HOWEVER YOU WANT ME

by W Winters and Amelia Wilde

There was a girl in the corner. She saw what they did to me and I saw what they did to her. Except when the lights were off and when they put us in confinement.

I was 16 and I don’t know how old she was. We couldn’t talk; we couldn’t even look at each other. That would lead to punishment. I was punished a lot because I had to see if she was there.

There were dozens of us and yet at night, it was only her that helped me sleep in that nightmare of a boarding school. They thought I was bad when they sent me there… little did they know the monster they created.

I didn’t know her name, but I knew who ran the school.

Years later and with blood on my hands, I got my revenge planned years ago when I was only a child.

Then I found a name. Her name.

If you thought they fucked me up, you should see what happened to her. My angel.

PROLOGUE

Dean

Tonight feels different.

Almost like that first time when I saw her across the room and knew she was innocent and worthy of so much more than this. We’re so close to the end. I know it. I can feel it in the marrow of my bones.

The evening air is crisp and my breath forms a fog outside her bedroom window. Behind me is only the woods since she lives on the backroad. It’s quiet apart from the sounds of the night. The sky darkens as I slip my hands into the jacket pockets and watch her undress.

Just for me.

I know she does it just for me. The way she arches her back to tease me. Exposing her slender neck so I can imagine kissing her right there, just beneath the shell of her ear. Her curves toy with me and my needs as her blouse becomes a puddle of silk at her feet. Bared for me with only a strip of cloth separating her cunt from my prying gaze.

The glow of the bedroom light dims when she flicks the light off.

I can imagine the creak of the bed as she climbs beneath the covers. I’ve heard it so many times before. My cock presses against the zipper of my jeans and I hold back a groan as I force myself to leave her sight.

The keys in my pocket jingle as I make my way around the side of the house to the backdoor.

It’ll all be over with soon. There will be nothing standing between us. Not the nightmares of what once was. Not the pain that lingers and keeps a grip on the thread of sanity I have left.

Haley

It’s all in my head but I swear I can feel him.

The sheets chill my naked skin as my eyes adjust to the dark. The bed is empty but I stare at the lone pillow, wondering how long it may remain that way.

My gaze drops to where the pillowcase meets the sheet and I know the notebook is hidden beneath it. I can feel its secrets, its confessions… the vivid dreams I’ve scribbled away in the darkest of the nights.

Turning onto my back, I let out a heavy sigh and close my tired reddened eyes. The relief is immense.

But then I see him again.

I see it all play out and my throat tightens.

If I had never kissed him… none of this would have ever happened.

It was a kiss that changed everything over a decade ago.

A single moment where we thought we could escape. The sirens wail in my memory, the flashing lights force my heart to race as if it’s all happening now. As if I’d just pulled the fire alarm. As if we’re racing down the hall in the middle of the night, praying for the Devil to stay soundly asleep in the heat of chaos.

Tears leak from the corner of my eyes.

“Run away with me,” he whispered and it’s like I can feel his warm breath kissing my neck like it did that night.

I stared into his desperate eyes, full of pain from what we endured, and I could only beg him, “Kiss me first.”

The water sprayed down around us, as he stared back at me, his chest rising and falling. We’d already made our choice. What was one more going to change?

“I don’t even know your name,” he murmured as others ran in a blur behind him.

“I know you though. I see you.” I told him and I’ve never felt so honest in my life.

That’s when the screams started.

Breaking up the moment… and yet.

A creak from the hall floorboards pulls me back from the memory. Grounding myself in this moment where it is all in the past. This is only trauma brought back by the recent events.

“It’s gone. It’s over,” I whisper and I don’t know who I’m trying to convince.

A second creak, louder and closer sends a wave of goosebumps down my body, chilling me to the bone. My heart seems to pound louder and harder with a spark of renewed fear. I call out, my voice hoarse, “Who’s there?”

DEAN

He walks the same. That heavy footed boot hitting the ground sends a chill down my spine. My back tenses against the brick wall as I force my eyes to stay open and watch him walk from his car to grab a pack of cigarettes. The gravel beneath his feet does nothing to remove the memory.

