23 MORGAN

Morgan wandered out of the downstairs bathroom, towel-drying her hair and leaving wet prints that evaporated in her wake. In an oversized shirt worn thin by time, and a pair of boxer briefs, she plopped down on her mattress. Then, she reached for the bottle of Absolut wedged in the couch cushion and slugged it back.

The vodka swam between her teeth, scorched her throat on the way down. Upstairs, muted by the floor between them, she could hear the sounds of A Christmas Story as her mom curled up next to her dad on the couch, and Grandpa Teddy slept with his mouth open in the recliner. That was how they spent most Christmas nights, but this year, Morgan had excused herself as being sick—not a lie—and hoofed it downstairs, toting her two new gifts: one from a handsome and wealthy admirer and the other from a sadistic anonymous fuck who wanted to see her squirm.

The same sadistic anonymous fuck who’d left her the key.

She knew it without a doubt. The handwriting on both notes was the same. She set her presents on her desk, the camera on one side of her computer monitor and the portable DVD player on the other. Then, she sat on the edge of her mattress with her knees drawn up, and stared, daring either one of them to move.

When they didn’t, her gaze slid to Eleanor’s box of photographs, on top of which lay a duplicate portrait of the one she’d first studied on the mantel. Her eyes burned a hole in the picture as she dared to imagine how different things would have been if she’d been born a Reynolds. If she hadn’t been “the ruin,” “the little wretch” as Aunt Bern had called her.

Left in her clutches at four years old and for four more years thereafter, Morgan had always thought Bern had been named for the scars on her face, the puckered flesh that made striated rivers on her skin. Legend had it she’d knocked a scalding kettle on her head when she was young. Or her sister—Morgan’s mother, Ava—had. Both women told different stories, apparently.

The people paid her aunt cash, mostly, but sometimes they presented little baggies of what looked like snow in exchange for twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour—depending on the amount—with Morgan. There was no set menu. It was à la carte. They could do whatever they wanted to her in the allotted time, so long as they did not kill her.

That didn’t mean some of them didn’t come close.

They wore hoods, or what Morgan later learned were balaclavas. Black wool hoods that concealed everything but their eyes, and even that space had a mesh insert. They could see her, but she couldn’t see them. A man beat her with a belt. Another strangled her with his tie. A woman hurt her with a corkscrew. But the worst were the plastic bags from the liquor store. Cloudy black things and vaguely translucent, they always looked to Morgan like skin shed by a snake. They slipped them over her head like a bonnet and knotted the handles around her neck. She screamed. Not because anyone would save her, but as her sentence dragged on, she learned that screaming made her black out faster, so she didn’t have to be lucid for the horrors that ensued.