The Debt Read online

  The scars matched the ones on my back. Across my ass.

  Simon probably had the same ones.

  The office was a fucked-up place where fucked-up shit went down.

  As bad as my punishments were, I had this sinking fear that when the girls got taken to the office they got something different. Something worse. Carissa said when he took her all he wanted to do was pray with her, but I was pretty sure that was only part of the story. She left the worst of it out.

  There was another thump and then a sob.

  Silence.

  All at once, I couldn’t fucking take it. Not for another night. Another second. He had us so scared we couldn’t stand up for each other. He had us so terrified we couldn’t tell anyone what he did to us. How we were treated.

  For years I’d kept my mouth shut, told myself half the time that I deserved what The Pastor did to me. Or I didn’t deserve any better.

  But I couldn’t sit here, staring at these walls, and pretend nothing was happening. Like I did when Simon got taken. When Carissa got taken.

  The way they pretended nothing was happening when I got taken.

  Not again.

  Because Beth fucking deserved better.

  I charged for the door even though I knew it was locked. Locked on the outside. Like it was every night. We were trapped inside.

  I grabbed the doorknob with both hands and rattled the door as hard as I could, but nothing budged. In this old fucking shithole of a house, the doors had all been reinforced. I braced both feet against the wall and pulled as hard as I could. And then I put my shoulder against the door and pushed as hard as I could. Nothing. Not any movement.

  “What are you doing?” Simon asked.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Like you’re being an idiot.”

  “I need to help her,” I said, straining against the door, counting all the ways I’d made this happen. I knew the art room was a bad idea, but Beth just had to smile at me and I didn’t care about anything but her.

  This was my fault.

  “You gonna fucking help me or not?” I said to Simon, but I knew he wasn’t going to help. He was going to sit at that fucking desk pretending no one was getting hurt in the other room.

  I was so sure of that, that when Simon showed up at my shoulder, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “The hinges,” he said. “They’re on the inside of the door. If we can get those off—”

  “With what?” I asked, even though it was a great fucking idea. “We don’t have any tools in here, Simon.”

  He ran the three steps back to his desk and pulled open his book bag.

  “If you have a screwdriver in there I’ll take back every single shit thing I’ve ever—”

  He pulled out a metal protractor. The thing nerds used in high-level math class. Disappointment bottomed me out.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s what we’ve got.” He pushed me out of the way so he could get down on his knees and start trying to pry open or unscrew or who the fuck knows what to get the hinges off the door.

  I ran to the window, which was locked and sealed. Every kid who came to St. Joke’s figured that out the first night, when they tried to run away from this place. Jacob, a kid who was here when I got here, he broke a window open one night and the cops came and took him away.

  Last I heard he was down in San Bernardino serving four years.

  The door slammed at the end of the hallway, and Simon and I both looked at each other.

  “It’s Beth, isn’t it?” Simon asked. “What’s he doing—”

  “You know what he’s fucking doing,” I sneered, guilt chewing a hole right through me. “Hurry the fuck up.”

  “It’s not…” Simon shook his head. “The hinges have been sealed with something. I can’t do it.”

  I grabbed Simon’s chair, lifting it over my head.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, getting up off his knees, coming at me like I was the problem.

  “I’m going to throw it through the window—”

  “And then what? We’re on the third floor!”

  “I’ll climb down!”

  “You’ll fall and break your neck.”

  “So we do nothing!” I whisper-shouted. “I can’t do nothing anymore! He’s hurting her.”

  “You don’t know that. Not for sure.”

  “What happened when he took you into the office after that shit with the candle?”

  His face got red and he looked away because none of us talked about what happened in that office. And it wasn’t just because he said if we told we’d lose our court placement and go to jail. I mean, we were all scared of that.

  But if we all pretended like it didn’t happen, then we could believe that it didn’t happen. We could just put it away. Hide it someplace where we didn’t look at it, think about it, and never…ever…talked about it.

