Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,5

that strength now. It was stolen, scooped out of her like everything else had been.

“I hurt so bad,” Ri sobbed, all semblance of strength crumbling away from her like the weak shield it had been. “I’m so tired.”

She was. Exhausted. She wished she could sink into the concrete, the ground, and sleep forever. She didn’t just want to sleep, she wanted to die. It was the first time she’d wished such a thing, and it would certainly not be the last.

Mary Lou wiped the tears from Ri’s face. Ri regarded what the girl was wearing. A white hospital gown with tiny blue flowers covering it. She expected it to be dirty—they were surrounded by filth after all. But it was spotless. Ri looked down to see she was wearing the same thing. She was clean. How could she be clean? The dirt and grime clung to her, was embedded in her bones.

“Where am I?”

“That’s a good question,” Mary Lou said. “We call it The Cell. Not very original, I know.” She fumbled with a chain wrapped around her ankle. It was attached to the wall just like the one around Orion’s ankle. “Truth be told, we don’t know where we are.”

“We?”

She motioned to her right, and Ri’s eyes found the girl at the other end of the room—The Cell—leaning against the wall. She wore the same gown as the other two girls, ankle chained to a D-ring on the far wall.

“That’s Jaclyn,” the girl explained. There was an edge to her soft voice. “She’s a delight, if you can’t already tell.” She pointed a few feet beside Jaclyn. “The one pretending to be asleep is Patricia.”

Ri focused on a girl, curled up in a ball on the floor, facing away from everyone. She found herself jealous of the girl, pretending or not, wishing she was doing the same. It hurt to talk, hurt even more to take in her new reality.

“We don’t all live in denial like Mary Lou here,” Jaclyn said, her words sharp. Everything else about the girl was sharp too. Latina; emerald eyes; long, dark, wild hair; all of her features strong, jarring, and beautiful, even in here. She was also clean.

Ri was struck with pure jealousy in that moment, despite everything. Despite the pain between her legs, inside her soul, the fear gnawing at her nerves, telling her that nothing would ever be the same again, her girlish envy somehow remained unharmed.

Ri would come to learn that Jaclyn’s beauty, her presence, was not something to be envied, coveted. It meant she was the prize possession. Their favorite.

In The Cell, you didn’t want to be the favorite.

Mary Lou straightened, jutting her chin upward in a gesture that Ri recognized. April did it now and again, not really knowing she was doing it. Almost a tic for girls from families that spoiled them, pampered them, and gave them the tools to be spoiled, to look down on people whether they knew they were doing it or not.

“You will never bring me down to your level, Jaclyn,” Mary Lou said, her grip tightening ever so slightly on Ri. She found she preferred that pain as opposed to the tenderness of before. “I will always have hope.”

Jaclyn narrowed her eyes, focusing on Ri. “You want to know what happened to the last person who wore those chains, little girl?” she asked Ri, and Orion didn’t much like where she was going with it.

It hit Ri then, quickly, without mercy. The truth. The ugliness of it. These girls were familiar with their surroundings. Resigned. They’d been here long enough to figure out ways to cope.

She wasn’t stupid. She’d read stories, watched the news. Missing girls. Children. Rarely found. What was it, the first twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? They were important. Critical. You didn’t find many after that. You wouldn’t want to find many after that.

“Do you really wanna know?” Jaclyn followed up, her tone condescending.

“You shut up right now, Jaclyn,” Mary Lou snapped, voice bordering on shrill. Similar to the tone April’s mother used with her when she was being a brat.

Then again, she also shouldn’t have been sitting in a basement with a chain on her ankle.

Ri started to tremble. She didn’t want to. She wanted to lean against the wall with her arms folded, accepting of her fate like Jaclyn was. Or maybe even blindly hopeful and kind like Mary Lou.

Not shaking, with tears and snot running down her face.

But she wasn’t in control of that. She felt powerless to