Laney
A familiar sensationof fear and shame sank into my belly like a cold stone.
I’d never told the full story to anyone. Just a few snippets here and there from the background information. Never all of it. Certainly not the killing part.
The idea of bringing every detail into the open was physically painful for me. All of the old dark stuff rose up inside me like black ink, swirling through me in icy tendrils and creeping into my brain like spider-legs.
“There’s a really long background story that I need to tell you first,” I began in a halting voice. “So I can explain why I did it.”
Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “Fine,” he said coolly. He held up the video camera and switched it on.
“It all started when I was fourteen. We didn’t have much money, which I guess you already know. Mom quit college when she was younger to support my dad’s business, and that didn’t go well. He had his own handyman company, but it barely paid the bills. Mostly because he drank half the profits and spent a lot of the rest on betting at one of the local bars. I think he was addicted to it.”
Hunter frowned. “I know what that’s like,” he cut in, voice low. “With my mom and her pills.”
I nodded slowly. “Right. Anyway, even though we didn’t have any money, I ended up being offered free piano lessons over in Bairnsdale, because of a favor my dad did. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Bairnsdale, but—”
“I have. It’s about forty minutes from here,” Hunter said, cutting me off again.
“Yeah. Not as nice as Royal Falls, but much nicer than Silvercreek,” I said. I scrubbed a hand across my face and went on. “Anyway, the first few lessons were fine. My teacher was a man named Peter Elton.”
His name felt like glass in my mouth. I paused to take a deep breath, lowering my gaze from the camera trained on my face.
“He was a good teacher. Not a good person,” I went on.
“Why?”
“Well… at my fourth lesson, everything was normal at first. But then he said I looked hungry, and he offered to get me a snack. I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime at school that day, so I agreed to have some cookies and juice. I was excited because we could never afford to have cookies at home. Not the nice brand, anyway.” I rubbed my face again. “He brought them to me by the piano and left them on a little coffee table next to it. The juice was orange and mango, which I don’t like at all. I had a few sips to be polite, and then… well, this will sound silly, but I really didn’t want to be rude and leave it mostly untouched. So I waited until he left the room to get some new sheet music, and then I tipped the rest of the glass into a plant pot near the coffee table.”
Hunter’s brows furrowed, but he didn’t say anything. He just waved his hand for me to keep going.
“I started to feel a bit weird a few minutes later. Kind of… spacey. Like I was floating in a dream. Peter asked me if I wanted to lie down, and that was the last thing I remembered before I woke up again.”
Hunter’s expression softened for a moment, but the softness didn’t last. “Go on,” he said.
“When I woke up, I was in a bed, and he was above me. My jeans and underwear were off, and he was… doing things to me.” I turned away and moistened my dry lips. “I think I was supposed to drink the whole glass of juice,” I went on, voice barely above a murmur. “I wasn’t supposed to wake up. He didn’t freak out, though. He just stroked my hair and told me to go back to sleep. That it was all a dream.”
“Jesus,” Hunter muttered.
I sighed and leaned back. “I was young, but I knew what was happening,” I said. “I… I didn’t fight him. I pretended to pass out instead. I just closed my eyes, went limp, and let him do whatever he wanted. I was scared he would hurt me otherwise. More than he was already hurting me, I mean.”
I looked up again. Hunter’s eyes flared hot as his gaze locked with mine. “What happened then?” he asked.
“After a few minutes, I felt woozy, and I passed out again. When I woke up for the second time, I was lying on the couch in the living room. My clothes were back on, and Peter was sitting nearby, watching me. When he saw that I was awake, he smiled and said something like, ‘Wow, they must be running you kids ragged at school’. I had no idea what happened at first, so I asked what he meant. He said I seemed really tired halfway through our lesson, and then I asked if I could lie down on the couch for a few minutes. Then I went to sleep, and apparently I looked too peaceful for him to wake me up.”
I saw something shift in Hunter’s eyes—a fleeting shadow of doubt in his otherwise steely gaze. “And then?”
“He told me I was tossing and turning near the end of my nap. That I must’ve been having a nightmare. At first I believed him, because I didn’t remember anything. But I had a bad feeling.”
I looked down again, recalling that exact feeling. Tremors had raced through me in those moments; a fear like I’d never known before. I’d tried my best to unearth more, but my mind was a total blank. I knew something very bad had happened, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what or when.
That all changed when I sat up.
“Once I got up, it started coming back to me,” I said, twisting my fingers in my lap. “I realized what he was doing, and what he’d already done. He thought I drank all the juice, and I’d forgotten everything like I was supposed to.” I hesitated, letting out another heavy sigh. “He was so pleasant and smooth when he talked. As if he’d done it a hundred times before. Even the nightmare thing was part of it—on the off chance I remembered even a few fragments, he was conditioning me to think it was just a bad dream. That it never really happened.”
“What did you do?”
Heat rushed into my cheeks. “I… I froze again,” I said. “I didn’t say anything about what I remembered. I just smiled politely and played along. I was terrified of what he might do if I told him I knew what he did. What a monster he was. So I waited for my mom to pick me up, and then I told her to take me straight to the hospital. She asked why, but I couldn’t tell her at first. I just felt so… so stupid. Like it was my fault for drinking any of the juice, even though there was no way I could’ve known what Peter was going to do to me. So I stayed quiet until we got there, and then I finally told one of the doctors when they took me into a private room to talk.”