  It was the only way we could survive this place.

  Not talking about it meant not going crazy with it.

  The sound of a key in the lock of the door made both of us go still. I could feel my blood turn to ice, like it was cracking in my veins. We’d been whispering but we’d still been too loud.

  “Fuck,” Simon breathed, his dark eyes wide. “It’s him.”

  Or worse. Her.

  “I hope so,” I whispered and tiptoed to the far side of the door, the chair still in my hands. I’d fucking kill him if I had to. And her. I’d kill them both.

  I wasn’t some genius like Simon, I didn’t have someone who loved me like Rosa. My future was as shitty as my past. And jail for killing him would be worth it.

  The door eased open and Simon stood at the end of my bed, his wide eyes darting from me to the door and back again. I lifted the chair over my head, wondering how hard I’d have to hit him to kill him. I was pretty big and I would use all of my strength and I’d hit him as many times as it took. I locked my knees. Swallowed down the vomit in my throat.

  I’d done some shit, but nothing like this.

  I saw the toe of a shoe on the floor and I swung the chair in a wide arc around my shoulder, hoping to hit the fucker in the face.

  “Stop!” Simon put his hand up and caught the swing of the chair that I tried to check but couldn’t stop. Simon grunted as the chair hit his shoulder, knocking him back towards the bed.

  I turned, ready to charge, but…it was Rosa at the door.

  Rosa. Out of her room.

  It was so strange I could only blink at her.

  She had her black hood up over her long hair. The baggy sweatshirt she wore pulled taut over her pregnant belly.

  “I’m out,” she whispered. “I’d rather be in jail than here.”

  “How’d you get our door open?” I asked, my voice as low as I could make it. I knew Rosa had a whole history with B and E, but getting out of these rooms was no joke. Not when he locked the door from the outside.

  She held up a key ring with five keys on it. “Fucker’s not as careful as he could be when he’s excited about raping teenage girls.”

  My stomach curdled.

  “Did he just drop them in your room?” Simon asked. “The keys—”

  “You got bigger problems than how I got the keys,” Rosa said. “He just took Beth. You’ve got time before shit gets real.”

  This place needed to be burned down to the ground, and I’d be the guy to do it. Right after I found him and killed him. I’d light a match and watch it all burn.

  And the memory would keep me warm in jail for the rest of my life.

  I stepped past Rosa into the hall. Five doors. Ours was open. So was Rosa and Beth’s. Carissa’s on the other side was opened too. There was another locked and empty bedroom, and then his office at the end of the hall.

  I stepped towards the door, the keys in my hand. They had those colored plastic things around the edges. A different color for each key. All I could think was:

  He has us fucking color-coded?
/>   “Wait,” Simon whispered. “If you try a bunch of keys in the lock he’ll hear you. You need to know which one is the right one.”

  Solid. That was solid thinking. But my fingers were shaking so hard I couldn’t even separate one key from the ring.

  “Hey,” Simon stood beside me, his hand out for the keys. “Let me help you.” I dropped the keys in his hand, never expecting when I woke up three minutes ago that I’d be grateful to him.

  There was a creak on the stairs and we all went totally still.

  The Wife.

  When I first got placed at St. Joke’s I had a baseball bat. My first foster family gave it to me, but the second I got to St. Joke’s, The Pastor took it away.

  A kid like me with a bat, he’d said, shaking his head.

  And I’d thought, yeah, no shit. Who in their right mind trusts someone like me with a bat?

  I wanted that bat back with everything in me. I could do some damage with that bat.

  Every muscle tensed, I figured I would just charge when she got to the top step. Push her down the steps and hope for the best.

  The top step creaked like it always did and I bounced on my tiptoes, ready to charge. I was lightheaded and shaking but I was ready to do this.

  But it wasn’t The Wife coming up the stairs.

  It was Carissa in her pale pink pajamas. The moonlight coming through our bedroom door turned the long butcher knife in her hand to silver.

