He folded his arms across his chest and nodded. “You know what this is?” he said, widening his eyes as if he had just had a brilliant realization. “It’s like what performers go through when they first go onstage in front of an audience. I heard about it. It’s them butterflies in your stomach sorta thing, right? You’re just nervous we won’t do well together, but I’m not, and soon you won’t be, either. I know this is gonna be just great like we planned. Hey, you came up with a lot of the ideas, Kaylee. Just try to relax, and it’ll all work out. I swear,” he said.
“Ideas? What ideas? Did I tell you I’d like being chained to a wall? Did I tell you I wanted you to take away all my clothes?”
He held his smile as if he hadn’t heard me. He hears only what he wants, I thought. How could I ever get through to someone like that, someone with a built-in filter to keep out anything that opposed what he wanted? I might as well talk to the wall.
“I know all your favorite games, and you’re going to teach me some of them modern dance steps, remember?” he asked. “I got the music you told me to get you, and guess what’s in that bag there. That’s right, a CD player. Tell you the truth, I never had one. That old tape recorder and those tapes were from when I was a kid and living down here.
“I promise that after a while, when I think you’re ready for it, I’ll get a television hooked up for you so you can watch them shows you like in the late afternoon, those soap operas. I still don’t get it. Why do they call them soap? Are they clean or something?” He laughed. “You said you were going to find out for me, do some research on your computer, but you musta forgot, huh?”
Teach him how to dance? Choose music for him to buy? Why did Haylee construct so many specific things in this fantasy? How could she not see how sick it was? On the other hand, I knew how she enjoyed playing with boys, teasing them and flirting. She was like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, keeping all the men on a hook, promising to dance or eat with each.
“Don’t boys look like bees around a flower when they hover near me, Kaylee?” she had asked me more than once.
“They look like idiots,” I’d told her.
She didn’t like that. As usual, she called me jealous.
“So,” Anthony said now, slapping his hands together as if all disagreements were settled amicably. “What say I start on our great dinner? Bet you’re hungry. What did you have for lunch?”
“I didn’t eat lunch. I didn’t know what time it wa
s. You took my watch, and there’s no clock here.”
“You don’t need to eat by a clock, Kaylee. You eat when you’re hungry. I bet you’re twice as hungry as I am because you didn’t eat lunch. I’ll get right to it. Glad you took yourself a shower. I’m bringing you some clothes in a while. You should dress for dinner tonight. It’s special, being our first dinner. We’ll do candlelight. You said you liked that, and I brought the candleholders and candles down. And yeah, we’ll play music, and you’ll tell me more about yourself. I want to hear why your parents got divorced and how you felt about it. You never said. You just said they got divorced. Conversation. That’s what makes a dinner special. So you can imagine what it’s been like for me eating dinner alone all these years, huh? Mr. Moccasin doesn’t talk much,” he added, and smiled.
He went to the kitchen area, whistling. I lay there thinking, wondering how I could frighten him enough to get him to let me go. Would he ever? Wouldn’t he be afraid that I would have the police go after him for what he had done already? Could I ever convince him that he had made a mistake, and if I did, how would he react? Would he be sorry, or would he become the frightened one and maybe do something even more terrible to me?
Think, Kaylee, I told myself. Think, think, think, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’ll never get out of here if you don’t think.
When someone is imprisoned like this and has so little choice about everything involving her, she can feel so defeated she simply gives up. I felt like a puppet on a string. The more he pulled and pushed, the less I felt like resisting. What good would it do?
Once, when I was having a discussion with Mr. Feldman, my English teacher, about Huckleberry Finn, he had made a big thing of Huck’s decision to help the slave Jim even though he believed it meant he would go to hell. That’s what he had been taught in the Southern world in which he had grown up.
“What makes him heroic was he was willing. He chose to do it, and making a choice gave him meaning,” Mr. Feldman had explained. “It’s important to be able to choose. Think of this,” he’d continued. “You’re caught in a current that is taking you downstream, and you can’t fight it. What can you do to keep your identity?”
“What?” I had asked.
“You swim faster than the current. You’re the one making that choice. Understand?”
“Yes,” I’d said.
Yes, I thought now. That will be how I deal with this, how I might stop feeling like a puppet.
I sat up. Show courage, I told myself. Show strength. No more fainting. Swim faster than the current. Embrace his madness, and get him to give up on you.
“I’d like to see the clothes before dinner,” I said in the tone of a demand.
He stopped working and turned to me. “Huh?”
“I want to choose what to wear for dinner. Bring all you have right now. I can’t just throw something on. I need time to make it right.”
He stared at me a moment.
I held my breath. Would he get violently angry? Would he tell me I couldn’t order him to do anything?
He smiled. Then he shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. Of course. Girls like that. I shoulda known. Sorry. I’ll get right on it.”
“And shoes,” I said. “I don’t like walking on my bare feet. Your mother’s shoes might not fit me, so bring slippers, too, and some stockings or socks.”