My mom took me to a hypnotherapist after St. Joke’s. She said she wanted me to shed light on all the memories, to bring them out into the open so they couldn’t fester. We needed to talk, she told me. We needed to process.

I wasn’t entirely sure what she needed to process as she hadn’t been there, but I didn’t put up a fight when she took me to this doctor’s office with this big leather couch and a fire in the fireplace and when he said to relax all my muscles one at at time starting at my feet – I did the opposite.

I tightened. I clenched. I became hard and solid and impenetrable.

I made myself my own armor. And it hurt. And it ached.

But it kept me safe.

Because I knew after Tommy, I couldn’t expect another Tommy. There was only one. Which meant I had to protect myself.

The hypnotherapist told my mom after one week that I wasn’t a good candidate for hypnosis. And mom took that as a challenge. Shit got real after that, but the armor only got thicker. Stronger.

It had kept me safe from a lot of shit.

But now… right now…it was gone. And I was all weakness and soft under belly. I was memory and grief and a longing that hurt.

I tried to be strong, clinging to my Jada persona, but she vanished with the shock.

I was fucking Beth.

And in front of me was the only person I’d ever loved.

“Look at you,” I breathed, feeling myself smile.

A smile crossed his face, and it was so familiar, so beloved, tears filled my eyes.

“Someone fed you.” He nodded, and my gaze ran laps around his body, over and over again, looking for pieces I’d missed. “You’re a man.”

“You’re a…” he almost said woman, I knew it, in that way I’d always been able to know what he was thinking, but he swallowed the word down and instead said; “singer. An artist. I knew…I knew you’d be something amazing.”

I nearly laughed. I was far from amazing.

How could I forget those eyes? I’d taken one look at them and fallen so hard and so fast it was like I’d become a different person. Someone I didn’t recognize. Someone I’d never been before. Confident and funny. Alive, all the way down to the ends of my hair.

The foster home had been a horror show, but somehow…I’d found myself there. I’d found happiness. A kind of innocent desire, a healthy lust.

When I found Tommy.

Was it possible to forget the person you first really revealed yourself to? Or did he just get woven into my skin. My hair. Part of the person I became and every costume I wore after that.

Tommy.

He crouched in the open doorway, blocking the new light of the sun.

“Are you hurt?” he asked. “Your feet?”

My feet could be bleeding. They could be missing and I wouldn’t feel it.

I had a thousand questions. Important ones about why I was in this car and what he’d been doing the last seven years and did he think about me. Did he miss me?

Like I’d missed him?

But instead I said—stupidly—“I thought you hated dogs?”

It’s what he’d said years ago, during one of those long conversations at school. When we couldn’t learn enough about each other.

“Dogs or cats?” I’d asked.

“Neither,” he’d said. “I don’t want another thing to worry about.”

His smile, crooked and patchwork with the dimple and the chapped lips—it made me suck in a breath.

“Pest is barely a dog.”

I remembered, in a sudden full-body memory, the second he and Simon and Carissa came through that office door seven years ago. I’d been fighting the Pastor with all my strength, and in that second, when they burst in, I stopped fighting. Every muscle went soft. Every fist relaxed.

I gave up and nearly blacked out from the relief.

The exact opposite of the hypnotherapist.

Tommy would take care of me, I’d thought.

It was the first time I ever thought that about anyone.

And the last.

And I wanted to hug him. I wanted to pull him as close as I could to my body. I wanted to hold him in the cradle of my legs and rub my hands over his hair and let him kiss my freckles. I wanted to be that girl. And I wanted him to be that boy. And for a moment, just a moment, this wasn’t a kidnapping.

It was a fairy tale.

“Tommy,” I breathed. “You’re here. I never… I never thought I’d see you again.” And I reached for him. For his face. Beautiful and familiar.

But his smile vanished and he jerked back, away from my touch.

“Don’t—” he said and turned away, his ears bright red.

“Don’t what?”

He swallowed.

“Touch you?” I asked, my voice strained and tight.

“Remember,” he said.

“Don’t remember you? Are you joking?”

“Don’t think about the past,” he said. “I’m not. This is just…this is a job. That’s all.”

Once upon a time we’d jeopardized everything to touch each other, and now… I didn’t even understand what he was saying. Don’t remember? Was he crazy?

How was this happening? After all these years?

Oh, that’s right, because fairy tales weren’t real. They were tricks played on girls like Beth. To keep us quiet and calm, to preoccupy us with dreams of boys and rescue so we wouldn’t get on our feet and rescue ourselves.

