Pulled Within (12 page)

He was right; it didn’t matter. But I could still feel her words and her expression. It felt like they’d slashed my skin, like the pain in my scar was fresh all over again.

“If she knew what happened to you, she’d feel like a fucking
fool,” he said. He wiggled out the joint that had been tucked
between his head and ear and handed it to me, with a lighter.

It seemed as if he had an endless supply of drugs on him at all times. I suddenly appreciated that.

I stuck one end in my mouth and lit the other. The weed wasn’t
going to soften her words, or make me forget them. But it would
help stop my brain from wandering and help me fall asleep. And I was going to need it. On my way back from work, I’d heard on the radio that a rainstorm was headed our way. The thought of that made me suck down even more of the joint.

“You want some of this?” I asked him, nodding toward the weed.

He shook his head. “Nah, you keep it.” He was lighting his own joint. I didn’t know where that one had come from. This time I didn’t care. He had given me my own, and that was all that mattered.

I finished it and crashed, without even bothering to clean the room like I’d wanted to.

***

My body still wasn’t used to this new schedule, and as a result, I
only slept for about five hours. When I woke up, I downed half a
bowl of cereal and drove to work.

I sat in the back lot behind the casino, my hands circling the top
of the steering wheel, even though the car was in park. I could feel what the lack of sleep and food were starting to do to me. My collarbone stuck out more than usual; my belt was on the tightest
notch. I didn’t like being this skinny, but there was nothing I could do. My body
was completely in control until December seventeenth. Weed should have made me hungry; it didn’t. I could feel the hollow of my stomach gurgling, trying to reject whatever it held but finding nothing of substance.

I just had to wait this out and continue eating tiny amounts for the next
twenty-seven days
. After that, my appetite would return. My hair would thicken, and my body would fill out again.

When this first happened five years ago, I tried to stop it from
repeating the following year. To keep my mind straight. To forget
the significance of that date.

To forgive what had happened, and the one who’d caused it.

I couldn’t.

So I stopped fighting and I let it take over. My stomach. My
dreams. And though things didn’t completely return to normal after mid-
December, they did improve. They became a little more tolerable. I
could at least keep down the food I ate.

Without looking at the time on my phone, I knew I had to get inside for my shift. I wasn’t ready. The mid-day sky had turned
black, with a storm that hadn’t yet released its rain.

Tears
.

He
had once told me that’s what the rain was.

I hoped I wouldn’t hear the storm over the clanking chips or the
clinking glasses or the chatter. If the noises of the storm seeped
through, I didn’t know how I’d finish my shift.

As my eyes drifted down the sky, something else grabbed my
attention: the movement in the car across from mine. Two girls sat in
the front seat, holding their phones out in front of them. It looked
like they were snapping pictures of each other, probably posting them all over social media or some shit like that.

They couldn’t stop laughing.

One put lipstick on the other. With a glossy red mouth, she
began
to fix the other’s hair, teasing the sides to curl around her face. I was only feet away, but they were too caught up, too busy to notice I was staring.

It didn’t look like they worked at the casino. They were most
likely
just having a girls’ day and had decided to spend it here. I had no
one
to do that with—no girlfriends to curl my hair or put makeup on to
cover my scar. No one who wanted to take my picture.

No one who wanted to look deeper than my scar tissue.

I only had guys in my life. They fed me joints and made sure I didn’t swing my fists.

Maybe that was all I needed.

I GRIPPED
the handrail as I climbed up the basement stairs—not
with just the tips of my fingers, but with both hands, leaning against it as I walked. The stairs were moving, shifting…wiggling underneath me. It was like a ride at the fair.

Or maybe it was just my eyes.

And that I didn’t have any balance.

And that I’d chugged way too many beers over the last few
hours at Caleb’s party.

I was prone to losing control whenever I consumed anything
stronger than weed, which was why I didn’t usually drink. But
tonight, or this morning—or whatever time it was—I wanted to lose control.

He had called, using an unlisted number.

Him.

Gerald.

Or I thought it was him, at least. There wasn’t anyone else it could have been.

I also drank because it was raining. Storming. It had started
when I
was at work. Customers came in with their heads dripping wet,
laughing about the sudden downpour. But once I was finished with my shift
and ready to drive back to the house, the rain had cleared. Only a
few times had it released even a sprinkling of tears. Or raindrops.

Whatever the fuck they were.

But as soon as I joined the party in the basement, the weather changed again. The thunder was louder than the bass pumping
through the
speakers. I felt both in my chest. The lightning lit up the small
windows at the top of the ceiling—the ones Caleb had opened to let out the smoke. It let in the smell of the circling storm, of the heavy air.

Of mud from the ground wet with rain.

Rain
.

I had grabbed a red plastic cup filled with keg beer and drowned it all out—the noises, the smells, the flashes of white light, the tears.
Rain and him.
I’d eaten a roll during one of my breaks. Other than
that, my stomach was empty. The alcohol hit me quickly.

And hard.

I rounded the corner to the living room, holding onto the wall and keeping my eyes trained on the sticky wood floor. I didn’t want to bump into anything, to touch any of the filthy surfaces that surrounded me. But the hallway was so slanted and yellow from the
flickering lamp. Endless. There were way too many steps between me and my bed, but finally I collapsed on top of it.

My thumb hit a button on my phone, and the screen lit up. It
showed
a picture of Brady and me. He still hadn’t called. I fucking missed
that boy. He listened. Always.

My finger hit another button. Then a second one. The screen felt
so smooth on my skin. Smooth and unmarred. I held it against my scar and rubbed the softness over my jagged edges.

“I hope you’re not driving home in this weather,” Hart said.

