What Unbreakable Looks Like Read online

  “C’mon,” she says, shaking me. “The others won’t be up for half an hour. We can grab the showers.”

  “Fug off,” I tell her, snuggling deeper into the cocoon I’ve made.

  “Bro, you will be so pissed when there’s no hot water left for you.”

  No hot water? Hell, one time at the hotel we didn’t have water at all for a week. My ass was nasty.

  “Lex,” she tries again. “They’ve got body scrubs and lotions and professional shampoo. Face masks too.”

  What the hell is this place? “They got pumice stones?” I ask, peering up at her with one open eye.

  She nods enthusiastically.

  I throw back the covers. It’s been too long since my ugly-ass feet got some attention. My toenails need clipping and my heels are cracking, they’re so dry.

  I grab towels and clothes from my closet and follow Sarah from the room. Someone else had the same idea and is using the bathroom at the far end of the hall. Sarah gestures for me to use the one closest to our room, and she hurries to the one in the middle.

  She wasn’t lying. Oh my God—the stuff in this bathroom! There’s a basket of masks on the counter, the kind that have three or four applications in them. I pick a moisturizing and toning one. There’s a note that says to check under the sink for shampoos and body lotions. I can’t believe it when I open the cabinet.

  “Jesus,” I whisper. There are tons of small bottles of high-end stuff. I grab shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and a pumice sponge wrapped in plastic, and stand with my hands full. That’s when I see the baskets on the stand above the toilet. They have names on them—mine is empty—but the others are full of different items.

  I start the shower and clip my toenails with clippers I find in a small bottle of disinfectant. After getting clean, I wrap my hair in a towel, dry off, and dress, putting all the items I used, including a new razor, in my basket and setting it on the shelf. I put my towels in the laundry and return to our room. Sarah is already there, making her bed. She takes one look at me in my leggings and sweater and smiles. “You look like your aunt.”

  I glance down at my clothes. “Yeah, not really my style, but they’re comfortable.”

  “Make your bed and you can come with me to help feed the horses.”

  Do I look like someone who wants to feed horses? I must, because I make my bed as fast and neat as I can and follow after her.

  Downstairs, breakfast is cooking. My stomach growls at the smell of bacon and coffee as I pull on my coat and boots. I tug a cap over my damp hair and step out into the cold. There is a fine layer of snow on the ground, and our footsteps seem to echo in the quiet, the crunch of gravel sounding like a roar.

  The stables aren’t far from the house. A couple of women are working there, carrying bales of hay and shoveling manure. One of them looks up as we approach. Her eyes are bright and her cheeks pink. She looks older than my mother.

  “Good morning, Sarah!” she says. “And you must be Alexa.”

  I hesitate. “How do you know my name?”

  The woman smiles. “I’m Bev, dear. I help run this place. I’m supposed to know your name. You two are just in time to help feed the beasties, though I’m sure you know that.”

  The last time I met a person whose eyes twinkled so much, he was done up on cocaine. Bev doesn’t seem high though. Just … happy.

  She leads Sarah and me into the barn. It’s darker in there, the air slightly damp with horse breath, and smelling of shit. Horse crap doesn’t smell as bad as I thought it would. It’s almost sweet.

  Sarah names the horses off to me, but I’m not listening. My gaze is locked on a huge, black monster at the far end of the stalls.

  “What is that?” I ask, pointing.

  Bev laughs. “That’s Joe, our Percheron.”

  “Percheron,” I repeat. “Are they all that big?”

  “That big and bigger,” she replies. “Would you like to meet him?”

  I shake my head.

  “He’s a big baby,” Sarah tells me. “Come on, you can give him a carrot.”

  Hesitantly, I approach the giant horse. As we get closer, I notice the white blaze running down his nose and the shaggy fur—hair?—hanging over his forehead. His eyes are huge and dark when he looks at me.

  “Here.” Sarah puts a chunk of the biggest carrot I’ve ever seen in my gloved hand. “Open your hand and offer it to him on your palm. That’s it. Open your fingers a little more. Now give it to him.”

