On His Six - Rachel Robinson Page 0,1
because she speaks the truth. This girl is just as broken as I am, recognizes we’re similar, but chooses to focus on how we’re different. I’m the homeless girl without anyone who cares. Jessica has a mom that cares, but she refuses to tell her what Bob does to her in the middle of the night. He threatens her. Makes her feel worthless.
The girls stomp up the deck stairs, Jessica last. “Oh, there she is,” she hisses when she spots me balled up in the corner. “Don’t talk to her,” Jessica orders her friends, pressing the cigarette out in Bob’s ashtray he keeps on the railing. Her friends, for all of their effort, still manage to wince. They feel sorry for me. God forbid if that pity was turned on their glorious leader.
I stay silent, mulling over my assessment. “Well, aren’t you gonna get out of our way, dummy?”
I’m blocking the sliding glass door. Standing quickly, I sway. The heavy book falls to the wooden planks below me and I lean from the sudden movement and pass out. It was the first time I’ve ever fainted. They had to take me to the hospital because I hit my head hard. Jessica blamed herself, but I couldn’t pinpoint why I passed out. In the end, I think I just stood up too fast. It wasn’t that Jessica was calling me out and embarrassing me, though that’s what I assumed as a kid. At the hospital, a kind nurse who was trying to hide a shiner with too much makeup, took pity on me when I told her I didn’t want to go back.
That RN never made me tell her why I didn’t want to return—she called CPS without asking questions, and I went back into the home for girls instead of the bedroom next to Bob’s. The girls there are fantastically mean, but not in the same way Jessica was. I have friends there. Ones that I can talk to without fear. Most importantly, there aren’t any Bobs at the home for girls. Just rats, cheats, and thieves. Enemies I know and can defend myself against.
When I come to, I’m in the back of an ambulance, a medic leaning over me. “Ma’am, you’re on the way to the hospital now.” Glass bottles are rattling somewhere in here and it distracts me as I come to, brain hazy, stuck in the past—the last time I fainted.
“Lincoln. Where is Lincoln? Is he okay?”
The medic pulls a face. So much for bedside manner. “I’m sorry. He didn’t make it,” he says, voice low enough to be sympathetic but loud enough that I can hear him over the accelerating engine.
A swift punch to the gut couldn’t have taken my breath away quicker. “What?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He pauses, not meeting my eyes. “They do have one man in custody and they were tracking down the other person when we left. How are you feeling?”
How am I feeling? How am I feeling? I don’t know. It’s an out-of-body experience, like I’m floating above myself watching my world shatter once again. I slam my eyes shut so tightly I see bursts of colors and lights. Fireworks for those too fearful to enjoy actual fireworks, for the damaged and broken.
I focus on my heart. It’s beating. It’s jagged and hollow, because I’m not sure how to quantify this loss… again, but it’s beating. You can do this, Maeve. You are enough. I replay Rexy’s words from his last email. I want to ask him, what happens when I get caught in the backblast because I didn’t know surrounding myself with Lincoln also meant surrounding myself with Rena? I’m trying to shake back, Rexy. How do I shake back harder than this?
I try to sit up, but can’t. “Stay back. You hit your head. We’re almost there and we’ll get you up and going. Just a few more seconds.”
“I need to see Lincoln. Where is he?” Something I never got a chance to do with Rexy. When you don’t see a lifeless body, it’s difficult to rationalize the permanence of the absence. For me, especially.
The medic tells me he’s probably on his way to the morgue as he lifts the bed I’m on out of the ambulance and onto the pavement where there is a team waiting for me. Me. These people think I need help when Lincoln is gone. There has to be a better use of their time.
“I need to sit up.” They give me reassurance that I’m