And the boy I’d known had grown up to be a man who could take unconscious women out of their homes without shoes, or ID or phones.

I smacked him. I smacked Tommy so hard it sounded like a gunshot. I smacked him so hard we both jerked back.

I swallowed my apology, cupping my stinging palm in my hand. His face was turning red.

“You’re…kidnapping me, Tommy?”

“I am.”

“You get that this is ridiculous, right?”

“I do.”

“So how about you explain it to me!”

He glanced at his watch. “I will, I just… We need to get going, Beth,” he said.

Every second of my life since I left him had been about turning myself into something he wouldn’t recognize. Something I wouldn’t recognize. Burying that real and true part of myself I’d shown him so deep, so far, I never saw it again.

And no one else did either.

I had to be Jada.

Jada was the only way I survived.

“My name is Jada,” I said out of sheer habit. Sheer self-protective habit.

“Jada,” he said with a nod as if committing it to memory. As if erasing all he could of Beth.

It wasn’t a bad idea. I’d done it, too. In fact, I would do it with him. I’d put Jada in charge of shit again.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Then don’t do this. Let me go.”

“I can’t.”

“Well then, what are you waiting for, Tommy? You’re in the middle of a kidnapping! You’ve got a time frame to keep. Chop chop, my friend.” Sarcasm was a comfortable place to be. Sarcasm was all Jada. Beth had been too soft for sarcasm.

Tommy shut the door and then locked it with the key fob he’d taken when I tried to drive away.

I rolled my eyes at him in the rearview mirror, but I liked that I was a problem.

Really, was there anything worse than a passive kidnapping victim?

We pulled away from the side of the road, and I exhaled slowly. My brain was chasing itself in circles. I was half here, half in the past.

Concentrate. Concentrate on now. The past is nothing.

“Is this for money?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“You said it’s a job.”

“Not for money.”

“What kind of job isn’t for money?”

He didn’t answer.

“Is this some kind of Jimmy Fallon prank?” Please let it be a Jimmy Fallon prank.

His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, and I felt the blast of something…sizzly. An echo of that prickly new-love feeling, with all the heat we’d had. God. So much heat. I’d been on fire at the thought of him. My hands—at every available moment—in my panties.

Once this guy showed me what hands down panties could feel like.

None of that, however, is relevant to the fact that he is kidnapping me.

“No. It’s not a prank.”

“Is it a sex thing?”

His eyes in the mirror were horrified.

“Is it? You’ve kidnapped me in order to do what we didn’t do when we were kids. You looking for a little sexual closure, Tommy? You want me to put my hair up in pigtails and we can find the nearest art room and finish what we started?”

That I was actually trotting out one of my old, post St. Joke’s fantasies shouldn’t have been exciting. None of this was…exciting.

But it was. Kind of.

And when his eyes met mine in the mirror—that was exciting too.

“No,” he said. And if that was true, fine, but now the idea was here, between us. Like his ugly fucking dog.

We used to want each other so bad I rubbed myself raw in bathrooms in that high school. I’d get worked up just from a glance at his wrist, with its knobby bones and all that promise of manhood. The sound of his voice cutting through the noise of the cafeteria had the power to stop my heart. Turn me to goo.

I’d been a radio with one frequency. Him.

“Then you better start explaining,” I said, snapping through the smoky heat in my blood.

“Do you… you remember the foster home?”

I laughed. “Yeah, Tommy,” I said with enough sarcasm for, like, twenty kidnap victims. Using up all the sarcasm in a twenty-mile radius. They were running out of it in the Grand Canyon. There would probably be a national shortage. “I remember St. Jokes.”

His ears got red, which meant he was blushing, and I hated that I knew that. That those memories lingered like ghosts. “Some people would want to forget what happened there,” he said in a low murmur.

I stared at the back of his head, my heart in a knot.

Yeah, I wanted to say. Some of it was shit but…there was you. There was us.

And those memories were so sweet. So fine. Worn smooth like pebbles, because I took them out like gems and held them in sweaty, clutching fingers when I needed to remember a time I’d been loved.

There was no way I could have forgotten him. Tommy was too big a memory to forget. Too beautiful a sound to let go of. Despite everything else, there was no forgetting Tommy.

“Is that what you did?” I asked him. Did you put me in a box and forget me?

