The Dark Light of Day

  is it?” Owen trailed his tongue over my earlobe, his hot breath almost making me wretch. I stretched my neck aside, pulling away as much as I could. I screamed until he covered my mouth with one large filthy hand and began to pull me backward into the dark. I pressed my feet down into the dirt, trying to hold my ground.

  Where was he trying to take me?

  With his hand still over my mouth, he hoisted me up with his forearm under my breasts, dragging me over the jagged rocks of the seawall. I lost one boot, then the other. My knife was securely tucked in the last one. Still, I refused to let up on my struggle.

  The rocks sliced painful cuts on the soles of my feet. With my arms locked to my sides, I tried to use my elbows to dig into his ribs. It did nothing more than annoy him. He was too big, too powerful. He just turned and lifted me, carrying me like a suitcase tucked under his arm. His other hand never left my mouth.

  My heart raced. Every vein inside me throbbed in panic.

  Jake! I need you! Was my primary thought.

  I did the only other thing I could think of, I bit down as hard as I could, digging my teeth all the way into the flesh of Owen’s hand. His blood instantly flooded my mouth, tasting of liquor and copper.

  “Motherfucker!” he shouted. But, he never loosened his grip, and he never missed a step.

  Hot tears streamed down my face.

  “You think that’s going to change anything?” He spoke with a playful tone piled on top of his menacing laugh. I knew now that this was just a game to him, with rules I didn’t have any hope of understanding.

  I screamed into his hand, blowing his blood into my nose, breathing it into my lungs. I coughed and choked but didn’t stop the onslaught of teeth into skin. I bit into him again, only this time he released me. I spun around, trying to gain some footing on the uneven sand only to be met with the wrecking ball of his fist smashing into my right cheek. It crunched under the pressure of the blow, spraying the blood from his hand all over my face. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before, like my head had exploded. My entire body vibrated as my legs collapsed under me and I fell onto the beach.

  “Fuck, Abby. Look at what you made me do!” Owen scolded me like I was a child who’d knocked over my dinner plate at the table. “If you’d just behave yourself, it wouldn’t have to be like this.”

  Words I’d heard before and had hoped to never hear again.

  Owen paused and let out a deep sigh. “Either way, baby, it’s gonna be real special.”

  I drifted in and out of consciousness after that punch.

  Truth be told, I wished he would have knocked me out cold.

  Owen took both of my feet in his hands and dragged me under a palm tree leaning over the water. I couldn’t open my right eye, the vision in my left had begun to blur. I kicked my legs aimlessly as hard as I could, hoping to hit something or anything of Owen’s that would cause him to stop. Either my kicks were so weak they had no effect on him, or my perceived kicks were purely a product of my subconscious still willing me to fight.

  He dropped to his knees, hovering over me. His sweat dripped onto my forehead like water torture. His pungent body odor mixed with the smell of the salt in the air. I spent the last bit of fight I had left trying to keep my knees together when he pushed my shorts down off my legs, shoving his hands between them and holding my thighs open with his elbows. He hooked his fingers through the crotch of my underwear, ripping them off in one swipe, groaning when his fingers brushed over my sex. He brought my panties up to his nose and sniffed. His jaw tightened. The thick vein in his neck throbbed. His rage erupted.

  “I can fucking smell him on you, you fucking whore!” he roared.

  He tossed them blindly into the canal. He used his knees to keep my legs spread open, then positioned himself between them.

  This is really happening...

  I tried to scream, but all that came out was a weak groan. A wave of nausea washed over me. I turned my head to the side, and I threw up into the sand, choking on the chunks of fried chicken as they came back up.

  Had it been only an hour since I was with Jake? Was it possible?

  Because now I was in hell. With the devil himself.

  Owen didn’t seem to notice the vomit, and if he did, he didn’t seem to care. With one motion, he pulled down his jeans and freed himself of his boxers. He forced one hand under my back, yanking me closer to him, and with the other hand he thrust himself inside me. I could feel the grit of the sand from the beach tearing at my insides like shards of glass. The burning was like nothing I’d ever experienced from external touch. This wasn’t like my skin was being ignited.

  I cried out.

  This time, I was the flame. The pain was blinding. All I saw was white.

  I couldn’t make myself believe what was happening. As a product of the most fucked up home in some deviant God’s creation, I was being faced with the one thing I’d managed to avoid. This can’t be happening. I kept telling myself over and over again. This can’t be happening.

  Only, it was happening. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

  The pain was worse than when my mother carved me up like a fucking Thanksgiving turkey. It was worse than being stabbed.

  Worse than being beaten.

  Worse than anything.

