“His car?” I ask, and Sebastian takes off running. I’m right on his heels. We race to the parking lot where students typically park, up one aisle and down another, but Vic’s black Chevy is nowhere—
“There!” Sebastian spots it at the end of the next row. We run to either side.
It’s empty. I slam my palms to the hood. Where else could they be?
“Classroom?”
“No, I checked. The security gates to the main corridor are down. Only the locker rooms are open.”
“The field?”
We take off running again, through the parking lot, around the building, across the main visitors’ lot, and through the gate to field. The Fusion dancers, cheerleaders, and color guard are clumped up under the goalpost.
“Anybody seen Ashley?” I shout.
Brittany, a girl in my grade, smiles up at me. “Hey, Derek.”
I snag her by her arms. “Have you seen my sister? I gotta find her. Now.”
Brittany pulls away. “Um, she and Victor Patton took off together, like, twenty minutes ago.” And then she frowns. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Vic’s got his eye on her. For points.”
Brittany shuts her eyes and groans. “I’ll help you look.”
Ten more minutes go by. I’ve got cheerleaders checking the girls’ bathroom, Sebastian checking the woods that border the school, and I’m about to lose my damn mind when shouts go up at the other side of the field. I whip around, find Sebastian and Vic in some kind of shoving match. It takes me a few seconds to notice, to connect the dots. The cheerleaders, the dancers…they aren’t shouting at the two fighting guys. No, they’re all running under the bleachers.
I take one step, two…and then I’m running at full speed.
SEVEN YEARS AGO
BELLFORD, OHIO
“Ashley, stop that before you hurt yourself!” Mom shouts at Ashley from the other room. She’s been running around the living room with thick fluffy socks on her feet, trying to skate on the bare floor.
“Your move,” Justin prods, somehow ignoring Ashley’s antics.
Chess is ridiculously dull. I move another pawn that he immediately murders in cold blood.
“Come on, you guys! Skate with me.” Ashley slides into the table where we’ve got our board set up, scattering pieces.
“Ash, will you stop? Look what you did.” Justin chases a queen that rolled under the table while I retrieve my pawns.
They’re probably trying to escape before they’re all slaughtered or die of boredom.
“Chess is dumb!” she shouts as she runs back to the entry to gather momentum for her next slide.
Justin frowns and replaces the pieces on the board.
“How do you remember where they all were?”
He shrugs. “That’s part of the game. You keep track of where every piece is and what they can do.” His voice cracks, and I laugh once. It happens, like, all the time. He shoves me. “Knock it off and play.”
“She’s right. This is boring.”
Ashley does a kind of cool sideways drift from the center of the room to the sofa.
Justin looks at me, adjusts his glasses, and shrugs. “So go skate if you don’t think you can beat me.”
Beat him? Oh, it’s on now. “I can beat you. Let’s start again.”
We reset the board and start again. Two pawns are already off the board when Ashley blurs past us. This time, her trajectory has her sliding directly toward the tall bookcase in the corner of the room. I’m on my feet before she crashes, but I’m not fast enough. Time sort of freezes and then starts in slow motion. The bookcase bounces off the wall and falls forward, spilling books and pictures on top of her. My feet feel like they’re frozen in concrete.
“Ashley!” Mom runs in from the other room.
There’s this second, the longest second of my life, of complete silence. There’s nothing—not even the hum the house makes. Then all three of us are hefting the bookcase up and out of the way, moving books and all the other crap aside.
Ashley’s on the floor, blood dripping from a gash on her forehead, and suddenly, my own forehead hurts, too.
“Justin, first aid kit!” Mom shouts, and he takes off running.
I fall to my knees next to her. Ashley’s not moving, but her eyes are open, and they latch on to mine, her terror a living, breathing thing.
“Hey, April,” I say. “You’re supposed to say ‘Cowabunga’ when you wipe out.”
She tries to laugh and move and then cries. “Mommy! It hurts!”
