Page 97 of Hunt for You

Then the Police told me I was going to need to testify. And they kept bringing me into the station and reading me things I’d said in the first few days, and even though I didn’t remember them, I just kept saying yes.

By then I was nine and Aunt Pattie got a new boyfriend, so I couldn’t sleep in her room anymore, which meant I didn’t really sleep much at all.

By the time I was ten, I was a zombie, failing elementary school, and getting molested by her boyfriend.

He never fucked me, thank God. But he was a pervert who touched me and snuck into my room at night—one more reason not to sleep—and it was one more secret. And he stole the one person I’d been able to talk to about my real life—my aunt. He told me if I told her what he did, he’d kill her. And I believed him. After all, men have guns, right?

So, she was off limits.

I pulled away from her.

I started acting out at school because I was so fucking tired, and so fucking angry all the time.

And I didn’t even have my real name anymore.

But then I had to testify against him and I did it. I was so fucking proud of myself. I had just turned eleven years old and I hadn’t seen him for that whole time.

Dad looked fatter and older. And he never once looked me in the eye.

I cried, and felt stupid about it, but the judge was really kind.

He got convicted, and I got told by a lot of adults that I was strong.

But I wasn’t. So it was one more lie that I lived.

Then I hit puberty, and the ticking time bomb of my life finally detonated.

My aunt found her boyfriend in my room during the night and blamed me. At least, that’s how it felt. She kicked him out, but she always looked at me with rage in her eyes. And nothing I did after that was ever good enough.

She fed me, clothed me, and showed up at the school when they asked her to come in to talk about my behavior. Which got so bad in middle school that she—very reluctantly—started paying for a private school that was better equipped to help me.

I was the weird girl there, but it was better. I met Richard. I made a couple of friends. They weren’t close, but I had people to sit with at lunch.

And then my aunt bought me a car when I turned sixteen.

It was the nicest thing she’d ever done for me, and I was really touched. It was a cool car, too. A truck because she said it felt like I’d want something I could run people over with.

She wasn’t wrong.

Trucks also had “beds,” which at that point in my life, was very useful.

Everyone knew I was a slut, and I didn’t give a fuck. Or rather, I gave too many—according to everyone else. Richard was the only man who ever talked to me about it without telling me to be ashamed of myself. He was more worried about why I did it.

But he was old and out of touch and even though I started to trust him, I never really let him see everything.

Probably because, soon after that, I started thinking.

Why had my aunt—who still looked at me every day like I was a roach that crawled across her floor—bought me the car? It was my sixteenth birthday, sure, but… she hadn’t been kind since those first couple years. Why now?

As my teachers always told me—I was very intelligent and clever, but didn’t want to apply myself to academics.

I sure as shit applied myself to investigating my aunt’s motives though.

It took a few weeks, but eventually, while she was at work, I found the box of papers she’d hidden.

Lo and behold… my mother’s life insurance wasn’t just enough to provide for me…it was a fortune. And some clause in my father’s meant his got paid out too—if he had a medically determined date of death. My aunt went to court to argue that life without parole was a medical date of death and… I guess she won. And it made her a rich woman. Because she was named as the trustee tomyinheritance, which gave her free rein to spend on “my behalf.”

Suddenly the bathroom renovations and that cool leather jacket, and all her “business trips” took on a whole new light.

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