Hunger

Austin: Fine Now

I fall asleep that night but don't get any rest, even though I'm next to Rory. She doesn't know that bringing Ray up has made me have nightmares all night. The dreams have a common theme; I'm trying to run away and I can't outsmart Ray. He's everywhere I run. He gets to my hiding places even before I do, like he's inside my head.

Once I tried to run away in real life, and that becomes one of my dreams too. I was eleven years old. It was only a couple of months before they took me. By then my soul was only partially attached to my body, like a loose tooth. But most of me had broken off in fragments over the years. I felt myself dying. Not physically. It was worse than physical death. At least when you die physically, you die with your soul. But my soul was dying at a far faster rate than my body.

A couple years before this, I saw on a crime TV show that sometimes abused kids' minds break apart, creating a bunch of different people that take over randomly. You can't control what the others do, and the "real" you is locked away deep inside and one of the others might eventually take over for good, essentially killing the real you. It's called Multiple Personalities. I worried about that happening to me because I could feel myself breaking apart. Not like I lost consciousness or something, but I could leave my body whenever I wanted to, and as I got older I realized that wasn't supposed to happen. I didn't know any other kids that could do it. I knew I was a freak.

I thought if I, the real me, had any hope of surviving intact I had to get out of my life. If I had succeeded with my escape plan, who knows where I'd be now. Not sleeping next to Rory, that's for sure. I guess it's good that I didn't make it, but it didn't seem that way at the time.

I packed up all my clothes and stuffed them into my school backpack. It was December, that weird week between Christmas and New Years when no one knows what the hell they're doing. I made it about two miles before Ray caught up to me at a Burger King down the street. He was absolutely silent on the drive home, and so was I. There was a mutual understanding that I was going to pay for what I did. I didn't bother pleading or crying or apologizing. Those things never worked. I thought he might kill me, but I didn't feel sad about it. As far as I knew death was like being asleep without dreams, and that was okay. I wouldn't feel anything anymore, and that thought is a relief when all you feel is fear. Fear is exhausting, and I was so very tired.

There was a thin layer of crunchy ice on the grass. It was cold, but Ray wouldn't let me go inside the house. We were in the backyard where no one could see us. I'm not sure anyone was in the house. If they were, they probably wouldn't have noticed anyway and definitely wouldn't have intervened to save me. A few of the druggies were cool. They'd bring me toys and joke around with me and stuff, but I knew they wouldn't save me either. Everyone feared Ray too much.

"Take off your clothes," Ray told me, his breath puffing in the freezing night air.

I did what he said.

"Everything."

I took off my underwear.

"Shoes too."

I took off my shoes.

The ice burned my bare feet, and I stood on one leg, switching feet when the pain became unbearable. My teeth were chattering so hard I thought they would break like candy. Ray went into the house, but I didn't follow because I knew he wanted me to stay there freezing to death. It wasn't a bad punishment as far as things went. I was pretty relieved.

But it wasn't over. It never was.

Ray came back out dragging the electrical cord. And then he reached down and picked up the garden hose. He presented both to me.

"Which one?" he asked.

I didn't know what the hose was for, but I figured he'd hit me with it. It was much fatter than the cord and also had that metal thing at the end, and that made me nervous, so I pointed at the cord. Better the devil you know after all.