Authors: Carrie Mac

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Adolescence, #JUV000000

Charmed (6 page)

BOOK: Charmed

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Chapter Eighteen

Dillon is back. Actually, he never went away. Kitty tells me this after she overhears a phone call between Dillon and Barrel.

“Just in case you ever thought he was your boyfriend,” she says. She’s been in a bitchy mood all day, probably her period.

“You don’t mean that,” I say.

“How else do you think Barrel gets his girls?” Her bread comes out hard as a rock. That makes her even more pissed off. “It was the same with me. The attention, the shopping, the whole works.”

“It’s different with Dillon. He’ll come get me when the debt’s paid off.”

“It was with Dillon.” Kitty chucks the bread into the garbage and slams the lid. Barrel hollers at us to shut up. There’s a big hockey game on. He’s got all his boys over to watch. A stack of pizzas came, but we’re not allowed any.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s all part of the game, Izzy.” Kitty sits down. Her voice is a little shaky, like she’s telling me all this against her will. “Me and Dillon. It was the same with me. I lived in that apartment for three months too.”

“You’re lying.”

“Let me guess. For your three-month anniversary he took you to Casa Italiano and then to that motel up on Kingsway.”

Someone scores a goal. Barrel and his boys cheer. I’m so angry I throw my mug at the window above the sink. The window and the mug shatter. Just as I’m reaching for something else to throw, Barrel and a couple of his boys storm in. The boys haul me up and shove my face at the jagged glass.

“You want to get sliced open, huh?” Barrel picks up a shard of glass and presses it to the skin under my eye. The first punch knocks me out.

When I come to, I can’t open my eyes. At first I think he cut them, but I feel with my fingertips. No slices. But so swollen. I’m naked. My ribs are tender all over and it hurts to breathe. My neck is stiff. My lip is fat. I’m in the basement; I can tell by the footsteps overhead and the hum of the furnace. I’ve only been down here once before. Barrel made me and the other girls watch his boys beat up the guy with the goatee. Something about money. He made us watch so that we’d stay afraid.

I am afraid.

Chapter Nineteen

I don’t know how long it was before I could open my eyes. When I could, it was dark. Upstairs there were voices, the muffled laugh track from some cheesy TV show, footsteps crossing from kitchen to living room, someone running up the stairs, then down again. I watched the road outside. There was a lot of traffic. I figured it must be about supper-time, everybody heading home to their normal lives, from normal jobs in offices and factories and warehouses. It was a busy, dirty, wide road. Not many people walked by that route. It’s a mostly industrial part of town. I saw a few guys with lunch kits and hardhats. I waved and waved, but they never looked over, and they couldn’t see me anyway. The basement was dark. Someone had taken away all the lightbulbs.

The smells of Kitty’s famous chili and fresh-baked buns wafted under the door. Later, the stereo went on, there was dancing and partying, something major tipped over, maybe a shelf, or a person. After the longest time, people left; it grew silent upstairs and quiet outside. Time to go.

I found a nail and a brick and a bunch of dirty rags. I tapped the glass until it cracked and then carefully broke away each piece, catching them in the rags so they wouldn’t fall to the floor and smash, waking them up upstairs.

I looked around for something to wear. There was nothing but oily rags and a great big moldy blue tarp. I shoved it through the window ahead of me. It would be better than being naked. I climbed out onto the cold, wet grass, my thigh getting sliced on a piece of glass I missed. It bled really bad, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was going to drape the tarp around me right there, but it made too much noise. I hobbled around to the front of the house, dragging the tarp behind me.

A voice broke the silence. “Psst! Over here!”

It was Cherise, smoking a cigarette on the porch. She threw me a sweater and a pair of pants. “We’ve been taking turns, waiting for you. Your phone rang. It was your mom. She’s looking for you.”

At first I thought she was speaking to me in her and Lena’s secret language.

“My mom?” I said as I painfully shifted from one freezing bare foot to the other, struggling to get the pants on.

Cherise came down the steps to help me and saw all the blood.

“Wait here, I’ll go get a bandage.”

As she opened the front door, a light went on upstairs.

“You’d better go!”

