Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 46398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 232(@200wpm)___ 186(@250wpm)___ 155(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 232(@200wpm)___ 186(@250wpm)___ 155(@300wpm)
When the van rumbles to stop, it’s still night. It might be very early in the morning. The sun isn’t up yet. A single bare lightbulb shines down on a sign.
That sign scares me more than anything.
It’s just a regular sign with the name of the school.
This can’t be a school. The building doesn’t look like a school, and schools don’t kidnap students in the middle of the night.
But the sign could be in front of any school. It looks cheerful. There’s a logo of an open book. All I know is something is very wrong and I have no way out.
The door of the van opens, and the men climb in to pull me out.
“Don’t fight,” he grits between his teeth.
I don’t want to leave the van. My legs are numb from sitting on the hard seat and my wrists feel bruised from the cuffs, but the van seems safer than whatever this school is supposed to be.
“Where—” The men jostle me as they yank me out of the van and put me on my feet. The pain rips through my arm and it fucking hurts. They know how much bigger they are. They know they can push me around. I swallow the lump in my throat and try to keep the tears back as they surround me. Rocks dig in to my toes, scraping my skin as they hustle me across the driveway and into the school.
It doesn’t smell like a school. Every school I’ve been inside smells pretty much the same—like lockers and the polish on the floor of the gym and the warmed-up food scent of the cafeteria.
This place reeks of decay, like a building that should’ve been torn down long ago. There isn’t enough light to see much of it clearly, but there has to be mold—that wet, creeping smell like decomposing plants.
They take me to a room with a concrete floor and a drain in the middle. One man steps in and tears my pajamas off. I try to cover myself but I can’t.
“Don’t,” I shout, over and over.
He leaves me with nothing. Naked in a room with two men and then goes to the right with determination while the other two stay on guard.
I’m not ready for the hose when it hits.
The second man turns on the spray full blast. It’s freezing water, soaking my hair and my skin and taking my breath away.
I gasp and try to curl away like an animal. I can barely breathe. One shock after the next.
I’m an animal to them. A piece of meat. I shiver so hard I know there’s another word for it—convulsion, I think, but the next frigid blast makes me forget.
I can only pray and try not to think about what’s next. When the hose is off I cover what I can of myself and hope it’s over.
“A towel, please,” I beg. I can’t even hug my arms around myself because of the cuffs.
A woman’s voice answers. I didn’t see her come into the room, but she’s there in front of me, her lips pinched with disgust.
Tall. Her long, dark hair finished with a sweep of hair spray to give it volume. Her eyes are light blue and narrowed behind thin rimmed spectacles. She wears heels that click and echo in the room even though I can’t see them, her wide legged black pants are so long they nearly touch the floor.
I want to plead with her to help me, but I can’t make my voice work. My words are caught in my throat from the way she looks at me.
“No towel. You’ll have to earn it,” the woman tells me. There’s no kindness in her eyes. Nothing but blank, dead emptiness. She doesn’t see me as a person.
I’m not a person here.
I hug myself as best I can. My bones feel like they’ll snap. Fear tightens around my lungs, letting me breathe only in sharp, shallow gasps.
She drags me to another room with the same rough concrete floor. My toes are numb, barely feeling the cold beneath them. She flips on a light—a flickering fluorescent light, too bright. On the side of the wall, there’s a mirror. The woman’s hand on my arm digs in hard enough to bruise. There are boys in the other room beyond the mirror. Her hand is at my wrist. She releases the cuffs from my wrists, and when I open my mouth, I open my mouth to scream for help.
I can’t catch my breath. I can’t scream. Even if I did, who would hear me?
When I raise my hand to my mouth to cover my sob, the woman yanks it back down and shoves me into the seat attached to a narrow desk.
The desk is the first thing I’ve seen that belongs in a school. It reminds me of the desks in my homeroom last year. I never thought of those desks as something normal.