She wiped her hands on a dish towel and opened the back door, heading to her room on our prewar’s top floor.
“Good night, now,” she said, slamming the door behind her.
Chrissy came into the kitchen then in her pajamas as I was wrapping my mind around what had just occurred.
“Daddy, Shawna says that Emily Parker is your new girlfriend. Is that true?” Chrissy said.
Oh, I thought, staring at the just-slammed door. Okay. Now I got it.
Like I said, men are dumb.
Part Two
FINAL EXAM
Chapter 19
CHELSEA SKINNER COULDN’T stop trembling. At first it was strictly because of fear, but after three hours of lying bound on a bone-numbingly cold stone floor, she felt like she was actually freezing to death.
The only other time she could remember being as cold was when she went skiing in Colorado for the first time, when she was six. Seeing her breath in the backyard of the house that her dad had just built, she’d made her mom crack up as she pretended to smoke an imaginary cigarette.
Chelsea began to cry through her chattering teeth. That was her problem right there, wasn’t it? Always wanting to be older, always having to push it. Why couldn’t she just be satisfied? It was as if there were a hole inside her, and no matter what she tried to fill it with—clothes, food, friends, drugs, boys—there was always just a little itty-bitty space left that kept her from feeling like a whole person. She practically deserved this.
It was bound to happen. It was—
Stop! she commanded herself. You stop that right now!
She’d been abducted, and she was getting down on herself? Blaming herself? That had to stop yesterday. This wasn’t therapy. This wasn’t a confidence-building activity at Big Country, the wilderness rehab camp that her parents had sent her to last summer to “get her rear in gear,” as her dad had so cornily put it.
This was real.
Fact: Someone had knocked her out in front of her house as she was coming back from a night of dancing.
Fact: Someone had removed her jeans and T-shirt, and she was now in her bra and underwear.
Fact: Her hands and feet were bound with giant plastic twist-tie strips, and she was being held against her will in what felt like a crypt.
All the facts were bizarre, horrible when you got right down to it, but very, very real. She suddenly remembered something that Lance, her Big Country eco-psychologist, had kept stressing. You make your own reality.
At the time, she’d thought it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard, but now, as she considered it, maybe this was what he meant. When you were in a very bad situation, you could either feel sorry for yourself or you could—
Chelsea stilled herself as the lights went on. The door to the dilapidated room she was locked in creaked open. The saliva in her mouth evaporated.
At the threshold stood a man wearing a suit and a ski mask.
This isn’t happening, she thought as the man stepped in and knelt down beside her.
“Hey, Chels,” the man said in a polished voice. Then he head-butted her in the face and the world dimmed.
She gained consciousness to a zipping sound. The man in the ski mask was tightening the last of the straps of the appliance hand truck that she was now lashed to. He rolled her out of the room and bumped her up some steps and whirled her dizzily around a long, tiled corridor.
The room they entered had a low ceiling and a long stainless-steel counter that ran the length of one wall. She came to a clanking stop.
“I didn’t—,” Chelsea said, shaking now. “I d-d-didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly,” her abductor said from behind her. “Maybe you should have. Have you considered that? Have you considered what you have failed to do?”
As she watched, the man went over to the sink. He lifted an orange five-gallon Home Depot bucket from underneath it and opened the tap.