“I tried,” he said. And it didn’t just hurt; it fucking infuriated me. It filled me with something dark and hollow and hungry. I’d been shining memories of him to a high polish, imagining what would have happened between us if we’d only been regular kids, if Mr. Mendoza hadn’t walked in on us.

I’d thought myself so in love that when I finally got away from my mother—I looked for his family.

Looked. For. His. Family.

I’d tried to connect myself to every single part of him I could find. I’d thought I could fix things for him. Or something…

And he’d been trying to forget me?

I called bullshit on that, right there. Something in the way his eyes tracked me in the backseat, the way the tips of his ears were red and his hands were squeezing on that steering wheel told me a different kind of story.

“And yet, here you are, kidnapping me? I don’t think it worked, Tommy.”

“No,” he said in his serious, quiet voice that I remembered so clearly. “It didn’t work.”

Outside, a dark bird took flight against the peach dawn, and in the silence of the car, the memories sprang up like dandelions in May. Unstoppable.

The art room. The notes under salt shakers. Sitting beside him at church, the distance between our legs delicious and awful at the same time. My nerves still remembered. The wild zing of something so wanted and so forbidden, it left its imprint on my thigh. A tattoo of desire.

The graham crackers.

The fucking graham crackers really started everything.

“You hungry or anything?” he asked like he’d been remembering the crackers too.

I was starving, but I wasn’t asking this guy… my God, Tommy… for shit. That was how Stockholm syndrome began.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Finish your story about how you came to carry me out of a house without shoes, phone or…what else, oh, that’s right…consent.”

God, I loved Jada.

“You asked me to get you out of there, Jada,” he said.

Of course I did.

“Is that making you feel better about this? Or did you happen to notice I was wasted at the time?”

His silence was pretty damning.

“It’s a long story,” he said with a sigh that told me he’d rather do anything but explain why he had me in the backseat of his car.

“Yeah? Good thing we’re on this thousand-mile road trip, isn’t it?”

He laughed, a kind of tired laugh. He must have been driving all night.

I refused to feel anything about that.

I refused, in fact, to feel anything about anything. Dr. John was so good at facilitating that kind of thing. It was hard to manufacture that drifty careless feeling on my own. But I pulled my legs up under me and crossed my arms over my chest and gave it my best shot.

“Right.” He sighed and picked up a Styrofoam cup from the middle console but it was empty and he swore, tossing the cup into the passenger seat footwell. I imagined him stopping at gas stations with me passed out in the backseat of his car, and I was cold to the bone. “Well, that night when the Pastor took you into the—”

“I know which night,” I said. I held myself rigid so the memories and their hot, greedy hands would get no hold on me. Those memories I’d dealt with. I’d processed the fuck out of them. I’d counseled and therapied. I’d group sessioned and yoga retreated. I’d art therapied and casual sexed them into something I could manage.

I’d cried… I’d cried and I’d cried and I’d cried. And I’d raged and screamed. And then I put them away. Leaving me with trust issues, insomnia and some stories to tell.

And Jada.

But here they were again, slices like nightmares. The Pastor’s hand had smelled like tomato sauce and his breath like soap. The edge of the desk had bit into my thighs. And I thought, I thought with my whole heart that it was over. That I was going to be raped by the Pastor in my Hello Kitty nightgown. But then the door opened and Tommy came in, holding his knife. And he’d screamed. He screamed so loud everything went quiet. I would remember that for the rest of my life.

I didn’t get raped, and that that was my silver lining for that night was its own kind of nightmare.

Everything after Tommy coming in was hazy.

“They told me he was dead,” I said. In the hospital room they’d told me he was dead. That the kids in the house had killed him.

But then my mother showed up. And the nightmare got real.

“I thought all of you were in jail,” I said.

“We would have gone to jail,” he said. “But this man came in and he made the charges go away. He even took care of the Pastor’s wife, who told the police we’d planned to kill both of them and steal from the church.”

“Was he a lawyer?”

“No. Opposite of a lawyer, I think. But in return for him doing this, we owed him a debt.”

“You fucking killed a guy, and you got to leave for a favor?”

“The man, Bates, he was really powerful. Or worked for a really powerful man at that time. And he pulled the strings to get us out. I can’t explain it. I don’t know why. It just…happened.”

I understood that kind of power. How money could make things go away. How fear could make people do things they normally wouldn’t. How some people could walk into a room and make everyone bow to their will—and feel, in the end, like every awful thing they did was right. And just.

My mother had that kind of power. She’d waltzed into that hospital room with her money and her soft, reasonable voice and all her credentials and it was like she’d never left me. Never hurt me. Wouldn’t dream of doing it again.

