He looked at her with contempt, as if she were the sleaziest whore in Pigalle. She recoiled, her face flushed with embarrassment. Again, for some bizarre reason it reminded her of her father and the time she had worn make-up for the first time on a date. When she had walked into the living room, he had called her “a cheap slut” in front of Brad and sent her back upstairs to wash it all off. She ran up the stairs, humiliated, knowing it would be all over the school the next day. That night, when Brad parked the car, she let him take her panties off for the first time. And when he put his hand between her thighs, all she could think of was not sex, but how much she hated her father.

“You don’t have to force me. I want to,” she whispered, her eyes dry and calculating. His lip curled with disgust.

“Shut up,” Gerard snapped, his eyes gleaming in the dashboard light.

The taste of bile burned the back of her throat and she thought she was going to throw up again. Her stomach heaved and she begged him to please pull over for a minute.

“So you can run away again, pas encore,” he growled.

“I’m sick, can’t you see?”

“Tant pis,” he shrugged and it came with a rush that he was really going to kill her. She was going to be one of those articles in the paper, the details of her body described in humiliating detail, something people glance at for a moment over their morning coffee and mutter some pious platitude about the crime rate before going on to the crossword.

She glanced down at the door and thought about jumping, but the car was going too fast and it was locked anyway. There was absolutely nothing she could do and she felt like crying, except that it seemed silly because she couldn’t believe it was happening. That sense of unreality, as if it was all a bad dream, had returned. It couldn’t be happening to her. None of it was real, except for the cool vibrating surface of the car window as she rested her head against it. Soon she would wake up and tell Lori about this horrible dream she’d had. It would be all right, this was happening to her dream self, not her. Except that she had fallen down a macabre rabbit hole, flying through the tunnel of light carved by the car’s headlights, and she wasn’t even sure who she was any more.