Under a Silent Moon

41

Chapter Forty-One: Stuck in Place

LANA

I don't want to tell Zack what happened. It's not that I have some sick perverson to protect my attacker, but that I simply don't want to talk about it ever again. I don't want to think about it ever again. I don't think Zack means to be intrusive, but he won't let it go.

"What. Happened," he growls, looking like a wolf about to pounce.

"Zack, please," I plead, and let out such a pained sigh that he backs off for about five minutes.

We're both sitting on my bed until Zack quietly rummages through one of my drawers and hands me fresh sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I'm still sopping wet and shivering beneath a thin towel, but I don't make any move to change clothes. I feel frozen, stuck in place. I welcome the temporary numbness.

It's Zack's turn to plead now, I can see it in his eyes. He doesn't protest when I ask him to turn around while I carefully change into dry clothes and crawl back into bed.

When it's obvious I'm not going to answer his questions right now, he ambles over to my desk and to my horror I realize I laid out the suicide notes before going into the bathroom.

They'd always been in the desk drawer, and periodically I'd take them out and read them over. Some days I would shake my head and furiously hide them beneath a stack of binders. Other days, when the darkness was in charge, instead of shoving them into a drawer I'd stack them neatly next to my lamp, always in arm's reach. It's a savage game I liked to play with myself, apparently.

And after the trauma I just faced, it only felt right that I position them where my loved ones would find them. They would never know what threw me over the edge, but they didn't need to. I'd spare them the pain and humiliation.

I grab at the envelopes in Zack's hand, wanting to rip them to shreds. He holds it too high for me to reach, like an older brother taunting his sister.

"What the fuck are these?" he demands and his voice cracks slightly from emotion.

"They're nothing. They're . . . old."

"Can't be that old, Lana," he refutes by tapping the one with his name on it. I can only stare at him, mouth agape as my mind grasps for a reasonable explanation.

All I can say is, "I told you I was sad."

"Sad?" he nearly yells, sitting down next to me. "I didn't know you were suicidally sad, Lana." He turns away from me, dropping the letters to the floor.

I clamp my mouth shut. It's the first time anyone has alluded to my suicidal thoughts out loud, and the gravity of what could have happened floods over me like a coastal town during hurricane season. I almost took those pills.

Almost.

When he shifts to face me once more, I cut him off before he opens his mouth. "Can you just let it go for now?"

He stares at me, dumbfounded and almost angry at this point. "I just found you half-clothed in a bathtub holding an open bottle of sleeping pills." I wince as a pitiful mental image of me surfaces in my mind's eye. "I can't let it go."

I'm ultimately resigned to the fact that I have to be truthful with him at some point. If I don't tell him, I'm afraid my abuser might. He's so sadistic that he probably bragged to the group after I left. I can't let something this pertinent get back to Zack in an indirect way.

Fighting back humiliating tears, I recount the order of events that occurred after he went outside with Lizzy.