An aged brick construction, the hospital appears more like an old homestead than a medical establishment. It’s only the newer, contemporary levels behind, visible over the tiled roofline, which give away the property’s true purpose. That and the large signage dotted amongst tidy hedgerows and shrubbery indicating where to find the various departments.
“Come on.” I take Mila by the arm and coax her inside. “Their job is to help us.”
We’re ushered straight through the waiting room to a pre-prepared corner of the triage area; six cubicles sectioned off from the surrounding patients by heavily patterned curtains. Our male chaperones are held back in the waiting room—deputies included. I help Mila onto one of the beds, Nandi immediately resuming her reclined position on another. Darla hesitates between, eyeing the four spare beds, hand clutching The Kid’s.
“You okay?” I ask once I’ve finished settling Mila under a heavy knit blanket, warm from the heated cupboard.
Darla eyes a nurse who flits in to drop off a stack of supplies, buzzing back out as quickly as she entered. “You’ll think I’m silly.”
“You sure about that?” I lift an eyebrow to tease her and attempt to lighten the mood. “Try me.”
She exhales out her nose, oblivious to the way The Kid cranes her neck to watch her. “Of everything we’ve done since leavingthat place,thisis the thing that makes it the most real.” She snaps out of her daze and promptly lifts The Kid onto a bed opposite Kathy. “This is the thing that makes me realize how serious it all is.”
“Having a hood shoved over your head didn’t make it feel serious?” Nandi asks, eyes closed.
I toss my middle finger her way, immediately blanching when I notice The Kid watching. “Sorry.”
The girl smiles.
“Maybe it’s the connection to the real world?” Darla muses. “Until now, everything was so… surreal. Unfamiliar. But being here…” She sighs, glancing my way. “It puts it into context.”
“Makes sense to me,” I say quietly, excluding Nandi from the conversation.
It’s how I felt seeing Mary-Beth’s face; a slap to the senses. A jolt back to the real world.
I suppress the shiver aching to travel my spine and turn for one of the remaining beds. Nurses return in a group—three of them for the six of us. One seems to be a trainee.
They ask the usual questions. What’s our family history? Do we have any pre-existing medical conditions? When did we last menstruate?
I clench my jaw when they ask the kid if she knows what a period is. They don’t even know her age.
The nurses take our vitals: weight, heart rate, and blood pressure. Mila’s, after they find a smaller cuff for her undersized arm.
They ask when we last had intercourse. Was it consensual?
They ask if we experienced sexual assault in our time with the men. At the houses. After being shipped.
I keep my eyes on The Kid the whole time, Darla on the bed next to her, holding her hand.
It’s Nandi who takes me by surprise, refusing to answer the question.
They check her reaction times and balance, and shine a light in her eyes.
And no matter what we answered when they asked if anything physical happened, we’re ushered one-by-one into a side room to do a full swab.
Even The Kid.
I want to vomit.
It’s while Darla and The Kid are undergoing testing that I lock gazes with Nandi. She watches me with a kind of despair mixed with distaste. “What?”
“You never flinched.”
“When?”
Mila pretends not to listen, yet her gaze is stuck to a single spotted tile on the ceiling. Kathy lies curled on her side with the blanket tucked around her ears, disassociated.
“When they asked if you’d been abused,” Nandi hisses. “If those fucks touched you.”