Left. Right. Left. I hear footsteps all over again. His footsteps. Just like it was yesterday. Like I’m in the cot, urine stench and all, listening to him come down in the middle of the night.

The moon is full so there’s plenty of light and I don’t mind that he can see me.

Unlike back then when I wished I could just disappear whenever I heard the thunk of his heavy gait.

A truck pulls into the parking lot of the bar just as I stand up straight and focus on my phone. There’s nothing on the screen but pictures of her but I don’t mind passersby in the night thinking I’m texting someone. Some drunk patron trying to find a ride, maybe.

My heart races and a flash of faces forces adrenaline to course through my veins. The screams are something that’s so hard to silence. Nearly impossible.

I try to remember what she told me. I try to think only of her. It’s all too much sometimes. The memories and the nightmares that linger.

His footsteps echo again and it helps to remind me this is something that has to be done. They can’t get away with what they did. Then it happens.

His footsteps, one after the other, they’re off.

My heart drops and my blood runs cold.

Punishment. That’s a punishment.

As my gaze focuses on him, silence descends. With a cigarette hanging from his mouth, he lights the end of it and takes a puff. All the while walking to the side of the building where cigarette butts litter the gravel.

He’s alone. Just as he is nearly every Tuesday night. And Wednesday and Thursday and nearly every fucking day of every fucking week.

Maybe that’s how he deals with what he’s done… he drinks his sins away.

My throat is tight as I swallow and keep my hands in my pockets, my left holding the basic utility knife, the pad of my thumb running circles around the metal.

He lifts his head back in greeting as I make my way to him.

It’s nearly midnight, the bar is only open for a handful of regulars. I wonder if they’ll even find his body tonight or if he’ll lay in the puddle of ash and blood all night.

Maybe the animals will get to him. After all, he’s close enough to the trash.

The corner of my lip picks up just slightly as I ask him, “Got a light?”

His head lowers as he looks down to his pocket.

I watch his hands and remember them on my shoulders, his fingers digging into my flesh in a bruising grip. ‘Straighter!’ he’d scream in my face and I swear I’d try. I can smell his breath. Cigarettes. ‘Straighter you little shit’ Whack!

I swallow as he looks back up at me and offers the lighter. He has to hold it out a second too long. “You going to take it?” he asks.

“Shit,” I tell him. “Forgot my cigs.”

He pushes off the brick wall, the prick is my height now. For a fraction of a second, I think he might recognize me, but he doesn’t seem to.

“You trying to bum one?” he asks then adds, “Bum.”

As he takes a step forward, I remember the times we were this close before. When I couldn’t fight back.

“Do you remember me?” I ask and his brow creases as if he’s trying to think of where he can place me. How can he not remember?

I don’t mean to do it so quickly, I wanted to ask him so many haunting questions. The thoughts that keep me up at night… but I suppose they’ll go unanswered.

I strike out with my left hand, blade to his throat, once then twice. With each jab I pull up, slicing the inner cords and making the most of every stab. Wide eyes stare back in shock and then I do it again. His hands reach up, first towards me, but quickly to defense. To try to block another blow. To try to keep the streaming blood from the gashes in his throat.

His knees give out and he falls to his back. Sputtering blood as he tries to scream out for help.

“Let me help you remember, Mr. Jay.” I speak calmly as I lean over his body under the sole light that hangs down the alley. With one foot on either side of him, and the blood spilling from his neck and mouth, I lean closer to make sure he can hear me.

His eyes are full of terror and I think then, maybe he remembers.

“Welcome to hell,” I hiss and stab again and again and again.

It’s over in only minutes. All of it. Including the cleaning of the blade and slipping the jacket inside out after wiping off any evidence from my hands and face. I carry the bundle under my shoulder and the gravel crunches beneath my feet as I head back to my truck around the corner.

After I climb in and turn on the lights I look back to the bar. One person leaves and I watch the car go, none the wiser that there’s a dead body only ten feet from the entrance, hidden only by trash bags.