  I cried out again and again as he entered me. Every sound from my mouth was answered with a blow from his closed fist. “Don’t fucking cry, you bitch,” he spat, thrusting harder, punishing me. “I know you like it.”

  He closed his eyes and moaned. When he opened his mouth, I could see strands of saliva connecting his top and bottom teeth. I tried to scream again, I wanted someone to hear me, but this time, no words came out. “I heard you moan like the whore you are when you fucked Jake tonight. I know this shit turns on girls like you. So, moan, you fucking bitch!” With a twist of his hips, he sliced into me like a serrated knife. The more I tried to resist, the more forceful his thrusts became.

  I could no longer feel my limbs.

  Owen suddenly pulled out of me, scraping my insides like sandpaper, flipping me over onto my stomach like I was a rag doll. With one hand on the back of my head, he shoved my face into the wet sand. “That’s what you fucking get for trying to scream.” His next thrust sent painful shockwaves through my body, I’m pretty sure I lost consciousness for a minute or two.

  I was being torn apart from the inside.

  I didn’t know how much more I could take. My body was shutting down. I wasn’t gasping for breath anymore. Only small pulls of air kept my heart pulsing slowly, deep within my chest.

  “It fucking hurts, doesn’t it?” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Bet Jake didn’t fuck you in the ass!” Taking fistfuls of hair, he yanked and pulled for leverage until he yanked hard enough to rip out patches of hair and scalp. It made the same sound as a stubborn zipper. “You see now, don’t you? A part of you is mine now.” He almost giggled when he whispered those words. I could smell him even through the sand. I could smell and taste my own blood and vomit. I could actually feel my insides coming apart as every grain of sand ground against them.

  My mind wandered to the news reels I’ve seen where people describe the aftermath of a tornado: It was a surprise… sounded like a death train… left everything broken and twisted in it’s wake… almost killed…scared to death…lost everything…would never be the same…

  I’m not going to survive this.

  I opened my mouth to scream into the ground. Instead, I welcomed wet sand into my lungs, gagging until I dry heaved and forced even more of the beach into my throat.

  I’m going to die.

  I was never going to see Jake again. Just when I thought I finally had something I could trust, something real, it was all being taken from me.

  By force.

  How stupid I was to think I could ever be happy. I was being punished for wanting more than what I had been dealt. I was going to die here. I lifted my head from the sand in one last attempt to stay alive.
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  Owen flipped me back over and pressed his hands into my chest forcefully to steady himself. I felt the crack of my ribs and heard bones snap. He kept talking, but now, his voice was just a muffled sound in the distance.

  Smaller background noises seemed amplified. A nearby cricket chirping. The rustle of palm fronds in the wind. The splash of mullet jumping into the canal.

  Help, please someone... help.

  Instead of help, I received only more blunt force, more blinding agony across my battered face.

  And then, I died.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DEATH DIDN’T DRAW ME INTO ITS EMBRACE that night, although I truly believed that it had. I’d rather have been dead than have to be the fucking victim again. I'd rather have been dead than hold the knowledge of what happened, to have the power to see those images whenever my thoughts felt like wondering beyond the walls I’d built. All the reminders of the blows to my face and body would come with them, the revisiting of the horrific intrusion inside of me.

  It was too much to ever think that I could be happy.

  I wasn’t the happy ending type, after all. I was the fucked-up kid that fucked-up shit happened to. Why had I ever thought I deserved more?

  I didn’t know how long I’d lain there, didn’t know if it was day or night. I didn’t open my eyes for hours. I kept them shut and wished for a quick death. I thought if I concentrated hard enough I could will myself into oblivion. People like me were only meant to feel pain and suffering, I opened my eyes —or, I should say, I opened my eye.

  And pain I felt.

  I was in my room. Jake’s room. Our room. That was all I could make out before having to shut out the harsh rays of daylight. My mouth was dry and cracked, and seemed glued shut. One of my nostrils was clogged. I couldn’t catch my breath. I used my swollen purple fingers to pick the dried blood and scabbing from my lips so I could open my mouth to take a deep breath. It felt like glass shattering inside me.

  How did I get back here?

  Did someone save me?

  No, someone hadn’t saved me. Someone moved me.

  He moved me.

  A wave of nausea came over me. Unable to stand and run to the bathroom, I tried to wretch onto the floor beside the bed, in the process unclogging a dried blood-filled nostril, sending chunks of black and streams of fresh red into the bile on the side of the mattress.

  So much for puking on the floor.

  Exhausted from what couldn't have been more than a few minutes of consciousness, I drifted back off to sleep lying upon the mess I just created.

