Power

TW: This story contains references to implied/past sexual violence. 

“You can do this. Don’t you trust me?” 

Her fierce hazel eyes bore into me, holding me where I stood. The answer stuck to my tongue, dishonesty feeling out of place even in my sleep-hindered state, so instead I asked a question of my own. 

“What makes you so sure?”

The eyes twinkled in the half-light of the bathroom, and I might have even thought the face from which they were peering out was pretty; her hair a coppery blonde that reminded me of my mom’s, her nose turned up slightly at the end like my little brother’s. It would have been something like home had it not been for the wolfish smile that slashed across it, making the young woman look more like some flesh-starved beast, ready to feast upon the rotted carrion that so often lined the highway leading up towards the university at this time of year. It made my stomach turn. 

I looked away, staring instead at a bit of grime stuck to the bottom of the sink between them.

“You’re strong. You always have been. You can face this— do what you need to do.”

“I don’t think I can.”

I could feel her watching me squirm. God, it was like her shrewd eyes cut through to the very center of me, picking at the secret and scary bits there, illuminating a darkness I must have hidden somewhere deep below my ribs. Gnawing it right off the bone. I didn’t even know her anymore. I was starting to realize maybe I never did. What she was capable of; what she was asking me to do.

“Look at me.”

My head snapped up, my body shivering in the scrap of red fabric that had once been my Halloween costume. Caroline was going to be so pissed when she saw the state it was in. We were going to be a pair of deviled eggs, had laughed for hours about it. But she’d decided last minute to go to Rocky Horror with her roommate instead, so I had figured the more classic devil would be less weird as a solo costume. She’d let me borrow her favorite red dress to say sorry. I wish I’d gone to Rocky Horror, too.

The girlish voice piercing through my head was like ice, sending another chill down my frail form. Images of voiceless lambs, drugged as they awaited their slaughter filled my buzzing head, but I noted there was something soft about the lilt of her tone, the familiar way she rounded her vowels, placing them high in her mouth. It caressed some secret part of my heart I wasn’t sure I’d noticed before. Something about it made me listen— to allow myself, like the lambs, to be silently led to whatever end awaited me.

“You can do this, Erin. You have to do this.”

Erin. My name had always felt too short, the syllables always jumbling together in people’s mouths when they spoke it— too often allowing it less space than it was due. 

But in her cadence, in that accent that wrapped my aching body like a blanket, it sounded right. It sounded powerful coming from her. Maybe that’s what the feeling wedging itself into my sternum was: power. Powerful was something I hadn’t felt in a very long time and… I liked it.

“And you’ll—you’ll be there with me?”

“I always am.”

I let my gaze wander around the ugly little bathroom, covered in Natty Light cans and reeking of piss and entitlement. It had been easy enough to slip into the house again unnoticed; it seemed one of the guys had drunkenly knocked the back door off its hinges at some point in the night. All that stood between the ignorant young men passed out from their violent reveling and the rest of the sleepy campus, was a single piece of flimsy mesh making up what was left of the screen door. 

Finding the knife just laying out on a kitchen counter had been a happy accident— leave it to college boys to not clean up their messes. It was almost too easy. Almost.

“I didn’t think it would be this hard. Being back here. It hurts.”

The calamity of the night still haunted me, the memories rattling around like a vengeful spirit: disturbing and cruel and absolutely refusing to leave. I could still smell the sickly drink, see his hungry leer. Feel the spinning in my head, taste his brutal hands as they found their way to my mouth. The accosting light of an Iphone camera still lingered at my back, like it had never left, even after he’d finally taken what he'd wanted. I still don’t know who the phone had belonged to— there may have been more than one monster in the room that night. But dissociation had been my only savior.

I could feel the tears sitting in wait at the edge of my tired lids, threatening to spill down my already tear-stained face. Old mascara painted my sallow cheeks like charred watercolor in the awful yellow light of the bathroom; fresh rain would only add to the mangled portrait. 

I breathed and let them come, and the world around me slowed. I could just make out the fuzzy outline of the girl in red before me as she swam in and out of focus.

“Erin. You’re so close, honey. You’re gonna make it all go away. It’ll only be his pain now.”

The ice melted as her words crashed through me like a tidal wave. The cool waters of the sound clearing the muddiness in my head and soothing the ache in my heart. The handle of the knife felt warm in my fist, and I smiled at the thought.

“His pain now.”

Slowly lifting my head, watching the sickly smirk spread inhumanly wide across the wretched face of the girl looking back at me in the dirty mirror, I whispered into the silence— this time out loud:

“No, I don't trust you. But OK."