“I know. Don’t worry. We’ll fix you all up.” Mom tickles her feet, and when Ashley wriggles both, Mom squeezes her eyes shut.
We spend hours in the hospital emergency room, Dad rushing in soon after we get there. There are X-rays and stitches and some loud scolding that gets Ashley all sniffly, but soon, we’re on our way back home with takeout bags and a new movie to watch. Ashley’s cuddled up on the sofa between me and Justin, a bandage over her stitches.
She falls asleep before the movie’s credits finish. Carefully, I put my arm around her and adjust her so she’s leaning on me.
I look into the corner where Dad fastened the bookcase to the wall with two thin cables. Lemon cleaner tickles my nose. There’s no more blood on the floor, but I swear I still see it. My forehead throbs again, and I rub away the pain. Dad’s kicked back in his favorite chair. Mom’s curled up on her side, and Justin’s reading a book. Carefully, so carefully, I lean over and kiss the bandage on Ashley’s head and then settle back to watch the movie.
I don’t know if any of that kiss-the-boo-boo stuff really works, but if there’s a shot, why not take it?
TWO YEARS AGO
BELLFORD, OHIO
They won’t let me near her. Jesus, this is my sister, my fourteen-year-old sister. They say they have to preserve evidence.
My sister. Evidence.
I want to tear Victor Patton’s head off his body with my bare hands. But he’s safe in the back of a cop car, hands cuffed behind his back.
Forty or fifty people are now standing around, aiming their cell phones at her, and I lose my shit. “Turn them off!” I shout over the roar inside my head, this screaming white noise that drowns out everything but my own thoughts. “Turn them off now!” They stare at me like I’m about to detonate, and I am. Why doesn’t anybody get that?
Cursing, I stalk to the ambulance. “That’s my sister. What did he do to her? Tell me!”
“Calm down.” A paramedic says. “We’re taking her to the hospital. She needs to be processed—”
That word send an icy chill down my back. “Processed? What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s standard procedure in sexual assault ca—”
“Sexual assault,” I repeat, the words cutting deep trenches into my soul, yet my brain can’t seem to interpret them. Sexual assault. Sexual assault. I repeat the words until they play by themselves in my head, and suddenly, I whip around with one goal. One mission.
And that’s to end Victor Patton’s miserable little life.
“Whoa, whoa, stop.” Strong hands hold me back, but I’m too blinded by rage to get that.
“Let go of me. He raped my sister! I’ll kill him!”
“Friendly advice, son. Never threaten to kill somebody in front of a cop.” The hands tighten to the point of pain. “Calm yourself down, or I’ll put you in cuffs, too.”
“That’s my sister!”
“I know. You want to help her, get your temper under control. You can’t help her if you’re under arrest.”
I close my eyes and suck in oxygen, but it does little to kill the urge to rip Victor’s face to shreds.
“Good. If I lift my hands up, can I trust you not to move? Because if you move, I will have to assume you’re dangerous and arrest you.”
I nod and open my eyes.
“What’s your name, son?” the cop asks, hands still clamped on me.
I exhale slowly. “Derek Lawrence. That’s my sister.” I stab a finger toward the ambulance.
He slowly lift his hands. “I need you to tell me what happened. And then, you’re gonna want to call your parents.”
My parents. I rake both hands through my hair. Holy shit. How am I supposed to tell them Ashley was… Oh, God.
I can’t remember getting to the hospital. Suddenly, I’m just there. The cop who’d held me back earlier is gone and in his place is a pair of detectives. They make me sit in a waiting room, Sebastian at one end, me at the other. When had he gotten here? How had he gotten here?
They ask us question after question after question, and I still haven’t seen Ashley. The detective wears this wrinkled suit and smells like an entire pack of cigarettes.
“I want to know more about this scavenger hunt. Did you boys both play?”
Sebastian shakes his head while I lower mine. He refused to play from the very beginning. Didn’t care how much shit we gave him over it, just wouldn’t play.
“Are you and Victor Patton friends?”
