It can’t be true, it can’t be true….
Except, it is true. There’s a newspaper that tells her it’s no lie. Gage and his three roommates were all incarcerated for nearly a decade after their capture for multiple armed robberies. These were robberies that they got away with for years before they even tangled accidentally with Minnie.
She was a mistake, if she understands the article she read. That’s how she remembers it, too. The Clown hadn’t been thinking about the small girl lurking in the front seat, huddled over her book. No, he’d been looking for the biggest vehicle to hijack on the street, and she just so happened to be in it.
Sheer bad luck colored in shades of dismay.
Remembering those details, Minnie curls up into a ball and tries to calm the pain in her heart and head.
There’s a knock on her door by noon. Ariel sounds almost timid as she inquires, “Minnie, do you need anything? Some toast, maybe? Momma Marla has a lovely jasmine tea…”
“Go away,” Minnie murmurs. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She wants to wallow in her own sadness, not deal with Ariel’s pity. Or anyone’s pity, for that matter. Has she been a fool all along? How could she have been so blind?
He wore a mask back then, she reminds herself coldly.How were you supposed to know him?
“Mouse,” Ariel laments, bonking her forehead gently against the door, as if that will bring her closer to her grieving sister.“I’ll be here when you’re ready. Please eat something soon. Mom is fretting.” She singsongs slightly, saying the old family joke, “Think of her heart…”
Of course, Marla is fretting; she always frets.
“What about my heart?” Minnie snaps bitterly. “I think the pieces of it are still scattered around the sitting room floor. Might want to sweep those up before someone gets cut.”
A sigh greets her.
When Ariel moves away from the door, Minnie sits up in the bed and makes her way over to her childhood desk. It still has old pictures of her and Ariel as young girls, some photos with their neighborhood friends. Minnie smiles at the frozen images weakly. She had been so different before the traumatic event. She’d been more carefree, less anxious about whatmighthappen. Her smile had been so bright, unburdened.
Being held as a hostage, even for so brief a time, changed her into the timid woman she is now. Not that she was ever boisterous and wild like Ariel, but she hadfeared less. She didn’t test the locks on her doors three times and didn’t have horrid nightmares based on her reality.
Sitting at her desk, Minnie stares at herself in the mirror, numb and broken inside. Her blonde hair is mussed, her soft brown eyes looking forlorn.
The longer she stares at her face, the more she begins to look how she did years ago: young and tear-stained, traumatized. Her fifteen-year-old self stares back at her with a blank expression, and the vivid image ends with the Skull Mask standing behind her, his gloved hand on the nape of her neck, his gun kissing her cheekbone.
Shuddering, Minnie closes her eyes and looks away from the mirror. She retches into her small garbage bin, but thankfully, nothing comes up.
She can’t connect Gage to the past. How can the man that she’s fallen in love with be part of her horrible history? How can he be part of the single most horrible moment in her life? And worse yet…hashe always known?
Did he know the first day he saw her in the library? Or did he only realize after she told him her story?And he didn’t say anything?!Urgh, she could strangle him for that. She ought to build a guillotine just for him.
The very idea of it burns like a scourge on wounded flesh. The undying urge to know when Gage made his own realization. Was it like Red? Or had Gage been so deep in denial that he didn’t seek to see his past in her face all those times in the library before they got intimate?
Red may not have recognized her the first time he met her, but at the cookout? He spent some time staring at her, hating her, loathing her, and eventually, he looked so deeply that he realized what it was about her that hehated.
It wasn’t just that she was from Uptown Gold. What a flimsy answer that had been, the one Gage had given her.
No. The reality was, she reminded Red of a fateful day long ago, and something clicked in his memory, right then and there. Red saw the tearful girl in the stolen car, surrounded by men in masks. His noxious voice weasels its way into memory from that day at the cookout. The cruel sneer on his face, his unkind laughter.“Those big doe eyes and glasses. You’re Minerva Fray.”
…and just like that, Red had recognized her and outed her to all of the roommates. He called Gage sick for being with her, and that’s when Gage got strange, defensive-
“Damn you!” Minnie curses uncharacteristically, knocking things off her desk in a fit of mental agony. Tears prick her eyes and she lets a sob break free of her chest. “How could you do this to me?”
Covering her face, trying to breathe, Minnie’s mind races. Has it all been a joke? Has Gage been laughing at her? Has she just been a dancing circus monkey for his amusement? Picking up the broken girl he traumatized all those years ago?
“This can’t be real,” Minnie whispers sickly, burying her face in her hands, humiliation and heartbreak eating her alive.
The worst part is, Minnie has no idea how she’ll ever face Gage again, knowing this ugly truth.
He was part of the criminal gang that committed multiple armed robberies, and he ruined her life.
Now, he’s been sleeping in her bed these past few months, as if none of that ever mattered.
