Page 123 of Slashed Bonds

To be sabotaged. Ruined. Harmed. To carry all of this under ink, scars and phantom pain and symptoms that don’t have names yet, and to carry it for the rest of my life for the crime of laughing at a rich girl in a players’ lounge.

It makes me understand vengeance.

Not as a word. As a body. Why people take things into their own hands. Why the ones who were ruined first go looking for the ones who did the ruining, with tools. Because the alternative is standing against a tree at five in the morning waiting for a bruise on the sky to become a day, and doing it again tomorrow, and the day after, until the dog dies.

I bite my bottom lip.

The panic’s coming up from my toes. That’s where it starts, every time, a cold that begins at the floor and climbs, and I know it, I’ve named it, I’ve had a woman in an oatmeal chair explain the mechanism to me with a diagram.

Knowing doesn’t stop it.

My hands go first. Then the back of my neck, under the moth, a phantom pressure like a thumb on the scar. Then my breathing, which forgets its own rhythm and has to be reminded, and I’m the one who has to remind it, and I’m not available.

The pines lean. The path’s too bright and too dark at once. Somewhere a bird starts, one note, over and over, and it sounds like a monitor in a hospital room.

Four count. In through the nose. You know this. You were eleven.

I walk back onto the running path. Crouch. Close my eyes. Fight the shaking, and lose, and let it happen with my arms wrapped around my knees while the frost soaks through my tights.

Panic attacks are a common feature of the new life. Like the meds, like the nightmares, like the nine-degree tilt.

This one’s different. This one’s made of anger.

Anger at a future that was at my fingertips and was taken. Not lost. Not misplaced. Taken, by hands, with a vial and a signature and a window, and the hands are still attached to men who sleep well.

I’ve wondered whether they do. Sleep. Whether Theo lies in a bed in Halbrook with a woman who smells of peach candy and funeral lilies, and whether, at 2:13, anything in him turns over.

I hope so. I hope it turns over every night. I hope he’s never once been able to name what woke him.

My phone buzzes.

I get it out. Barely. My hands are shaking so badly the screen swims, and I have to hold it with both of them to read it.

Unknown number.

Didn’t we say you should remain a shadow?

I don’t have to look at the time. I know what it says.

2:13.

It’s always 2:13. Four calls in six weeks, and now a text, and never once a different minute, because whoever’s holding that phone wants me to know they remember.

2:13 in the morning is the time on a plastic bracelet I wore for eleven weeks. ARRIVED 02:13. UNCLAIMED. The time a district hospital logged a body dropped at its ambulance bay by a car nobody got the plates of, three quarters dead, no name, no identification, one shoe.

I’ve never told anyone that number. Not Maddie. Not the woman in the oatmeal chair.

Which means whoever’s texting me was either in the car, or in the room where somebody decided what time to leave.

I’ve never replied. Not once, in six weeks. Not because I’m above it. Because a reply is a door, and I’ve spent five years learning which doors stay shut.

My thumb’s on the screen anyway.

I could write one word. I could write no. I could write the name I think it is, and watch the typing dots appear or not appear, and know.

Don’t. That’s what they want. They want you to open the door so they can see what’s behind it.

I lock the screen. My thumb’s shaking so badly it takes two tries.