“We play on the same team. But we’re not friends.” I’ve had enough. “Just tell me how she is,” I demand. “Nobody will tell me. Was she…” I break off, unable to say the word. “How bad did he hurt her?”
Before he can answer, the door bursts open, and my parents rush in.
“Derek!” Dad’s at my side in two strides.
“Where is she? What happened? Is she okay?” Mom’s sobbing out the words, mascara running down her cheeks.
I stand up, hug her so tight.
“Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence? I’m Detective Lansing.”
“Our daughter. Where is she?” Mom turns back to head out the door, but the detective bars her way.
“They’re still treating her, Mrs. Lawrence.”
“I need to see her!”
“You will when they’re ready. Right now, your daughter must be examined and evidence collected.”
Dad’s spine snaps so straight, I could hear it crack. “Evidence of what, exactly?” His voice is suddenly shaky.
Detective Lansing turns to Dad and answers bluntly. “Of rape, Mr. Lawrence.”
Dad makes a sound like he’s been gut-punched, like air gushing out of a popped tire. A second later, he picks up the chair closest to him and heaves it at the wall, where a bunch of magazines and leaflets hang on a wooden rack. Dad’s big; I get my height from him. But he isn’t violent. Even when he’s mad at us, he’s never scary.
But right now, he’s terrifying.
The second cop leaves Sebastian in his corner and hurries over, muscling Dad down into another chair. “Mr. Lawrence, I understand your anger. But right now, we have to let the medical team do their jobs.”
Dad finally remembers me sitting there. “Derek! Is this more of that scavenger hunt bullshit? Is it?” When I don’t answer, he leaps to his feet, eyes wild, and has my shirt bunched in his hands before either detective can twitch. “Answer me! Do you know who did this?”
Oh, I know. And I am going to gut him the first chance I get.
It takes a few minutes, but Lansing’s partner gets Dad back into a chair and slightly calmer.
“The scavenger hunt. What can you tell me about that?” Detective Lansing asks, flipping pages in his notebook.
Mom cries in a chair next to Dad.
I swallow hard, tugging my shirt back into place. “It’s a team thing,” I try to explain. “I told the team. I told everybody Ashley was off-limits.”
“Derek, I swear to God—” Dad says through clenched teeth.
“He did, Mr. Lawrence,” Sebastian adds. “I was there.”
Lansing turns his balding head in his direction. “There for what?”
Sebastian explains the whole ugly story. He tells the detective about the scavenger hunt, about the points and how we collected them, about how my parents flipped out over Ashley being targeted, and how I lost it and tackled Victor for what he said about Ashley. “If he hadn’t have done it, I would have. Vic is a real ass—uh, jerk.”
Lansing exchanges a look with his partner, a younger guy with a better suit and much better hygiene. “Stay with Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence. I’ll take the kid through it again.”
He does.
I lose track of how much time we spend with the detectives. The roar in my head grows louder but not loud enough to muffle the sound of my own conscience.
Why couldn’t you just be nice to her? it keeps asking.
November
19
Ashley
Every day, I wonder, Will this be the day I turn some corner and walk right into him? Will this be the day I have an anxiety attack so bad, I pass out in the middle of the street? Half the people in this town think I’m lying, but nobody is that good an actor. Why would anyone want to be? I want it to stop. I just want all of this to end.
—Ashley E. Lawrence, victim impact statement
NOW
BELLFORD, OHIO
I survived October.
I’m not entirely sure how I did, but I did. Even though I missed the homecoming game, Sebastian totally understood. He told me nobody got assaulted in the stairwells or under the bleachers, nobody had to wear shorts under their skirts, and absolutely nobody got hurt—except for Bruce Bishop, and that’s only because he got sacked in the third quarter.
And then he told me it was all because of me.
So, um, I now have an actual boyfriend.
On Monday morning, I jump out of bed, like literally spring out of it. October is over, and I have a boyfriend, and tonight, we’re going to the movies.
I haven’t been to a movie theater in two years. I don’t like the dark. But I feel like I can do it now. Like maybe I can do anything now.