I nearly leave before I cross his name off, but I remember. Taking the note from my back pocket. I see the one side first, her name and address and then turn it over. A list of names, seven of them, one already crossed off stares back at me. With the pen from the cup holder, I cross off Jay Danning. I’m surprised the mark is so clean compared to the first line I’d drawn through the name above. It’s then I notice my heart pounds harder when I think of her than it does from what just happened.

Soon. It’ll all be over soon.

HALEY

10 years ago

Shame weighs on me, heavy and suffocating, but the fear cuts even deeper, slicing me to the bone.

The reality that weighs me down: I’m fifteen, and I’ve been arrested.

Arrested.

The word echoes in my head, driving the shame even deeper. Anxiety washes through me in waves.

Two men burst into my bedroom while I was sleeping and pulled me out of the bed. They handcuffed me while I stood there in my pajamas. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. My screams didn’t help. My pleas for them to stop. The terror was far too overwhelming.

Arrested? Me?

It was a bad dream. It had to be a bad dream. It couldn’t be real.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to wake up.

But I didn’t wake up.

Not even when they started to take me out of my bedroom. They weren’t cops. Not real cops. They were kidnapping me.

I struggled, and my shoulder hit the poster that's been hanging on the back of the door since I was eleven. The actor’s face tore in half, and the paper crumpled under one of the men’s feet.

“Mom!” I knew she would come for me. I knew she’d stop these men from kidnapping me. That’s what they had to be doing. Not arresting me, kidnapping me. “Mom, help!”

One of them slapped me. Fast. Unthinking. Like he done it a million times before.

Shock betrayed me, making my body still as they gathered me up making my fighting useless.

“Stop. Dad!”

I hadn’t been getting along with my parents. They didn’t like the friends I made at school. They didn’t like the dark clothes I’d been experimenting with.

They didn’t like how I’d stayed out a few times, unable to make myself leave.

But they wouldn’t let this happen. They wouldn’t! My parents were going to stumble out of their bedroom any second and save me.

I tried to shout it as we passed their bedroom door, but there was too much to say.

“Mom, please,” I screamed instead. “Mom, they’re taking me. Mom! Dad!”

But the door didn’t open.

It stayed closed like they couldn’t hear. I screamed until my throat was raw.

I stared at that door as they took me away, hoping, praying. Open. Open. Open.

It didn’t open.

My stomach clenched with new terror. The men took me down the stairs and I couldn’t see my parents’ bedroom door anymore.

The fight went out of me when I got to the back of the car with the door slammed shut. That was like a nightmare, too. I knew they wouldn’t let go, and that closed bedroom door broke something in me.

It’s all I can think as the early morning sun starts to show and the car takes me away. It’s silent. There’s no way to fight anymore. I’m trapped.

Even if I got free, where would I run?

Outside, the neighborhood was silent. Curtains twitched in the window of the house next door.

I pulled against the men as hard as I could praying she would see and help me. The lady next door, Kathy, was always in everyone’s business. She’d spotted me in my own backyard more than once and asked what I was up to.

Of all people, Kathy wasn’t going to let kidnapping happen on our street.

Kathy’s porch light stayed off.

Her front door stayed closed, just like my parents’.

I tried to call for her. She was my last hope. I knew she didn’t like me, probably for the same reasons my parents had been so disappointed, but I still thought I meant something to them.

A hand clamped down over my mouth before I could scream her name.

“Don’t make this worse,” one of the men told me roughly. He sounded bored. Annoyed that I wasn’t going along with this kidnapping. I couldn’t remember what they’d said when they put the cuffs on. What charges? How could they take me to jail? Why?

The vehicle in my parents’ driveway wasn’t a police car. It was a white van with a door that creaked as the second man pulled it open.

The first shoved me inside and onto a worn seat with practically no cushion in it. A metal frame under the cloth dug into my ass.

There were more handcuffs, chaining me to the inside of the van.

“Where are you taking me?”

They climbed in the front seats, and the man who had told me not to make it worse started the engine.

“Which jail are you taking me to?” I don’t even know how I’m able to speak with my heart rampaging as it does. I’m still fucking terrified.

They didn’t answer.

If my parents wouldn’t save me, and Kathy wouldn’t, then maybe the police would listen.

