Rage (5 page)

She kicked off her boots and tugged down her skirt. She unrolled her stockings, forcing herself to go slow, silently grateful she'd worn the sexy panties.

"More," he said, his hands sliding up her bare legs.

Breathing hard, she pulled off her top.

Adam took a moment to appreciate her bra and what was within the bra. "Everything off," he murmured. "I want to see you. Really see you."

She fumbled with her bra clasp, her fingers slipping because she was nervous and horny and couldn't stop to think. All there was to the world was Adam and Missy, his hands on her body, his mouth on her skin.

She dropped her bra onto the floor.

"Everything," he rasped.

Panting, she shucked off her underwear.

Adam kissed her once more, deeply, then stepped backward, his heated gaze roaming over her body. She stood before him, stripped, her scars revealed. She had a moment of worry—this was when he'd panicked two months ago, when he'd seen her fully naked for the first time in the nine months they were together and he saw the raised lines along her body and he called her a freak as he scrambled to grab his clothing.

But that Adam wasn't here. The Adam who was with her now was drinking her in and smiling at what he saw.

"Pose for me," he said, his voice husky.

She sprawled on the bed, arranging herself so that she covered her breasts with one arm and crossed her legs to hide what lay between them—nude and yet modest. She smiled at him coyly. "Like this?"

"Oh yeah," he said, grinning. "Just like that."

And then his grin pulled into something cruel, and he called out, "Now!"

The door banged open, and a flood of people rushed inside the bedroom, whooping and shrieking laughter. Cell phones flashed, capturing Missy's shock, immortalizing the scars that were all too clear on her belly, her arms, her thighs. People gathered around her, pointing and chortling, calling her a freak, a slut, a suicide walking. More and more teens pushed inside the small bedroom—Kevin and some of the soccer girls and others, people Missy knew and people Missy didn't know at all, all of them laughing at her, recording her.

And there in the center of it all was Adam, grinning smugly as one of the Matts slipped him a wad of cash.

"Cutterslut!" screamed the other Matt.

"Cutterslut!" came the reply, a dozen voices strong, and growing. "Cutterslut!" The taunt spread until Missy was drowning in a verbal wave. "Cutterslut!" It was a name, a brand, a scarlet letter sliced into her skin.

Half blind from humiliation and fury, Missy scrambled off the bed to grab her clothing. Someone snatched her panties before she could, and another person claimed her boots. Missy barely noticed; the world had given way to a sea of red.

Clutching her clothes to her chest, she tried to push her way out of the room. But she was surrounded by a crush of people, of classmates jeering and clicking pictures. Tears burned her eyes as she frantically tried to shove her way through the mob. But no one would budge.

Missy couldn't breathe.

It was Adam who saved her. "Let her go," he said, his voice like a blade. "She has to go home and cry to her mommy."

The crowd parted, still laughing and mocking.

Missy ran.

She stumbled down the stairs, not stopping to throw on her clothing. She bolted out the door, leaving the taunts of "cutterslut" far behind. As she ran in the Red, an image of Adam burned brightly in her mind—Adam, so smug as he pocketed a wad of cash, grinning hugely, his eyes flashing "gotcha" even as the cell phones captured her forever and longer.

Adam, who had destroyed her over a bet.

Missy ran from her life, thinking now about the salvation that waited for her in her lockbox. She ran, already picturing the razor that would kiss everything away.

She ran, and in her closet at home, the white tie box waited.

Missy stopped long enough to take shelter behind a bush and fumble on her clothing, her scars winking like knives in the moonlight. Stockings and bra, top and skirt, all tugged into place. No boots; those, like her panties, had been reduced to tokens, limited-edition mementos of The Night Adam Ruined Missy's Life. Missy was far too numb to feel the pavement slap against her feet.

Clothed and yet still feeling completely naked, Missy ran back to her house. There was a moment of bitter relief that her key was in her skirt pocket; she would have died of humiliation if her parents or, God forbid, her sister had opened the door. That relief quickly faded as Missy placed the key into the lock.

