Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Age 12
The sun was shining the day I got kidnapped.
I remember every detail from that day—the three pancakes I had for breakfast, my little brother’s temper tantrum before leaving for school that morning, the A-plus I got on my math test, and Marie complaining about her ruined skirt on our way out of school.
“I’ll make my mom send her the dry-cleaning bill, I swear,” she seethed, staring at the white yogurt stain on the front of her pleated skirt.
Eloise had accidentally knocked it over during lunch—and profusely apologized—but Marie couldn’t let it go.
“Yogurt stains can’t be that hard to remove,” I offered lamely.
The truth was, I had never washed my own clothes, so I had no idea how stains were removed. I just didn’t want her to feel bad.
But Marie kept cursing Eloise while trying to remove the stain with her nails. Under the scorching summer sun, I tuned her out and kept walking down the stairs that separated the main school building from the parking lot—and I smiled to myself, knowing nobody was waiting for me.
After a couple screaming matches, I’d finally convinced my mother to let me ride the school bus with Marie. I was old enough, and all the cool kids in my grade were doing it. We’d agreed I’d carry a cell phone with me at all times in case something happened, and that I wouldn’t use it for anything else in case the battery ran out. I was only too eager to agree.
That’s why I was surprised to hear a feminine voice calling my name when Marie and I stepped out of the front gate of the school.
“Allison! Sweetie, wait.”
My steps came to a halt. With a frown, I stared at the blonde woman rushing out of a modern black car. Her smile was a mix of worried and awkward. I didn’t recognize her.
“Do I know you?” I asked her.
Her hair looked too shiny and yellow, almost fake. She wore office clothes—nothing that would make her stand out from other businesswomen in the city or give me any clues about her identity.
“I’m Claudia, one of your mom’s friends,” she explained.
Does Mom know a Claudia? I wasn’t sure.
“So sorry to bother you, sweetie.” Claudia took a step closer. “Your mom sent me to pick you up and drive you to the hospital. Your brother was in an accident, and he’s in the ER. I’m so sorry, but we have to hurry up.”
My mouth turned dry. Johnny had been in an accident?
“Um, I need to take the bus,” Marie quipped awkwardly, walking backward in the opposite direction. “Bye.”
I couldn’t pay attention to her.
“How do you know that?” I asked Claudia, my voice laced with skepticism and fear while my mind raced with worried thoughts about my brother.
Johnny has been in an accident. Johnny is in the ER.
“She knows I work a couple blocks away, so she sent me to pick you up. She and your dad had to rush to the ER with Johnny. He hit his head and was bleeding a lot, from what she told me.”
Despite Johnny being only five years younger than me, we weren’t super close, but I still loved him. Of course I did. The ER always meant bad news, and I didn’t want him to die.
But my feet wouldn’t move. Something in my stomach turned with an emotion I couldn’t put a name to. Terror, yes, but also something else.
Among the fog in my brain, I scrambled for any reminders of Claudia and found none. My mother had many friends, and my twelve years were long enough to meet them all. Or at least to have heard of them.
“I-I don’t know you,” I stammered, holding on to my backpack straps a little tighter.
Her chuckle took me aback. “Don’t be silly, Allison. I was at your house just last week. I helped your mom replace those black shelves in her dressing room.”
That made me pause. My mother had replaced some dark shelves for white ones in her massive dressing room after complaining that it altered the feng shui of the room. Whatever that meant.
There was no way for Claudia to know that unless she’d been there.
“Come on, sweetie,” she urged me, putting a cold hand on my arm to walk me to her car. “Your parents are waiting. They want you to be there for Johnny.”
I took a step forward, then another. The closer I got to the car, the more my stomach clamped, and the more nauseous I felt.
Something wasn’t right.
“Wait.” I stopped again. It earned me a frown from the woman, but I pressed on. “If you’re really my mother’s friend, when’s her birthday?”
“August 12,” she replied easily, as if the answer was foolishly obvious.
“What food does she hate the most?”