  I hold my breath. Joe’s giant head comes farther out of his stall. He snorts lightly, and the carrot is gone.

  I stare at my empty palm. I didn’t even feel him take it.

  “See?” Sarah says, grinning. “A baby.” She runs her bare hand along the horse’s jaw. “You can pet him. He likes it.”

  I take off my glove and carefully set my hand on the side of Joe’s face. He’s soft, but not like a cat or dog. Solid muscle is right below the surface, and it moves and flexes as he chews the carrot. He turns toward me, sniffs my coat. Tastes it.

  I laugh. The sound startles me.

  Sarah offers Joe some oats and gives me a sympathetic look. “Pretty great, huh?”

  I nod. I’m embarrassed, but that doesn’t stop me from taking a handful of oats from the bucket and feeding them to Joe when she’s done. This time, when he nuzzles me, I get closer. He rubs his muzzle against the side of my face. I smile.

  Sarah shows me some of the other horses—all rescues or donations—but I go back to Joe before we have to return to the house for breakfast. Inside, we wash our hands in the small bathroom by the kitchen and join the others in the dining room. Breakfast is set up buffet style. We get to take what we want, and there’s so much to choose from!

  So far, I’m enjoying rehab.

  I load my plate with scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. I even take an orange. The only place at the long table left open is next to Lonnie and another girl whose name I don’t remember. I sit down. Lonnie smiles at me.

  “Been to the barn?” she asks.

  I nod. “Sarah took me to meet the horses.”

  “Which is your favorite?”

  “Joe.”

  She looks surprised. “Yeah? A lot of girls find him scary when they first come here.”

  “He didn’t scare me.” It’s not really a lie. He didn’t scare me for long.

  “No. I’m not surprised.” She smiles. “I don’t think you’re scared of much.”

  “What’s there to be scared of now?” I ask her.

  “A lot,” she replies, her smile gone, and goes back to eating her eggs.

  After breakfast, we’re funneled into the living room to watch a documentary on human trafficking. The girls I saw with the horses when I first arrived are sitting together. They look bored and defiant. I take a step.

  “Sit with me,” Lonnie says.

  I glance from her to the girls. I really want to be with them, the ones who look like they might explode at any second. But Lonnie just watches me with a faint smile, and the next thing I know, I’m sitting in the chair next to her.

  The documentary is about girls who were trafficked, and the case their mothers are building against Stall 313—the website they were trafficked on. Stall 313 is where Mitch posted his girls. Us. Me.

  I squirm in my seat. I can’t get comfortable. This shit on the TV isn’t helping. Mothers crying, dead-eyed girls talking about what happened to them, lawyers promising justice.

  Ain’t nobody promising justice for me, or for the girls sitting around me.

  “Fry their asses,” says a girl close to me. “Make them motherfuckers pay.”

  “Shut up,” says another. “You know they ain’t gonna pay shit. Bunch of old white guys are gonna buy their way out.”

  The people behind Stall 313 are three middle-aged white guys. You only have to take one look at them to see they’re assholes. I want them to pay for what they’ve done, but I know they probably won’t.

  There’s a woman on the
screen, talking about her daughter, Shendea, who was sold on Stall 313, beaten, and left for dead in a motel room. She’s crying. I can’t imagine my mother getting sober long enough to cry over me. I don’t want to listen to the list of things the johns did to her girl.

  “They raped her, vaginally and anally. They beat her. They burned her. They whipped her with belts…”

  If I could reach the TV, I’d put my foot through it to shut it the fuck up. Lonnie puts her hand on my left leg to stop it from twitching. She doesn’t look at me.

  The film cuts to a girl about my age. She’s got scars on her face, on her arms and back and legs. Everyone in this room knows she’s got scars in other places too, places the documentary can’t show. She takes out her false teeth, showing how many the men who bought her knocked out. I run my tongue along my own teeth, thankful I still have them all.

