*
THEY DIDN’T SEE ME COMING. Too busy whispering and giggling, reminiscing about the good old days, whatever. Their heads were bowed, Jacob’s hair gray-streaked and greasy, hers dark and silky.
It made it easy to launch the first strike. My arm raising all the way up, just like every slasher film I’d ever seen, except this time, I was the crazy-eyed stalker instead of the doe-eyed college student.
Nobody wants to be a monster.
Or do they?
Arm coming down, down, down.
A scream, sharp and shrill. Mine? Nope. Definitely hers. The beautiful new girl came shooting off the sofa, blood blossoming down her back where I had raked the knife across her shoulder blade.
“Shit!” Jacob exploded, fear just beginning to penetrate his doper’s glaze. “What the fuck, what the f—”
I turned to him next. Arm up, up, up.
Arm coming down, down, d—
She launched herself at me. The new girl who wasn’t new fought like a hellcat. She tackled me down to the ground. Fingernails slashing down my face, going for my eyes. Screaming words at me in a language I didn’t know. Not Spanish. Something far more exotic.
As I heaved against her reflexively, forgetting all about the kitchen blade, which had scattered from my grip.
But she didn’t. Her gaze flashed to the knife, resting several feet away. Her face sharpening with a look of cunning.
I realized what she was going to do the second before she made her move. A fresh launch, this time from my chest, toward the blade. I turned with her, grabbing at her left arm, as if to hold her back.
She kicked at me without ever losing focus, stretching long, and just like that, she had the knife, turning back, looming over me. The smile on her face. Feral. Happy.
So Jacob wouldn’t be the one to kill me after all.
Interesting.
Knife. Not going up, up, up. What would be the fun in that? But instead twirling lazily in front of my eyes.
She spoke again, whispers of death in her exotic tongue. No translation required to understand she was going to slice me up. And she was going to enjoy doing it.
“Stop!” Jacob’s hand, snapping around her wrist. “Gimme that. Stupid bitches.”
She yelled at him. In English this time. Demanded the right to finish what I’d started. I didn’t speak. I didn’t move. My heart was beating too fast. I lay on the floor, the fallen gazelle trapped between two lions.
“She has her uses,” Jacob was arguing, the first time I’d heard him give me any credit. “Not for you to decide anyway. She’s mine. Get your own plaything.”
Then, after a long exchange that went over my fuzzy, blacking-out head—she was still sitting on my chest—a sudden change.
The girl stood, removing her weight and allowing oxygen to come flooding back. She tucked away the knife but still peered at me in triumph.
“You,” Jacob addressed me. “You got work to do.”
It took me a bit to sit up, climb shakily to my feet.
“You attacked my daughter,” he said.
Daughter?
“Violated her hospitality. Now you gotta pay. She demands a tribute. Since she can’t kill you, you gotta go out, find her a replacement toy.”
I couldn’t do it. I begged, pleaded. Jacob had tried before. Talk to that girl in that bar. Go chat up that woman in the corner. Bring her over to me.
Before, I’d always been able to distract him. Have another beer. Let’s go back to the rig. Let’s put a new song on the jukebox.
But now, he was adamant. I would go out with him and his daughter. I would befriend a girl of their choosing. And I would introduce the woman to them.
Or Jacob would leave me alone with his daughter and an entire collection of kitchen knives.
For emphasis, she produced the knife, then slid the blade down my forearm, both of us staring in fascination as the blood welled to the surface.
In the end, I caved. You tell yourself you will be strong. You tell yourself this is impossible, it can’t get any worse. You even tell yourself you’d rather die.
But the truth is, it’s hard to give up on life. I don’t know why. Surely giving up would’ve made more sense. I should’ve gone with my first instinct and slashed my wrists in the kitchen.
But I hadn’t. I didn’t.
I wanted to survive.
And now . . . this.
I bandaged Lindy’s shoulder. I’d hit all bone, leaving a long but shallow groove across her shoulder blade. By morning, she wouldn’t feel a thing.
Only my terror would go on and on and on.
She dressed in a deep purple, a shade so dark it was nearly black. I was given some of Lindy’s clothes, a worn pair of jeans, already falling off my bony hips, and a T-shirt tied beneath my breasts. Lindy had a car. A clunker to match her home.
Jacob drove. Lindy sat with me in the back, gloating over what was to come.
“How long have you lived here?” I tried to ask. “How often do you get to see your father?” I nearly tripped over the word father. But Lindy wouldn’t talk. She had her eye on the prize, a fun night out on the town.
The bar Jacob finally chose was a dive, a barely standing shack at the edge of a barely there beach advertising cheap beer. The kind of place that would make discerning patrons shudder and dedicated drunks cheer. The kind of place Jacob himself fit right in.
Lindy stood out. Too young, too beautiful in her purple-black dress and long, loose hair. Men stared at her in instant lust, women in instant hatred. She smirked at all of them, following her father through a maze of closely packed tables.
In contrast to her, I went unnoticed. Too pale, too skinny, too all-washed-up. Not even a drunk, more like a heroin addict.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I followed them to the worn driftwood bar, earning points by association.
Jacob ordered up shots of tequila. A round for all three of us, and an instant bloom of fire in my empty, shrunken stomach. I was glassy-eyed after the first shot. Barely standing by the second.
Willing me into compliance, or an act of compassion, as Jacob knew I’d do what he said anyway.
Nobody wants to be a monster.
But some are still born that way. And others, with bleeding cuts down their arms and enough tequila in their stomachs . . .
Lindy nudged my shoulder, her gaze darting to the corner.
A woman sat there, eyes heavily made up, tube top barely containing her voluminous chest. She was not young and pretty. More like middle-aged and fleshy. A pro, I recognized by now. Because bars like this attracted as many working girls as local drunks.
“Tell her we want to party,” Lindy instructed me. “We know a place, we have the cash.”
I didn’t move. So Jacob shoved me. “You heard her. Go.”
I staggered back from the bar, having to focus hard to keep my footing. One step in front of the other. Moving past the tables. To the shadows in the corner.
To the woman waiting there.
She eyed me expectantly when I approached. Even for me, it was hard not to stare at all the flesh spilling out from that much-too-tiny top. But I forced myself to find her eyes, to register they were hard and calculating and also brown. Brown eyes. Like her mother’s? Like her daughter’s?
Everyone is a person.
Only I have become an object.
“Run,” I heard myself say, my voice barely a whisper. Was I speaking to me? Was I speaking to her?
Now was the time. The last moment of truth.
“Girl?” she asked.
“My name is . . .” What is my name? Who am I? Molly. Not Molly. A monster.
“Please, go. Just leave. They . . . they . . .” I needed to say something. Very important. My head was swimming. Too much tequila, not enough food. I was going to be sick.
Suddenly, Lindy was at my side, her hand squeezing my forearm where she’d sliced it earlier. Squeezing hard.
“We’re looking for a party,” she practically purred. “A private party . . .”
The woman agreed to come with us, her gaze going past us to rest on Jacob. The philosophical shrug of a woman who’d seen worse.
All of you? she asked, which nearly made me vomit.
No, Lindy corrected her, just the man. But I want to watch.