I didn’t say anything. My best friend had gone boy crazy right at the end of school and her boyfriend fever hadn’t let up. She wanted one. Bad.
Me? I didn’t care. None of the boys at school interested me. I’d known pretty much all of them since kindergarten, some even longer because I went to preschool with them. I found most of them irritating. The thought of kissing one of them?
Yuck.
“Please don’t wave and flirt with guys all day,” I said because I just . . . I didn’t want to deal with it. Not today. This was our day. Our chance to be by ourselves and ride whatever ride we wanted. Eat whatever we wanted. Do whatever we wanted. We had the neon-green wristbands that got us on every ride all day long for as many times as we could stand it, and we were ready.
I didn’t want to waste my time flirting with high school boys who’d laugh if they knew we were only twelve. I totally looked twelve, but Sarah didn’t.
She looked older.
“Don’t be such a downer.” Sarah had been smart. No sweatshirt for her, only a T-shirt that she was currently taking off, revealing a bright pink bikini top underneath. She had boobs and I was still pretty flat, but I wasn’t jealous. Not really.
“I’m not. I just . . . I don’t care about boys today. I wanna have fun.” I smiled at her and she smiled in return.
“We’re definitely going to have fun. And boys are fun. You just haven’t figured that out yet.” She rolled up her T-shirt and shoved it in the purse she’d brought with her. “Now let’s go on the Ferris wheel.”
I frowned. How lame. “Seriously?”
“We’ll start out small.” Her devilish smile grew. “And save the big one for later.” She pointed at the giant white roller coaster looming ahead of us. At that particular moment a train of cars went flying by, the passengers all screaming, most of them with their arms in the air, their hair trailing behind them.
My heart picked up speed just watching them. I couldn’t wait.
“And then what happened?”
The reporter’s voice knocks me from my thoughts. I’d become lost in them, after not having visited those particular memories in so long. Everyone always focuses on the bad stuff, including myself. What he did to me. How long he kept me. Where he kept me. How he chained me like a dog and blindfolded me and I couldn’t see anything and I was so incredibly scared that I peed my pants when he peeled the blindfold away from my eyes that first time. I knew by the determined look on his face what he was going to do to me.
But I didn’t really know because my sexual education wasn’t much beyond a few YA books I’d read with very tame sex scenes and those awful movies they show at school about getting your period and hormones and stuff.
“I had fun that morning,” I say, my tongue thick in my mouth because I did have fun that morning and there’s a hint of bittersweet in those memories. Sarah and I were laughing and being silly, which should make me smile. But it’s so painful to remember the good moments of that day. They’re completely overshadowed by the bad. “We met my parents for lunch at the food court, just like we promised. I had a corn dog.”
The details are still there, a little hazy, but the more I talk, the clearer they become. I remember the seagulls that divebombed the tables as we ate. How I dropped the last bite of my corn dog on the ground and the white-and-gray bird swooped in, stealing it before I could even snatch it back.
Not like I would’ve eaten it, but still.
The reporter smiles, trying to put me at ease I’m sure. “It was a nice day with your family and your best friend.”
“Yes.” I nod, thinking of Sarah. How we grew apart after everything that happened. How she didn’t like to be around me because I made her uncomfortable. She told me that once, both of us crying and not understanding why we couldn’t get back to that place we’d been before, when we were best friends. She’d blurted it out, clamping her lips shut the moment the words were said. She looked like she wanted to take them back.
But she couldn’t. It was too late. She felt guilty, she said. She hadn’t protected me, and I thought that sounded like a crock of crap but I didn’t argue with her.
By high school we were strangers. She wouldn’t even look at me when we passed by each other in the hallway between classes, and I heard rumors that she said bad things about me. I don’t know if any of it was true.
After I left, I never saw her again.
“Do you still talk to Sarah?” the reporter asks, as if she can reach into my brain and know exactly what I’m thinking. I’d heard that she’s incredibly intuitive and I should be on guard. She knows just how to get information out of people before they even know they’re offering it.