Page 40 of Freaks
“What are you talking about?”No. No, no, no. This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be. Something ugly, and cold, and evil squirmed in the pit of my stomach. This was a joke. A really cruel joke. A tear streaked down my cheek and dripped off the end of my chin. “You’renotCarver,” I whispered.
Sadie canted her head to the side, arching an eyebrow. She laughed, and the sound was brittle in my ears. “I’m not?” she asked in a mocking tone. “You sound so sure.”
“You’re my friend. We’ve known each other for years. You wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.” I didn’t know who I was trying to convince, now—myself or her.
“Yes, we have been friends for years,” she conceded. “And even I found myself falling for your bullshit charms. You made it so hard to hate you some days. Mostly, I’ve been quietly despising you, though. Waiting for the perfect time to teach you a fucking lesson.”
“For what? What have I done to you?”
Sadie’s face was a mask of pure hatred. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, Sera Lafferty? The thing that cripples you with guilt whenever you’re alone?” She used such a measured tone and spoke so quietly that I knew this was a serious question. She really wanted to hear the answer. I wracked my brain, searching through my memories, bracing myself for the fall when I finally tripped over the answer.
“I didn’t protect Amy as well as I should have,” I said. “I didn’t take her away from my father. I should have put her in the back of the fucking car and driven away from that place way sooner than I did.”
Sadie’s eyes narrowed into furious slits. Suddenly there was a knife in her hand. The same knife I’d pulled out of the block in the kitchen and then left on the counter. God knows where she’d been hiding it. “Wrong,” she snapped. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. That isn’t the worst thing you’ve ever done. Try again.”
I eyed the knife, flinching at the five-inch blade as she held it up in front of my face. The thing was wickedly sharp, its serrated edge a row of jagged teeth, primed to bite.
“I don’t know. I have no idea.”
She turned the knife and pressed the tip of it against my cheek. “Think,” she hissed.
“I—I—fuck! I don’t know!”
“You aresucha piece of work. Let me help you out, since your conscience seems to have taken a permanent leave of absence. You used to live in Montmorenci. Your father, Sixsmith Lafferty, was a gambling, womanizing, alcoholic scumbag who didn’t like to pay his bar tabs. One day, Sixsmith made an agreement with a local business owner he owed money to, and low and behold, you started to pay that local business owner weekly visits. You’d go to his apartment above his bar, and you’d disappear into his bedroom. You’d be in there with him for hours, crying and moaning, begging for him to stop,pretendingyou weren’t enjoying his attentions, and all the while the local business owner’s daughter sat in her bedroom with her hands clapped over her ears, trying not to listen.”
Oh…
Oh my god.
She was…
“Julia?” I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to process the information, but it was written all over Sadie’s face: she was Sam Halloran’s daughter. I would never,everhave known. She looked nothing like him. There was nothing of that fat, disgusting pedophile in her at all.
Her lip curled back into a sneer. “Before you started going to Sam’s bar, he used to worship the ground his daughter walked on. He venerated her. Treated her like she was a princess. But all of that changed the moment you walked through their door. You warped something inside his head. You liked to pant and groan. You said no, you told him you didn’t want him, begged him not to hurt you, but youmadehim do all of those things. You enjoyed it when he was inside you. You twisted everything, turned everything upside down. You taught Sam that a girl meant yes when she said no.
“And then, one day, Sam was furious. Sixsmith kept you home, told Sam you were sick, but the old man had been anticipating your visit all day. He’d paced the floor for hours, waiting for you to show up. He was disappointed. He turned to his daughter with a dead, hollow expression on his face and he told her to go into his bedroom. And there, inside the four walls of his bedroom, his daughter begged and pleaded for him to stop. But he didn’t. He did terrible, awful, painful things to her. From that moment forward, Sam fucked you twice a week, but the otherfivedays of the week, he dragged his own daughter into his room by the roots of her hair…and he didunspeakablethings to her.”
I didn’t know how to process any of this. The shock was just too much. “He told me he never touched you,” I said numbly.
“Maybe at first, he didn’t. But you gave him a taste for the taboo. And what’s more taboo than raping your own kid?”
“You really think I went in there willingly? You really think I fucking chose to go visit your father?”
“I didn’t see anyone walking behind you with a gun to your head. Yeah, that’s right. I used to watch you coming and going all the time.”
“Peter would never have let me run.”
“Pssshhhh. Are you kidding me?” She was tinged with madness: the wild, unbalanced excitement in her eyes; the way her fingertips drummed against the handle of the knife; the way she kept lifting the coffee mug to her mouth, only to lower it a second later. She’d been so calm and together when she’d walked in here. Now, she was anything but. She’d completely lost her cool. “Peter was a weak, mindless idiot. He wouldn’t have done a fucking thing if you’d tried to bolt.”
God, perhaps she was right. Peter had been a bit of a soft touch even back in high school. Still, there were other reasons why I’d had to comply with Sixsmith and Sam’s fucked up arrangement. “If I didn’t give them what they wanted, my sister would have paid for it. I could take them hurting me, but I couldn’t let them hurt her. And I never encouraged Sam. I wasn’t saying one thing and meaning another. I meant no. Herapedme. Every week, twice a week, for a solid year, he fucking raped me.”
Sadie rolled her eyes.
I couldn’t believe any of this. For the longest time, I’d been meeting her for lunch. Brunch every Sunday. Yoga classes. Margaritas and tacos whenever either one of us was celebrating a big win. And all along, she’d been putting on a front. For fuckingyears. She’d been pretending to be my friend, pretending to be there for me, tolerating me when I came to comfort her, when all along her skin must have been crawling at my very presence and she’d been plottingthisin the back of her mind.
“I need to put clothes on,” I said. “You need to let me stand up.”
“Does it really matter if you’re naked or fully dressed when you die?”
