something else.
“All
right,” Bonetta said. “Maybe we can—”
The doorknob
across the room rattled. A second later it was flung open, and in stepped
their nemesis. Oni, Dmitry, stood there with Olga. The wave of intrigue and
lust had been what Kaley had smelled from the other side of the door an instant
before it opened. Oni in particular had a pretty cocky air about him, and his
lust…it was there.
Don’t worry, little girls
.
We fuck you soon
.
That’s what he had said.
“No,” Kaley breathed.
If a needle of ice had punctured her heart before, a spear of ice now split it
utterly in half. She knew what this was. She knew. The nausea returned, and
a vision of Shannon’s future hit her like a fist to the abdomen.
Olga looked at her
brother. “Which one?”
Oni didn’t
hesitate. “That one.” He pointed at Shannon.
“No,” Kaley
said. She stepped forward, and Bonetta stepped back, all her courage gone, shattered,
depleted, nonexistent. Oni had the gun in his hand, and Olga held something
that looked like a Taser. Out there somewhere, no doubt, was Mikhael. And
then the men upstairs, they were probably armed, too. Bonetta was not going to
stick her neck out for somebody else. “No,” she said again as they stepped
into the room. She dashed across and snatched Little Sister up by her sleeve
and pulled her to the other side of the table, where the board games were still
stacked high. “No. No. No, you can’t have her. You can’t.”
“Move out of the
way, little girl,” said Oni.
“Kaley,” Shan
whimpered.
“No,” she said.
But Kaley had made a mistake. Touching Shan had reestablished the Anchor, and
the fear swamped the boat of confidence she’d been floating in moments
earlier. “No…no, take
me
! Take me!” she cried.
“We don’t want
you tonight, little Kaley,” Oni said. “We want the little one. Don’t worry,
she will not feel—”
“Bonetta?
Bonetta,
please help us!
”
But Bonetta was
no help, not even to herself. She was backing up to the other side of the
room. Her own confidence was utterly sapped. Sapped by the same virus that
had spread from Shannon, who gripped her sister at the waist and screamed as
Oni lunged for her.
The boiling rage
of every person that had ever occupied their room surged through Kaleyat room,
and it came through in a piercing, a white-hot flash that sent her screaming at
the man. She rushed forward, slamming the table into Oni’s midsection. She
pressed her weight into the table to pin him against the wall. “Run, Bonetta!
Get help!” Bonetta didn’t budge. Enraged by the girl’s impotence, Kaley
screamed uselessly. “
Somebody help us!
”
Olga came into
the room and flashed the Taser at her. Kaley backed up, and, once again, made
the mistake of caring too much. Instead of protecting herself, she protected
Little Sister. She pushed Shannon away from the two monsters instead of
keeping her weight against the table to keep Oni pinned. Dmitry knocked the
table to one side, and Monopoly money spilled out onto the floor. Mikhael
stepped into the room. The three of them—Olga, Dmitry and Mikhael—now formed a
wall at the doorway. They stepped inside and corralled them into a corner,
with Bonetta , cried into her hands and held her locket.
“Bonetta?” Kaley
said, backing up while urine trickled down her leg. “Bonetta, help us. We can
get them together.
Bonetta!
”
Kaley looked
around the room for something,
anything
to use as a weapon. There was
nothing loose in here, it was all bolted sinks and sterile walls. Designed to
be that way, no doubt. Her hands still groped along the wall as she pushed
Shan behind her. “Don’t you—” she started, and then Olga lunged forward with
the Taser. Kaley leapt to one side. Olga missed and hit the wall. Momentarily
inspired, Kaley lashed out with a balled fist and cracked Olga on the jaw. The
bitch staggered a bit, her black hair a shawl about her face.
Now Mikhael and
Dmitry rushed in. Kaley kicked out at their shins and, for a brief moment,
felt the anger of someone else who had once been in this room. It wasn’t the
boy this time, no, it was another girl. This girl had bitten. She’d grabbed
hold and bitten, so—
Kaley grabbed at
the first outstretched hand—it was Mikhael’s—and held onto it with both hands
and bit as hard as she could on the first bit she could shove into her face.
It was his right index finger, and she heard a sharp crunch. There was blood,
and screaming, and then the world turned to fire.
The volts from
the Taser hit her, controlled her, and owned her. She fell backwards stiff as
a board and landed on top of Bonetta, who screamed and shrank away.
