TRAPT
“Run!” I scream at her as I sprint down the hallway. And after a second she has no choice but to follow. “Come on!”
“We can’t stay here. If he finds us now he’ll--“
“I know” I take a deep breath to get my bearings, “Let’s go.”
I say it all with a straight face, but I’m about to break down. I feel like there is shattered glass inside of me, twisting and turning as I move, ripping everything to shreds. But I can’t lose it now, Jenna may be older, but she's been here longer and that means I am stronger.
“There he is!” she whispers, her voice tight as she looks around the corner of the door. She will break in seconds if I don’t do something now.
“Get back here” I tell her as I move her away from the door so I can take her place. I need to look around the corner to see where he is, how far away he is and how close he is to finding us. When I look I see him just down the hall, kicking in the doors to each room one by one. He’s working his way towards us, we don’t have long.
We’ve stopped in a doorway two away from the next hallway. If we run, we can make it to the stairs just around that corner, and then it’s a straight shot through the lobby to the front door, and then through the door to the street and to help. To freedom.
It’s been at least a year since my first night, I think-- I wonder what the world looks like now. They stopped looking for us I don’t know how long ago, but we knew they had stopped from the lack of sirens in the area. Are our faces still plastered in the shop windows and on street lights? Will someone recognize us? Help us?
“He’s getting closer Penelope, what are we going to do?” Her voice is shaking and she is on the brink or tears. She has been here with him longer, how much longer though I do not know, so she is more afraid of him. She has a right to be.
“We’ll run, Jenna-- Jenna look at me, we have to run. When he comes we’ll slam him with the door, to stun him, then we run and we don’t look back.”
“But what if he gets us? We’ll be punished! If we turn ourselves in it won’t be as bad. It won’t be as--“
Her stunned silence is all that follows. I had to slap her. If I didn’t I would have lost her and right now she is all I have. But the hand print that I left on her cheek and the look of shear pain and fear in her eyes pulls at my heart. I know what she would have said, that it won’t be as painful, but turning ourselves in is not an option now. We’ve been here for too long already, and if we are here any longer who knows what he will do.
“Jenna, look at me. Just look at me please?” I pull her face so she looks up at me as I say “We can’t stay here. You go out first. You run. No matter what happens you don’t look back. Okay? You have to promise me, no matter what happens, you won’t stop.”
She sniffs, “Okay, okay I- I promise….” is all she utters before her voice trails off. But her voice is steadier than before, so for now I have her back with me.
He kicks the door of the room next to ours open, we are next. I listen to his footsteps as he moves and stops in front of our room, and I count to three. One…… two…..
“Now!”
We both ram our shoulders into the door at the same time. The doors hits something semi solid with a thud and I smile internally as we begin to run. Jenna makes it to the hallway before I do, and the stairs. I pushed her ahead of me, she had to go first. If only one of us is to make it out of here, it has to be her.
Half way down the stairs we can hear him coming after us.
“Damn, I thought we’d have more time--Run!”
Our legs start to move faster than our minds and we trip over our own feet, stumbling a few steps but almost never losing time. We hit the ground floor hard, our bare feet sticking better to the tile than the carpet that covered the stairs as we sprint for the door. At one point Jenna trips, hitting the ground hard, but I pull her up as fast as I can and push her ahead of me again.
If she hadn’t fallen we might have made it to the front door before he got to us, but she did fall and we lost that time, that crucial distance.
Right before we reach the door I feel the sharp tug on my hair and I stop thinking about my actions, I just act. I see her hesitate, like she’s going to turn around and see why my hand isn’t on her back urging her forward anymore, but I don’t give her the chance. I kick the small of her back, hard, and she slams into the door as I scream at her to run. She does. She runs, and if I focus hard enough I can almost hear her footsteps outside the door and on the street. Or maybe that’s just my imagination, my hope taking over.
It only takes him a few seconds to realize he can’t leave me to go after her and he would never catch her with me fighting him the whole way. And I use those five seconds to realize she’ll be okay, that she will live to fight another day. And because of that realization I stop fighting. Thinking of the life she may have, that she has a new chance to have, makes it easy to forget what he's doing to me. It makes it easy to forget the sound of tearing fabric, the sound of his grunts that have always been more animalistic than anything else. All I need to do to ignore the pain is picture the life she can have after she heals, because she is now free.
So I let him have his way with me, however many times he wants, and endure hours of this constant humiliation in a calm and quiet way. I am done with fighting, with screaming. My end is now inevitable. And when she leads the cops here in the next day or two, I know he will be long gone. But I will have his DNA on me, inside of me, and with that he can possibly be found. I only hope that when she sees me she understands. That when she walks in and sees my body bloody, cold, and grey, she will understand that I need her to live on for me.
********************
When the flashing lights and the sirens show up Penelope has been long dead. When Jenna walks in and sees her, splayed out in the middle of the lobby like a sacrifice, all bloody and barley covered by her torn clothing, all she can do is stare. She grabs one of the blankets and walks over to her fallen friend and covers her as much as she can. The police already know what he did to them, the physicality of it, but she doesn’t need to be humiliated any more. She covers Penelope, and moves down to cradle her head in her own lap.
“Oh Penelope, oh god……” she whispers as she closes the dead girl’s lifeless eyes. She remembers how filled they were, once, with her determination and bright spirit even in the worst times they shared. But now they are empty, devoid of everything. But the look on the fallen girls face she doesn’t recognize, a look caught between contentment and longing. She has never seen her friend wear that look before, but she does understand it now. She leans down and kisses her friend on the forehead, shielding both their faces with her knotted hair, and weeps.
“Oh Penelope. Thank you.”