This didn’t make me feel any better. There was no doubt in my mind—I had abandoned
Cameron, on one of the worst days of his life. Talking to the police would never change that. I
tried to tell myself that maybe my warning had come soon enough. Maybe he had been able to
escape on time. But then there was all that gunfire … all of a sudden I found myself actually
hoping that he would get arrested. It seemed like the safer alternative. The mere possibility of
the other alternative made me want to throw up. I put my head between my knees, willing myself
to focus on keeping the vomit down, and figure out how I was going to help Cameron.
The car came to a stop. I looked up. Victor had pulled the car up to the sidewalk. We were in a
small town outside the city. The town consisted of a stop sign, four corners, and a cluster of
tiny houses with big yards—the kind of place nice parents wanted their nice children to grow up
in.
Victor peered at Frances through the rearview mirror. “There’s a convenience store around the
corner. The bus comes every hour on the hour. It’ll take you back to the city.”
Frances looked embarrassed. “I dropped my purse in the church. I don’t have any money.”
Victor was growing impatient. He huffed and aggressively dug out his wallet. He emptied it of
its cash content and gave it her. Frances got a lot more than she needed for a bus ride. As soon
as she closed the door, Victor sped off, not waiting to ensure that she knew where she was
going.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“My place,” he explained. “Your parents are waiting there.”
I had no idea where Uncle Victor even lived, though we had lived in the same area for over a
year now.
We turned a corner and came to a stop sign. I had been wrong about this one-stop-sign town—
apparently there were two stop signs. Victor impatiently tapped on his steering wheel as a man
slowly crossed in front of us. The man was wearing a suit that was two sizes too big for him and
walked with a strut. I couldn’t see his face, but I was on high alert. Not just because he didn
’t fit in this town for nice people—but he was purposefully avoiding eye contact.
Please keep walking, I internally begged. He was taking a ridiculous amount of time to cross the
street, or was I just imagining that he was? Time had seemed to stop. I started to shake … I
knew. But what I didn’t know was that he had just been a diversion while his cohorts approached
the car from behind. The back doors opened, and I yelled … didn’t I? An arm grabbed me from
behind and held my body against the seat while a burlap sack was being thrown over my head. I
couldn’t breathe, and I started flailing my hands, scratching the skin off the arm that was
suffocating me. Something pricked my neck. There was a rush of warmth. My heartbeats slowed. Was
I still breathing? A gurgled moan in my throat, and then it was all nothingness.
Surely I was dead. My eyes were open—I had to bring my fingers to my face to confirm this. Yes,
they were open. But I couldn’t see a thing.
I groaned, but the sound that came out was not my own. It was the sound that a sixty-year-old
chain-smoker would make. My head was pounding against my skull. My clothes were drenched with
what I assumed to be my own sweat. Spit had leaked out the corner of my mouth and dried on my
cheek.
I was lying on something soft.
There was a slit of light streaming in a few feet ahead. Good. I wasn’t blind either.
I struggled to turn my body on its side—everything was numbed. I was a marionette, with my
brain pulling on strings to make my body move. I rolled to the ground in a thump. There was
carpet, but it was too rough and cheap, the kind that was sold by the acre. I could feel the
coldness of the cement seeping through it. I was suddenly thankful for the numbness—the tumble
would have hurt otherwise.
I dragged myself across the floor like a rabid dog toward the light. My breaths were shallow.
It took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the light. My elbows were too weak to hold me up.
I had to slump to my side, with my cheek against the smelly carpet. All I could hear were the
cymbals that were clashing between my ears.
Through the slit under the door, there was nothing to see but a white wall and an expanse of
more bargain-basement carpet. I willed myself back onto my elbows and used the door to hold my
weight while I struggled to sit up. The blood rushed to my head. With a dozen deep breaths and
my back against the door, I inhaled and exhaled the nausea away, while clumsily fingering above
for a door handle. I hit something cold—the door was locked. I was focusing on breathing … but
the panic was slowly setting in. I needed to move. Crawling on my hands and knees, I slid my
hand against the wall and felt my way around. Wherever I was, there wasn’t much to it: a square
room of maybe ten-by-ten feet with a bed—nothing else.
The room was so hot. There was no exit. I was having difficulty breathing, and I was sweating
buckets. I started to dry heave and finally threw up on the floor next to me. I rested my head
on my wobbly knees.