Page 91 of Resilience

But the full, real truth was yes, she did want to be involved. Because she was the one who’d been raped. She was the one who wanted—needed—revenge. Or justice. Whatever its name, she needed satisfaction. The bloodless ways her mother had suggested had not satisfied. She needed blood. For that, she needed the men in her family, but she was not about to let someone else get her revenge. She was not about to let the rape she’d experienced become about her father’s or Sam’s honor. It was about her.

And she meant to take back what that asshole had stolen.

“Yes,” she told Dex and everyone else who was paying attention. “I want to be involved.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mother shake her head. Athena kept her attention on Dex.

He nodded. “Okay. The end here is a car accident. We have the location, we know when and how to stage it. We can’t burn the car because the summer was too dry, and we can’t control the kind of fire that could happen. So anything we do to him before that needs to be consistent with injuries he’d sustain in the wreck. Understand?”

“Yes. What does that mean we do, then?”

“Blunt. Crushing. Some sharp, but any sharps should be with force and should be focused on his head. Lower body should be crush or blunt. There may be shit you want to do to him that feels like justice for what he did to you, but we can’t fuck with his junk. I’m sorry about that.”

That was what she really wanted: to take the thing he’d used to hurt her. But honestly, his dick was just a body part. His brain was the thing he’d really used to hurt her.

“That’s okay. I can focus on his head. That’s where the bad really is.”

Dex smiled slyly and glanced to Athena’s side—she realized Sam had been interpreting for her, so Dex understood everything.

“You’re a tough little cookie, Athena,” Dex said.

He turned then and apparently said something, because Jay seemed to answer, but nobody was signing or pointed in a way she could see enough of their mouths. She turned to Sam and raised her hands, asking.

“He’s telling people what he wants them to do. Jay is playing assistant. I’m with you.”

At that moment, Athena’s dad, now dressed in a coverall as well, grabbed Hunter’s legs and turned him around so he faced them all—and Hunter saw Athena there for the first time.

Hunter didn’t speak. Like Athena, he didn’t believe Deaf people should be expected to force themselves into unnatural acts just to fit in with the hearing world, and little seemed more unnatural than using a voice they couldn’t hear. As far as Athena knew, he made no sounds of any kind, though she assumed there were some noises that just happened. Sam complained a lot about how loud she was, but he meant that she slammed doors and stomped around. He’d told her she made very few and infrequent sounds with her mouth.

Now, however, she was fairly sure Hunter was making some kind of noise. He was gagged, and the gag appeared to be something jammed into his mouth and then a strip of duct tape fixed over that, so if he was making noise, it probably wasn’t loud. But he was frantic, and the muscles in his throat flexed stiffly.

When she’d come into the barn, he’d been squirming a little, like hanging that way hurt and he was trying to find some relief, but he’d been fairly calm. Dazed, or exhausted, or simply resigned. Immediately upon seeing her, he began to fight the chain.

Hunter was a jock. He was strong and fit, and he managed to pull his legs up so high it looked like he might be able to get them over the beam and maybe make this whole plan a lot more complicated.

Then Sam’s dad grabbed the crank part of the pulley, and Hunter suddenly dropped about three feet. The drop and sudden stop did something obvious and strange to his arms. He threw his head back and, Athena was pretty sure, screamed.

The strange and obvious thing was a shift in his shoulders. They seemed to get longer.

And Dex and Simon were now arguing. They weren’t signing, and she couldn’t see enough to understand. Dammit! They needed to remember she was here!

Athena turned to Sam, but he was focused on the argument. Before she could grab him and get his attention, Mom came up and faced her.

“His shoulders dislocated when Simon dropped him,” she explained. “That’s not an injury consistent with their plan, and Dex explained that ... pointedly. Simon told him he can reset the shoulders, but Dex says there will be signs of the dislocations. They’re working it out.”

“I hate that nobody is signing. Not even Dad or Sam!”

“This is tense, Athena. Their focus is not on you but on what you want.”

That was the problem, how she kept getting forgotten in her own revenge. But she was tired of making the exact same point over and over, so she stood where she was, watched an argument she couldn’t understand, and waited for something to happen.

Mom apparently decided that Athena didn’t need to know the whole argument, but she eventually signed that “They’ve figured it out.”

Dad came over and handed Athena a coverall of her own. “Anybody that touches him needs to be suited up,” he explained. “If you don’t want to touch him, just say the word.”

I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to, she thought. She raised her hands and very nearly made those words. She didn’t want any of this. She wanted a world where she hadn’t been raped.

But she lived in this world, and in it she had been raped. There was nowhere else to go but forward now, and no matter how sick all this made her, she would not stand by.

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