She answered with no hesitation. “Bananas. She likes the flavor—vegan banana bread is one of her favorite sweet treats—but she can’t stand how soft the flesh is. Makes her gag.”
“What’s her favorite color?”
“Red, but she currently has a thing for leopard print. Reminds her of her young days.”
That… was true. All of it, even the leopard print thing—she had just ordered a new leopard coat online two days ago.
“I know you’re worried, but I promise it’ll be all right.” Claudia’s smile was reassuring as her hand landed on my arm again. Her fingers held me a little tighter. “Just come with me.”
My throat worked a swallow on its own. “I-I should call my parents.”
“You have a phone on you?” Claudia asked. When I nodded, she gave me another patient smile. “You can call them in the car. But we should really be on our way, Allison. It’s very urgent. Johnny was very badly injured. He might not make it.”
The voice at the back of my head telling me something about this wasn’t right, telling me to run, got drowned by her last words.
He might not make it.
Claudia led me to the back seat with a hand on my backpack before sliding it off my shoulders when I sat down on the sticky leather.
“Is your phone inside your backpack?” she asked softly.
I gave her another nod.
“Very well.”
She shut the door with a little more force than I expected, making me flinch. I watched through the tinted windows how she rounded the car, threw my backpack in the trunk, and climbed onto the driver’s seat.
Claudia wasn’t smiling anymore. She adjusted the rearview mirror, touched a few buttons on her console, and suddenly a partition appeared between the front and the back seat. It looked like one of those plastic screens I’d seen in limousines in movies. Why did she have one?
Soon after she started the car, a male voice boomed through the speakers.
“You got her?” an angry, mean voice asked.
It didn’t sound like my dad.
“Yes. I’m on my way,” Claudia replied in a cold tone so different from the calm, patient one she’d used with me just a moment ago.
Despite my throat feeling like I had nails stuck in it, I managed to ask, “Are you talking to my parents?”
I knew the answer. Not so deep down, I knew this woman had lied to me. I knew I was in more danger than I could ever imagine. But a part of me wanted to believe it was all in my head. That the male voice belonged to my dad, but somehow the car speakers made it sound a little different.
And then Claudia chuckled.
“Oh, sweetie. You made it so easy.”
My heart took a dive. “You’re taking me to the hospital?”
“Nah.”
Tears started brimming in my eyes, and I held on to the door handle. As if it would lead to safety. As if we weren’t speeding down a highway. As if I could get out.
“L-Let me go,” I stammered, yanking the door handle to no avail.
Her eyes met mine through the rearview mirror, all traces of friendliness gone from them.
“Should’ve thought twice about getting in the car with a stranger, little girl.”
This couldn’t be happening. Not to me. This only happened in the news and in movies. This couldn’t be real life.
“Let me go!” I screamed to no one, because no one was there to help me.
Kidnapped . I was being kidnapped.
I kept yanking at the door handle, screaming, crying, and hitting the partition screen between us. Nothing broke but me.
Breathing became an impossible task. I cursed myself for not having kept my backpack with me. I could be calling the police right now, begging them to come help me, even though I had no idea where we were or where we were going.
I didn’t know how long she drove for or if we were still in Los Angeles. It could’ve been twenty minutes or two hours; I spent every second trying to get out of that car and blaming myself for being so dumb. Not getting in a stranger’s vehicle is a basic survival skill, something a little kid would know. How could I have fallen for it?
But she knew about my mother. Intimate details no one who wasn’t close to her should’ve known. I didn’t think she was her friend anymore, but I was still confused as to how she knew about her aversion to banana flesh and her dressing room shelves. Maybe she knew my parents somehow?
The car stopped. Looking out of the darkened window, I could barely make out the outside of some industrial area. Nobody else seemed to be around, but there were a few cars parked in the front. No noises either—not that I would hear much inside a vehicle.
Something in me unexpectedly settled then. Calmed when it shouldn’t have.
I didn’t fight it. I’d already neglected my inner voice once today, and it had led me here. It wasn’t going to happen again.
