“Why are you even talking to me?” Erin says. “Now that you can’t get any of the girls here to talk to you, you’re talking to me, the school freak? You must be really desperate. How pathetic.”
Then something crosses his face, something terrifying, a look of such rage and hatred, and for the moment Erin sees herself reflected in his pale eyes, she forgets she’s even human. He is not looking at something human.
Erin feels the pressure in her chest and her feet leaving the ground as he shoves her across the hall and into the lockers. She feels a locker handle dig into the small of her back.
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.” He spits the words in her face. She feels them stick to her skin.
“I can talk to you however I want,” Erin says. She doesn’t know where the words come from. Somewhere down deep, somewhere with the pain and memories and dark corners, but also with light that slices through the shadows, somewhere where fear turns into courage.
“You think I need the bitches at this school to talk to me? You think I want to talk to them?” He is half laughing, half choking. He is verging on hysterical. “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk to you. I can get what I want without talking.”
He pushes her against the lockers with his left hand and grabs her crotch with his right. Through the thick denim of her jeans, Erin can feel his muscular fingers grabbing, tugging, trying to tear through her. It is not sexual. There is nothing sexual about it. He wants to hurt her. He wants to turn her into nothing.
She is back in Seattle. Casper Pennington’s distant eyes look through her. She disappears under the weight of his body. She stops fighting. “No” may have never left her mouth, but her body said it. It is Casper who chose not to hear.
Erin cannot move even though all she wants to do is move. She cannot make him stop. She cannot scream. She cannot cry for help. This is what it is to be caught, to be powerless and frozen, to be turned into nothing. This is when your own body, your own voice, becomes your enemy, when it won’t even listen to you because it’s his now, because he’s stolen it, because he controls it with your own fear.
First, you are an object. Then you are taken. Then you are destroyed and pounded into dust.
Then a sound down the hall, a walkie-talkie the security guards carry around. Eric lets go, but only part of Erin is free.
She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look toward where the sound was coming from, doesn’t look anywhere. She just runs. She moves so fast she can’t think, she can’t feel. She runs out the door and down the street, and even though she isn’t breathing, even though she forgot how, and her bones feel like breaking, and her veins feel like knives, and everything in the world wants to hurt her, everything in her body is a threat, her mind violent static, razor blades, glass, even though her entire existence is a war zone, she runs and runs and runs until she falls through the door of her house, until she lands on her knees, a pile of bruises and broken skin, until she finds the corner where there is at least one thing in the world that is sturdy, and she backs up against it, and Spot arrives, ears erect, just in time to hear the moan escape from Erin’s broken-glass lungs, the sound like a whole soul deflating, a whole life imploding under the pressure of too much gravity, too much weight, elephant bones in a bird-girl’s body, breaking, breaking, breaking.
This is what happens when feelings are stronger than will, when everything that was stuffed away explodes out of the shadows. This is what happens when the feelings win and Erin loses.
She is rocking with the pulse of a bigger heart, her body a metronome, the back of her head banging against the wall as it keeps time, one two one two one two, and Spot to the rescue, nudging Erin with his nose, trying to put himself between her body and the wall, trying to make himself a pillow. She needs impact, something touching, something pounding, something marking the violence of her body existing in this world.
Spot softens the blow with his body. He is a living, breathing cushion. But Erin is not done hurting, not done breaking. She hits her face with her own hand. She hits and hits and hits. She hurts herself because she has to, because everything hurts so much already, because it is the only way to change the hurt, to move it somewhere else, so it will not swallow her up entirely. She has to fight, she has to fight something, and she is the only thing here to fight.
But Spot is there, his sharp teeth so gentle as he takes Erin’s hand in his mouth and pulls it away, like a mother with a wandering puppy and the loose, trusting flesh at the scruff of its neck, and it is this tenderness that ultimately wins, not Erin’s fighting herself, it is Spot wedging his eighty-plus pounds of dog into Erin’s lap, on top of her arms so she can do no more damage, so her only choice is to hold him, to feel the comfort of his weight on top of her, to be silenced and stilled by a creature who is programmed to do nothing but love her.
And that’s when Erin’s mother walks through the front door with her arms full of groceries. In this moment Erin cannot reach the world outside herself, cannot hear the grocery bags fall to the floor, cannot hear the cracks and splats of the eggshells, cannot hear her mother cry, “What happened? What happened?” In this moment Erin is only vaguely aware of her mother’s presence, and she knows nothing of the world inside her, the locked-up place where her mother is screaming too—helpless, powerless, tortured by love, as she kneels beside her unreachable daughter and knows there is nothing she can do to help. She knows she cannot touch her, cannot wrap her in her arms and rock her the way her instincts demand. And Erin cannot even consider that comfort in this moment, cannot see outside her body’s dense world of pain, cannot comprehend that there is anyone in the world who wants to help her, that there is anyone in the world who can.
Spot starts to whimper. He cannot escape Erin’s tight embrace. She won’t let go. She can’t. Her arms are vises that her mother has to carefully pry away.
ROSINA.
“Get over here right now,” Mami growls as soon as Rosina enters the restaurant kitchen.
“I’m not even late!” Rosina answers. In fact, she’s early. She didn’t even put up a fight when Mami told her to come in an hour early to help deep clean the walk-in fridge.
“Your principal called me today,” Mami says.
“What’d she want?” Rosina says coolly, despite the sudden panic in her chest.
“I don’t know yet,” Mami says, her eyes narrow, suspicious. “She left a message that she wanted to talk to me about something important. She said I could call her on her cell phone any time.”
“So why didn’t you call her?”
“I wanted to wait for you to be here.”