  Relief made me nauseated. Adrenaline made me numb.

  I collapsed against the door, sucking in air.

  Carissa was the youngest of us. The smallest. That knife was half the length of her leg.

  “Open the door,” she whispered, all murderous business. Well, as much as a fourteen-year-old half-Chinese girl in a pair of pink pajamas could mean murder business.

  Which was a lot, actually.

  Simon, who’d been checking the keys, lifted one in the air. “Got it!”

  “I’m out,” Rosa said, her hand over her stomach, and none of us blamed her.

  She and Carissa hugged briefly and Rosa was gone like she’d never been there at all.

  “Give me the knife,” I said to Carissa. “I’m bigger.” I was bigger than Carissa, sure, but I was way smaller than The Pastor. I was tall, but he had a hundred pounds on me, easy.

  I had the element of surprise and not much else going for me.

  “I’ll get Beth,” she said and I nodded. Yes. Someone would need to see to Beth.

  “You can’t kill him,” Simon said.

  “I can’t?” Because I could. And killing him was the plan. The scars on my hand burned like they agreed.

  “You’ll go to jail.”

  “Dude,” I sneered, “I’m going to jail anyway. Now or years from now, it don’t matter.” Jail was the natural course of things for a kid like me.

  “Yeah, but murder?”

  “You don’t want to do this, fine. Go back to your books. No judgement, Simon. For real. You helped a lot. But me and Carissa can do this on our own.”

  Carissa had been at St. Joke’s before I got here, and she ran this shit. There wasn’t a thing that happened in these walls that she wasn’t fully on top of.

  And she stood next to me at this door like she had no plans on bailing.

  There was a thump on the other side of the door and Simon swore under his breath. But his fingers… man, they were rock solid. I was shaking like a leaf, but Simon was steady. He put the key in the lock and slowly, silently, turned it. The door popped open and then eased forward.

  And I knew in the pit of my stomach that whatever I saw in this room, whatever horror Beth was experiencing, it was on me. I’d known we were going to get caught. But I didn’t care. I only cared about her. And how it felt when we were together.

  I’d lost my head over her.

  Don’t look, I told myself. Don’t see.

  But it was impossible not to. The reality of it was so big. So horrible.

  I saw the way her bare toes tried to get a grip against the floor. Her nightgown was pushed up to her thighs. Her knees thumped against the solid wood of the desk. Her hair was loose, the curls kinky and wild across the desk where she was pushed on to her stomach. The Pastor had one hand over mouth but I could hear her muffled screams. Her panicked breaths.

  Her amber eyes, when they saw me, they opened wide and I read a thousand things there.

  Fear and pain and a relief so wild she started to sob.

  I roared when I was supposed to stay silent. I fucking screamed and I gave him warning, that we were here, that I was coming for him. He turned, pushing himself away from her, and I saw his open belt but couldn’t tell if his pants were open. If he’d raped her or only planned on raping her.

  And it didn’t fucking matter.

  I lifted the knife and charged him. He brought his arm up just as I slashed at him with the knife and felt the thick give of skin and muscle as the blade went through his hand. I tried again. To get his belly this time, that sickening wobble of it under the clothes he wore, and I hit something, felt him grunt and heard him swear, and then he punched me.

  He hit me so hard I fell sideways, nearly losing my grip on the knife. I shoved at him, with all my strength, the knife cutting across his hand.

  “Tommy,” he said. “Put down the knife.”

  “No!”

  “Put down the knife, Tommy, or this will not go well for you.”

  “Fuck you!”

  He pushed me into the chair like I was nothing. Like I was a bug. Like all my fear and all my worry were made of air. The hate I felt for him was weightless.

  “Tommy!” Simon yelled and I glanced up just as a thundering punch caught me across the face, making my ears ring and my eyes cross. There was another and another. I felt my nose pop, blood rushing into my mouth. I fell to my knees. And then to my side.

