CHAPTER ONE
Sam
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds;
our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
-Goethe
The past never leaves us.
The past is a part of who we are, as much as our skin and bone and the lies we’ve told that we can never take back.
The choices we’ve made and the things we’ve suffered take every step with us, always present though not always seen.
My dad is a geologist by profession, but an all-around science nerd for the love of a good mystery. When I was little, our family would spend our weekends exploring hidden island beaches, hiking up mist-shrouded mountains, or pawing through the volcanic soil atop Maui’s dormant volcano.
On every trip, Dad’s voice was the soundtrack for adventure. Before the divorce, Mom used to joke that she felt like she was living in a nature documentary. I could tell Dad’s constant chatter annoyed her sometimes, but to me the stories he told were reason for wonder. It made me realize the world was full of mystery.
Every plant or animal we passed on a trail had a secret story to tell, an entire hidden world waiting to unfold to those who took the time to stop, observe, and ask the right questions.
It was Dad who taught me that palm trees aren’t really trees at all. They’re more closely related to the grass family and don’t generate new cells the way trees do. Cut through an oak’s bark and you’ll see growth rings that tell the story of each year of the tree’s life. Cut into a palm’s trunk and you’ll just leave a gash in the thick, spongy material of the plant.
And unlike the oak, whose yearly ring growth will eventually heal over the cut, protecting the plant from disease, the palm tree will bear an open wound for the rest of its life. Every insect and dangerous bacteria that floats by on an island breeze will be able to burrow straight into the heart of the palm and start devouring the plant from the inside out.
As I grew up, I started to think that people were a lot like both plants.
Sometimes, we’re like an oak, growing past an old hurt, burying it under layers of new growth, moving forward and getting stronger despite the scar buried beneath the healthy outer shell. But sometimes, our wounds refuse to heal. Sometimes, they stay open and ugly, reminding us every time we look in the mirror that we will never be the same.
The hurt was too big, the cut too deep.
We will never move past it.
From this day, until our last day, the wound will make us an easy target, a weakened animal falling behind the rest of the herd, waiting for another predator to step in and finish the job the first one started.
As I stumble down the courthouse steps, clinging to my dad’s arm with my head tucked to my chin, ignoring the questions the reporters shout from either side of me as we press through the crowd, I wonder what the cameras see.
Do they see the hardened, selfish, sexually deviant monster the defense attorney made me out to be? Or do they see the stinging, screaming gash four boys cut through the middle of my heart?
Not guilty.
They were all found not guilty.
At the end of the day, the jury believed that I invited four boys to take turns with me, not that I fought and bled and cried. They believed that I spread rumors about Deidre to keep news of my sexual adventures from my boyfriend, not because I was traumatized after being raped.
As far as the law and the world at large are now concerned, Todd, Jeremy, J.D., and Scott are innocent and the rape never happened.
But it did.
It did and now I don’t know what to do. How do I move on when I’ve been told the reason for my grief doesn’t exist, and that my voice, my truth, means less than nothing?
Someone shouts my name.
I flinch and look up before I remember that I’m supposed to keep my gaze down until I get to the car waiting by the curb.
“How did you feel when you heard the verdict, Samantha?” The man in the suit shoving a microphone in my face has sweat beading on his upper lip. I stare at it for a moment, feeling ill, while my father springs to my defense.
“No comment,” he growls, his arm tightening around me.
Sweaty Upper Lip says something else, but I can’t make sense of it. My focus has shifted, homing in on Todd and his father, standing in the shade of the coral trees planted along the sidewalk.
Once I’ve spotted them, I can’t seem to pull my gaze away.
Todd’s father is shaking hands with a pretty, stick-thin reporter and smiling. Todd is nodding earnestly, his blue eyes wide with gratitude and his shaggy blond hair waving in the gentle breeze. He is the picture of innocence, proving he’s a far better actor than his B-list celebrity father. If I didn’t know he was a liar and a monster, I might be tempted to believe him, too.
But I was there the night Todd’s human mask fell away and the devil beneath came out to play. I felt the cruelty in his touch. I heard him laugh while I cried and begged them to stop. I watched him smile as his friends took turns until the world was full of pain and blood ran down my thighs, mixed with the stickiness of other things I couldn’t bear to think about.
And I remember the last words he shouted after me as I hobbled away from the pool table and ran, half-naked and sobbing, across the frat house’s back lawn toward the quad.
You know you loved it, doll. Come back when you’re ready for more.
Or maybe we’ll come find you, Sammy.
The threat was the kill shot.
I had no idea how I would survive what they’d done once, let alone if they did it again. The terror the thought instilled, combined with the physical, mental, and emotional pain of the attack, swept through me like a hurricane, shattering the walls of the fortress protecting my most private, secret self.
And then J.D. put the video of what they’d done on the campus website and shoved the naked, innocent thing they’d exposed out into the driving rain.
It didn’t matter that my face wasn’t visible in the thirty seconds of footage or that it was only up on the site for a few hours before the administration shut it down. Everyone had already seen; everyone was already wondering who the girl might be. Hearing the hushed speculation in the library was like living through it all over again. I started to fear that it would never be over, that I would keep living through it, over and over again, every day until the day I died.
