She looked away, down her long, slender legs in their scuffed motorcycle boots.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?” Elliot’s voice was soft, gentle.
She gave a dismissive shrug. “It’s not a big deal.”
“You sure about that?”
She looked at him again. A hollow ache pulsed in her sternum. It’d been a long time since anyone but Julie had treated her like a human being.
She cleared her throat. “So my dad used to hit me. No biggie.”
Elliot’s eyes widened. “It seems like a big deal to me.”
A bark of laughter fought out of her throat. “I deserved it. That’s what my mom always told me—I antagonized him. I was always messing up. He’d overhear me talking about some party on the phone, or he’d catch me coming out of school with my skirt hitched up higher than was allowed. There was always one reason or another.” She kept her eyes down, away from the therapist, twisting a lock of hair around one finger.
Elliot crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s never right for someone to hurt you. No matter what you do. You know that, right?”
Parker scoffed. “Well, apparently the cops thought the same thing. Because he’s in prison now. Problem solved, right?”
Elliot scratched his nose. “Julie mentioned an attack.”
Of course Julie would sell her out like that. “Yep. The turning point. The night the cops came and took him away.”
“Can you describe that night?”
She shrugged. “He snapped. Went berserk. And this happened.” She gestured to her face and then tried to laugh, like it didn’t matter, but of course it did. Of course it mattered that her once perfect face now looked like this.
She remembered the party, remembered Julie finding her in Nolan’s bedroom, bombed out of her mind. That was the night he’d slipped her an Oxy—she’d never done that drug before. “Come on, I’m taking you home,” Julie had said.
Parker had begged her not to. “What if my dad is up? Can’t I just stay at your place?”
Julie had bit her lip; it was before she’d told Parker her secret. “He won’t be up. You’ve snuck in before. Just be really quiet and sleep it off.”
She remembered getting out of Julie’s car and walking shakily toward her house. But she actually didn’t remember much of what happened once she got inside. Still, she’d seen her dad angry enough times to fill in the blanks.
“It was awful, wasn’t it?” Elliot said gently.
Parker stared at her hands in her lap.
“And what happened after that? You were in the hospital, right?”
Jesus, had Julie told him everything?
“And then your dad was in prison, I believe? How did you feel about that?”
Parker snorted. “What do you think?” Then her gaze shifted to the window. “My mom hates me for it. She thinks that night was my fault. Maybe it was. But it was his fault, too.”
“Your dad’s?”
“No.” Her voice caught. “M-my friend’s.”
“What do you mean?”
Parker shut her eyes. Nolan’s face swam in her mind. She considered not saying anything, but she’d come so far already. “I had another best friend besides Julie. That night, the night of the attack, he gave me Oxy, even though he knew my dad would kill me if he ever caught me high.”
Elliot frowned. “Why would your friend do that?”
Parker’s shoulders shot up and then down. “That’s Nolan for you. Sometimes he played God just for the hell of it.”
Elliot squinted. “Nolan . . . Hotchkiss?”
Parker stared at him, her heart rate picking up. “Did you know him?”
Elliot shook his head. “Just what I’ve read in the papers. How have you been holding up?”
Parker leaned back in the chair and hugged one of the jacquard pillows to her chest. “I didn’t exactly love the guy.”
Elliot frowned slightly. “So you weren’t friends at the end?”
“No way. He wouldn’t even look at me after everything happened.”
“Did you go to the funeral?”
Parker shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, it’s not like I wanted him to get hurt. But am I ready to, like, hold a candlelight vigil? Not so much.” A shudder ran up her spine. “All the crying and histrionics. It’s been . . . bringing back bad memories.”
Elliot nodded slowly. “That’s not unusual.”
“It’s not?”
Elliot looked down at his notepad. “Julie mentioned once that you have spells. Headaches. Panic attacks. How often are you having those?”
She shrugged. “A few times a week. The headaches come and go. The panic attacks . . . those happen when something startles me. Loud noises, sudden movements. Cars backfiring. That kind of thing. And sometimes it’s hard for me to remember things. There are huge gaps. . . .”
“That sounds a lot like post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Which shouldn’t be surprising, given all you’ve been through.”