The Forgotten Girl

“Count the buttons,” he whispers. “Count the buttons and focus on that. Not the screaming.”

But they’re gone and now I can hear the screaming, echoing inside my head. Over and over again. The pain. The blood. He tells me to do things I don’t want to do. Lily does them so much better. She seems like a natural at this. Like nothing bothers her. She tells me I’m weak for not being able to do it.

“But I can’t turn it off,” I whisper. “The pain.”

“Then you’ll never make it,” she replies with a tired smile. “That’s life. Only the strong survive.”

“I want to be strong,” I say over the screams, the blood, the begging. “Just like you.”

Her smile broadens as she tucks a strand of her blond hair behind her ear, then sticks out her arm. “Then be strong like me.” Her other hand moves toward me and she hands me a knife. “Make me bleed,” she says. “And don’t feel bad about it.”

I shake my head in horror. “I can’t.”

She gives me this all-knowing smile. “I knew it.” She starts to put the knife behind her. “And he knows it too. That’s why he always picks you to go up there. Because you never fight back.”

“Don’t listen to her,” the boy says from behind me. He’s sitting in the corner in the shadows, tied up as usual. “You don’t want to be like her.”

I want to listen to him, but hearing Lily doubt me so much makes me want to hurt her, bleed the doubt right out of her. So even though it makes me feel sick to my stomach, I take the knife from her and with a trembling hand, I cut and for the briefest moment, if feels right, just like he always told me it would.

“Wow,” Lily says, cupping her wrist with wonder on her face. “I really didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Me neither,” I whisper, my voice faint as I watch the blood drip from her wrist to the floor and paint the concrete with dots. I wish I could erase them somehow, erase how easy it was to hurt her.

The memory fades and I look down at my wrist for a scar, knowing that if I slit Lily’s I had to have done it to myself. But my skin is smooth and flawless, the only thing on it is a powerful vein carrying blood, the beat of it matching the screaming still streaming through my head over and over again.

“Mom,” I shout as I sink onto my bed, trying to breathe through the noise. “Mom, get in here.”

Moments later the door flies open and she rushes in. Her eyes grow big as she takes in the sight of me, cupping my wrist, my skin damp, my eyelids wanting to close and shut out the noise. “Jesus, what’s wrong? Are you sick?” she asks, examining me over.

I shake my head, my fingernails digging into my own skin. “No, I just need my buttons.”

There’s a pause. It’s only the beat of my heart, but it seems like a lifetime passes by. I’ve said my secret aloud, admitted how much I need those buttons. But the real shocking part is, she doesn’t look the least bit shocked.

“I threw them away,” she says in a firm voice, then she turns away without a second glance back, leaving me to drown in the screams.

Chapter 20

Maddie

The screaming never leaves my head, but starts to wear on me. Like a song you hate when you first hear it, but then after listening to it several times, you start to understand the meaning. The screams have a meaning. They’re my past. They represent a torturous time in my life¸ where I was hurt, where I hurt people.

But eventually I become restless at the lack of movement in my life and fake conversations my mother tries to have with me. She pretends as if nothing happened, as if I didn’t see a man in our house, as if the alarm never went off, as if her daughter doesn’t need a box of buttons to make her feel better. To her, everything is perfect.

She’s f**king delusional. Always has been.

The longer it goes on, the more Lily gets restless and starts whispering to me more and more. She tells me not to hide from the world. That hiding is for the weak and that I need to get the hell out of the house and away from my mother. She sounds an awful lot like the girl in the memory and even though there’s no scar, I’m coming to the conclusion that it was her. That I talked to her then in front of a boy who seemed to know about us both. So who was the boy? I want to find out. I want to find out everything. Lily tells me to do so then. That if I want to remember things, then find a way to remember, instead of running away from the truth. And if I really want to remember who I used to be, the girl the detective was talking about, the girl in my repressed memories, then figure out a way—do something about it. Like it’s that easy.

And what about the man I saw. I’m not sure, but I know it had to be real. I even found bruise marks while I was taking a shower the next day and there was a bump on the back of my head, like I’d been hit hard by something.

One day, during one of my mother’s rare trips out of the house to restock the cupboards, Lily gives me an idea to attempt to get some answers. I start searching the house, for what I’m not sure. Photos and items that will show me what I already think I know. That behind the perfect daughter my mother has tried to convince me I am, I’m really a wild, confused girl who has no set identity.

I begin in the basement where my mother stores a lot of boxes. I don’t find much there, other than old papers, her yearbooks, old clothes. So I work my way to the upper floor and search my mother’s bedroom. I don’t come across anything, until I’m snooping around on the top shelf of the closet. There’s nothing there, but what I do notice is the entrance to the crawl space. It takes me a moment to get up onto the shelf, the wood creaking beneath my weight. So I hurry and push open the entrance and peek my head in quickly before the shelf gives out. I end up tumbling ungracefully onto the floor. It’s dusty and dark, full of insulation that makes my skin itch as I feel around blindly for… something. I’m not even sure what I expect to find, but I do find something. And envelope that’s sort of heavy. I knew that f**king woman was hiding something.

Clutching it in my hand, I duck out of the crawl space, shut it, and carefully climb down off the shelf. Then I go back into my room, lock the door and shut the curtains as paranoia sets in. I have something in my hand I’m not supposed to. I can feel it under my skin, deep inside my bones, and behind the veil that hides my memories.

Why are you hesitating?

“Because I’m afraid.”