when she woke up, a scribbled note next to it saying EAT. No spoon. Later, she will understand just how awful the man can be, but for now, the idea of spit is enough for her to set the bowl aside. After all, she’s not starving.
Yet.
She should’ve been startled when the boy spoke, but everything right now still feels hazy, as if even if she blinks hard over and over, she is unable to entirely clear her vision. It’s the weird orange light from the wall sconces, but also the lingering pain in her head. She stares at the bowl in her hands. Then at him.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a basement.”
She looks around, then sets the bowl back on the table and rubs at her eyes. The hazy feeling is fading. On her right thigh is a bruise that hurts when she presses it. Vaguely, she remembers a needle, and she closes her eyes for a moment. “He gave me a shot.”
“Yeah. He likes those. Sometimes it’s pills, ground up. But he likes the shots, too. They last longer.”
The boy comes through the doorway. The ceiling in this room is so low he has to hunch to stand, but although there’s a chair in front of her, he doesn’t sit in it. He looks around the tiny, dank space, then crosses his arms. When he looks at her, his face is a puppet’s. Blank, yet somehow menacing.
“How’d he get you?” the boy asks.
Effie doesn’t want to say. She feels so stupid now. She knew better than to believe the man when he asked if she wanted to see the cute puppy in his van. She knew never to trust a stranger. It hadn’t mattered, though, when she tried to run, because he’d caught her within half a minute. Her stupid shoes, the new ones her mom had insisted she wear, had given her blisters. She’d been limping. She could’ve run fast and gotten away, except for those stupid shoes.
“He told me my mom was in an accident,” the boy says. Too casual. As if he’s setting Effie up for a joke, but there doesn’t seem to be a punch line. “He said she’d been taken to the hospital and my dad sent him to get me.”
“That was stupid of you to believe him.”
The boy looks at her with bright green eyes through the fringe of shaggy dark hair, and incredibly, he laughs. Really laughs, as if she said the funniest thing he’s ever heard. As if Effie is the one telling jokes.
“No shit, right? I mean, my dad wouldn’t give a flying fuck if my mom was chopped into little pieces, and she sure as shit wouldn’t bother to tell him if she was in an accident. Even if he found out, he wouldn’t have sent someone to get me. I haven’t seen my dad in eight years. He wouldn’t even know what I look like now.”
Effie blinks. She has a few friends whose parents are divorced, but most are amicable with each other, at least enough. She doesn’t hang around with the sorts of kids whose parents don’t see them.
Her own parents must be frantic by now. She’s not sure exactly how long it’s been since the guy with the van grabbed her and put her in this room, but her mom goes into panic mode if Effie is even fifteen minutes late from art lessons. It has to be so much longer than that by now.
She rubs her hands on her pleated skirt, but they’re still sticky and gross. “So...why’d you go with him, then?”
“Because you always hope, don’t you? That it’s true?”
“That your dad sent someone for you?” Effie is confused.
“No,” the boy says. “That your mom’s been in an accident.”
Is he joking? Effie doesn’t know what to say to this. Somehow, being grabbed and shoved into a van and waking up in a smelly basement is not quite as creepy as the idea that she could ever be happy her mom was hurt.
“That’s pretty messed up,” she says.
The boy nods, one side of his mouth twisting. “Yeah. I’m kind of a mess.”
“He grabbed me,” she says suddenly. “He told me he had a cute puppy in his van, and when I tried to run, he...he was just so fast. He grabbed my backpack and yanked me back and I lost my balance, and then he hit me on the head. He pulled me into the van, and he stabbed me in the leg with a needle. Then I woke up here.”
“Shit, he hit you on the head? You feel sick or anything? You’re not supposed to sleep if you have a concussion.”
Effie frowns sourly. “Well, it’s too late now if I do, because I’ve already slept. My stomach hurts, but it’s because I’m hungry.”
“Don’t eat that,” the boy warns again. He sits at last. His legs are so long that his knees seem to reach his chin. His hands are really big, too, when he rests them on the worn denim. His fingers play with the torn threads around the holes where his knees poke through.
“I heard you the first time.” Effie eyes the bowl again. “Everything? He does something to everything he feeds you?”
“Sometimes it’s just too much salt or pepper or hot sauce, stuff like that. But sometimes it’s pills or...other stuff. So you never really know. You just get so hungry you’ll eat anything, eventually,” the boy says. “But I try to at least pick through it, make sure there’s nothing really bad in it.”
“Worse than spit?” She can hardly imagine it.
The boy gives her a solemn look. “Oh. Yeah. Way worse than spit.”
And then, just then, Effie knows there’s no getting out of this. The man took her and he’s going to keep her and probably he’s going to do awful things to her that are worse than spitting in her oatmeal. Her stomach clenches and twists, but she forces herself not to choke or gag. She has to keep her head on straight. That’s what her dad would say. If she’s going to get away from here, she has to keep her head on straight.
“How long have you been here?” Effie asks.
The boy shrugs and looks away, again as if he’s telling her a lie but not with words; this time it’s with the things he doesn’t say. “I don’t know. A while.”
Effie pushes herself up off the bed with a wince at the pain in the back of her head. A tentative exploration reveals a few tender spots but no blood that she can feel. Her blistered feet hurt at the scratch of the rough concrete. Her shoes were missing when she woke up. The man must’ve taken them off her along with her white cotton socks. She shudders at the thought of him touching her anywhere while she was unconscious. If he took away her shoes and socks, did he also touch her in other places?
Repulsed, she wants to run her hands over her body to check for any signs of being violated. She settles for forcing herself to stand up straight. Unlike the boy in front of her, she’s not even close to touching the ceiling.
“I’m Effie.”
“That’s a weird name.”
She shrugs. “It’s really Felicity, but I hate it. I shortened it to F when I was ten. Now I’m Effie.”
“I’m Heath.”
“You’re named after a candy bar,” she says, “and you think my name is weird?”
Heath