I spent January in hell, ravaged by rage, fear, and shame, forced to pretend everything was okay while I waited to find out if I was pregnant or if the test I’d taken at a local clinic would come back positive for HIV.
I don’t remember telling my gossipy roommate that I’d heard it was Deidre Jones in the video. I don’t remember going to classes or getting up for my morning run or exactly what I said to my stepbrother, Alec, the one time I worked up the courage to ask him why he hadn’t stopped them.
Why he hadn’t saved me.
But I remember the day I learned that Deidre had hung herself in her dorm room with crystal clarity, right down to the jeans I was wearing and the pattern of the coffee grounds floating in my cup when I heard the news. It was the day that everything changed, the day I began to hate myself as much as I hated the boys who had broken me.
By the time I took the stand in a packed Los Angeles courtroom, I thought I knew hate inside and out. I thought I understood it in a way I had understood very few things in my twenty years of life.
But I was wrong.
Todd’s gaze meets mine across the crowded courthouse steps and an ugly grin curves his full lips, and at that moment, I realize that hate is fathomless.
There is no end to it. I could sink down, down, down through the inky depths of my hatred for Todd Winslow for years and never reach the bottom. I could drink and eat nothing but hate and never be filled. And I could spend the rest of my life applying bandages to the wound he and his friends have ripped in my soul and it will never heal.
They say love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, the two great transformative forces in the universe. One leads to light and freedom, the other feeds a fire that will consume you whole.
Anyone with sense would choose to be free.
I have parents who love me, believe me, and support me. I have a boyfriend who wants to be by my side, helping me pick up the pieces of my shattered life. The trial is over and I’ve spared Danny as much of the horror as I can. Now, all I have to do is pick up the phone. I know he will meet me on the island where we fell in love, hold me as long as I need to be held, and dedicate himself to loving me enough to make up for all the pain and injustice.
But I’m not sure there is enough love in the world for that. Enough love to make up for Todd’s smile. Enough sand in the hourglass to make me forget that I went to the mat with evil and evil won.
But there might be enough hate.
Hate enough to make me strong, hate enough to turn a wound into a weapon.
I hold Todd’s gaze, memorizing the exact curve of his lips, silently promising myself that one day, not too long from now, I will wipe that grin from his face. I will show him what it feels like to have every scrap of dignity, safety, and happiness stripped away and to be left twisting in the wind while the vultures swoop down to feed.
I’m silent in the car to the hotel my mother, father, and I have been staying at for the past few weeks. I stare out the window, ignoring my father’s assurances that we’ll appeal the court’s decision, get a better lawyer, sue the bastards in civil court, do whatever it takes to make things right.
Things will never be right.
And I’m not going to beg for scraps of mercy or justice anymore.
I should have known better than to think a court and a bunch of anonymous jury members would take my vengeance for me. They don’t understand. They can’t see through my eyes, breathe my breath, or walk the dark, desolate halls in my soul that didn’t exist before last New Year’s Eve. No one can and no one ever will.
This is too personal, these crimes and the hatred they have left behind.
Violence creates a terrible intimacy between perpetrator and victim. For the past six months, I’ve rebelled against that intimacy, doing everything I could to distance myself from the pain and the boys who inflicted it. But now, I tear down the braces holding my feeble defenses in place. I close my eyes and let the memories sweep over me, drowning me in a flood of hurt, baptizing me in hatred and sealing it with a poisonous kiss.
By the time we arrive at the hotel, my decision is made.
I wait until my parents are distracted at the checkout counter, arguing with the clerk about whether we should be charged for the next two nights even though we’re leaving early, and I step outside.
I walk calmly across the parking lot, get into my car, and pull out onto the highway. I head east and drive straight through the night, stopping only for gas and coffee. Around midnight, I turn off my ringer. Come sunrise, I chuck my phone out the window near the Texas state line.
I don’t look into the rear view mirror or let regret creep into my heart.
I don’t think about how devastated Danny will be when he realizes I’ve disappeared or how scared and worried my family must be.
On this new road, there is no room for compassion. There is no room for love or the softness and vulnerability it brings. There is only where I must go and the steps I will take to get there.
Deep down, I know this won’t end well. I know I’m dooming myself as surely as the men I mean to destroy, but I can’t stomach making another choice. I can either let my wound become my weapon or I can limp through life a broken person, bitter and jaded, haunted by the ghost of my innocence
Either way, the people I love are better off without me. I will never live, laugh, or love the same way again. I will never be what I was and I refuse to be the broken creature Todd and his friends created. I will forge myself anew.
I will pass through the fire of my hatred and emerge as something stronger. I will give myself time to cool and the steely edges of my new self time to harden, and then I will teach Todd, Jeremy, J.D., and Scott a lesson.
I will teach them that there is danger in preying on the weak.
You never know when a lamb will become a lion or a kitten will grow ten-inch claws.
And you never know when the person you’ve broken will reach down, pick up a sliver of their shattered soul, and use it to open your throat.