Page 79 of He Hate Me

I lock the door when I go in my room anyway. I’ll need to add some security—a camera at least—and maybe a better lock. I wonder if Rourke would let me put a metal core door on here. I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t even know if his absentee dad will let me live here.

The DVD drive is attached to my laptop with a USB cord. I’m feeling so fucked up. I don’t want to do this. I didn’t even work out this morning and I’m feeling all keyed up. The disks are stacked on the coffee table, so I set up there, plugging my laptop in to the charger since I don’t know how long this will take. The Wi-Fi signal is super weak because this place is so big, but I’m able to check my email. Nothing except the latest invoice from my mom’s hospital and a bunch of spam.

When I open the first disk, there’s only one file listed, and the name is just a date. I click on it and a video opens, showing what looks like a basement. The camera is pointed at a sofa with Devin and Mom sitting on it. My mom has a dreamy expression on her face, like she’s drunk. Her dark hair is cut in a bob, and she’s wearing a going out to dinner dress. I hit play.

“Stand up for me, Lindsey,” Devin says, and she does it, swaying a bit on her feet. She giggles.

“Now bark like a dog.”

My mom goes, “Ruff, ruff, ruff.” Devin laughs, slapping his knee and I can hear more laugher, though I can’t see who’s doing it. It sounds like a man and a woman.

“Bark like a chihuahua,” Devin says, and my mom does that too, a high-pitched yapping noise.

“This fucking bitch will do anything I tell her,” Devin says. My stomach twists. I remember her telling me that Devin was like family to her, yet here he is humiliating her. But why is she doing this? Could she be drunk? I’ve never seen anything quite like this. When he tells her to do something she does it, but otherwise she just stands there looking dazed.

Devin asks her to crawl on all fours and kiss his shoes and a bunch of other things like that, cackling the whole time. The video jumps, and a number of items are added to the weather coffee table between my mother and the camera. Peanut butter, a jar of pickles, a lighter, a cucumber. Devin takes his boot off and makes her lick the peanut butter from his toes. His face is alight with malevolence. What could she have possibly done to make him treat her this way? My mother is one of the most harmless people I’ve ever known. He makes her eat the entire jar of pickles, then drink the juice, which makes her throw up. A woman yells for someone to get a trash can and a black man, wait no, Deja’s father, thrusts it under her mouth just in time. He looks at her with the same resentment as my father. I expect them to attack her with their fists at any moment. Once her stomach is empty, he takes her arms and leads her up the stairs with the trashcan in his other hand. The video jumps again, and she’s back, the front of her dress soaked with water. Through all of this she still looks peaceful, her expression trusting and childlike. And then things get even worse.

“Show us your tits, Lindsey,” Deja’s father says, sitting next to her on the sofa. She’s flanked on either side by David and Devin. I need to look away, but I can’t, because I have to know if she’ll really do it. But of course she does. She drops her dress to her waist, displaying her body for them with no self-consciousness whatsoever. I slam my laptop shut, my earlier nausea returning. I go over to the window and look out, gripping the sill until my knuckles are white. The sound of my own heart is so loud I can’t hear anything else. I knew Devin was a piece of shit, but I figured he was the regular kind—sleeping with his friend’s wife, greedy, dishonest, a thief, and selfish. But torturing an innocent woman for the amusement of you and your friends? That’s not normal. Doing what I’m pretty sure he is about to do? That’s not close to normal either.

Except I won’t know for sure unless I at least fast forward through the rest, and I need to know exactly what they did to her. I also now have the dilemma of deciding what, if anything to tell Deja about her parents’ involvement in this. There’s her father as plain as day, and I’d bet money the woman we never see on camera is her mom.

I run upstairs and find Rourke playing a military shooter with a headset on, yelling at someone in Italian. I try the door to the bar, but it’s locked.

“You need a drink?” he yells, covering his mouthpiece with his hand.

“A fucking strong one, too,” I say. He waves me over and unclips a carabiner from one of his belt loops.

“It’s that orange one,” he says, referring to a key with the FC Laurient symbol printed on it. “I’ll get you a copy made.”

“Why’s it locked.”

“Gets too crazy with people sometimes. Got some pricy stuff in there.”

It’s the first sign I’ve seen that Rourke’s even aware that things cost money. I thank him and grab a couple of shot glasses and a bottle of vodka from the bar before locking back up. We do a shot together and then I go back downstairs to face the carnage.

I get through the rest of the video by fast forwarding. They sexually assault her and make her do something humiliating with the cucumber, but I’m relieved to get to the end without an actual rape occurring. On the next disk, I’m not so lucky. By the third one, I can’t stomach it even when it’s accelerated to breakneck speed. I copy the videos onto my hard drive, checking the first few shots to confirm that my mother and Devin are in them and then dropping them into a folder I’ll zip and forward to Anton. It takes a while, and by the time I get to the video that says L&D, I’m pretty drunk. The alcohol is not making this situation any more bearable.

I copy the first solo D disk and check the opening shot. My mother is not in it. Instead, a pint-sized Deja is sitting on the old sofa drinking juice from a glass with a straw. Devin is sitting next to her, a friendly smile on his face. I hit play and listen to him telling her about Disney World and asking what her favorite attractions are. He urges her to finish the juice and puts the glass aside, his expression affectionate. Only minutes later, her eyes go hazy the way my mother’s were. It’s confirmation that my mom was drugged, and I want to stop the video here. Whatever is about to happen I don’t need to know do I?

“Can you stand up for me?” he asks.

She does it, looking unsteady the way my mom did. He runs through the same sequence of weird actions he asked of my mom, barking, crawling, kissing his shoes. I realize now he’d doing it to make sure she’s completely under the influence of whatever drug he gave her. Once he’s satisfied, he tells her to strip. At that point I shut it off. I don’t need to see this fucking shit. It’s bad enough I have the knowledge in my brain, the actual image would just about destroy me. Even thinking about what he probably did to her makes my skin crawl.

My god. She’s in that house, sleeping down the hall from that monster. I want to go over there and yank her out, but I’m too drunk. Why did I think it was a good idea to drink this much? I don’t watch the last two videos, spaced months and then a year after the preceding one. I copy all of them and zip the file. I text Anton.

This is some awful shit, man. Video of DT r-wording my mom and Deja ten years ago. Couldn’t watch most of it. Not sure what you can do with it, but I feel sick. I’m uploading now.

I log onto Anton’s secure server and upload the files. A few minutes later I get a text “received.” I wait, nerves driving me to take more shots until the whole world feels like it’s spinning. One bad choice after another, but I haul myself up the stairs, to find Rourke in the same spot he was in earlier, fooling around on his laptop.

“Damn, dude, you look like shit.”

“I need you to drive me to Devin’s house?”

“What?”

“I gotta get her outta there.”

“Dude, what are you talking about?”