  On the other side of the room, the girls I belong with are agitated, saying shit. I could have been one of them, but instead, I’m watching them, and I see them. I see them like Lonnie sees them. They’re scared little girls who don’t want to deal. They don’t want to see themselves in the girl on the screen.

  I can’t stop seeing myself.

  “My pimp named us after flowers,” says a new girl on screen. She’s kind of hard looking, black eyeliner all the way around her eyes. Her hair is bleached blond. On the screen they call her “TS,” but I know her as Iris.

  “He was friends with a guy my stepfather knew. Started coming around the house, telling me how pretty I was. He bought me gifts—things my parents couldn’t afford. Mom told him to step off, but it was too late. I loved him. He said he loved me too.”

  They ask her about the first time she was forced to have sex with a stranger. “He told me he owed this guy money, that he was going to get hurt—maybe killed—if he didn’t pay the guy back somehow. He said he hated asking me to do it, but the guy thought I was pretty. Did I love him enough to save his life?” She smiles sadly. “I did.”

  I’m cold. Something prickly is crawling up the back of my neck, digging its claws into the base of my skull. My vision narrows so all I can see is Iris’s face. Her words ring in my ears, bitterly familiar.

  “Afterward,” she says, “he put me to work with the other girls, but he always told me I was his favorite. I believed him. I still believed him when he tried to kill me, when he let two other girls be killed. Peony and Tulip.”

  I see their faces in my mind before their photos appear on the screen. They disappeared shortly after I arrived. This couldn’t have been filmed too long ago. Mitch told us they’d left. That Iris had left.

  I’m going to puke. I start to stand, but Lonnie grabs my hand.

  “I can’t,” I whisper. Some of the other girls are watching me, but I don’t care.

  “You can,” she says, squeezing my fingers.

  I pull hard against her grip. “Let me go.” I’m going to run. If I make it out that fucking door, I’m going to run as far as I can and I’m not coming back. Fuck this. Fuck her. Fuck it all.

  “This is how you survive. You sit the fuck down and give them the respect they deserve, and you make a promise to yourself that they didn’t die for nothing. You get mad, and you keep going. That’s how girls like us get even, how we say fuck you to the people who did this to us. We live.” She nudges me with her injured leg as she says this.

  I sit. Every nerve in my body is on fire, twitching and thrashing. I swallow and taste vomit in the back of my throat. My stomach lurches. If I puke, I’m going to do it all over Lonnie, I swear.

  Slowly, it begins to fade. On the screen, Iris is talking about how some organization that fights trafficking helped save her, took her in, and gave her purpose. I focus on her, on her face and her voice. I see her looking strong and healthy, going to school, and getting her diploma.

  She looks so normal.

  “I’m going to have that,” Lonnie murmurs. She looks at me. “You’re going to have that. Promise me.”

  I nod. Lonnie looks away, and so do I.

  chapter three

  I’ve never lived in a house, and I’ve never had what I would consider a home—not since I was a little kid and we lived with my grandparents. But I don’t remember that part of my life very well. I remember some of the apartments that came later. Some of them my mom and I lived in alone, others we shared with her friends, or people she’d managed to con into letting us crash with them. When she had a boyfriend, we usually had a place to stay. Sometimes I even had my own room, but usually I slept on a couch.

  I can’t remember the last time I had any privacy.

  “I hope you like your room,” Krys says when she picks me up Saturday for my first visit to her house. After two weeks in the program, they decided I could have a day out. “It’s pretty plain, but you can decorate it however you like.”

  “Does it have a door I can lock?” I ask, climbing into the car.

  “Well, yeah,” she replies. “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll like it.”

  She winces. I don’t mean to make things hard for her. I don’t know how to say things so they won’t affect her, and it’s not like I can pretend nothing bad has ever happened to me. She already knows I had crabs and gonorrhea. The hospital told her before they told me. Luckily HPV and HIV were both negative.

  Would she still have wanted me if I had AIDS?

  She turns to me after pressing the button to start the car. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, but I want to understand you, okay? I want to help you get through this. If you want to talk, I’m here. If you don’t … well, I’m still here. Always.”