  The next time I awoke, it was night, and I needed to use the bathroom. My legs wouldn’t cooperate. The second I tried to stand, I started to go down again. I tried to catch myself on the nightstand, but my arms weren’t strong enough. I fell chest-first onto the floor. A tingling sensation in my spine erupted into a tearing sensation from my neck to my ass. There was no way I was going to be able to walk the twenty feet or so to the bathroom.

  So, I crawled.

  With only the support of my forearms, I slowly dragged my own meat-bag of a limp body across the cold ceramic tile floor inch by agonizing inch. I left a bloody dirt trail from my bed to the bathroom. I don’t know how long it took. It seemed like days, years, an eternity. In another turn of universal cruelty, once I finally got there, I discovered that the bathroom door was shut. I summoned every inch of determination I still had to reach a shaky, nearly-useless arm up to the door handle. I leaned on it, forcing the door open and falling to the bathroom floor like a broken rag doll.

  I needed to see what he’d done, to know what I was dealing with.

  I gathered my strength and slowly pushed myself to my knees. In one huff, I launched myself up onto my feet, grabbing the countertop to regain my balance and hold myself up. I had to lean into the counter so far my chest was almost in the sink. I used my elbow to nudge the light on.

  What I saw in the mirror, the girl staring back at me, wasn’t me at all.

  My eyes were both as black as night, with smudges of purple and yellow. My usually-pale skin was unrecognizable under the red stains of blood. Blue and yellow bruising extended all the way down my cheeks along my jaw. My copper hair was slicked back and caked with dark crimson chunks. I ran my fingers over my lips, flinching at my own touch. The tank top I wore was smeared with dirt and vomit. I was naked from the waist down. Streams of red ran along the inside of my legs, like thick veins that spilled over onto my feet. I opened my mouth as much as I could in order to press a finger inside to feel for my teeth. As far as I could tell, they were all there.

  I need Jake.

  When I was eight years old, my mother’s drug dealer beat her to within an inch of her life. She looked very much like how I looked now, except she was unconscious and in a hospital bed for over two weeks. When she was released, I was so happy to finally have her home. To have her all to myself, sober for once. That had to be her rock bottom. Almost dying had to be reason for quitting and even more of a reason to start being a real mom to me. I convinced myself it was going to be a new start for all of us.

  I sat in the front of their yellow station wagon on the bench seat, between my dad, who was driving, and my mom, who was in the passenger seat, on the way home from the hospital. I was beaming. After everything we had been through, I had reason to believe that we were going to be a real family.

  We were three blocks down the road from the hospital when Mom asked me to hold one end of a rubber tie-off while she shot up right there in the front seat.

  That was the first and last time I allowed myself real hope for a family…until Nan.

  Nan...

  I let out a scream that could have woken the dead, igniting the fire of pain within every cell of my body. I didn’t care. Pain was what I was used to. Hurt and disappointment and fucked-up-ness were normal for me. I screamed louder. Something in my throat felt like it popped, and blood rose in my throat and into my mouth. I sank down onto the floor of the bathroom and curled up into fetal position. The blood, too much to swallow, flowed out from my mouth and onto the tile, creating rivers of red in the grout. I wasn’t throwing it up. I was just releasing it.

  Dragging myself up onto the toilet wasn’t an option. I had no strength left. Urine came out of me in burning waves of agony, causing me to see what looked like TV snow behind my eyelids.

  My life was my pain, and there was so much more to come.

  It was then that I made the decision. A decision I always knew I might have to make at some point in my life, but had somehow doubted I’d ever have the strength to actually carry out.

  Owen was going to die.

  When Jake returned, I was going to tell him what happened. Every explicit, gory detail. I was going to awaken the monster within.

  It wasn’t like I could call the authorities. In Coral Pines, Owen’s family was the authorities. The mayor, the DA, the county judge, the lowly sheriff— all were Fletchers, born and bred. They wouldn’t help me.

  Jake would.

  My breath quickened – not from the pain anymore, but from the dark satisfaction of my decision. A small maniacal laugh escaped my lips, and I clutched my ribs that felt like they were being broken again and again with each sound I made.

  I let it all come.

  Jake is going to kill Owen.

  In between the throws of unbearable agony and the fits of insane laughter, the thought was comforting. It made the pain almost bearable.

  Almost.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK P.M., and all of the lights inside Coral Pines High School were off. I didn’t want to turn any of them on for fear of drawing attention to myself. What I was there to do didn’t require light, anyway. The red glow from the exit signs above every doorway and my tiny keychain flashlight allowed me to see just enough for to find my way through.

  Even in the absence of students, the school still smelled the same as it always did: like chemicals from the dry erase markers mixed with
stale air and a faint smell of body odor wafting from the gym. It would be another couple of months before the students