Mackie, May I?

Mackie, May I? Chapter 14

A/N--If you haven't noticed, I've finally uploaded cast names for everyone.  Picture to the side is of Mackie. Just imagine her with green eyes instead of blue!

“Mackie,” Carly tentatively says as she walks into our dorm room.  I look up from where I’d been scribbling ideas for a paper due this week into my notebook, and see a pale, horror-stricken expression on her face.  I immediately drop my pencil and hop off my bed, walking straight to her and taking the manila folder out of her hands.

Scribbled on the front of the folder is her name in an uneven scrawl, and when I look up to her to ask what’s in it, she says, “I don’t think it was meant for me.”

Not knowing exactly what she means by this, I open the folder and draw out the sole page inside.  It’s glossy, laminate, which must mean it’s a picture of some sort, and when I look down at it and see exactly what it’s a picture of, I know that it’s one of the worst kinds.

It’s from that night, and there I am, my almost-naked body exposed to a group of teenage guys and thrown sloppily onto my old bed, the one I got rid of literally the next day.  Ted is there, in his almost morbid handsomeness, and he’s kneeling beside my drug-induced body, his hand posed mid air above my face, like he’s about to tenderly tuck a piece of hair behind my ear.

I see a couple of other guys off to the side of the frame, and they’re looking at each other and laughing, like it’s no big deal that there’s a naked girl completely unable to move about to be assaulted.

I remember that moment.  As much as I’ve tried to drown out the memories of that night in makeup and hairstyles and making sure I look perfect, I still remember.  How my body hadn’t been working right, and how when I could’ve sworn I’d lifted my hand to push him off of me, it hadn’t.

I remember not being able to scream, or cry out, and that the only part of me that seemed to work was my tear ducts.  I’d just lain there, crying my heart and soul out, not being able to voice my sobs, only able to feel them.  Ted had teased me for them, gently wiping them away and telling me that I was pathetic for crying, that what he was about to do to me was a long-time coming, that I should have expected it.

Not long after that, to everyone else in that room’s amusement, he slid my underwear down the length of my legs and tossed them to the first guy he saw.  And then he’d pushed inside of me, and all I’d been able to do was cry harder.

As the memory surges in my mind, my fingers seem to lose their grip on the picture and it flutters to the ground.  It’s been so long since I’ve remembered the entirety of that night, and now that I am it’s like the memories won’t stop.  They just keep pushing through; the pain I’d felt, the laughter and grunts I’d heard, the cries for help I couldn’t say.

Suddenly I’m on the floor and sobbing, and Carly’s rubbing her hands against my back, attempting to quiet my cries.  My chest is heaving and my breathing is laborious and heavy, and I’m having a hard time discerning if this is real life or just some hellish nightmare.

I’d been so, so close to enjoying my life again.  Hell, I might’ve even been there.  Just this morning I was giggling against Jesse’s lips as he’d pinned me against the door to my room, him tickling me and taunting me with sweet teases.  That was literally just hours ago, and now here I am, a complete and broken mess on the nasty floor of our dorm room.

It’s like it’s not even the same lifetime, this morning and now.

And I want out of this one.  I so desperately want out of it, and the fact that it keeps coming back to terrorize me every time I’m close is almost like a sick reminder that I’m forever going to be miserable.