Pick-me-up (2 page)

“Help,” Katelyn cried out to her, but the
woman made no move toward her.

Hatred and anger surged through Katelyn. Pain
pierced her sides as she moved, but Katelyn managed to get to her
feet. “I hate you!” she yelled at Tim. She held the wall as she
backed up. “I hate you!” she yelled louder and she turned to
stagger out the door.

Tim snapped out and jumped her from behind.
Katelyn collapsed down onto the front porch face-first. Tim jumped
on her back and pinned her. “You bitch,” he cried repeatedly as he
slapped her again and again in the head. Tim’s mom screamed
hysterically at Tim to stop, but he reached a rhythm.

Katelyn couldn’t feel the hits individually
any more. From beneath him, Katelyn struggled. She put all her
strength into making it end. Finally, she was able to get a knee up
and get leverage. With a heave upward, she threw him off guard and
Tim fell against the porch railing in surprise. With all her
strength, Katelyn raised her beaten body and struggled down the
steps. She kept going when she made it to the yard and didn’t stop
until she reached the end of the block. She fell to her knees on
the cold sidewalk. She turned around expecting him to be in chase,
but he remained on the porch of his house, his mom’s curses
reaching across the neighborhood.

Katelyn’s body hurt and she bled from several
cuts. She felt dizzy and broken. The tears came freely now, but
fear made her keep going. She pushed herself up. She had to get
away. This just couldn’t be real, couldn’t be happening. Not to
her. Not by Tim.

Chapter 3: 9 Months, 27
Days Earlier

“Jenny,
don’t drink it all!” Katelyn yelled from the cramped living room
into her sister’s even smaller kitchen. Yelling wasn’t really
necessary in Jenny’s small two-bedroom apartment. Katelyn, Jenny,
and two of Jenny’s friends were quite close amid the highchair,
dollhouse, toy kitchen, and an array of other toddler furniture
that filled up the space. Katelyn didn’t really want another drink.
She just didn’t want Jenny to have another drink.

Jenny, Katelyn’s 19-year-old sister, was
pouring the rest of a bottle of neon blue Vodka into a plastic
toddler’s cup; some spilled out and down the sides of a fading Elmo
decal. The last drops fell from the bottle as Jenny shook it. Jenny
let it clatter to the countertop where she grabbed an open lemonade
carton. Jenny filled the rest of the cup. She turned to Katelyn
with a wicked smile before she tipped the cup to her lips and took
a mighty drink. “Ahh,” she exaggerated, “you’ll just have to buy
another.”

“Jennieee,” Katelyn whined. “I don’t have any
more money.”

“You like coming over here? Want to go home.
Should I call mom?” Jenny turned to her two friends who were
watching a reality show on the screen; they had turned to watch the
sisterly spat. “Katelyn is mom’s fav’rite,” she slurred.

Katelyn looked down at her own drink to avoid
the obvious threat; her sister was drunk and she was a mean drunk.
Jenny, even though she was four years older, was the only sister
Katelyn considered a friend. Even a mean Jenny was better than
going home.

Katelyn forked over her allowance or whatever
she could skim from her mom’s wallet so Jenny could buy booze. And,
Jen let her hide out and drink with her. It was a give and take
deal, but she’d take it. Her mom and dad were fighting in full
force again. Her mom thought he was back on drugs. So, whenever her
dad made it home, all they did was fight until he left again.
Listening to it all was painful, but even more painful was the
truth. Her dad wasn’t acting right. Katelyn didn’t want to believe
he was back on drugs. Katelyn couldn’t deal with that again. Her
sister, on the other hand, she could handle.

“Sure, Jen, let’s call mom and let her know
I’m with you. Let’s call her so she can really know that you’re
still a drunk instead of just suspecting you are.” Katelyn got up
from the worn sofa while she talked. “Let’s call her so you can
wish your kids goodnight.” She knew she’d hit a nerve with the last
jab and strode quickly to the bedroom.

“You can leave now!” Jenny yelled at her.

Katelyn ignored her as she stepped into the
dark bedroom and slammed the door behind her. Through the thin
door, the TV show was only slightly muffled and her sister’s words
were only masked by the room’s darkness. “She may have them, but
they’re my kids. They’re my kids!” A commercial filled her short
silence.