  Carissa got Beth off the desk and into the hall, I saw that. I saw Beth screaming and reaching for me, but Carissa was stronger than she looked and she pulled Beth away.

  She was safe.

  The Pastor kicked me and there was a crack and a bright white-hot pain in my side. A rib, probably.

  I couldn’t do this. Black was seeping into the sides of my vision. I pushed the knife across the floor where it skidded to a stop in front of Simon, who was watching me, horrified.

  I tried to will Simon into grabbing that knife and charging at The Pastor while he was occupied with killing me. But as my chin came up The Pastor kicked me in the face, snapping my head back, and the lights went out.

  4

  Still that night

  Tommy

  Beth sang. Like really sang. Like for real. She didn’t say much, not for that entire first week, but that first Sunday in church… Jesus.

  The Pastor made us come every Sunday, trotting us out like prize fucking pigs in front of his congregation so they could all feel so good about donating money to us poor homeless kids with nowhere to go and no one to love us.

  Whatever. Jackoffs.

  Beth sat beside me, her hair in two of the tightest buns I’d ever seen at the back of her head. So tight it had to hurt. She wore a khaki skirt and a navy blue sweater and pretty boots that cost more, I’d guess, than every piece of clothing I’d ever owned.

  Beth didn’t make any sense at St. Joke’s.

  Like all of us she’d been court-ordered here, which meant she’d been in some kind of trouble. Word was, something had happened with her mom, and she’d split or Beth had run. None of us knew.

  Beth had shown up in nice clothes and good shoes—none of them hand-me-downs. She’d even had pearl earrings. So you knew something was up with her life before St. Joke’s. But she didn’t say shit. Not about what got her there. Or her mother. Or the pearl fucking earrings.

  Every day she got quieter and quieter.

  Until church.

  That Sunday, my hands were still red and swollen from the beatings. I couldn’t hold anything, or think of much past the beat of
my heart in my fingertips, but I’d felt her, all along my left side like a heater turned up too hot.

  None of us sang. He could make us hold the hymnal and punish us for not standing, but if we all just sort of moved our lips, he didn’t know we weren’t singing.

  It was pretty bullshit, but we had to get our rebellions in where we could.

  But Beth had pulled out that hymnal and turned the pages to the right song so fast she actually tore one of thin parchment pages. Simon glanced up at the sound and winced. Damaging the church’s stuff was bad news—Simon had firsthand knowledge of that after the candle thing a few weeks ago.

  But Beth didn’t stop. She didn’t even seem to notice. She got to the right song, lifted her chin, and when the organ started she opened her mouth and…I don’t know. I don’t have the words to describe what that sound was like.

  Angels is stupid and wasn’t really true because there was something gritty in her voice, something that sounded how all of us felt deep inside. Lost and hurt and so fucking angry we couldn’t breathe sometimes. That was it: she sounded angry.

  Everyone in the pew—Carissa, Simon, and Rosa—everyone turned and looked at her, their mouths open. We were all feeling the same thing when she sang. Like somehow—out of nowhere—we had a voice.

  It was crazy. I know. But we didn’t have shit in that place and now…now we had that voice.

  I couldn’t explain what happened inside of me. It was like… everything shifted, you know. Like all my energy and thoughts and worry, they went from me…to her. Just like that.

  By the end of the song I was pretty much in love with her. Maybe not love… I mean, what did I know about love? But I knew that if push came to shove, it was her before me. Every time. Not sure why. Or how.

  It just was.

  “Tommy! Tommy! Open your eyes! Please open your eyes!”

  Someone was hissing in my ear and I understood that I wasn’t in church with Beth. That I was somewhere else and I was… God, I was in so much pain. Everything hurt. My ribs were so bad I could barely breathe. The best I could do were little tiny sips of air.

  I wanted to stay in that dream. That memory. No pain there. Just Beth singing and warming up one side of my body from a half a foot away.