11. Lilah
11
LILAH
I heard their voices from the living room on my way down to the ground floor but didn’t bother trying to listen. The name of the game was avoidance: avoid talking to them, avoid looking at them, avoid thinking about them.
The tactic made me feel like a shade of my former self, the girl who’d been afraid of her own shadow in high school, the one who’d had to check out books from the library and leave them in her locker because her mom wouldn’t let her read anything but the Bible.
That girl had tried not to think about the things that were hard: the way everyone else seemed to have friends and plans on the weekend, the way they talked about the future like it was up to them, no one waiting in the wings controlling their every move.
I’d banished that girl to a corner of my psyche after I left home. She was weak and pathetic, someone who couldn’t fight for herself.
Who wouldn’t.
I wanted to be someone else, and out from under my mom’s preaching thumb, I’d risen from the ashes. But old habits died hard I guessed, because stuck in the house with the Bastards, all I wanted to do was lie low until I could get away from them.
The stairs leading to the ground floor were down a hall leading away from the living room. I hadn’t even registered it the night before. I padded in my socks past the door to what looked like an office and another door that opened to a room with a pool table and bar, plus a couple of closed doors, before starting down the stairs.
I expected it to be a basement, dark and low-ceilinged, but Jude had been right to describe it as the ground floor. The house was built on a small hill, making it seem like the main level was the ground floor when really, there was a whole other floor that opened to the back of the property. Like the upper floors, the ceilings were high, the walls mostly glass, offering a view of the snow-covered fields leading to the trees.
I could tell from the way the wall of windows was built that the glass was actually made of giant bifold doors that probably opened all the way in good weather, allowing the basement to act as a kind of recreation area for the covered pool and outdoor kitchen I could see through the glass.
I couldn’t help being surprised. It was an incredible house, luxurious and well designed, like something ripped from a high-end social media influencer’s page. I’d never thought much about where the Bastards were living — I’d always assumed they were still in the military — but if I had I would have expected them to live in some dark dank cave of an apartment, like a den of wolves.
Or a pit of vipers.
The ground floor was quiet except for an occasional hum that may have been the house’s heating system. I took advantage of the time alone to explore and discovered a fully outfitted home gym as big as my whole apartment. The lights came on automatically, illuminating racks of free weights and rows of professional-grade equipment in front of a wall of mirrors. It was all familiar from the hours I’d spent in the gym, although these days I spent more time on the mat with a sparring partner than lifting weights.
I found a wood-paneled room with a hot tub, plus another room that held all kinds of outdoor equipment. I walked in hesitantly, half expecting to be caught, and took a closer look.
At first I thought it was just camping stuff: rucksacks, hiking boots, tents, kayaks. But the deeper I went into the room, the wilder it got. There was an assortment of climbing gear, vests with carabiners that looked made for parachutes, a cabinet of drawers with super long bungee-type cords, all labeled with their lengths. I found a massive closet that held zippered parachute packs and three sets of huge nylon wings that turned out to be hang gliders.
There were several dirt bikes, scuba gear (complete with a row of oxygen tanks), and even a row of surfboards that looked more than a little out of place in a mountain house surrounded by snow.
Either the Bastards were wholesaling adventure gear or they were danger junkies, another layer of intrigue on top of the layers I was trying to ignore.
I left the room behind, careful to leave everything as I’d found it, and closed the door behind me, then looked for the sauna. I found it at the end of the hall, opposite the hot tub, which sat covered and silent.
The interior of the sauna was dark. I didn’t see a light switch, but I remembered the sensored lights in the gym and opened the door, banking that the sauna would be the same.
Sure enough, soft light glowed from above and below.
I found a timer on a digital panel outside the room, set it for twenty minutes, and looked around before stripping off the sweats Nolan had given me.
I had the boxers and tank top underneath, but I still felt exposed knowing the Bastards were upstairs. The only other alternative was to go in dressed in the sweats, and since I didn’t want to die from heat stroke the day after I’d almost died from hypothermia, boxers and a tank top it was.
I left the sweats in a pile on the floor, grabbed a towel from the rack by the door, then stepped into the sauna, which was well on its way to being hot.
It smelled delicious, like warm cedar and heat, and I spread my towel on the lower bench and leaned back against the wood, sighing with pleasure. I could still remember what it had felt like running through the woods, the cold seeping into my bones. I’d felt like I would never be warm again. The fact that I’d survived, that I was now sitting in a sauna letting the heat warm my body through and through, felt like a miracle.
And yeah, it was super weird that it had come at the hands of the three guys who’d almost destroyed me, but apparently miracles came from unlikely places.
I thought about Matt, wondered if he was okay. I knew if I asked he’d say he was okay. He claimed to like our mom’s mandatory daily Bible study, claimed to like going to church.