I jumped at the sound of him. “Hart? Where are you?” I glanced at the doorway, looking for him, and across the carpet of my room.

“At my house.”

He was on the phone. The phone was…
on?

“Did I call you?” I asked.

“Well, I didn’t call you.”

 At least his voice was familiar. Not as familiar as Brady’s, but it would do. And it did things…to my stomach, to my chest. But I couldn’t fully feel those places right now. The beer had numbed
them. It had numbed all of me. But I still remembered how much he’d hurt me.

I hated him for that. Yet I liked him in spite of it.

Shit.

“You’ve been drinking,” he said.

“How can you,” I stopped to hiccup, “tell?”

He laughed. “I think we both know the answer to that.”

I pushed myself up a little, resting the back of my head against the wall and digging my heels into the mattress.

Everything was…
spinning.

“Got a call today while I was at work,” I said, just rattling off
information I wouldn’t have normally shared with anyone but Brady
or Shane. “Fucker didn’t even leave a message.” My forehead
dropped
onto my bent knees, and I wrapped my arm around my head to
block out some of the light. “Can you believe that shit?”

“Who called you?”

“The number didn’t show up on caller ID…but I know it was him.”

“Who is he?”

I hiccupped again. My forehead banged against the hard knob of
my knee. “Ouch. My head hurts. Bet it doesn’t hurt as bad as
Becky’s.
You know Caleb screwed her so hard, her head went through the
wall? Then she called me ‘Scarface.’”

My stomach started to churn, flipping almost as fast as the room. My mouth began to water. I untangled from the ball I was in and searched the floor. There was a trash bag on the carpet—the one that
had held my
clothes. I reached for it and barely had it open before beer shot from between my lips. I tried to hold my hair out of the way, but I couldn’t get all of it. My coordination was off; my balance was
uneven. Each time I heaved, I leaned to the side and coated more of my hair.

When I felt like there was nothing left in me, I dropped the bag
and huddled back into my ball. I couldn’t make it to the mattress. I
just stayed on the carpet, with the trash bag next to me, my puke-
dampened hair dragging over my arms and the knees of my jeans.

“Rae?” Hart’s voice was small, but I could tell he was shouting at me. “Are you okay?”

I lifted my head and opened my eyes, searching for his voice. My phone was on the floor. “Hart?” I reached over and grabbed it. “Hart…”

“Where are you?”

“Caleb’s.”

“Caleb from high school?”

“Yeah…high school, Caleb.”

“Where does he live?”

I tried to bury my head between my stomach and my knees, and got a solid whiff of the puke. The bag had opened. The beer stared at me from the bottom of the plastic. It hadn’t gotten only in my hair; it was on my shirt and my jeans, too. I was covered in it.

“I need to wash it off me,” I said. “It’s everywhere. It’s all I can smell.”

“Wash what off you, Rae?”

Hart’s voice grew small again as I stood and dropped the phone. I held onto the wall as I moved into the bathroom. I stared into the
mirror. The yellow light on the ceiling showed all the wet spots on
my face and the round, chunky circles on my shirt. The front of my
hair was soaked. The smell made me heave again, but nothing came out. There was nothing inside but a massive ache in my stomach and a cry seeping from my lips.

I looked up again, my eyes catching the mark on my cheek.

Twenty-six days
.

I tugged at the bottom of my shirt and yanked it over my head. Then I pulled down my jeans, turning them inside out just to get out
of them. The black shower curtain was closed. There were white
stains
on the bottom of the fabric. They looked like snowballs. Snowballs
that had gone…
splat
.

I pushed it open and stepped inside, turning on the water, and closing the drain with the metal plug. There was crusted goo all over it. It stuck to my fingers. I had nothing to wipe them on except the wall of the shower. So I did.

I sat at the edge of the bathtub, feeling the grime against my
skin. It
was slick and slimy. There were small slivers of bar soap sitting in the holder. I didn’t know what it took to turn white soap brown. Whatever it was, Jeremy had discovered it. The bottle of shampoo
behind me was
nearly empty. I sniffed its cap; it smelled like pine trees. There was a long strip of black where the tile met the tub. It was mold. Something musty was on every surface in this entire house. I was
probably coated in it.

I should have cleaned the bathroom.

As the water started to fill, I leaned against the back of the tub
and placed my feet under the stream. The heat burned the blisters on my
toes, the ones those damn heels gave me. Steam floated up to my
eyes
and made them want to close. The tub wasn’t long enough to fully stretch out my legs, so I tucked them in and lowered myself as much as I could.

I’d left my shampoo in my room. My body wash, too. I hadn’t even brought in a towel.
Shit.
It didn’t matter. The water was
washing my
hair. My stomach wasn’t flipping as much as it was before. Even
though the spinning wasn’t as bad, I swear I saw three eyes staring back at me. Maybe it was four…or two?

“Those are some nice tits,” a man said.

I couldn’t place the voice, though I knew I’d heard it before. It belonged to one of the guys who’d been in the basement. I just
wasn’t sure which one. There were a lot of them down there, and the beer made them all sound the same.

And it made me so tired.

I placed my hands over my breasts and drew my legs in even closer. “Are you talking to me?”

“Don’t cover them up. I was enjoying the view.”

“Towel,” I said, pointing toward the sink. “Get me one.” I
realized
that by pointing, I’d just uncovered one of my breasts again. My
hand
immediately returned to my chest, the movement sloshing water
over
my face. I wiped it out of my eyes—this time showing him
both
breasts. As I rubbed, I wondered if there were even towels in the
bathroom. Maybe they were in the hall closet.

Was there a closet in the hall?