Ten Below ZeroTen Below Zero(10)

It probably should have hurt my feelings, but since I didn’t have any, I felt the usual – indifference.

Carly had moved in shortly before Jasmine, but they both hadn’t been here a full year yet. Carly and I got along a bit better than Jasmine and I did, but I still felt nothing about it one way or another. Years of bouncing around foster homes had enabled me to not care about making a connection to anyone. And the fake connections I cultivated myself had caused the scars on my body.

I wrapped the towel tighter around me and grabbed a second towel for my hair. And then I sat at my desk and booted up my laptop.

I checked my bank account first before I started paying my bills. My waitressing job paid most of the bills, but I was fortunate to have my rent and schooling paid for with grants and scholarships, as I had emancipated from the foster care system when I was eighteen. I had one more year of college left before I would be on my own, but I had a well-padded savings account from my settlement with Morris Jensen.

I suppose I should feel like that money was tainted, dirty, and came at the cost of permanent scarring. My lawyer had kindly mentioned the money would more than cover any plastic surgery I desired, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care where the money came from. I’d been forced into shock from the experience, so far into shock that most of the experience was still out of focus in my memory. A therapist had suggested I never came out of shock. She’d warned that the moment I came out of shock, when I fully grasped the entire situation, it would be traumatic and I would have a hard time coping.

I know that’s partially why I took comfort in my lack of emotion. The longer I existed without being ruled by emotions, the safer I was from what I had subconsciously buried in my memory.

As far as Morris Jensen, I didn’t specifically remember anything. I knew what the doctors and police officers had told me. They’d asked me, when they’d caught him, about the bullet in his stomach. But I didn’t remember the entire event. I remembered flashes. I remembered the dark, the screaming. I remembered tires squealing, the radio blaring. I remembered the crack I’d heard when my head had bounced onto the asphalt, the smell of oil and fear. Most of all, I remembered the smell of my own fear, tinged with blood and sweat. And if I closed my eyes and concentrated, I remembered the moments after, when I’d been completely changed.



Three Years Earlier

The doctors told me I had fought him hard. The blood under my nails was being carefully scraped by a very nice woman who tried distracting me with a story of her granddaughter. But my attention was focused on the social worker who was standing in the doorway, trying to keep the detectives from questioning me.

“She is too emotionally fragile to deal with questions right now.”

I was puzzled by that. I didn’t feel fragile. I felt pain, sure. Physical pain from the cut on my face, the skin stretched with stitches to cover the gaping hole in my cheek. The eight-inch cut on my forearm was quite painful as well. But maybe the social worker saw the ripped skin and torn tissue and assumed that she saw me. I was much deeper than just flesh wounds.

“I’m fine,” I said, my finger nails being picked clean underneath the harsh fluorescent lighting. The detective with the brown eyes looked at me with a sort of weary hope. As if I was his last obligation before he could go home and crawl into bed with his wife and wake up with his kids to cartoons. One last thing to cross off his list before he could go back to his life, crushed with the safety of it.

The social worker looked at me like I was out of my mind. Which, really, I was. I had no idea what had actually happened, so I knew I couldn’t provide the sort of details the detectives would want to know. But I wanted nothing more than to be gone from here, gone from the eyes that stared at me either dispassionately or sympathetically.

The detectives moved around the still shocked social worker and took my answers. They took photos of my arm, my face, my hands, and my back. I gave them clothes I’d been wearing when I was brought to the hospital and then I asked to be released on my own, wearing sterile scrubs. When I walked out of the emergency entrance, I turned the corner around the building and stopped short.

There was a small woman leaned against the wall, only visible with the parking lot lights that shined on the area around us. I knew she was the woman who had saved me, who had brought me to the hospital and called the police.

She blew out the smoke she’d just sucked in from her cigarette, tossed it on the ground and stomped out the lit end before walking towards me. The air around her smelled of smoke, which I normally detested, but the smell was safe to me. It was the smell that roused me from consciousness on the asphalt.

“They let you out?” Her voice was deep, smooth, sexy. Red wine. She dyed her hair bright red and lined her green eyes with thick kohl liner. She wore an oversized leather jacket, white jean shorts that were ripped at the hem, and ass-kicking knee-high black boots.

I nodded, my eyes traveling her. She was a few years older than me, and had the overall impression of a total hard ass.

“You hungry?” she asked without waiting for me to answer, walking across the parking lot and whipping out a key from her pocket. A small sports car parked illegally flashed its lights and she wrenched the passenger door open.

She didn’t look at me for confirmation and really, she was my best bet. I had left the hospital intending to get a cab, but arriving at my apartment alone was not appealing to me. So I followed, climbing into the seat next to her as she fiddled with her phone before tossing it on the console. Every movement of hers was graceful, but violently so. She was a small package of smoke and mystery and currently the only person in the world who knew what happened to me. And with that, a thought occurred to me.