Collared(40)

The crowd is quiet now. Really quiet. I’ve been shouting loudly enough that more of a crowd has gathered. As I scan the crowd, I see phones raised and what I guess are people snapping photos or videos.

It isn’t until the keeper’s eyes lower to my neck that I realize what’s happened. The scarf has come loose in the midst of my fit. People are staring at the scar, recognition flickering in their eyes. With the way some of them are looking at my neck, I start to wonder if I have a real knife sticking out of it.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” The keeper sets the stakes down and kicks the chains back a ways. Recognition is on his face too. “I didn’t mean to make it so personal.”

More people stare—even the kids are looking at me like they know something’s off. I feel like everyone knows who I am and what happened to me. The scar is like walking around with a sign listing my darkest, deepest secrets. I haven’t seen the news or read the headlines, but I can imagine what has been blasted out there.

How many young girls in this area have wide purple scars winding around their necks?

From the phones that continue to rise toward me, I know not many.

“This isn’t about me,” I shout to the keeper as I back away. “This is about the goddamned elephants.”

I turn to leave because I’ve seen enough of the zoo for one day. Phones pan with me as I hurry back up the same path we just walked. Torrin is beside me before I get more than a few steps away.

“I don’t like the zoo anymore,” I say, trying to ignore a few of the cameras still following me.

Torrin curls his nose. “Yeah. Zoos suck.”

I catch one last look of the elephants before we reach the top of the pathway. I didn’t get close enough to look in their eyes this time. If I had, I wonder if I’d still think I could see their souls. I doubt it—how could a soul survive when it had been strangled out by a length of chain?

The scarf is swinging at my sides, my neck drawing more attention as we fly to the zoo’s entrance. Grabbing the scarf, I start to wind it back around my neck, tighter this time so it stays. When I’m about to wrap it around a third time, Torrin stops me. Taking the end of the scarf from me, he unwinds what I’ve just done. Then he lets it slide off the back of my neck and clutches it in his hand.

“You’re better without it.”





SINCE I CLEARLY don’t like the zoo anymore, I let my mom drag me to the mall close by the house. Maybe I’ve gone all opposites on myself and what I used to loathe now I love.

I realize that’s not the case the instant I step inside the mall in Bellevue. It’s a Saturday after lunch, and I remember this place being crazy busy on a Tuesday morning. It feels like just as many people are milling about here as at the zoo a few days ago, but we’re enclosed here. No fresh air to help me flush out the panic attack before it digs its claws into me.

“Anywhere you want to start?” Mom asks as we join the masses of shoppers zipping around like Christmas is seven hours away instead of seven months. “You’ll need new everything, so we might want to start at one of the big anchor stores first.”

I’m wearing another one of my old outfits. It’s a shirt of a band that’s not even around anymore, and my cut-offs are only staying up because I borrowed one of Mom’s belts. I know I need new clothes, but I’m not in the mood to shop.

Shopping. Spending hours and hours skimming through, trying on, and purchasing things that will be dumped off at a thrift store next year was a practice I hadn’t really understood as a teenager—it’s even more extreme now.

I know it means a lot to my mom though, so I try to look interested. “Okay, sounds good.”

She waits for me, but I can’t remember the names of the big stores or in what direction they are. “Let’s start at Nordstrom.”

She starts down the hall, and I follow. I know she still feels uncomfortable around me. Sometimes I catch her looking at me like she can’t figure out who invaded her daughter’s body or how I can be exorcised. She isn’t the only one who looks at me that way.

Torrin’s the only one who still looks at and talks to me the way he used to. I’d rather have the old mom who would be ordering me to keep up and to wipe the sulk off my face than the one who keeps glancing back at me like she’s waiting for me to blow.

As we pass a cell store, I pause to look inside. The phones have changed a lot since I had one. “I think I need a cell phone.”

Mom backs up toward where I’m hovering at the entrance, and she glances inside. “Why do you think you need one?”

I shrug. “In case I want to call anyone.”

“We’ve got a landline for that.” She tries moving on, but I don’t move with her. She stops and waits.

“In case anyone wants to call me.”

Recognition settles into her expression. “You mean in case Torrin wants to call you.”

I shrug again. “Since Dad’s been screening my calls, yeah, it would be nice to be able to talk to who I want to when I want to. I’m not a kid anymore, Mom.”

When I say the “I’m not a kid” part, my mom’s shoulders fall just enough to notice. She knows it’s not quite the truth. Even I know it’s not. I might be twenty-seven, but I still feel very much like the seventeen-year-old I was. I might as well have been cryogenically frozen because I feel like ten years have slipped by without including me.