Dare Me

“You must be Lake.”

I looked up at him and nodded. The first thing I noticed was the crazy Einstein hair. He’d be handsome without it. Next were his green eyes at least ten times lighter than mine. So light they were unsettling, almost scary in contrast to his skin. It was tanned dark and a little red. I could see a tan line peeking out the low hang of his shorts and it told me that his natural skin color was paper white. He had to spend all day in the sun. “Yeah,” I finally said, processing him. “You must be Hunt.”

He hopped out of the truck and pulled the shorts up on his narrow hips as he came to me. “Yeah. Come on. I’ll help you with your shit.”

Helping me with my shit involved taking my bag while I rolled the suitcase and tossing it onto a chair once we got into the trailer. It was bigger than I thought it would be with two full bedrooms but it was messy and cramped. Some walls were chipped, grey and unpainted but then others were lime green out of nowhere. There were crushed cans of Keystone Light in every direction, on every surface.

“That’s her cleaning for you,” Hunt said.

I turned to him and saw the wry, crooked smile on his lips. I gave as much a look of amusement as I could muster and took irrational comfort in the fact that he had a sense of humor I could relate to for at least that second. It was the first thing to make me feel even a hair more comfortable since I got in. He tossed me a can of beer from a cooler but went ten minutes or so before talking again.

“Hey, man,” he said. I turned to him. I laughed a little on the inside. I was pretty sure no one had ever called me “man” before. “I know you didn’t want to come back here. I wish you didn’t have to. I’m sorry about what they put you through. Both of them. But she…” Hunt winced, like talking sucked and he hated ever having to do it. “Trish is just trying to get us away and then when she does, she’s going to make it right. She can get mean but she’s a good person. He…” Hunt made a face and rubbed the back of his neck. I knew he was struggling to say something about his dad. Dean, who had beaten someone with a bat and put him in a coma. The one who had Trish scared all the time. I had been sending her the money so she could save up and escape him but every time we almost reached the mark, something happened. The first time, she said she needed enough money to bring Hunt. The second time, she said Dean found the wad of cash she hoarded and went ballistic. The third time, there was a leak to fix. There were tons of excuses but after awhile, I was just sending her money so she’d leave me alone for a couple months. I hated being out with my friends, laughing, having a good time when suddenly, a pang of anxiety shrunk my ribs, squeezed my heart. I know I went pale sometimes because Dara liked to point it out. I hated thinking about Trish, dreaded her contact. But the one time I blocked her on Facebook, she emailed my school address. She started to get volatile after that one, latching onto the idea that I thought I was better than her, despite the fact that she made me.

I started full on hating her by the time I was at FIT. I quit Facebook by then and lied that I wasn’t going to college. I said Caroline had no money because of the divorce and I had to work. But Trish always found a way to contact me and somehow remind me, if I was acting distant, that she knew my nice rich lady’s address. And since she did know where Caroline lived, I just tried to keep her happy and quiet however I could, realizing that it was my fault for even opening up the Pandora’s box in high school, and being grateful that Trish sometimes gave me up to four months between contact.

But things went haywire when she found out I was in college. She was furious and her logic pinballed everywhere. I was wasting the Pike’s money, I should be giving her the money, I was having the time of my life while she was trying to run for hers. She said I could probably afford to give her more money than I was sending. Some of it was meant to appease Dean, after all, so he’d be nicer. But most of it was for her savings to run way. She accused me of using my funds to date and drink and have sex when I should be donating every penny I could to her cause. Dean was getting worse and worse and I was just letting her suffer through it because I thought I was better, that only I deserved a good life. Every email grew more hysterical and they started coming with more frequency, so desperate and unhinged that after every one, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

Worse, I couldn’t unload it all on Callum and let him comfort me in the way only he could. I’d hidden Trish and my stupidity from him for so long that I was afraid of how he’d react if I finally told him and he finally realized the crazy I’d let into my life. Our lives. At the points that I truly couldn’t handle the stress without feeling like I might die, I’d call Callum and, under the guise of being late on an assignment or being the worst sewer in class, would have him comfort me. It helped to hear his voice and sometimes, on that fire escape, see his face. But of course, we were never talking about the same thing because he never knew. I was lying to him so hard and I felt like complete shit about it. But thanks to him and friends and the fact that I lived in a city packed with twenty-four-hour distraction, I survived every email.

Until the one that sent me my own dorm address.

It was Dean’s work. He had found out I was in college. He had found out that I’d been sending more money than he had been seeing. He was ready to kill, Trish said. He was bitter about the life I was living while I let my family toil in poverty. He was furious that Trish was hiding money from him because he was entitled to that money.

He was threatening to come to New York and get me.

I tried my best to do damage control. I called. I sent money and I scrambled to get everything they asked of me like I was on a high stakes scavenger hunt playing for my life. But in the end, they weren’t satisfied. They said I didn’t deserve to live the way I did. I was one of them and if I wasn’t going to take care of them, I didn’t deserve what I had. I was bad and dirty. An evil, selfish person. I was going to be the reason the Pikes got their nice things taken away.

The demand for me to go to Virginia went on for months and as terrified as I was, I still refused.