I feel strong.
That’s because the Raise the BAR campaign has not only seen lots of pledges at my school, it’s now made it into other schools across the district. In fact, the school board president emailed my principal, and we had a meeting about changing the name from Bengals Against Rape to Bellford Against Rape so the entire district can adopt the program.
I’ve been asked to speak at other schools. I’m thinking about it, even though I wasn’t technically able to speak at my school. Every time I do though, I start to breathe harder. Maybe they’ll let Sebastian come with me.
“Ashley! Come on. You’ll be late!”
I glance at the alarm clock next to my bed. I grab my bag, head downstairs for one of the bakery muffins Dad brought home Sunday morning, and skid to a stop. Both of my parents are still home.
“What’s up, guys? Closing the garage today?”
Dad shakes his head. “No, sweetheart. Sit down. We have.…news.”
Uh-oh. By the looks they exchange, I can tell I’m not going to like this news. My heart skips a beat, and I hold my breath. Slowly, I pull out a chair, bracing for impact.
Dad clears his throat. “We…” His voice breaks, and Mom lays a hand over his. “We heard from Carol.”
“Carol, the assistant DA?”
Dad nods. “He’s out, Ash,” he says, shoving out the words like they’re trying to choke him. “Victor. He’s free.”
I try to process the words I just heard. Free. Victor Patton, free? I knew this was coming. I’d prepared myself for it. And now that’s it here and real—no. Just…no.
“But…what about me?” My voice sounds small and…weak.
“I know, baby. I know.” Dad cups a big rough hand around my cheek and catches a tear before it can roll all the way off my face. “He can’t come near you. We have a restraining order. He won’t want to go back to prison, so we’re confident he won’t violate the order.”
“Wha
t if he—”
“He won’t get near you, I promise.” Dad’s lips thin into a straight line. “I want you straight home from school, no hanging out. I want your phone on you at all times. And I need to talk to Sebastian. Is he picking you up?”
Dizzy, I nod and absently wave a hand toward the street. Mom gets up, heads to the front door, and lets Sebastian in. I hear them talking.
A minute later, he’s there, kneeling next to me, his beautiful eyes dark and stormy.
“Sebastian, I’m counting on you to help keep her safe,” Dad says.
He nods gravely.
“Home right after school.”
Wait, no. “We’re going to the movies,” I protest.
Dad shakes his head. “Watch a movie here.”
Sebastian nods. “It’s okay, Ashley. We can go out another time.”
Something deep inside me coils up. I can feel it…the outrage, the fury, this absolute sense of injustice. “No,” I say. And then more loudly. “No. I am not the criminal here!” I stand up, shaking from rage. “It’s not fair. Damn it, it’s not fair.”
“But, Ashley, we’re only—”
I hold up a hand. “I know. And I’m telling you I am done living like a prisoner. He’s the one who should stay home, not me. Come on, Sebas. We’re gonna be late.”
Sebastian nods, and we leave the house.
He has his mom’s car. We’re silent all the way to school, but inside, I’m still seething. He parks the car and cuts the engine. Outside, I see Tara walking up the school’s road, shuffling through a pile of leaves, and I smile. I want that. I want to be able to walk wherever I want, without looking over my shoulder.
“Ash.” He says my name quietly.
Turning to him, I’m kind of shocked to see him wearing his game face, all tough and don’t mess with me. Sebastian is always so careful around me, making sure I know he’d never hurt me, so this is.…confusing.
“Your dad’s right. You need to be extra careful.”
I wave that away, making a sound of frustration. “I get that he wants to protect me. But do you not see how friggin’ unfair this is? This is why we have a justice system! So the victims, the people who already suffered, don’t have to keep suffering every day for the rest of their lives! I’m not doing it, Sebastian. I finally reached a point where I don’t freak out over the scent of somebody’s deodorant, and they let him out? Fuck that!” I slam a fist on his dashboard. It feels so good, I do it again. “Fuck the whole stupid system.”