No one would hear me scream even if I could.
Bam! Suddenly I’m down on the ground, on my back, the result of a violent throw. Pain sears through me as gravel digs into my skull, and white lightning cuts through my vision. A wave of nausea swells up inside me as this monster pins me down, one knee pressed so hard into my chest I can barely breathe – just enough to take in the stench of cheap beer. He cackles as he starts to unbuckle his belt.
This is all really happening. The words loop over and over in my mind. I squeeze my eyes shut and try my best to squirm out from under him, push him off me, but it’s like trying to stop an approaching thunderstorm. Impossible. And each attempt to fight back only pleases him more.
‘This is what you get for being cute,’ he snarls, his face twisted in rage. He lifts his knee off me at last and as I gasp for air, he grabs me by both shoulders and slams me against the ground again.
Inky darkness starts to swirl in front of my eyes. I realize I’m going to pass out, and the feeling that comes along with that understanding is relief. But then, out of the corner of my consciousness, I hear something.
‘What are you doing to her?’ a female voice says, but I never get an answer because at that very moment I slide into blackness.
Someone is close to me. Shaking me gently.
‘Wake up. Please wake up.’
I manage to open my eyes, but it’s almost impossible to focus. I see a shadow of a figure next to me in a crouched position. My head is pounding, and my right hand instinctively touches the pulsing pain just above my neck. When I pull it back, my fingers are covered in a warm wetness.
‘Oh my God, you’re bleeding,’ says the figure. ‘Here, sit up. Put pressure on it.’
With the help of this hazy stranger, I drag myself into a seated position and obediently fumble for the soft fabric that’s being pressed onto the back of my head – someone’s sweater?
‘That’s it,’ says the girl’s voice. It’s shaking ever so slightly. ‘Just keep pressing, all right? Do you understand me?’
I blink hard once, then twice. At last, I start to make out just who is huddled next to me.
When my eyes finally focus and my mind catches up with what I’m seeing, I’m almost certain I have to be dreaming. Because crouching there next to me, her left hand cradling my head like a baby’s, is the same girl in pink who I defended earlier at the concession stand.
‘I think you should stand up now. All right, Evie?’ she says. ‘It is Evie, right?’
I manage to nod, then wince.
‘My name is Diane,’ she tells me.
Not Donna. Diane.
Diane’s face is illuminated by the streetlamps surrounding the perimeter of Winkler’s, her cherry-red bow lips in stark contrast to her porcelain face. She winces along with me as she helps me up. It’s then that I notice a splatter of bright red like an explosion of fireworks on the front of her soft pink dress. My clumsy mind tries to figure out what it could be, but it struggles to accept that my first guess could be true.
‘Are you all right?’ Diane asks.
It’s then that I see him, and I lean forward, the beginnings of a scream starting to explode out of my sandpapered throat.
‘Stop,’ Diane says, her voice a whisper but still so firm that I have no choice but to listen and shut up. ‘Don’t make a sound,’ she continues, one arm tight around my waist, the other gripping my forearm. ‘Listen to me. Don’t even look over there again.’
I may be able to muffle a scream, but I can’t obey Diane’s last command. I gaze back at the crumpled figure, turned face-first into the chain-link fence at the edge of the drive-in’s property line. I take in his dust-covered khaki slacks and a rust-colored stain the shape of some unknowable country on a map blooming on the side of his torso. I know, immediately and with certainty, that it’s fresh blood. I give silent thanks that I can’t see his face.
Somehow, my eyes know to look down at Diane’s right hand. Smeared up the wrist and the forearm are streaks of blood. That boy’s blood.
‘Did you … ?’ I begin.
Diane nods, her bright green eyes wide and uncertain as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing, either. She takes a deep breath, then exhales with a shudder.
‘Is he … dead?’ I manage.
Diane nods again, a single, tight nod. She closes her eyes and says, ‘I stabbed him. It was so quick. But I’m not sure what would have happened to you if I hadn’t done it.’ The words she’s uttering are as ridiculous as if I were saying something about my debutante ball. But she’s saying them anyway.
I shift my focus and look around at the patch of weeds and gravel behind the washroom building. ‘No one saw you?’
‘No,’ she answers, and when I glance back in her direction, her eyes are open, full of fear.
And that’s when we both hear the sound of voices coming from the other side of the building, far enough away that we have a chance. But only if we move. Now.
‘Under that fence,’ I say, ignoring the panic that is trying to paralyze me. ‘We have to go.’
She blanches, shakes her head, unwilling. Despite what she’s just done, it dawns on me that I’m the one who knows what to do now. I’m the one who’s friends with Connie Treadway, I’m the one who understands the dumb-broad voice you have to use when the fuzz ask you questions, I’m the one who knows when it’s time to stay and fight and when it’s time to run.
And now it’s time to run.
The voices on the other side of the cinder-block building are growing closer – I don’t even take time to figure out how many and who they might be. All I know is I take Diane by the hand and tug her toward the chain-link fence, near a dip in the dirt that’s been worn down by bad boys scuttling through night after night. We are feet away from the body. The body. The body that just moments ago was holding me down, threatening me, now lies lifeless in the dirt. I don’t even have time to feel any which way about it. All I know is we have to get out of here.
Sliding down on my back causes my head to pulse with pain again, but I try to ignore it. Diane’s bloody cardigan still in one hand, I roll under the fence, wincing as the edges of the chain link scratch my arms and back. I roll free onto the other side, into the edges of the bottling factory property. My heart is thudding so hard it hurts.
‘Come on,’ I urge, my voice a whisper.
Her face frantic, Diane drops down to the ground and mimics my moves. She’s uncertain, and far too prim about it. But she does it, and as soon as she joins me on the other side of the fence, she stands up, breathing heavily.
‘Now what?’ she whispers, peering back over her shoulder toward Winkler’s.
‘Now we run like hell,’ I say, taking one of her hands in mine. It’s stained and sticky with blood, but I give it a squeeze, for her as much as for me. And then, all at once, the only sound in my ears is the steady beat of our shoes on the pavement and our desperate breathing as we run and we run and we run, racing toward a destination we haven’t yet named because we have no earthly clue what it is.
We’ve run straight and hard down Telephone Road for a good two minutes or so before Diane slows to a stop. Then she leans forward and presses her hands into her sides. She needs to catch her breath. I tug her off the main drag down a quiet street lined with houses not far from our neighborhood, and we duck under the branches of an oak tree. There’s the sound of someone’s television playing through an open window, bursts of studio audience laughter punctuating the night, and it makes me even more jumpy.