“Why don’t we just go back to the preppy stores and get you some ripped jeans and sweatshirts?” Lauren suggested.
“No, I want to wear these clothes.”
“Will you at least wear pigtails with it?”
Cracking a smile, Willow said, “If it will make you feel better, I can totally rock the pigtails.”
Lauren sighed and waited patiently while Willow stepped back into the dressing room to change. Before she did, on a whim, she snapped a picture of herself in her pretty dress, then she set about getting the dress off and her jeans and tank top back on.
By the time they left the mall, they had bags full of clothing that Lauren didn’t fully approve of, but Willow was quite happy with the haul.
When her mom half-joked that her new wardrobe would scare off all the boys at her school, Willow barely stifled a mumbled, “Good.?
??
High school guys were stupid anyway.
Her thoughts drifted off to the man who had unwittingly taken her virginity.
Well, not really to him, but more to the dream image of him that she still couldn’t shake.
When she couldn’t take any more of the bad dreams, constantly waking to a blanket of terror, she had tried to retrain herself, to think differently. Before she would go to bed, she would think of Ethan, since she knew he would be there when she closed her eyes anyway, but she thought of him differently. Instead of fearing the bad dreams, she would think of the odd good dream that he had been in, or the fairly nice phone call—the fact that he was probably a totally decent person in reality.
Plus, well, he was attractive.
And even if it made her feel weird at first, having some twisted version of a sex dream about him was a hell of a lot better than reliving being raped.
It wasn’t even close.
She still had bad dreams sometimes—sometimes featuring the unpleasant loss of her virginity, other times just dreaming about that room she had slept in, the other girls, occasionally being kidnapped again. Once she dreamed about the dead woman with the gun—she was going to shoot Willow in the face, but she woke up before the bullet hit her.
Other times, she had dream-memories of watching the woman be shot, hunching down in the corner, convinced she was seconds away from being similarly slaughtered.
Those were unpleasant thoughts.
She had promised herself she wouldn’t go there while she was out with her mom. When she was alone at night those thoughts usually reoccurred, but if she kept busy during the day, she found it easier to keep them at bay.
She could only keep so busy at night though.
Shoving those thoughts away, she opened up her phone to look at the picture she had taken in the dressing room. It was pretty good, as far as dressing room selfies went.
Since she couldn’t even remember the last time she had posted an update, she decided to go ahead and post the picture, with the little caption, “School clothes shopping with my momma!”
It felt frivolous and silly even as she posted it, but within seconds, someone had already liked it.
Smiling slightly, she closed the app and prepared to put her phone away, but on second thought, she opened up her text messages.
Most of the recent ones were from her parents and her brother, Todd. Just below those, however, were the messages she hadn’t gotten around to deleting, even though she figured she probably should. Her mothers certainly didn’t seem the type to go snooping through her stuff, but on the off chance, she had saved Ethan’s phone number into her contacts under the name Shelly. If they ever tried to play detective and snoop through her stuff, they wouldn’t look twice at a text message from Shelly.
She was no good at remembering phone numbers. Plus, she was lazy about deleting things. There were thousands of messages in her email inbox for exactly that reason.
“Do you think you’ll still be able to do once-a-week appointments when you’re back in school?” Lauren asked suddenly.
Willow had started seeing the counselor the week after her phone call to Ethan. It wasn’t helping all that much, however, since she still got pissed off when anyone wanted her to talk about the whole ordeal. She also refused to tell the counselor about Ethan. Ashlynn had assured her she could—and should—tell the counselor anything and everything, but Willow wouldn’t.
It wasn’t only because she didn’t want to get him in trouble; she didn’t want to acknowledge what he had done. It clashed with her new view of him, and she needed that to keep her sanity.
And a little because, despite Ashlynn’s assurances otherwise, Willow couldn’t shake the idea that the counselor would tell. If Ashlynn knew the truth, she would drive to Ethan’s house and gut him before Willow could even attempt to explain the situation.