Katelyn couldn’t help but picture the plump
cheeks of her niece and the baby blue wide eyes of her youngest
nephew. Kayla was almost three and Jacob was at that cute, smiley
six month stage. Katelyn’s mom took custody of the kids after Jenny
went missing for a week the previous month. When Jenny came back,
without the dirtbag she left with, their mom wouldn’t give Kayla
and Jacob back until Jenny went through an alcohol treatment
program. Jenny still hadn’t signed up. This month, Jenny was going
to lose her welfare payments, but even that didn’t seem to worry
her.

“Let her take care of them; it’s more she
ever did for me.” Sadness mixed in with the bitterness in Jenny’s
voice, but Katelyn knew better than to play into her pity
party.

Katelyn moved away from the door after she
was sure her sister had moved on. She heard Jenny complain to her
friends and, shortly thereafter, wicked laughter from her friends.
Katelyn threw herself on the unmade bed; her eyes had adjusted to
the dark and she kept the lights off. She checked the time on her
cell phone: 12:36 a.m. It was too late to walk anywhere; the stupid
city curfew was at 11:00 p.m. on weekends and the cops loved to
stop her. Her last name might as well be stamped on her in
reflector neon. Thanks, Dad, for the legacy, she thought. Katelyn
had already been stopped and escorted home twice by the police.
Luckily for her, after the cops left, her parents ended up cussing
about the crooked cops rather than punishing her.

She leaned back on the bed, knocking over a
laundry basket full of clothes onto the floor in the process. She
didn’t bother picking the clothes up. They were probably dirty
anyways. Jenny hadn’t asked her to borrow money for laundry
lately.

On the ceiling she could see the outlines of
stick-on, glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. They didn’t glow. The
lights had been off for too long. Some previous tenant had put them
there to amuse their children, probably someone like Jenny, a
single mom on assistance. The apartment complex was for single
moms; the rent was super cheap because the Iowa Department of Human
Services paid most of it while moms found jobs or went to school.
The State must not have found out about Jenny’s custody issue yet.
If Katelyn needed to, that was something else she could use as
leverage against Jenny. Katelyn hated fighting dirty, but kind just
wasn’t how her family played anymore.

She checked her phone again. The screen’s
light momentarily blinded her in the dark. No calls, no messages.
She ran through recent texts and sent a few “wussup” probes to a
few people from school. Emily, a sophomore Katelyn met in Foods
class last trimester, said she was going to a party tonight on a
junior’s farm outside of town; Katelyn wasn’t invited. No freshmen
were ever formally invited to the upperclassman parties. But, Emily
didn’t even ask Katelyn if she wanted to go. Suspicion crept into
Katelyn’s mind.

She started a new text to Emily: “where r
u?”

She watched the message send, and the screen
went to black. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark again. The room
had a stale, dirty smell to it. It’s good the lights are out, she
thought. She didn’t want to look at stains in the warped carpet or
on her sister’s clothes. Now that she centered on the smell, she
couldn’t shake it. She pushed the window up with her foot, but it
only rose a few inches. The early May evening was considerably warm
already and the air wasn’t stirring.

Katelyn pulled her t-shirt collar up over her
nose. The familiar laundry soap fragrance was traceable under the
smell of secondhand smoke. Her mom had started smoking again when
her dad came home. He already burned through more than a pack a day
on his own. She hated smoking. She had grown up her whole life
breathing cigarette smoke; the thought of putting a cigarette on
her lips on purpose grossed her out. Still, the smell was familiar,
almost comforting. There was another scent today; she closed her
eyes to concentrate on it. The baby smell of Jacob still lingered
from where she had patted him to sleep earlier.

Vibration and light announced the new message
on her phone: “Leaving lame party. Going to RD. Wtf r u?”

Yes, a way out, thought Katelyn. RD: Emily
was headed to Rollins’ Dam, not so much a dam, but a pile of logs
and rocks in a creek that dwindled to a trickle after the spring
rains finished. It was on the edge of the Rollins Acreage, off a
gravel road accessed through a rarely-used county road. Emily’s
friends had turned it into a hangout complete with cheap plastic
lawn chairs and a homemade fire pit. It was outside of town limits
and therefore out of the jurisdiction of Northrup’s PD. The
County’s Sheriff Department didn’t have it on their radar, either.
Emily had her driver’s license and must have been able to borrow
her dad’s car tonight.

