“You must be Lake.”
I looked up at him and nodded. The first thing I noticed was the crazy Einstein hair. He’d be handsome without it. Next were his green eyes at least ten times lighter than mine. So light they were unsettling, almost scary in contrast to his skin. It was tanned dark and a little red. I could see a tan line peeking out the low hang of his shorts and it told me that his natural skin color was paper white. He had to spend all day in the sun. “Yeah,” I finally said, processing him. “You must be Hunt.”
He hopped out of the truck and pulled the shorts up on his narrow hips as he came to me. “Yeah. Come on. I’ll help you with your shit.”
Helping me with my shit involved taking my bag while I rolled the suitcase and tossing it onto a chair once we got into the trailer. It was bigger than I thought it would be with two full bedrooms but it was messy and cramped. Some walls were chipped, grey and unpainted but then others were lime green out of nowhere. There were crushed cans of Keystone Light in every direction, on every surface.
“That’s her cleaning for you,” Hunt said.
I turned to him and saw the wry, crooked smile on his lips. I gave as much a look of amusement as I could muster and took irrational comfort in the fact that he had a sense of humor I could relate to for at least that second. It was the first thing to make me feel even a hair more comfortable since I got in. He tossed me a can of beer from a cooler but went ten minutes or so before talking again.
“Hey, man,” he said. I turned to him. I laughed a little on the inside. I was pretty sure no one had ever called me “man” before. “I know you didn’t want to come back here. I wish you didn’t have to. I’m sorry about what they put you through. Both of them. But she…” Hunt winced, like talking sucked and he hated ever having to do it. “Trish is just trying to get us away and then when she does, she’s going to make it right. She can get mean but she’s a good person. He...” Hunt made a face and rubbed the back of his neck. I knew he was struggling to say something about his dad. Dean, who had beaten someone with a bat and put him in a coma. The one who had Trish scared all the time. I had been sending her the money so she could save up and escape him but every time we almost reached the mark, something happened. The first time, she said she needed enough money to bring Hunt. The second time, she said Dean found the wad of cash she hoarded and went ballistic. The third time, there was a leak to fix. There were tons of excuses but after awhile, I was just sending her money so she’d leave me alone for a couple months. I hated being out with my friends, laughing, having a good time when suddenly, a pang of anxiety shrunk my ribs, squeezed my heart. I know I went pale sometimes because Dara liked to point it out. I hated thinking about Trish, dreaded her contact. But the one time I blocked her on Facebook, she emailed my school address. She started to get volatile after that one, latching onto the idea that I thought I was better than her, despite the fact that she made me.
I started full on hating her by the time I was at FIT. I quit Facebook by then and lied that I wasn’t going to college. I said Caroline had no money because of the divorce and I had to work. But Trish always found a way to contact me and somehow remind me, if I was acting distant, that she knew my nice rich lady’s address. And since she did know where Caroline lived, I just tried to keep her happy and quiet however I could, realizing that it was my fault for even opening up the Pandora’s box in high school, and being grateful that Trish sometimes gave me up to four months between contact.
But things went haywire when she found out I was in college. She was furious and her logic pinballed everywhere. I was wasting the Pike’s money, I should be giving her the money, I was having the time of my life while she was trying to run for hers. She said I could probably afford to give her more money than I was sending. Some of it was meant to appease Dean, after all, so he’d be nicer. But most of it was for her savings to run way. She accused me of using my funds to date and drink and have sex when I should be donating every penny I could to her cause. Dean was getting worse and worse and I was just letting her suffer through it because I thought I was better, that only I deserved a good life. Every email grew more hysterical and they started coming with more frequency, so desperate and unhinged that after every one, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
Worse, I couldn’t unload it all on Callum and let him comfort me in the way only he could. I’d hidden Trish and my stupidity from him for so long that I was afraid of how he’d react if I finally told him and he finally realized the crazy I’d let into my life. Our lives. At the points that I truly couldn’t handle the stress without feeling like I might die, I’d call Callum and, under the guise of being late on an assignment or being the worst sewer in class, would have him comfort me. It helped to hear his voice and sometimes, on that fire escape, see his face. But of course, we were never talking about the same thing because he never knew. I was lying to him so hard and I felt like complete shit about it. But thanks to him and friends and the fact that I lived in a city packed with twenty-four-hour distraction, I survived every email.
Until the one that sent me my own dorm address.
It was Dean’s work. He had found out I was in college. He had found out that I’d been sending more money than he had been seeing. He was ready to kill, Trish said. He was bitter about the life I was living while I let my family toil in poverty. He was furious that Trish was hiding money from him because he was entitled to that money.
He was threatening to come to New York and get me.
I tried my best to do damage control. I called. I sent money and I scrambled to get everything they asked of me like I was on a high stakes scavenger hunt playing for my life. But in the end, they weren’t satisfied. They said I didn’t deserve to live the way I did. I was one of them and if I wasn’t going to take care of them, I didn’t deserve what I had. I was bad and dirty. An evil, selfish person. I was going to be the reason the Pikes got their nice things taken away.
The demand for me to go to Virginia went on for months and as terrified as I was, I still refused.
But then Dean called one night. It was summer by then and I was spending time with Callum at the townhouse, so we could be near Caroline. Trish had been the one to call at first. She was in hysterics, pleading, crying things I couldn’t understand before she screamed and got the phone ripped from her. And that was when I heard the voice of the man she’s been telling me such awful things about for so long. It was throaty, gravelly and it warbled out at me with such fire that half of what I heard was spit hitting the receiver. “You’re going to come back here, little girl, and you’re going to stay here or I swear to God, I’m going to kill you and that fairy godmother of yours. I promise. I will do it with a smile on my face unless you get your ass back here with everything I asked for, you ungrateful little bitch.”
I was shaking so hard the phone just trembled out of my hand when the line went dead. I don’t think I even hung up. I sat there with no air in my lungs and my jaw rattling in my head. I didn’t have any coherent thoughts for what felt like hours but when I finally did, they were of no relief.
I imagined what I’d do if Caroline or Callum were ever hurt. I felt my soul shatter to pieces when those four men attacked Callum in the park and that was already my fault. If I let him get hurt again, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I let my dark mind imagine the worst of what Dean could do and when I saw images of Caroline and Callum in pools of their own blood in their bedrooms, I thought about killing myself.
I brought this upon them. I was born from trash and I was, piece at a time, flinging that trash into their lives without them even knowing. I should’ve never spoken to Trish. I should’ve never entertained her demands. I was an idiot sixteen-year-old when it started and I’d let it go on for so long because I couldn’t bear to tell anyone about the colossal mistake and massive web of lies I’d been caught in from the day I started living in the Pike townhouse. They didn’t deserve any of it. Because of me, they were going to be punished for being good. I couldn’t let that happen.