This is bad.
I remain in the water to spare her blushes and lean on the bank.
“What do you remember?”
A flash of pain darkens her expression.
“I remember Angela Constable and what she made me do. I wish it was easier to erase that part of my life from my memory.”
“You can talk about it if you like. I won’t judge, or then again, you could tell me to mind my own business.”
“I’d rather not talk about her, but it has got me thinking.”
I say nothing, wishing like hell she had never stepped foot inside that fucking academy.
“What about?”
“How I got there.”
“You don’t remember?”
That surprises me.
“It’s as if I always lived there. I can’t remember arriving, where I came from, and how I became her, well, slave.”
I say nothing because I’m liable to curse way worse than she ever did.
“However–” she smiles. “For some reason, I realize that Delilah Grimes was never my name. I also understand her reason for being there isn’t mine.”
My ears prick up. “Tell me about Angela.”
“As you’re aware, she was the principal and not a nice woman at all. She ran a club for the staff who she had something on. Many of them owed her, or wanted to be in her good books, so she exploited them.”
“In what way?”
“She used them to do things nobody should imagine are right.”
She sighs heavily, a troubled expression on her pretty face.
“Every Friday evening, she summoned them into her apartment. They wore robes to cover their nudity.”
I can tell she’s uncomfortable and so I say nothing, waiting for her to be ready.
“She sat in the center, like a queen on a throne, and well, ordered them to do things to please her.”
She shifts, peering off in the distance, and her voice is soft, almost as if she is speaking to herself.
“It was all about sex with Angela Constable. She loved it, and the more degraded the better. She forced the others to do unspeakable things to her and to each other. If they resisted, she reminded them of what they had done. Many times, it would involve the cops, and they would either be arrested or fired with no references. They hated her.”
I’ve heard worse, seen worse and killed for less, but it doesn’t get any easier hearing despicable tales like the one this little lady has in her memory.
“I understood it was wrong. How could it be right, but for some reason my mind was always blurred? She used to inject mein my sleep, and I’m guessing it was the drugs she used to keep me compliant.”
“How do you know she injected you while you slept?”
“Because I woke up one time and attempted to get away. The punishment was so harsh I never tried again. But I knew. Every night the same pinprick in my arm, the same pain and the same sensation of floating away from my body. The inner discomfort and the sense that a lot went on during those hours that I would never remember.”
“Fuck, darlin’!”
