Page 100 of I Am Salvation

I draw a breath, still holding on to her hand. “Diana, you don’t know me.”

She crinkles her eyes, shakes her head. “I do. I know you have a good heart. I know you have a tortured soul. I know you, Dragon, and I love you.”

I take a deep breath in. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“All right.”

“I’ve never told anyone. Jesse knows a lot. My therapist knows even more. What I’m about to tell you? No one knows, Diana.”

Her eyes are wide, her lips trembling slightly.

I’ve frightened her.

Good.

She should be frightened.

Because she’s about to learn what I’m capable of.

“All right,” she finally says. “Tell me whatever you need to tell me, Dragon. But I promise you it won’t change how I feel about you. Nothing could.”

She’s wrong about that.

As much as I want to believe her impassioned words, she’s wrong.

And she’s about to find out why.

Seventeen years earlier…

After a few months, I’m good as new. At least physically. I’d been violated in the worst way by boys bigger and stronger than I am.

Zach and Mike never asked me about it. Other than Leon, no one did.

But they knew. They had to know.

I never even thought about telling anyone the truth. Tully and his gang would torture me again—probably worse, if possible—if I turned them in, and like the first time, no one would stop them.

I found out that it was common knowledge at the home that you made your way up the totem pole. That when I had my growth spurt or hit sixteen or seventeen and began to look more like a man than a boy, I’d be expected to take part in this initiation for the new meat.

No fucking way.

I’ll stop it before then. I’ll think of something.

Zach and Mike and the others seem to take it with a grain of salt. “It’s just the way things are,” Zach says to me one night at dinner. “Nothing we can do about it.”

I remember Zach’s words that night.

Oh, Dragon. You just made things so much harder on yourself.

I see what he meant.

“You shouldn’t have fought back, Dragon,” Zach continues. “It’s not so bad when you don’t fight.”

I don’t answer.

I wasn’t raised like that.

I was raised to fight back. That’s what my father taught me. Before he abandoned me, of course.

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