* * *
“Why did you take the newspaper clippings?” I demanded before Loretta had even shut the gate behind her.
“Good afternoon to you, too.” The hinges creaked as Loretta swung the gate shut. She leaned against the stone post, her eyes gazing up into the trees. Courtney had been experimenting with her hair again – it was tied in several small pigtails. It might’ve been a fashionable style on a hip hop singer, but it made Loretta look like a porcupine. “I noticed Mr. Dexter had bite marks up his arm, and Ms. Halsey’s head is all bandaged up. Your doing, I suppose?”
“Don’t change the subject. Ms. West has the articles now, did you know that?” I balled my hands into fists. When I thought about it, it made me so angry. “Does she know you got them from me?”
Loretta shrugged.
“I read them,” I blurted out, trying to shake her out of her indifference. “You told me your dad was never in your life, but that’s a lie. I know you killed him.”
“Then you know why I took them,” Loretta’s voice was hard. “They already knew my mother killed herself because she was gay. What do you think would have happened to me if the monarchs found out about my father?”
I fought to keep my anger under control. She was right, of course. The monarchs had one job at this school – to make our lives as miserable as possible. If they’d had that detail of Loretta’s life, they would have twisted it and exploited it and made her even more miserable.
Instead, Loretta kept it close, allowing it to twist up inside her and poison everything that had been good about her life. I knew all too much about keeping secrets.
“Someone went to a great deal of trouble to get those articles to me,” I managed to say, trying to find another way to convey my anger. “If I’d read them all sooner, I might have been able to stop some of this from happening.”
Loretta shook her head. “Of course you think that. I didn’t come to talk about the past. You found Greg?”
I nodded. “Ms. West has him locked up in her new laboratory. She needs the students and staff to believe he’s been sacrificed, but she won’t give him to the god because she’s trying to weaken the Eldritch Club. Theoretically, the oath I made still protects him from being hurt. But I don’t know for how much longer.”
“It sounds as if you have everything figured out,” Loretta said in a bored voice. “I don’t see what you need me for.”
“I need to know about when you were thrown into the god’s prison. What happened? What did you see?”
“Everything,” Loretta wore her secret smile like a mask. “And nothing.”
“Did he speak to you? Do you know why he can’t or won’t take our souls?”
“I told you why.” She frowned at me. “You just refuse to listen.”
“I am listening. Please, Loretta?” I clasped my hands together, my voice cracking. The rage inside me threatened to snap at any moment, transforming my pleading into my hands wrapped around her throat. She had answers that could help us all, but she refused to cooperate. “I don’t care about what you did. I’m the last fucking person to judge. I just need to know if there’s some way I can give the others back their souls.”
Loretta cast her eyes upward, focusing on something in the trees I couldn’t see. “Do you know what a pitchfork sounds like when it slides through flesh?” she said. “That’s what I hear every time I close my eyes. It’s a wetsquelch, like sinking your feet into fresh mud.”
Fuck.I rubbed my temple. White-hot flames danced behind my eyes.I’m not sure I’m up to hearing this.
But Loretta needed to tell her story. Sheneededme to know.
“He raped my mother when she was just sixteen years old,” Loretta said. “He was her youth leader at their church. She came to him for advice because she realized she was gay. He thought he would fuck the gayness out of her. She was a good Christian girl, a virgin saving herself for marriage. He was supposed to be a good Christian, too, but he just took what he wanted. Afterward, she was too scared to tell anyone, too scared to go to a doctor. She felt the baby growing inside her – a baby she loved and hated with equal measure until it tore her heart in two. She had to tell her parents. They wouldn’t allow her to get an abortion, so she had to give birth to a child who’d been violently placed inside her.”
Loretta closed her eyes. “I think she tried to love me. My grandmother showed me photographs of me when I was a baby. I’m in my mother’s arms, and she’s crying and smiling as she holds me. But his shadow loomed over everything – he stared back at her from my crib. I don’t remember much about her now, except a vague feeling of unease. In her suicide note, she said she tried so hard but as much as she loved me she couldn’t be my mother.
“After she died, the authorities said I had to live with my next-of-kin – the man who raped my mother. My grandparents knew what he’d done to their daughter, but as far as they were concerned, she’d made the whole thing up because she was sick. She thought she was gay. She was mentally disturbed, and he was a Godly Man – a church leader, a pillar of the community. They thought he’d be just the person to make sure I grew up ‘right.’ So off I went to live with a rapist. The first time he came into my room, I was just six years old.” Her hand tightened around the gate. “He told me I was beautiful, a good girl. He said God loved me for being with him. He was the only one who ever said those sweet things to me. I wanted to make him happy.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Loretta, I’m so sorry.
“As I got older, I tried to fight back, to tell him I didn’t want to do anything. I felt ashamed – a wretched secret that no one wanted. He was ashamed, too, I think – he took to the bottle and he became violent. Not just to me – he would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation. Everyone in the church was afraid of him. Every day I hoped he’d drink so much he’d pass out – if he didn’t drink enough, then he didn’t care who heard my screams.
“That day, he went out to the barn to talk to a neighbor, and he took a gallon of moonshine with him. Two hours later he bellowed for me. I knew if I didn’t come he would come inside to find me, crashing through the house, destroying our possessions and then blaming it on me. I walked out to him, every step heavy as lead.
“I entered the barn and found him leaning against the haystack. He had that glint in his eye, shit from mucking out the pigs smeared on his hands. Something inside me snapped. He lunged at me, and I ran into the haystack. My hands closed around the shaft of the pitchfork. He laughed, and the laughter was all the wrongs he’d done me. I swung. The fork went in easily, like testing a fresh-baked cake with a skewer to see if it was cooked. He might have screamed, but I didn’t hear. Everything felt far away, like I was watching a movie on mute. But maybe he screamed, because the neighbor came running, and he called the police.”
I could never imagine what Loretta had been through. Home had always been my safety net, the place I ran to when the outside world was dangerous. She didn’t know the meaning of ‘home,’ or ‘safety.’ Home had been a place of terror, where her abuser took advantage of her body and where the other adults in her life had looked the other way because their god said she was broken.
In three strides I closed the chasm between us and wrapped my arms around Loretta’s shoulders, encasing her in a hug. Loretta stiffened at my touch, but I flexed my muscles and refused to move, to relent. We were locked together in a battle of wills – she determined to keep her walls up, me desperate to smash them down.