It fit perfectly, just as Adam had played her perfectly.

He'd played her, and everyone had watched. Those who hadn't seen the live performance were assuredly being treated to the recorded version. Possibly in surround sound.

She thought of everyone—
everyone
—in school seeing her there on that bed, completely bare, her scars and skin on display. She heard their mocking laughter, felt their scorn like pimples erupting on her face.

Oh, God.

The pressure started like a balloon in the middle of her chest, slowly getting bigger. It expanded, flattening her heart, her lungs, now reaching out and around. It cemented her bowels and squeezed her throat as she stood there on the stoop, her hand on the doorknob, tears frozen in her eyes. Her vision blurred. She couldn't get enough air.

The pictures, the video, the gossip—all of it would circulate through school. Everyone either had seen her or would see her, stripped, her sins exposed.

Everyone.

Her hand shaking, she opened the front door and stumbled inside. The scent of garlic and butter had settled in the living room, and Missy breathed in the remnants of dinner as if they could save her.

They couldn't.

Cutterslut.

Adam's eyes, glinting like diamonds. Adam's grin, so horribly smug.

Freak.

Gasping, she worked her way upstairs. She didn't hear the television blaring from her parents' room—which signaled that her mom and dad were having sex—or notice that her sister's bedroom door was wide open, indicating that Sue was out of the house. As far as Missy was concerned, she was alone, for now and for always. She thought she saw a cat from the corner of her eye as she rounded the top of the stairs, but she ignored it because Graygirl was two months dead, and even if it was Graygirl's ghost there in the hallway, the cat couldn't help Missy now.

Only one thing could do that.

Drowning, she staggered into her room and leaned heavily against the door until it shut, then locked it. She turned on the overhead light because her scars, already exposed to everyone, couldn't be shielded by the dark, and she went to her closet door and dragged out her lockbox. She bumped the door semi-closed, and she placed the lockbox carefully on her bed.

Let me make it up to you.

The pressure in her chest had become almost unbearable—the glass jar of her heart had been crushed, the heart inside pulverized—and her breath came only in spastic wheezes. She had a clear thought, clanging like a bell, saying that she didn't need the blade.

But she did. Because without it, she would surely die.

She darted a frantic glance around her room, looking for something she couldn't name. On the closet door, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe said nothing, both lost in the land of stars who had died too young.

She was going to die.

She didn't want to die.

Her hand trembling, she opened her lockbox. Two months dropped away like snowflakes as she stared at the contents within. Before Adam's betrayal—the first betrayal, the one that had merely left her gutted and raw—back when she was cutting frequently, Missy would have gone to the bathroom before she opened her lockbox, and would have rubbed her arms and thighs and stomach with alcohol. But that was another girl, in another lifetime. Potential germs and infection didn't mean anything now.

All that mattered was the blood. She had to bleed out the badness, bleed until she could breathe again.

Folded neatly in the lockbox was a towel, once white, now dingy and stained from her ritual of pain. She took it out, running her fingers over the brown spots, trying to remember them when they had been scarlet drops—fresh, rich, brimming with emotion. It was her own security blanket, a dream catcher that trapped living nightmares when she pressed it against her cuts. The towel protected her from getting caught.

Too late for such things now. She set the towel aside, then looked inside the box.

The razor gleamed, winking like an old friend.

It was the same blade she had always used, taken from a broken disposable razor—the same brand used by her mother. There were times when Missy would touch the razor to her flesh and imagine that her mom knew what she was doing, that they were connected through the steel as if it were an umbilical cord. She would imagine that her mother understood what Missy did and why she did it, that her mother quietly condoned it even as she removed the stubble from her legs.

It was a pleasant lie, and as Missy would float in the quietude that came after the pain, she would enjoy the notion of her mom, even her dad, seeing her true face—that of the real Melissa Miller, whose colors ran outside the lines.

