Pretty Girls Dancing(67)

Returning to the sheets in her hands, she moved them on the wall until they were positioned in a dim slant of light.

He lets you earn things for good behavior. And after a while, I started requesting things I wanted instead of the lame stuff he offered. Like a big sketch pad and a pencil. I’m good at drawing.

The words were followed by a small sketch of a girl with long, dark hair with her eyes crossed and her tongue out. But despite the silliness of the picture, it was good. Detailed. It looked like a real person and not the stick figure Whitney would be able to draw.

So I fill the pad up with my artwork. Of my room. My family. Places I’ve seen. And I carefully tear out a page or two in between to write on. Because he’ll look at the pad sometime. Nothing is allowed to be private here. But these pages will be because I figured out a way to hide them.

If only I could find a way to hide myself.

Sometimes I miss my family so much, it’s like my heart is ripping in two. I can hear my mom’s laugh, or see Janie clowning around in my room with one of the tiaras I won in those kiddie pageants. I remember the way it used to be, just the four of us.

And other times I hate my father so much that I don’t want to see him, ever again. He’s the reason I left the house that day. He’s the reason I was so sad and angry those last few weeks, our secret weighing me down like an anchor. I’m here because of him.

Sometimes I dream that he’s the one who brought me here.

Whitney’s nape prickled, uneasy at the raw emotion in the words. But an instant later, her attention was yanked away by a tiny scratching sound.

A key in the lock of the door.

Panic speared through her. The day’s meals were always on the edge of the stage when she got up. Never had she been awake when he brought them. There was no time to put the papers away. To replace the board beneath the mattress. She had a split instant to consider her options. There wasn’t a pillowcase or sheet on the mattress. But the dated nightgown she wore was baggy.

The door began to open. Frantically, she rolled the papers up and sprinted on tiptoe back to the mattress as she shoved them beneath the nightgown. The screw she still clutched cut into her palm as she eased back onto the mattress. Huddled there in a fetal position, trying to control her breathing. Her heart was hammering so hard, she was afraid he would hear it.

How had she slept through his approach every morning? Even the quiet sound of his footsteps seemed magnified to her heightened senses. They drew closer and closer, and she squeezed her eyes shut, praying he’d think she still slept.

She hardly dared to breathe as there was a tiny sound only feet away. The food being set down. But he didn’t retreat. Not right away.

Did he suspect something? Or did he stay there like that every morning, listening to her breathe? She forced herself to draw oxygen into her lungs and then release it in a slow, even rhythm. Her pulse was galloping in her veins like a spooked wild thing.

The moment stretched. Finally, she heard him move away. Relief streamed from her, turning her muscles lax. The paper made a tiny crinkling sound against her body. His footsteps stopped. Her heart in her throat, Whitney deliberately moved her arm as if she was changing positions. The chain jangled. Praying he’d think that was the source of the sound he’d heard, she lay still again.

A minute later she heard the key in the door. The sound of it opening then closing behind him. She pressed the hand fisted around the screw to her lips to stifle the sob that threatened.

That had been too close. How much time did she have before the computer turned on and the alert sounded? If she wasn’t showered and ready by the time the film started, the consequence would be predictable.

She counted to one hundred to make sure he wasn’t coming back and then withdrew the pages, rolled them into a tighter scroll, and moved to the space left empty by the floorboard she hadn’t replaced. She stuck the papers inside and refit the board before padding toward the shower, her thumb worrying the smooth, flat top of the screw. She mentally berated herself. If she was going to take a risk, this had been a stupid thing to waste it on. It was going to take brains and cunning to get out of here, so she needed to start using her . . .

Her feet faltered to a stop. She ran her thumb over the top of the screw again. A flat head, it had a single groove running through the center of it. Whitney turned to stare in the direction of the barre. It was clamped to the wall at both ends. The clamp was secured by three screws on top, three on the bottom. Screws just like this one. Flat heads. She recalled that much from her endless warm-up routines. Mindless activity that allowed her to take stock of her surroundings. And she had. Whitney had spent plenty of nights testing the security of that barre, but it held tightly. She hadn’t been able to pull it loose from the wall, even using all her body weight.

Her fingers closed around the screw again. It had taken all this time to figure out that it could be used for more than a lever.

It might also work as a screwdriver.





Janie Willard

November 13

4:21 p.m.

“I can do this alone,” Alyvia said, sending Janie a sideways glance from the passenger seat of the car. “It’d be no big deal.”

“You’re not doing it alone.” Janie knew her friend was trying to reassure her, but it just made the sense of failure clog in her chest again, tighter and darker than before. It had been her idea to approach Newman about the photo shoot. But on Wednesday, she’d managed to get only as close as the hall outside his office, which was in the grungy storage room where the time clock was kept. She’d stood there, heart racing in her chest like a runaway locomotive. Palms sweating. Body shaking. Even if the man wasn’t inside, she’d known all she had to do was press a button mounted on the wall that would summon him.