Page 4 of Broken Pregnant Mate
Vern sells—and uses—some sort of powder he gets from a trader at the dark market. It makes the guys high, mean,hallucinating, and sometimes a little feral. Once, a guy tried to bite me. When I hit him with a lamp, everyone else in the room laughed, like it would be a hilarious joke to tell later.
That guy always keeps his eye on me. Whether it’s from fear or a hunger for payback, I have no idea. He’s here now, a thin, silver scar showing the spot where the lamp broke through his skin, the wound that bled for nine hours until his high ended and he woke up, sticky and half-blinded by the blood on his face.
None of his friends bothered to help him—wipe him up, slap a band-aid on him, nothing.
“Let’s go, Emmy,” Vern drawls, his hand sliding down my body lazily. The feeling of it makes bile rise in the back of my throat, but I stay quiet, walking with them to the car.
It’s dark outside, with nothing but the sound of distant winds and the soft chirping of desert insects to interrupt the silence.
That, and Vern’s friends. Slamming into the car, jostling around, laughing with their mouths wide open, and reaching their grubby hands into each other’s snacks. I sit, sandwiched in the back, uncomfortable and wishing I could hold my nose.
“Where are we going?” I ask because it’s just now occurred to me to ask the question.
“None of your fucking business,” the guy in the driver’s seat says, snorting, but Vern reaches over from the passenger seat and cuffs him on the back of the head. The guy goes silent, staring at the road, and the guys on either side of me shrink away, giving me a breadth of space on either side.
“Don’t worry, babes,” Vern says, twisting in his seat and fixing his eyes on mine. They’re always shifting, darting to the next thing, but right now, they’re firmly on me. “We’re just goingto make a little cash. Heard a rumor that anyone who goes to the border can get a fat stack of coins.”
“The border?” I tense, looking out the window. It’s so dark out there that I can’t tell what’s passing by. The city is close enough to the border, it might only take an hour or so by car.
I squint my eyes, trying to make the neon green clock on the dash a little clearer.
“Sure,” Vern says, smiling, his teeth surprisingly white and full. The rest of his friends are not so lucky. Reaching back, Vern settles a hand on my knee, his eyes looking bottomless, inky black in the low light of the night. “Don’t worry, Emmy. We go, collect the cash, and come back. It’s nothing.”
“Who would pay us to go to the border?” I ask, fear gathering in my chest, my voice rising an octave. My body starts to feel more frantic, and this car starts to feel like a train, headed straight for the end of the rail. “Vern,whooffered you the money?”
The smile slips off his face, as it usually does at any implication I give that he’s not he smartest man on the planet, that there might be something he doesn’t know. Dread and fear instantly swirl together in the pit of my stomach, turning to a bright, sour anxiety.
“That’s for me to know,” he spits, turning around in his seat and facing the front, fishing a little powder from his front pocket and running it over his lips. “And for you to shut thefuckup about!”
This last part rises into a shout, his palm hitting the dash so hard it makes the radio—which has been broken for months—kick on. The other guys start to laugh, and Vern joins in, like nothing happened.
I sit perfectly still in the backseat, heart skipping like a baby bird stuck in a clear box, desperately trying to flutter out.
This is a dream, I try to tell myself. If this was the real thing, the real event, I might catch sight of the border on the horizon, might steel myself, tell them to let me out of the car.
But this isn’t the real thing—it’s my nightmare. And in this nightmare, I just stay on this road, sandwiched between guys in the back seat. We never arrive at our destination, so I’m just stuck in the purgatory of what came before.
It goes on until I get so scared that I wake myself up, bursting back into reality, soaked in sweat, heaving, my throat raw from silently screaming in my sleep.
My own personal, tiny version of hell.
***
When I finally come to, slick with cold sweat and shaking, the covers completely kicked off my bed, I can tell that it’s morning. There’s no window, no chirping birds, but the lights on the ceiling are on, shining directly into my eyes.
Back when I was told I’d be taken into custody and held in a cell, I hadn’t pictured this.
I’d pictured a cellar, a damp basement, a dungeon. All rock walls and dripping water somewhere, food thrown at you in a bucket. Grime on the floors and walls, smells to make you gag. Maybe fighting with the other inmates, having to fashion a weapon from a pencil or something.
Instead, my cell—which is more like a small bedroom—is clean, with fresh vacuum lines on the carpet. I have my own small bathroom with a tiny sink, toilet, and shower. I’d thought I might be wearing a potato sack, or worse, just going completelynaked, but instead I’m in a pair of soft, stretchy scrubs, with a tie around my waist to keep them up.
The food isn’t amazing, by any means, but I’m not exactly used to gourmet.
I can’t count the number of times I’d gone without dinner as a kid, or had a bag of microwaved popcorn when the home manager couldn’t be bothered—or when I came home too late and missed the meal.
Now, I sit up on the edge of the bed, pressing my palm to my forehead, like I might be able to physically repress the thoughts, keep them from taking over my mind.
Keep myself from thinking about the nights that Aidan would tap on my window, help me climb through, then sit knee-to-knee with me in the grass, eating fish and chips from a greasy Styrofoam container.