But that was a fantasy. Her parents didn't know her, not really. They went through the motions of affection, smiled the smiles of patience and platitudes. They claimed to accept her for who and what she was, and maybe they even believed they did just that. But her parents had their expectations, and Missy either met those expectations or exceeded them. Anything else was outside of their frame of reference.

The blade was cold to her touch. She stroked it once, hesitant and yet hopeful.

Missy's relationship with her razor wasn't just outside of her parents' frame of reference. It was another language, a dead language of a forgotten tribe. To her parents, pain was something to be avoided at best and dealt with at worst. To Missy, pain was a blessing. It was a moment of crystalline purity, one that made everything somehow bearable, if only for a little while. Momentary agony, and then the buzz of her blood welling up on her flesh. Pain was her salvation; seeing her blood on her skin was like seeing God.

She lifted the razor in her right hand, holding it between her thumb and first two fingers. She heard Adam and the others call her names and accuse her of horrific things, laughing at her all the while. She felt her soul crumple, squeezed into pulp. She tried to breathe and failed.

In her mind, Adam's voice whispered:
Freak.

Tears stinging her eyes, she sliced down.

***

"Time to go," Death said abruptly. In the blink of an eye, his guitar was nowhere to be found.

Famine smiled tightly, a knife-flash of humor. "From zero to a hundred in a split second."

"It's all in the timing," Death agreed, sounding chipper. "Go thee out unto the world."

The Black Rider would have responded, but Death was already gone.

***

It wasn't enough.

She had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer.

She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn't breathe.

She had brought the razor to her inner thighs again and again and again, but with each sting came no release, no comforting numbness that dulled the horror of her life.

It wasn't enough. So she cut again—swiftly, mercilessly.

And maybe it was because her fingers were slick with blood, or maybe it was because she was exhausted and wretched and in excruciating pain, but for whatever the reason, her next stroke—her final stroke—slipped, and she opened up an artery. The spray hit her eyes, her cheek, her chin.

She had a moment of utter shock, in which she let out a quiet "Oh." An inexplicable feeling of déjà vu settled into her bones.

And then the blade slipped from her hand and she sank to the ground and she watched as her life leaked out of her in thick streamers of red.

She wondered numbly what went wrong, and what, if anything, waited for her when it was done. She knew that her parents and sister would think she had committed suicide, and she was horribly sad because she couldn't tell them how wrong they would be. She didn't mean to kill herself. She had only wanted to breathe again.

Bleeding out, Melissa Miller began to die.

You have blood on your hands.

The memories fell upon her, gentle as summer rain: first, Death standing on the doorstep, dressed in delivery browns, telling her to take the package he offered; next, her fingers dragging over the white box, leaving trails of red in their wake; last, Missy grabbing the package and slamming the door in Death's face.

In retrospect, she probably should have been a little more polite.

So afraid.
Death's voice again, but she couldn't tell if it was her memory or if Death was with her now. Because he was, wasn't he? She was dying, so he would be there for her, lead her to wherever she was supposed to go...

Take the box, Melissa Miller.

The box. Where was the box?

On her closet door, Marilyn Monroe sighed in ecstasy, and James Dean searched for something just out of reach.

The closet. It was in her closet.

She tried to get up and failed; she tried to crawl and instead crashed prone on the floor.

You taking a nap?
That was Bella's voice, teasing her on the safety of the soccer field.
You've got to use your body better.

Listening to Bella, Missy dragged herself across her bedroom floor. Behind her, bloody streaks marred the beige carpet like a serial killer's bread crumbs. Missy made it to her closet door and nudged it open with her wet fingers. She lifted her head up to stare at the top shelf, impossibly high. The long white box that Death had given her was up there, waiting for her to take it and claim what lay inside.

"You should hurry," a cold voice said.

She turned her head—God, when did her head become so heavy? It was too big for her neck—and saw Death seated on her bed, grinning lazily, his eyes sparkling beneath his long messy bangs.