I was naive enough to think they were taking me to jail.

We drove right past it and I thought I would cry but apparently the tears have all dried up.

Instead, we drive away from all the lights and onto back roads and highways. I can’t keep track of where we’re going. I don’t know if they’re making extra turns to confuse me, or if I’m just too shocked and tired and sick to remember them.

When the van rumbles to stop, it’s still night. It might be very early in the morning. The sun isn’t up yet. A single bare lightbulb shines down on a sign.

That sign scares me more than anything.

It’s just a regular sign with the name of the school.

This can’t be a school. The building doesn’t look like a school, and schools don’t kidnap students in the middle of the night.

But the sign could be in front of any school. It looks cheerful. There’s a logo of an open book. All I know is something is very wrong and I have no way out.

The door of the van opens, and the men climb in to pull me out.

“Don’t fight,” he grits between his teeth.

I don’t want to leave the van. My legs are numb from sitting on the hard seat and my wrists feel bruised from the cuffs, but the van seems safer than whatever this school is supposed to be.

“Where—” The men jostle me as they yank me out of the van and put me on my feet. The pain rips through my arm and it fucking hurts. They know how much bigger they are. They know they can push me around. I swallow the lump in my throat and try to keep the tears back as they surround me. Rocks dig in to my toes, scraping my skin as they hustle me across the driveway and into the school.

It doesn’t smell like a school. Every school I’ve been inside smells pretty much the same—like lockers and the polish on the floor of the gym and the warmed-up food scent of the cafeteria.

This place reeks of decay, like a building that should’ve been torn down long ago. There isn’t enough light to see much of it clearly, but there has to be mold—that wet, creeping smell like decomposing plants.

They take me to a room with a concrete floor and a drain in the middle. One man steps in and tears my pajamas off. I try to cover myself but I can’t.

“Don’t,” I shout, over and over.

He leaves me with nothing. Naked in a room with two men and then goes to the right with determination while the other two stay on guard.

I’m not ready for the hose when it hits.

The second man turns on the spray full blast. It’s freezing water, soaking my hair and my skin and taking my breath away.

I gasp and try to curl away like an animal. I can barely breathe. One shock after the next.

I’m an animal to them. A piece of meat. I shiver so hard I know there’s another word for it—convulsion, I think, but the next frigid blast makes me forget.

I can only pray and try not to think about what’s next. When the hose is off I cover what I can of myself and hope it’s over.

“A towel, please,” I beg. I can’t even hug my arms around myself because of the cuffs.

A woman’s voice answers. I didn’t see her come into the room, but she’s there in front of me, her lips pinched with disgust.

Tall. Her long, dark hair finished with a sweep of hair spray to give it volume. Her eyes are light blue and narrowed behind thin rimmed spectacles. She wears heels that click and echo in the room even though I can’t see them, her wide legged black pants are so long they nearly touch the floor.

I want to plead with her to help me, but I can’t make my voice work. My words are caught in my throat from the way she looks at me.

“No towel. You’ll have to earn it,” the woman tells me. There’s no kindness in her eyes. Nothing but blank, dead emptiness. She doesn’t see me as a person.

I’m not a person here.

I hug myself as best I can. My bones feel like they’ll snap. Fear tightens around my lungs, letting me breathe only in sharp, shallow gasps.

She drags me to another room with the same rough concrete floor. My toes are numb, barely feeling the cold beneath them. She flips on a light—a flickering fluorescent light, too bright. On the side of the wall, there’s a mirror. The woman’s hand on my arm digs in hard enough to bruise. There are boys in the other room beyond the mirror. Her hand is at my wrist. She releases the cuffs from my wrists, and when I open my mouth, I open my mouth to scream for help.

I can’t catch my breath. I can’t scream. Even if I did, who would hear me?

When I raise my hand to my mouth to cover my sob, the woman yanks it back down and shoves me into the seat attached to a narrow desk.

The desk is the first thing I’ve seen that belongs in a school. It reminds me of the desks in my homeroom last year. I never thought of those desks as something normal.

This one isn’t normal. It’s the only desk in the room, and it faces the one-way mirror.

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