When I thought of it as simply as that, maybe it wasn’t so blurry after all.
The money on the coffee table mocked me, and I could feel all the pent up anger that had been distorted by the sadness from losing Jake rise to the surface. No matter what they tried to pay me, I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone except Jake, anyway. Did they think I’d be seeking justice from a failed system? That I’d tell people what their precious son did to me? Little did they know Jake leaving had just bought Owen a reprieve from his almost guaranteed death sentence. Something clicked inside me. I wasn’t sad over losing Jake, or upset that Bethany Fletcher thought I was poor, stupid white trash who could be bought.
I was fucking enraged.
I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I’d been so angry. The heat from below the surface of my skin felt as if it had been dropped in oil. I wanted to jump out of my skin and harm someone, throw something. To destroy for the sake of destroying.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My heart rate went from normal to borderline cardiac arrest in a matter of seconds.
Fuck. This. Shit.
This bitch thought she could buy my silence? Well, she was dead fucking wrong. All the Fletchers were. And, I was about to show them how dead fucking wrong they really were.
The argument Jake and I had in the kitchen over me paying him back for the camera he’d bought me played in my head. “I’ll just burn the money,” he’d said, when I insisted on paying him back.
I stuffed the bills back in the envelope before grabbing Jakes truck keys from the rack. My move to nowhere would have to wait a little while. I grabbed a half empty bottle of lighter fluid from the shelf over the barbecue and a pack of matches from the drawer below it.
I got into his truck and drove. I tried to ignore the part of me that was thinking about how much the truck smelled like him, how his old black baseball cap was still sitting on the dashboard, and how much all I wanted to do was curl up in the back seat and sleep surrounded in his smell.
The misery wasn’t going anywhere, either.
I became more and more heated as I drove. I saw red again. The anger poisoned my blood, and I was drunk on it. High on my hatred. My heart pounded in my ears the closer I got to my destination. I didn’t follow a single traffic law. The gas pedal was squeezed between my foot and the floor board the entire way.
What was it about me that made people think I was for sale?
My mother thought I could be used as payment for her fucking habits. Owen and his family seemed to think that ten-thousand dollars could buy him a night of rape and attempted murder at my expense. Owen may have seen the shy Abby in the past—the one whose skin was always covered, who kept to herself out of self-protection. He had no fucking clue who he was dealing with now. I wasn’t going to curl into a corner. I was done feeling sorry for myself. This shit wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t something I’d asked for.
I was no fucking victim, and I refused to be bought.
Fuck. This. Shit!
I peeled down the shell road that led to the Fletchers’ compound. The Sheriff’s squad car was already parked in the driveway by the main house. Owen’s blue Chevy was on the side of the house by his private entrance.
A chill ran down my spine at the thought of them witnessing me making it clear that I wouldn’t be purchased, by them or anyone else. Ten-thousand dollars may have bought the Fletchers a lot of things, but it couldn’t buy me. I knew one thing for sure at that point: Owen was determined to treat me like the whore he thought I was by taking what he thought he was entitled to and then making sure he paid for it.
I didn’t take my foot off the gas when I tore into the Fletchers front yard. I started with a few 360s, making sure I used every bit of the thick heavy truck tires to destroy Bethany Fletcher’s award-winning roses, plant beds, retaining walls, and manicured lawn. I hit a few sprinkler heads and mini-geysers of water shot out of the ground and into the sky, raining a thick muddy fountain down onto the windshield. I turned on the windshield wipers, spreading the mud over the windows before clearing enough of it to see through the blurred coating of brown sludge.
I kept going even after there was no grass left. Each turn of my wheel kicked up more mud, caking it onto the sheriff’s car and the pristine white siding of the house. By the time I pulled back onto the road, the front yard looked like a good ol’-fashioned redneck muddin’ hole.
I threw the truck in park and grabbed the envelope, the matches and the bottle of lighter fluid from the passenger seat. The envelope felt hot, as if its evil intentions were burning a hole in my hand. I laughed.
It was about to get a whole lot fucking hotter.