Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(109)

The new girls were mean and awful and cruel. Before, we had each kept to ourselves. Now I had to watch my back. It wasn’t enough to hate the men. I had to hide my hairbrush, hoard my dresses, watch my stash of sweets.

The girls were older and wiser. Especially compared to Vero and me. Madame Sade ended up pairing us up in a single room.

Otherwise you’ll be eaten alive, she’d informed us coldly. Seriously. Wise up.

I hated Vero. Whatever mean things the other girls did to me, I turned around and did to her. The trickle-down theory of pain. And maybe that did make us a family. A large dysfunctional family where each member competed to dish out the most hurt.

Vero started telling stories. Whispering them under her breath. Secret realms. Magical queen. Kidnapped princess.

At first, I think she was simply comforting herself. But eventually . . .

I made her keep talking. Tell me more about this mother who loved her daughter. Tell me more about this daughter who knows one day she’ll make it home again.

We slowly but surely became allies, as the dollhouse darkened and twisted around us.

“I couldn’t pretend things were normal anymore,” Thomas says now, as if reading my mind. “At a certain point, even I understood most foster families didn’t have kids locked in towers, and normal deliverymen didn’t look so shady, nor lick their lips every time a girl walked into view.

“I confronted my mother. At least, I tried. I said we shouldn’t be a foster family anymore. I was worried about the girls. Couldn’t we just . . . go back to the way things used to be.

“‘What?’ My mother laughed at me. ‘You mean poor?’

“‘If you want to help the girls,’ she told me, ‘then the least you could do is assist with their medicine.’ Which is how at the age of fourteen, I started driving our car into town, meeting with ‘business associates,’ then returning to the home with drugs. I wasn’t even legal to drive. Meaning that of course I was extra careful every inch of the way, terrified that I’d be pulled over by some cop. My mother had no patience for fools, not even her own son.”

I look up at him. “You became a dope dealer. You made all the purchases. You kept us drugged out of our skulls!”

Thomas doesn’t deny it. “Where would I have gone, Nicky? What would I have done if my mother turned me out? Her gift was equal culpability. She turned us all into her partners in crime. Then none of us could escape, because all of us were too terrified of the consequences.”

I want to argue with him. I want to yell and scream because it would be easier to blame him. Maybe once, I even did. But now I have an image in my head. A teenage boy with a mop of brown hair, all arms and legs, striding down the front steps of the house, moving with purpose. At the last moment, turning, looking back. The expression on his face. Frustration and longing and rage. Before turning once more toward the vehicle.

He was a prisoner, too. I remember thinking it then. The irony that he was her son, her actual son, and he was just as much a victim as the rest of us.

Vero once said she felt the sorriest for him. The rest of us didn’t belong here. But Thomas had been right: Where else could he go? Madame Sade was his family. This was his home. How do you escape that?

Vero and I lasted longer than most. But eventually, years and years of hopelessness took their toll. Vero talked about the magical queen less and less. I no longer imagined long, quiet conversations with the boy I’d once watched mow the lawn. We succumbed. Depression. Fear. Anxiety.

Then, when we refused to turn out at night, do as we were told—because what did it matter?—Madame Sade shot us up. First me. Then Vero.

I should’ve protested. I should’ve run, fought, anything. I would’ve liked to have been the girl who at least hit back.

But I didn’t. I stood there. I held out my arm. And when the meth first hit my vein . . . the rush. Suddenly I was alive for the first time in years.

While Madame stood there smiling with the syringe.

She didn’t just victimize us. She taught us to victimize ourselves. Go along to get along. So we did, so we did, so we did.

Until the day I started hoarding my drugs instead.

“I figured out what you were doing,” Thomas says now, with his uncanny ability to read my mind. “It took me a few days to notice it; that your eyes weren’t as glazed over, your expression was more alert, your responses quicker. I kept handing over your supply, and you kept accepting, but clearly . . . I didn’t say a word. If you wanted off, I wasn’t going to rat you out. I admired you, Nicky. You were up to something. And I thought it was about time someone had a plan.”

“I’d had enough,” I say simply. “And I don’t mean of being an addict. I mean of living. My first plan wasn’t to sober up and escape. Once, I’d thought about it. But even sober, walking out the front door . . . I had no hope in the woods; they’re too thick, the terrain too steep. That left the driveway, but she’d simply send you to fetch me.”

Thomas doesn’t argue. That’s what would’ve happened, and we both know it.

“My first thought wasn’t escape; I was going to OD. Which meant, of course, I needed to build up a certain quantity. Then I’d take it all at once. Vero watched me. She knew what I was doing. Then one day . . .

“She’s the one who told me what to do. And you want to hear something funny?” I smile at Thomas, and even now, all these years later, my eyes well with tears. “My first thought was that she just wanted my stash. She was looking out for herself, manipulating me. Of course, I wouldn’t hear of it. She’d OD on my drugs? Then I’d simply take her place in the body bag. No way!