Yeah, I understood that kind of power.

I lived in fear of that kind of power.

But I didn’t feel like being sympathetic.

I was being fucking kidnapped. By my childhood crush. My first love.

Sympathy was squashed out by the heavy fucking irony of it all.

“Sounds ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It really does. But we walked out of that police station, and no one stopped us.”

“And none of it explains why you’ve got me in this car.”

“This was the debt.”

“Kidnapping me?”

“Picking you up in Santa Barbara and dropping you off in Arizona.”

“That makes zero sense, dude.”

“I know. But it’s happening.”

“You know I’m going to have you arrested, right? For kidnapping. I’m going to see you in jail for this shit. The second I get my hands on a phone, you’re done.”

“That seems about right,” he said like going to jail for this was what he deserved, and I sniffed and looked out the window. The sky was getting lighter. My heart was turning to glass.

“People are going to be worried about me,” I told him, though frankly it was kind of hard to come up with a list of people who would give a shit.

The US tour was over, and after the debacle in Los Angeles, the European venues were pulling away. Two of them had been canceled altogether. Half my crew had left for Lorde’s tour.

I’d fucked up.

My mother said I self-sabotaged.

She was probably right, but I didn’t go around admitting it.

“My manager,” I said. “Sherman. He’ll call the cops. He probably already has.”

In front, Tommy nodded.

“Beth. For sure she’s freaking out,” I said, and he glanced at me in the rearview mirror.

“Your assistant?” he asked.

“Yeah. She does not fool around, and she will be out for your blood—”

“You fired her.”

“What?”

“You fired her. Last night before I picked you up.”

“You didn’t ‘pick me up,’” I grumbled, but I frowned. Was that the low-level anxiety I felt about Beth. Had I really fired her? I swallowed my groan and put a hand over my face so Tommy couldn’t see my expression in the rearview mirror.

“She stayed though,” he said. “After you fired her. She stayed and she tried to protect you from that doctor.” He smeared a bunch of disdain all over the word doctor, and he wasn’t wrong.

I sniffed and watched the rolling red earth outside.

“Where in Arizona are you dropping me?”

“Outside Flagstaff.”

Flagstaff. Jesus.

“You better hope it’s a spa, Tommy.”

“Let’s hope it’s a spa, then.” I glanced up to see a quick smile flash across his face. There and gone. This wasn’t funny. None of it was funny.

But his smile was nice. His smile had always been nice. It was the dimple.

And its rarity. How, in those three months, I’d felt special when he turned that smile on me.

Think of something else. Anything else.

But since I was only twenty percent myself these days and the things I usually thought about—the things that usually crowded my brain, like art and music—weren’t there to occupy me…

I couldn’t stop fixating on what was happening in my body: the anxious, antsy feeling in my veins, the way my skin didn’t fit right and every thought wanted to go someplace dark. This would be about the time I’d make my assistant get Dr. John.

So he could make these feelings go away.

“You have my purse?” I asked. I had a bottle of Ativan in my bag. And an Ativan would really help take the edge off this kidnapping.

“No,” he said.

“No phone. No purse. No shoes. I’m giving this kidnapping a shitty review.”

I was being ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. I felt like I was coming apart.

The dog came up over the console to jump into the backseat. She crowded me into the middle, stepping on my hand and flopping over my legs. I suddenly had a lapful of dog.

“Pest,” Tommy said, but the dog—Pest, I guess—didn’t listen. She licked my hand instead.

“Are you sure this is a dog?” I asked.

“Simon and me thought she was a cat.”

I blinked at the casual mention of Simon, and I bit back a thousand questions I had and instead, feeling small and awful, muttered, “Get off me,” and shoved the dog away. She whimpered as if wounded by my rejection, and she climbed and flopped back into the front seat.

Comfort had no appeal for me.

The silence was thick and awful, and I wanted to snarl at him. I wanted to sharpen my claws and draw blood. The anxious feeling was growing worse, and it had nothing to do with Beth or not having my phone or even wondering where the hell he was going to take me.

The feeling that my body didn’t fit me anymore—it came from the pills and the needles. Or rather it came from not having them.

“Beth?” he said.

“The name’s Jada.” Beth doesn’t live here anymore.

“Jada. You all right?”

I wiped a hand over my face, and it came away sweaty. I was beginning to sweat through my shirt. But I was cold.

“Just fine,” I said, giving him nothing. Not even my pain.