:/

I'm not really happy with it, but I think I just need to get it out and find out later why it's not satisfactory.



Dust on my face. Fire in my throat.

No amount of calling brought back the man who kept me inside a box. I'd been stored away. I thought I had the will to fight against this fate when I began twisting and groping for my bonds, splitting my nails trying to undo those tiny, sinewy knots, and tugging until my hands were pink. But then I finally crashed to the floor on my shoulder when the chair came undone from the beam, and I couldn't get myself to be resilient for a moment. Why had I seen something like pity, real pity, and then been betrayed all over again? I didn't think I could win. I felt like a failure in every possible way that a person could fail. A girl with his heart in her hand who had ruined his life; a friend who had unleashed terror and then protected terror itself; someone who asked for it. Someone who crawled into the spider's web again and again and again. I could imagine it beneath me, as if we could never part. I lied there, caught, until the cement took the heat from my body and I turned as cold as the floor.

I felt sorry for myself for some time before it hurt to be like this any longer, so, slowly, I turned over with the chair on my back and struggled against the ties around my stomach and thighs. I kept pulling and throwing my weight down, whacking my scraped knee, trying just to wriggle out one of my legs. After an exhausting amount of effort, I did, but I had to rest before trying for the other. The second was easier, but then I swore I'd heard something. Facing the light below the door, I saw no shadow, and none appeared. I slipped the rest of my body out and sat up to cradle my face in my hands.

Erik would come back again, I thought, so I waited, trying to think of something I could possibly say to please him, but time stretched on. For too long. I may not have been able to leave the web, but I crawled to the edge, to at least tell God or whoever watched me but would not intervene that I wanted to be free.

So I reached the door and beat at it with my fists. Listen to me. I'm here. I want to be free. I want to be free. I want to be free!

Then, with my weight on the handle, it turned, clicked, and released the door, and I fell forward.

* * *

There was a long instance where I felt like I was gliding on a wave that had pushed me to stance and sent me sprinting on an uncoordinated but determined mission, if only to see the sky again. They saw me emerge from the stairwell and trip across that black underworld, but I never saw them. I never had any true thought until I was passing people on the street.

Erik had vanished, the car had vanished, and I was wandering away from the building in a haze, just taking myself farther and farther away, as if every few feet were safer than the last, but the shadows were so thick. There was an unexplainable feeling of hopelessness all around, as if things came to this part of the city simply to wither out of sight. I passed a graffiti on the wall of nothing but a face, screaming. I repeatedly dodged litter and tripped over scruffs of weeds coming through the sidewalk, and then this couple appeared. I could imagine outside of myself. I could see the girl that was me under the streetlights, in the beautiful ivory dress with pearls dangling at her chest and a layer of dirt across its tow. A creature of this place, a bride of chaos. The woman stayed close to the man as we passed, and he didn't seem fazed, but neither was approachable. I didn't seem to be who I was, and there was no way to prove what had just happened to me. There was no freedom just yet.

Erik had thrown my phone out the window and successfully severed my lifeline. I knew I had to find someone who would let me use theirs, but, after I let that couple slip by, the faces crossing my path were not so trustworthy. I was told never to cross a patch of darkness at night, but Erik had made me fearless for so long. I once walked with one of these shady men, the one sick with adoration. They made me so nervous. I dashed into the middle of the street just to pass them, and I was snickered at, but never pursued.

At the mouth of a parking garage, I saw a man who seemed young. I decided I'd trust him. I don't like to think of him looking at me as he did when I approached him near the concrete stairs – he wanted to tell me he was in a hurry and leave – but I told him I just needed a quick call. Two minutes. I was lost. I'd fallen out of my group and needed to call a friend. One minute.

* * *

Her mother's dark green Subaru came down the road on the other side, and I stood up until she saw me and did a U-turn across a barrier. The car stopped at the empty curb, and Mariam shoved open the driver's door. We ran the distance between us and threw our arms around each other. She knew more than I needed to tell her. She had many tears still in her, but my eyes were dry as I dug my face in her shoulder. A car whirred by us while I caught the scent of her house on her clothes. She had been warm all the time I had been shivering. I didn't want to let go, but she had to take herself away just to see me face to face. I hated myself for understanding the fear within her eyes only after all of this time. We kept close, but I had to drop to the curb. I'd been curling up at the bottom of the parking garage stairs, covering the dull pain in my stomach with my hands, keeping in a shadow but staring all around.

“Let's get in the car, Lily,” she told me, but I didn't listen. “God, I knew something like this would happen,” she said, then as if nausea began to claim her words. “I knew we'd never done enough.”

We? We were my victim. We were here because of me. We were here at night, shaken and helpless, because of me. And whether true or not, Erik believed I'd ruined his life.

I asked if my parents were looking for me. She said yes. I asked if they'd called the police. She said she felt certain they had, but she wasn't there. I tried to bring my face to my hands, but she took my wrists gently and saw the pink abrasions, then the hardened blood on my forehead.

“God, what, did he hit you?” She asked me quietly.

“No. I hit my head on the stage floor when we went down,” I answered facing the curb.

“Who went down, where?”

“It was the door on the backstage, with the lift. He jumped down the lift with me.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? ...Look up at me,” she asked, so I did, with my focus settling on the road, the direction from which I'd come. “Your skin is all strange here.” Her hand rose in my peripheral, just before my lips, but I turned away without thinking. “Come on, Lily, we've gotta get you home.” She still held my wrists and gave me a careful tug as she was rising, but I said no. “Why do you want to stay here?”