  My aunt hasn’t asked me a lot of questions, but I know she met with Detective Willis and Jill. I assume they filled her in on my story. What they know of it, anyway.

  “Okay,” I agree. I’m not about to start telling her everything though. She might still change her mind. Who the hell wants to take in a seventeen-year-old who’s been passed around and discarded like loose change? God, I could really use a little something right now.

  Being clean is hard. I don’t miss the drugs, really. I like being able to focus, but I miss being numb. Feeling shit is overrated. Feeling shit means it has to go somewhere—get out—and everyone at Sparrow Brook has sharp fucking eyes that’ll notice new cuts, fresh marks, or missing hair. Even if you think you’re being smart, Dr. Lisa always seems to notice. Yesterday, she noticed me rubbing a spot on my leg.

  “Lex,” she said. “Have you been self-harming?”

  It’s no good to lie. Bitch has some kind of superpowers when it comes to that shit. She doesn’t like being called “bitch” or “bro” either. I have to remember that.

  “It’s just a scratch,” I told her.

  She looked at me a second, got up from her desk, went to a cupboard, and took out a small laptop. She handed it to me. “How about you try writing your feelings down on this rather than on your skin?” she suggested.

  I grabbed the laptop like it was gold, or E. I could check my email, my Facebook accounts, my Twitter, my Instagram …

  “It doesn’t leave the house. Wi-Fi is available only at certain times, and social media sites are blocked.”

  I slumped. So much for having any kind of contact with the outside world.

  “We can’t take the risk of anyone finding you who might hurt you, Lex.” Her expression said she was sorry. I got it, but I didn’t like it.

  So now, I’m writing stuff down when I feel like tearing into myself. I haven’t made myself bleed once today. I don’t share this with Aunt Krys, but Dr. Lisa will be happy when she sees me next week.

  “Do you like shopping?” my aunt asks. “I thought maybe we’d get you some new clothes, stuff you can pick out for yourself. We don’t have to worry about school for a few months yet.”

  School. Right. I agreed to summer school to catch me up to where I should be, and then I’ll complete my senior year at Middletown High School. “A fresh start,” Jill called it. A pla
ce where no one knows me or my story.

  “Sure,” I say. I do like to shop. I like clothes and nice things; that was how Mitch sucked me in. “Why are you doing all this? And don’t say it’s because you love me. You don’t know me.”

  She looks surprised—and hurt. I refuse to feel bad. “You’re right. I don’t know you, but I don’t have to know you to love you. We’re family. I should have taken you when you asked me to. I’ve always regretted that.”

  I frown at her. “What do you mean?”

  She glances at me. “You don’t remember?”

  I shake my head.

  Her attention on the road, she says, “When you were seven, you asked if you could come live with me. I was barely twenty-one and enjoying life away from my parents. But I should have taken you.”

  I shrug. I still don’t remember. “Mom wouldn’t have let you.”

  She sends me a dubious glance. Yeah, okay, so maybe Mom would have helped me pack. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you then.”

  I am too, but I don’t say it. It’s not her fault there’s a part of me locked in a room that can’t get out. I feel her in there, pounding on the door, but I can’t be bothered to help her. It’s like I’m sitting on a couch in my head, listening to that part of me screaming, but I’m too stoned to get up and open the damn door.

  I stare out the window as we drive through Middletown. It’s a nice town for the most part. Cute downtown. No mall, but lots of neat-looking restaurants and shops. Krys tells me the school where Jamal is a professor has all kinds of famous alumni. I try to look impressed, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with me.

  A few minutes later, we’re in a fairly nice neighborhood—better than anything I’ve ever lived in before. I think maybe we’re only driving through, but my aunt pulls into the driveway of a big gray and dark blue house with a veranda.

  I stare at it. “This is your house?”

  She looks almost embarrassed. “Jamal’s parents gave us the down payment as a wedding present.”

  “Are they rich?”

  “They do okay.”

  “Okay”? Obviously she and I have different ideas of what that word means.