My stomach dropped as Claudia—was that even her real name?—got out of the car. When she opened my door, her hand wrapped around my arm in a tight, hurtful grip, and she dragged me out of the back seat.
We were outside of a warehouse. Mold clung to the walls, and from here I could tell it was mostly empty except for dozens of pallets and containers grouped at the back.
What if she handcuffs me and puts me in one of those?
What if she does something worse than throwing me inside a container?
I knew I had seconds to save my life. That woman, whoever she truly was, had no intentions of ever letting me go back home.
When she stopped to peer inside the warehouse, I saw my chance.
With adrenaline shooting through every inch of my body, I kicked Claudia’s knee. Hard .
She gasped and doubled, releasing her grip on my arm. Maybe she wasn’t expecting me to fight back so aggressively, but I didn’t stay behind to double-check her shock levels.
I ran.
I ran faster than I’d ever ran in my entire life.
I didn’t know where I was, or where I was going, or if Claudia was coming after me, or if someone else who was working with her had their eyes on me.
I just knew I’d die if I stopped.
Then I saw it—a fence.
If I had been older, taller, more athletic, maybe I could’ve jumped over it. But I barely reached five feet, and even from a distance, I knew attempting to climb it would slow me down too much. I knew Claudia would catch up to me.
“This way!” her familiar voice bellowed, not far from me.
Every ounce of me wanted to panic in that moment, to cry, to scream , because I had managed to escape only to be abducted again, and that wasn’t fair.
I have to fight. I can’t give up.
Gravel dug into the bare skin of my legs and arms as I lay under one of the cars parked at the front. There was no other place to hide, no exit, and I knew if I entered that warehouse—even if only to hide—I wasn’t going to get out.
From under the car, I saw Claudia’s heels reach the gate where I had been standing just seconds before. They turned in all directions as she looked for me. Moments later, a pair of dirty sneakers attached to gray jeans joined her.
“Did you seriously fucking lose her?” the man shouted.
“She kicked me ,” Claudia shot back. “She couldn’t have gone far. Search the inside.”
“While you do what?”
“I’ll check if she jumped the fence and is roaming the streets. If she stumbles upon those fucking pigs, we’re done.”
The man grunted something under his breath I didn’t catch and jogged out of sight. I lay very still, barely breathing, barely moving my eyeballs for fear of attracting her attention.
Claudia punched some kind of code on the gated fence, opening a small door. She shut it as soon as she got to the other side, unknowingly locking me inside the warehouse lot again.
And I waited.
I waited for hours under that car for some kind of miracle to get me out of there alive.
I could hear distant masculine voices, which told me I wasn’t alone, and someone would see me if I moved. Claudia came back some time later, shouting that I’d gotten away, that the police would come at any second, and that they needed to leave.
My stomach sank. If they were leaving, that meant someone would take this car. And as I saw it, I had two options—to get run over and die, or to be found alive and then killed anyway.
I shut my eyes and begged my tears not to choke me up. I couldn’t make any noises. Not that it would matter, because just then I heard a voice shout, “Check the cars at the front!”
I was dead.
I was going to die at twelve years old at an abandoned warehouse somewhere, and nobody would ever find me.
I was never going to see my parents again. My siblings, Johnny and baby Cindy, either. I was never going to play with Milo again. I was never going to attend Mrs. Jada’s classes, to feel the beach sand between my toes, to try on new shoes I’d end up not buying, to go on hikes and complain within ten minutes that I was tired, to play mermaids at the pool, to jump on the trampoline to see how close I could get to the sky, to read a book under my blankets with a lantern, to laugh or smile or sing or grow up or fall in love.
My life was going to end today, and there was nothing I could do to change my fate.
I’d never been a religious person, and I still wasn’t then. But in that moment, with my eyes closed and my body curled in the fetal position under that car, I made the universe a promise.
If you let me get out of here safely, if you let me live, I’ll make it up to you. I promise to make the world a better place. I promise to try even harder than I was going to try before. I promise you won’t regret letting me live. I promise. I promise.