That was part of the problem. Church was fine. I knew lots of people who went to church on Sunday and lived normal, happy lives. But those people didn’t pray on their knees for four hours for telling a lie. They didn’t have someone telling them they were going to burn in the fires of hell for eternity after being accused of “sinful thought.”
I needed to get Matt away from my mom, out into the real world. Some of it was guilt: when I’d left Blackwell High to be homeschooled after my nudes scandal, my mom had insisted on homeschooling Matt too.
But I was also worried about him, worried he was going to end up like my mom, locked away from the world, disappearing into Bible verses while life passed him by. If he was going to lose himself in religion, I wanted it to be his choice, and the truth was, neither of us had ever had a choice. I’d known we weren’t normal even before I left home, but I hadn’t realized how really lost I was until I’d gotten away.
I didn’t know how I’d do it yet. Would he come live with me willingly? Would he leave our mom? Would he consider college? I had no idea. I only knew that I had to try, which was why I’d saved seven thousand dollars, almost enough to move into a bigger apartment and take care of Matt while we figured out what was next for us. He’d be eighteen in just six months, able to make his own decisions, and I planned to make sure he had options.
Now I felt all my plans slipping away. The men who’d chased me through the woods had been willing to hunt me in the snow at night. Did I really believe they wouldn’t come after me at my apartment less than five miles from the bar?
I obviously couldn’t bring Matt there, not right now.
I sighed and tried to empty my mind, but it wasn’t easy. It was one of the reasons I’d taken up Krav Maga after Locke, the guy who owned my gym, had approached me about joining his class. Despite my desire to avoid Blackwell Falls at all costs, I’d loved going to the Gym (even if the name was unoriginal), but it didn’t turn off the endless loop of fear that had run through my mind in the months right after I’d left home. Away from my mom’s control, from the confines of her religion, the world had felt unexpectedly big and dangerous and my mind had spun with the barrage of stimulus, the sheer number of decisions I had to make, decisions I was allowed to make.
On the sparring mat, there was no room for thought. It had been terrifying at first, facing down another person, someone who would punch and pull and kick me, someone who would charge me, drive right through me. I’d been aware of my body for the first time, really aware of it, of the way it felt to be hit.
The way it felt to hit back.
I was addicted after one sparring session. For the first time in my life, I felt in control of what happened to me. I didn’t have to do what someone else told me to do.
I didn’t have to let things happen to me.
Now my body itched for practice, for the liberation from my mind, which I definitely wasn’t finding lying in a sauna in a house owned by the Blackwell Bastards. Knowing they were close, it was impossible not to think about that night at Brandon Miller’s party, and not just the night itself, but the devastating aftermath.
Why had they done it? Taking the pictures was bad enough but I could understand that at least: a bunch of perverted seventeen-year-old guys fucking around with a drunk girl at a party and taking pics as souvenirs.
Gross but not as unexpected as it should be.
But sending them to practically the entire school? Letting everyone think I’d fucked all three of them?
I still didn’t get it. I’d never even spoken to the Bastards before that night. They’d been so far out of my league they were in another universe, the kind of guys other girls whispered and giggled about in the bathroom, the kind who only dated the prettiest, most popular girls at school.
And I obviously hadn’t been one of those. Not in my second-hand clothes, too afraid of the world — of myself — to even look up.
So why fuck with me? Why ruin me?
Everything that came after was a result of that incident — not the drunk picture-taking session, which I could have gotten over, but the humiliation of knowing everyone had seen me naked. The shame of it had destroyed me, even after I left Blackwell High to finish school at home, and especially when the guidance counselor told my mom what happened.
My knees still hurt when I thought about the days after when I’d been forced to kneel and pray for hours in the coat closet.
I couldn’t even think about the two years after that. I’d been too young to leave home, and I hadn’t had any money anyway. As much as I’d hated school, it had given me a respite from my mom’s righteous thumb. After my mom withdrew me from Blackwell High, I’d been stuck at home every day with a litany of my sins and the drone of her TV preachers interspersed with her own “Amen.”
It had sent me over the edge. Literally.
I opened my eyes and sat up with a start as the hum of the sauna cut out. My heart raced when I realized the lights were out, the heat gone, but a moment later I realized it was just because the timer had ended.
I took a few deep breaths to calm my racing heart. I was too broke to afford therapy but I knew that PTSD wasn’t always prompted by things that reminded me of my trauma. The truth was, I still didn’t feel safe in the world. I knew I stood a chance at fighting my way out of a bad situation, but the problem was that I was always half waiting for the bad situation, and anything — even something like the sudden cutting of lights — could trick my body into thinking it was about to begin.
I considered starting the timer again, just because the heat felt so good, but decided against it. I felt vulnerable in Jude’s boxers and tank top, now plastered to my sweaty body. Plus I needed to see if Jude had found a charger for my phone so I could check in on my other jobs and see if the roads were clear.
I picked up my towel, stepped out of the sauna — and ran smack into Nolan.