Page 69 of Three, Two, One [321]

“You say you care?” she yells. “Then go after him!”

“You go after him. He likes you. He’ll listen to you just as much as he will me.”

She looks out at the hallway again. Will she go? I mean, she needs clothes, obviously. But she’s been making do with JD’s sweats and t-shirts all week.

But no. She closes the door with a sigh. “I can’t.”

“Can’t?” I sneer. “More like you won’t. I’m not buying this whole afraid-to-leave-the-apartment bullshit.”

She walks off towards JD’s room. I follow again, and when I get there she’s searching for something to wear. She pulls on a pair of JD’s boxers and a summer t-shirt.

“So obviously you’re not going after him.”

“I can’t leave. If they see me—”

“If who sees you?”

“They,” she whispers, looking up at me with bleary eyes. “They know who I am, Ark. And they don’t care. They know my father would have the power of two governments on his side if I made one phone call.”

“Then make it.”

“I can’t. I can’t go home. I can’t leave here. I can’t do anything. They…”

She stops. And it doesn’t take a mind reader to understand why. “They have shit on you, don’t they?”

She tips her head up and takes a deep breath. “It seems you have a lot in common with them.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “How do you figure?”

“Because they have an affinity for filming girls as well. Only they set us up. They filmed me doing drugs. Having sex. And…”

“Just fucking say it, Blue.” I want to pull her hair out right now.

“And babysitting.” Her words are so soft, I almost miss them. My heart actually skips a beat. Maybe two. “Only it’s not babysitting, Ark. That’s just the code word.”

I’m reaching for her throat to throttle her, but she misunderstands and sinks into my chest, wrapping her arms around me. Holy fuck. Just keep cool, I tell myself. Just keep cool. “What’s babysitting, Blue? Come on now, just tell me. You’ve said this much, might as well get it all out.”

“We weren’t sex slaves, Ark. We weren’t whores, or strippers, or mistresses. They kept us for babies.”

The blood is pounding so hard in my head.

“And when a girl had a baby, they took it and gave it to someone else. They sold them, Ark. And the girl was paid to give the baby up.”

Disgust runs through my veins. Bile rises in my throat. “Did you sell a baby, Blue?”

“No. I never got pregnant.” And then she drops her head and cries. She falls to the floor on her knees. Her hands cover her face and then she lowers her forehead to the ground and wails.

I just watch her for a few seconds, and then I snap out of it. “Come here,” I say, picking up her too-thin body and carrying her back to my bedroom. I lay her down on the bed and climb in next to her as the sadness pours out of her in heaving sobs and rivers of tears.

“Shhh,” I tell her, putting my arm underneath her so I can keep her close. “Calm down, OK?” I drag my fingers up and down her arm to try to soothe her, but she’s lost control.

This is the girl we found out in the rain. This is how she should’ve reacted that day. This is the reaction that never came. Because she never admitted to what happened to her. She couldn’t.

No one knows when Zoey Marshall went missing, but all of North America heard about it the minute they realized. It was on every nightly news report last year. And from what Blue says, that was months after she was actually gone. There were rewards and heartfelt pleas for her safe return on the news by her family. Vigils were held outside the ambassador’s home in DC and her family’s home in Canada.

It was a multi-national affair and lasted about three months. And then no one ever talked about the missing college grad again because she made a YouTube video telling people she was on a writing sabbatical in some rainforest. There was some buzz, but then it all died away. People forgot all about Zoey Marshall. She simply disappeared.

I stroke her hair as she begins to calm down. “We should call them, Blue.”