But the universe or God or whatever sentient or insentient being controlled our fate—if such a thing could be done in the first place—didn’t listen to me.
“I found her!”
Gravel pierced my skin as someone yanked me from under the car. The man with the dirty sneakers and the gray jeans grabbed me by the hair and pulled .
“You little shit,” he snarled, his smoky breath hitting my face. “You thought you were smart, huh?”
Claudia rounded the corner. Her impatient eyes set on me for no longer than a second before she turned to the animal manhandling me. “Get her in the van.”
“No!” I screamed, thrashing against his grip on my hair. I didn’t care if he ripped it all out, if it hurt so bad that more tears filled my eyes. “Let me go!”
“You’re not going anywhere.” He yanked harder. “Do as I say, or this will get a lot more unpleasant for you.”
I didn’t listen.
If I was going to die, I was going to fight until my last breath.
“Help! Please help! I’m a child! Help!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Claudia hissed. “Van, now .”
“No!” I tried kicking him like I’d done with Claudia, but he stepped away just in time.
When he started dragging me toward the warehouse again, I screamed . A bloodcurdling scream, high-pitched, louder than any other sound that had ever left my mouth.
It sounded as inhuman as I felt.
The man covered my mouth, but I bit his hand so hard, I tasted blood.
And then I screamed again because they were going to kill me no matter what I did or said.
I screamed.
Again.
Again.
I screamed until the silent promise I’d made under the car reached the sky. Until it answered in the form of a police patrol car, stopping on the other side of the warehouse fence.
“ Shit ,” the man grabbing me hissed.
My ears started ringing.
I kept screaming.
I couldn’t stop.
Two police officers got out of the car, guns pointed at us.
I promise. I promise. I promise.
I woke up at the hospital two hours later.
When a police officer came by to get my statement, she asked me why I got in the car with that woman. I told her she knew private things about my mother no stranger should’ve known. She gave me a sad, pitying look, asked me a few more questions, and wished me a speedy recovery.
The next day, I found out that Johnny hadn’t been in the ER.
There had been no accident.
My mother didn’t have any friends named Claudia.
When I left the hospital soon after that, I saw myself in the news.
I saw myself everywhere.
Tragedy hits the Buccieri family.
Child of influencer family gets kidnapped. How much of our personal lives should we share online?
Online.
I wasn’t allowed to go on the internet other than to do schoolwork, and even then, someone had to supervise me. I knew my mother posted videos and pictures online because she always said that was her job, but what did that have to do with Claudia?
That afternoon, I took her phone while she was in the shower and saw everything.
Photos of me, of Johnny, of our baby sister, Cindy, all over the internet.
Photos of our home, our bedrooms, our vacations.
Of the shelves she had recently replaced.
Pictures of me in my school uniform, holding certificates and awards with the name of my school.
Pictures of Johnny playing rugby, going fishing with our father, with his own certificates.
Pictures of Cindy’s toy room, of her playing dress-up, of her covered in bubbles in the bathtub.
Our lives for millions of strangers to see.
My body turned cold. Was this how Claudia knew about my family? Because my mother talked about it online?
It wasn’t until years later that I brought up Claudia to Jada and asked her what had happened that day. Not what the news had speculated on, but what had actually gone down.
Jada didn’t look too keen on telling me at first. But after I insisted, she finally admitted, “After they were arrested, the police told us she was part of… of a ring of some sort.”
“A ring,” I echoed.
By that time, I was old enough to understand what that word meant in that context.
But I wanted to hear it from her. From the only adult I could trust.
“Why did they come for me?”
“They knew your parents had money, so maybe they wanted that. Your mom… Well, she made it easy for them to find out all kinds of information on your family to gain your trust.”
Nausea climbed up my throat. “What kind of ring was that woman part of?”
Jada lowered her gaze. “Child trafficking.”
The ground opened beneath my feet. My soul turned cold.
I understood then. All of it.
The danger I’d been in. What could still happen to me if I didn’t save myself.
Because nobody else was going to do it for me.