She sat up and typed. “Fun. Can u pick me up
[email protected] Jenny’s?” Before she could push send, the screen flashed a red
warning “Battery Exhausted” and then switched to the fatal “Turning
Phone Off” message. Katelyn moaned and slumped back on the bed.
“Great,” she muttered, and she felt her eyes start to brim with
tears.

Katelyn didn’t cry in the open, not where
anyone could see. She didn’t dare let her family see that they
could hurt her. Crying never brought words of comfort. Even now,
with her nieces and nephews running around the house, their tears
and cries only brought angry shouting from her sisters and her
parents. Tears didn’t earn sympathy in the Wells household.

In the dark, though, sometimes. When she
couldn’t sleep, long after her mother stopped coughing in the
living room, tears just slid out of her. And now, tears trailed
slowly out of the corner of her eyes to run into her hair.

Minutes passed, maybe a half hour. Katelyn
seemed to come out of a trance when she heard the deeper bass of a
male voice in the next room. Then, a second male voice said hello.
She heard her sister’s friendly-flirt tone, an over-compensating
pitch that girls instantly recognize as fake but that boys seem to
believe.

“Now the party can begin!” Jenny screamed,
“Ladies, we’re back in business.” The new arrivals must have come
bearing gifts, the 40% proof kind. More greeting sounds and
friendly insults were thrown around and now music accompanied the
rising noise. She heard Jen say, “Sure, right back there.” The
bathroom, right next to this bedroom. She looked to see shadowed
forms under the door as they stopped in front of the bathroom. She
heard the door open, saw new light—the bathroom—and then the light
fade as the door clicked shut. Katelyn pulled herself upright to
focus on the problem. The shape of the visitor’s shadow still cast
against the carpet through the space under the door. No one had
gone into the bathroom. The person was still standing outside the
door.

Next, the door handle to the bedroom turned.
Katelyn jumped back into the corner of the bed, crouched and still.
The door swung open briefly and the shadow quickly sneaked into the
room and closed the door behind.

Katelyn didn’t mean to, but she sucked in
air. The intruder instantly turned her way. There was just enough
moonlight outside to make everything in the room have enough its
form. The moisture of this boy’s eyes reflected a small enough
amount of light to reveal that he was looking straight at her. His
body didn’t move, but his head tilted to the left.

“What do you want?” Katelyn finally
managed.

His body relaxed; he didn’t move away from
the door. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

Katelyn was still on guard. “Are you lost?
This isn’t the bathroom,” she snapped.

The mystery guest leaned back against the
door, his hands casually found his pockets in jeans that hung low
on his narrow hips. “Well, we’re all lost,” he paused. “Aren’t we?”
His voice was playful, tempting her to relax and play along. He
clearly wasn’t leaving. “That is,” he said deeply, “until we find
what we’re lookin’ for.”

Katelyn didn’t know whether to be bothered by
this boy’s evasive talk or to play along with her own. She didn’t
recognize him as anyone she’d met at her sister’s before. Most of
the boys that came to Jenny’s were somehow linked to a familiar
troublemaker group—friends of one of the kids’ fathers or some
seniors from Jenny’s former grade, some still in school, some not.
Jenny’s friends were rough; some had been in trouble with drugs and
others busted for some misdemeanor theft crime like Jenny. Katelyn
didn’t mind this crowd, though. They were more real than most of
the people in this town. She felt a bond with them because with
every strike against them, it only made them have more in common
with her family. Still, it didn’t mean Katelyn should let her guard
down. She decided to play along.

“What are you looking for, then? And why do
you think you’ll find it in my sister’s bedroom?” she added,
swinging her feet off the bed and sitting upright to add more of a
challenge in her posture.

“Your sister, huh?” He took his time in
reply. Katelyn instantly wondered if she’d given away some bit of
knowledge she shouldn’t have. “Well, sister, what are you lookin’
for? And why are you lookin’ for it in the dark?” He followed up
his words with a quick reach out to the light switch. Halogen light
instantly flooded the room from the overhead bulb. The light shade
had been taken down at some point and the bulb burned directly into
her eyes. She quickly shut her eyes and turned her head, but she
had caught a quick glimpse of the boy.