I lifted my arms to put on the sweater, but the pain was so bad I couldn’t do it.

“Just go!” Cherise shoved me into the street. “Run!”

But I couldn’t. I hobbled away as fast as I could and ducked into a doorway. I waited for Cherise to follow me. She didn’t. I saw Barrel drag her back inside, and then all the lights in the house went on.

I limped barefoot to the hospital, clutching the sweater to my naked chest. The night nurse lept up when I dragged myself in.

“Oh, honey.” She put her arms around me. “Let me help you.”

I told the police Barrel’s address, but when they went by an hour after I left, the house was empty, not even an empty beer can left behind.

Rob the Slob was gone too. Word got to Mom through one of the logger’s wives that he was screwing around on her the whole time. That’s why she came home early and was looking for me. Now she was all apologies, all the time.

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

“I’m sorry I went away.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to you.”

“I’m sorry about Rob.”

I didn’t go back to school, even though Mrs. Singh said I was welcome and Mom thought it would be best if things just got back to normal as soon as possible. I tried to explain to her that I didn’t know what normal meant anymore, but she doesn’t get it. She thinks normal is about things: school, friends, clothes, food, home.

I might go back to school in the fall. A different school, though. I might miss Margaret, a lot, but I can’t be her friend right now. And she can’t be mine, even if she does want to be. She came to see me in the hospital. She brought me flowers and a teddy bear and a box of chocolates and a stack of magazines. It’s weird that people bring the same stupidly comforting things whether you’re hospitalized after being beaten and consistently raped for weeks or if you’re just having day surgery.

“My mom doesn’t know,” she said.

“That you’re here? Or what I went through?”

“Either.”

“Go away, Margaret.”

“Please, Izzy? I’m sorry.”

“You and everybody else.”

“I told Amanda I’d pick you over her any day. I told her you were my best friend, not her.”

It’s when she said that that I knew. What a little-girl thing to say, how grade four, how playground, how tea set and dolls.

“That’s right. Were. I’m not your best friend anymore.”

“But you are!”

“No I’m not. Go away, okay? Just go away.”

“But we’ve been best friends since third grade!”

“Well, this isn’t third grade anymore.”

She left in tears. I could hear her sniffling out in the hall, waiting for me to call her back. I flipped through one of the magazines, trying to disappear into the latest Hollywood gossip. When she finally left, I dumped everything she brought into the garbage. Later that day, though, when the cleaning staff came to take away the garbage, I took it all back and tucked the teddy bear under the blankets with me when the hospital lights dimmed for the night.

Chapter Twenty

Mom and I put our stuff into storage, and I flew up north with her, to work as a kitchen apprentice at the logging camp. First a big plane, then a long drive to the ocean, then up in the shuddering floatplane off the water. I saw a moose ambling through an alpine field and a black bear just before we flew over the log sort. The plane landed with a little bounce on the waves and we taxied up to the dock. I climbed out, my breath puffing into the crisp cold morning. The smell of cedar, the calm lapping of the water in the sheltered harbor, the mist climbing the mountains, an eagle circling overhead, a heron taking off from the log boom, its wide blue wings lifting it up to the clouds. For the first time in months I felt normal.

I dumped my bags on my bunk and ran along the boardwalk to the dining hall. As soon as I stepped into that wood-smoke kitchen, I just wanted to crawl into the metal cupboards and sing to hear my own voice echo. So I did. That’s where Mom found me when she finally caught up. She peered in at me singing to myself and laughed. She actually laughed. When I crawled out, I found a big ceramic bowl and the bucket of flour and got busy teaching her how to make bread.

OTHER TITLES IN THE ORCA SOUNDINGS SERIES

Blue Moon
by Marilyn Halvorson

Bull Rider
by Marilyn Halvorson

Death Wind
by William Bell

Fastback Beach
by Shirlee Smith Matheson

The Hemingway Tradition
by Kristin Butcher

Hit Squad
by James Heneghan

Kicked Out
by Beth Goobie

No Problem
by Dayle Campbell Gaetz

One More Step
by Sheree Fitch

Overdrive
by Eric Walters

Refuge Cove
by Lesley Choyce