But then Dean called one night. It was summer by then and I was spending time with Callum at the townhouse, so we could be near Caroline. Trish had been the one to call at first. She was in hysterics, pleading, crying things I couldn’t understand before she screamed and got the phone ripped from her. And that was when I heard the voice of the man she’s been telling me such awful things about for so long. It was throaty, gravelly and it warbled out at me with such fire that half of what I heard was spit hitting the receiver. “You’re going to come back here, little girl, and you’re going to stay here or I swear to God, I’m going to kill you and that fairy godmother of yours. I promise. I will do it with a smile on my face unless you get your ass back here with everything I asked for, you ungrateful little bitch.”

I was shaking so hard the phone just trembled out of my hand when the line went dead. I don’t think I even hung up. I sat there with no air in my lungs and my jaw rattling in my head. I didn’t have any coherent thoughts for what felt like hours but when I finally did, they were of no relief.

I imagined what I’d do if Caroline or Callum were ever hurt. I felt my soul shatter to pieces when those four men attacked Callum in the park and that was already my fault. If I let him get hurt again, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I let my dark mind imagine the worst of what Dean could do and when I saw images of Caroline and Callum in pools of their own blood in their bedrooms, I thought about killing myself.

I brought this upon them. I was born from trash and I was, piece at a time, flinging that trash into their lives without them even knowing. I should’ve never spoken to Trish. I should’ve never entertained her demands. I was an idiot sixteen-year-old when it started and I’d let it go on for so long because I couldn’t bear to tell anyone about the colossal mistake and massive web of lies I’d been caught in from the day I started living in the Pike townhouse. They didn’t deserve any of it. Because of me, they were going to be punished for being good. I couldn’t let that happen.

So after they fell asleep that night, I left. I collapsed to my knees twice as I walked away from my childhood bedroom and with my tear-streaked hand, stifled the sound of my hysterics down that hall of once-perfect memories.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lake

Trish didn’t look the way she did in her pictures. Her brown hair was dry and reddish now. She’d done the dye job herself and I couldn’t unsee it after Hunt whispered in my ear one morning that it looked like bacon. She was only forty-one but her skin hung loose off her bones and her eyes sagged, like the bags under it were adamantly pulling them down. The fact that you could still tell that she was once completely stunning just made her appearance all the more startling. But over time, I got used to her. And sometimes, depending on how she acted that day, I thought she looked pretty. Or maybe I just really wanted to think she looked pretty.

I quickly started to crave the days that she’d plop onto where I slept on the couch and ask me to tell her a story from New York. Her laugh was grating on my ears but I still wanted it because it was better than what she was like most of the time. All she ever talked about was money. The first thing she asked me when she first saw me was how much the cab was from the airport. She couldn’t believe I took a cab. She wanted to know how much money I even carried around in my wallet on a day-to-day basis and when I wouldn’t answer right away, she asked if she’d just been offensive, and if I found her offensive.

That first day together, she took a bit of time to admire my hair and my clothes and the shiny ballerina flats on my feet but after that, it was nonstop interrogation. She asked if I had money for her and I said I had Caroline’s necklaces and rings, which pissed her off because she said I’d have probably gotten more money hocking it in New York than where we were and we’d just waste gas money on driving to one of the bigger cities to pawn the jewelry, so it wouldn’t be as good a profit. “You screwed up on that one, baby girl,” she said, trying to sound like she was joking but I knew that she wasn’t.

She never stopped talking. She talked more than Hunt and Dean combined. Then again, Hunt didn’t talk much and Dean rarely ever said a word.

The first time I met him, my muscles were clenched so tight that it felt like I was going to give myself a six-pack. He was the manager of the park and he sometimes slept in his office next to the moldy-looking community center where the little kids played. Sometimes he didn’t come out of it for days. That was what happened when I first arrived. I was grateful that I didn’t see him for the first few days at Sunstone but at the same time, his absence only heightened my stress and fear for the moment we actually met.

His appearance alone had me trembling when I first laid eyes on him. I was sitting on the bright red stool in the kitchen. It had a ripped cushion that scratched my thighs. Hunt had apparently stolen it from a diner. I was eating a waffle that was still half frozen at

the center and hurting my teeth when Dean walked in. He was a tall, gruff-looking man in his mid to late-forties. Most of his face was covered by the same straw-like hair that stuck up straight and at the sides of Hunt’s head when it wasn’t peeking out from under a dirty Marlins cap. He muttered everything he said under his breath and what he didn’t, he barked suddenly, like you’d just asked him to repeat it for the tenth time.

He said not a word to me the first time we met. Or the second, or third, or fourth or fifth. He glared at me, grunted, shook his head and walked out of the room. I froze over like a statue whenever he passed by or came near because I couldn’t predict what he was about to do. I didn’t know what he was thinking or anything about him aside from the fact that he threatened to kill me and the people I loved. I could hardly fathom that I was living most days under the same roof as him. The day after he finished an argument with Trish by screaming, “You’ll fucking burn in Hell!” and flipping the kitchen table over with a swipe of his hand, I went and got a second job. I was five months in at the point and I needed to get out faster than I was moving. I’d already been waitressing at what was technically a strip club along the highway and averaging a sad eighty dollars per shift, but I lost a good fraction of it to gas money, so I also got a job at the liquor store next to the place. That way, I could go from one shift straight to the other, in just a matter of steps.