“I-I don't want to face them,” I answered, and Mariam's grip weakened. But it grew stronger the more I explained myself, the more I dreaded the faces of those who would hear me tell this story differently, make it seem like something that all the more attested to my stupidity.

I could continue, even then, to sacrifice parts of myself just to keep him sacred.

She could hear the words I didn't say. My mind was a place of truly outrageous things. I wasn't a friend by now so much as someone who kept messing up her life, but she kept trying to pretend that together we could put things as they were.

“No. No. If you tell them the truth, they're not going to blame you. They just want to know you're okay, for you to be somewhere safe again,” she tried. He'd broken into my house and stained my bedside with that memory. Whose fault was it that she didn't know this?

“Nowhere's safe.”

She thought I deserved her hand on my shoulder. “I know it feels that way, but it will be safe there, I promise.”

“No... no... It doesn't matter where we go. He can be anywhere I--”

“He's not anywhere!” She spoke over me. “I need you to trust me... He is not coming for you. He is running again, but he's going to be found.” Tonight, I wouldn't know how she could assure me of that, but I still put my head in my hands. “Please.”

No.

The place made me sink inside, ready to wither out of sight. I was getting used to my goosebumps. I was slammed with a feeling of embarrassment for having this fate. Mariam came by my side again but I just focused on the texture of the street, the rocks beside the curb, my shadow covering the cracks. She had to keep her patience with me for some time, but this was another world, a black hole in which she threw herself and all these kind words... I was numb; I deflected the all without needing to speak. Everyone wanted me to come back, she said. It might have been hard to come home, but I had the strength to do it, and I owed it to them because they loved me, she said. I deserved to lie my head down, she truly believed. It still hurt a lot.

What about Erik?

“We'll just get in the car. We won't go home.” There was no answer from me, but was I somewhere underneath the heaviness, the dress? It was hard to move, and somehow I had grown committed to the shape I created under the streetlight in that cracked street. But I knew... if I thought about it... “I promise we can stay away for as long as you want.”

If I thought about it, I didn't want to lie down here, be claimed by ivy, let the shadows pick their pieces of me. If that was supposed to have happened, I'd be on the floor in that room. I smelled her house on her clothes and thought of sitting in the dining room, telling Mrs. Rahma I'd been so busy. Mariam thought I needed guidance towards the car, but I kept in front of her and let myself in.

She got me water and paper towels at a 7-11 and we sat in the car, with scarcely anything outside the bushes around the parking lot. We simply burrowed into a timeless place with the night enveloping us, and right away I didn't want to or have to tell her what had happened, but we started talking. She was telling me Jeffrey wasn't mad at me, but he thought there was something strange about the things he learned here or there. He became worried I was being abused without admitting it, and he said that he had an aunt who'd been through something awful a couple years ago. She wouldn't admit her family wasn't perfect, but the imperfection was always so obvious.

“Was it so obvious?” I asked while looking out the window.

“Sometimes.”

After a while, I said to her “I can't go back and do this. No one's going to believe that it wasn't like that... unless I pour my heart out... and I can't do that anymore.”

“You don't have to,” she answered. But what would I say to them?

We talked about everyone. How Paulina didn't know anything about tonight, not unless she had been contacted, but she was bound to find out, bound to know somehow, as the two of us agreed my entire cast would hear that I'd disappeared.

We talked about Westin, who already knew something of the story I was already distorting in order to share it with all of them... He was already worried, even though there were such better things in his future that could feed his imagination. Yet he would say to her “I wonder about her.” And finally I looked up from hugging my knees and said “I'm going to say I chose to run off with Erik.”

“Lily, no.”

“I don't want Westin to know what I was doing.”

“If he's a real friend, which I think he is, he's not going to--”

“Erik and I got in a fight. I broke up with him. I lost-”

“No.”

“I lost my phone somewhere at the theater.”

“Why, why, whyyyy would you make up a story about this?” She had to keep her voice from rising, and I still could not look at her.

“I don't want to be involved with this. I want to stay out of it. You're right, they're going to find him... and I don't want to have to face him.” She went quiet for a moment, but I could feel the pressure behind the dam. “I don't want to see him even more lost than I have now, or for anyone to!”

She didn't get it. She got a message from her phone and directed all of her attention to it, then answered with quick fingers and stuffed it away. Then after a pause, “I just want to tell you: your mom and dad know you're with me, and they're waiting for us to come back.”

I shook my head. “I just want him to be okay. I feel like I kept arguing that I wasn't supposed to help him while he was... he was screaming his head off, inside, please, Lily... I don't have anyone but you, and I just said 'you can't tell me that, you can't tell me that.'” Still, there was nothing for her to say. “I thought it wasn't true because it meant something very bad if there was just me. He wouldn't tell me things because I wouldn't have it, I wouldn't believe it. And even then, he's forgiven me...”

Nothing, from her.

“I wasted that man...” I watched the wick burn out. “He just wanted to talk to me,” I said as I began to claw up the seat and look around the car. She turned on the engine right away.

“I don't like being out here, Lily. We'll go somewhere else. We don't have to go home yet. Let's just go closer.”

“No! No one's going to help him. He let me go because I'm useless,” I admitted. I sunk into the seat. If I were back in his car again, maybe I could do this over.

“We're going to go, okay?”

He had freed me...

I told him I wouldn't forgive him, but he forgave me, even so...

She pulled out and I jolted forward, then climbed over the side of the door and watched everything fall behind us. Was he really gone? I felt like no one was listening.

I hadn't imagined the lock being turned. It had turned. The Erik of my own faith had come to forgive me. I remembered my Angel.

He'd freed me.