I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I’m shaking. My covers are damp and tangled around my lower body.

That nightmare is back. I haven’t had it in years.

Pushing my bedsheets off my legs, I stumble to the bathroom and wash my face. As I look into the mirror of the medicine cabinet, a flash of an image lingers from the dream.

Caleb’s face.

Dammit. That’s why I had quit my job at his family’s department store. It’s the same reason I avoided him all through college. I didn’t want to see him earlier either. He’s a living, breathing, walking, talking reminder of what happened to me.

But I looked.

My eyes stole a glance at him at our front door, and somewhere deep in my subconscious, it all came flooding back. No wonder I had the nightmare again.

Returning to my room, I dry off my face and hands with my towel hanging over my closet door. In just those few seconds with my eyes closed, more images return. I take a seat on one side of my bed and look over at the picture box window, the only source of natural light in my room. My curtains are partway open, letting in the white glare of the nearby streetlight.

I don’t want to remember, but I have no control of the dream anymore. It’s back. A waking nightmare I can’t shake no matter how hard I try.

And I hate Caleb for it all over again.

The events of that night don’t happen in order. This nightmare was almost the same, with a different ending.

The kids from my school give me strange looks at my locker. As I walk down the hall before my first class, some of the popular girls speak under their breaths. All I hear are snippets. My name. The words ‘slut’, ‘drunk’, ‘trash’, and sometimes, ‘whore’ thrown in somewhere.

A bunch of guys from the football team pass by just before I turn to walk into my classroom. They smile at me, but there’s one who points at my face as though I don’t matter enough for him to speak behind my back. He talks to the rest of them about the pictures. Someone asks, “Which pictures?”

The loudmouth boy answers that they’re all shots of me at the party. “Everyone’s sharing them. It’s her my fifteen minutes of fame, and it’s all over social media.” He pulls out his phone and passes it around.

That’s when Caleb appears in the dream. Someone hands him the phone and he turns it toward me. He shows me myself. A picture of me, but it morphs into me in real life and leaps out of the phone, mimicking the position I was in when whoever snapped the photo. I look down at the floor in the hallway of my high school. I see myself sitting there. Not quite sitting, as my legs are stretched out to the side, and one hand props me up a little, as though I was on my side and am trying to get up.

At that point, my awareness moves to my second body, the one on the ground. My limbs are numb, so heavy. My hair is stringy and damp, clinging to the sides of my face and neck. I can’t keep my eyes open. Then I see that I’m literally half naked. The knee length wool skirt I had on is bundled around my waist. My candy-cane patterned holiday stockings are down around my ankles, and I only have a bra on. I go by touch around me, feeling for the rest of my clothes. I look up but everything’s blurry.

Everything but Caleb.

There are so many pairs of eyes around him. Voices are garbled, words are jumbled. I pick up the laughter, the teasing as they call me a drugged-up piece of trash. A slut who can’t handle her liquor. When my eyes focus, I follow the nearest voice. All those words are coming from somewhere near Caleb.

I ask the voice why he’s lying about me. I want to shout that Caleb brought me here. He let this happen to me, but my words come out sounding like the scratchy sounds of a DJ messing around on a turntable. With only my eyes, I ask why he was so kind to me just that one time before the store party, was it to get me here? He grins, and the voice near him continues to tell the guys that I was a good fuck. I stress to him that he’s lying, that no one fucked me, but it’s no thanks to him. The voice admits that I would’ve been a good fuck if the old man of the kid whose house they partied at didn’t show up and stop shit from happening.

In the dream, I’m pushed back into my clean, fully dressed body, except I’m no longer at school. I’m stretched out in a hospital bed. A nurse walks into the tiny private room. She tells me I’ve been here for a few hours, that I may have been sexually assaulted. I need to undress so she can get a rape kit done.

The room blurs, and when my eyes focus again, there’s a female police officer sitting across from me with a cold metal table between us. She asks me what I remember. I tell her about the holiday party. About ending up at the house party. I had a drink. The person told me it was punch, but everything got weird after I took a few sips. The room turned on its side somehow.

She asks me how often I drink and do drugs. I reply that I never do. That I didn’t know what was in the Dixie cup.

She asks me why I was drinking. That I’m underage and shouldn’t have been around at the party. I feel hot tears run down my face as she speaks. She tells me it’s not the time to cry. That I should be ashamed. That my parents would be heartbroken if they were alive. That I’m lucky my rape kit came back negative. That there was no evidence I was touched. She warns me that if this happens again, my next stop will be juvie.

My foster mother is in the waiting area of the police station when I leave the room. She tells me that her other children are home alone with her husband and she has to work the next day. That I can’t get myself into trouble again because it’ll be too disruptive to the rest of her foster children.

But her face softens for a second. She cups my cheek for a minute and says she’s sorry they hurt me. That it’s not my fault. That the cops would never treat me this way if we weren’t working class. She asks me if I remember anyone specific from the night. If I tell her the same thing I told the police and the nurse. No. I don’t remember. No one was familiar. My foster mother tells me that if I remember anyone specific, she’ll help me find a good lawyer. That we can sue someone because of where it happened. Some rich guy’s house.

My dream takes me back to school then, and I’m sitting in my classroom. For some reason, Caleb is sitting in the seat in front of me. He looks back and tells me I’ll ruin his life if I talk. That one ruined life—mine—is one too many. He presses a finger to his lips and breathes out the sound ‘shhhhh.’

My nightmare used to end there. Every time, I’d wake up to the sound of Caleb shushing me.

Every time until now.

The dream I just woke up from had a different ending. After Caleb turns to look at me, he doesn’t press a finger to his lips. He says that I’m the only one who can help his rich successful friends.

A wave of disbelief comes over me.

I know that it’s just a dream.

Half of what happens in my sleep didn’t really take place in real life.

Most of it is just my mind distorting pieces that bother me, adding fiction and drama to fact.

But honestly?

I still blame Caleb.

He didn’t have a hand in what happened to me, but he didn’t stick around to stop it either.

And I just agreed to help these people where Caleb works?

Am I fucking for real?

I must’ve been out of my mind when I told him to give Emily my number.

I remember that I left my phone in the living room earlier when I bolted from the room to get away from him. It’ll need to be charged for sure. I leave my bedroom and find the phone where I left it. It’s in the chair I was sitting in before he showed up. As I flip it around to unlock the screen, it lights up with a text he must’ve sent right after he left here. There are only five words.

Caleb: Thanks again. Will call tomorrow.

Fuck.

I can’t do this.

I won’t. Not with him.

He has no fucking right to ask anything of me.