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THE FIELDS. PROLOGUE " PROTECTING WHAT'S HIS "
tws for assault and battery, mentions of blood, and poor attempts at world building
The kids at school often teased Mariah for her pious nature and her pinched face, but none were as bad as Tommy Carson.
He, a year her senior, had been that way since grade school; born with the kind of charisma (and a family with a good enough moral standing in their town) that made it easy for him to make someone cry and convince the teachers it was somehow their fault, he shoved his way to the top of the food chain, treating the children of Babylon's worst and greatest as if they were nothing more than dirt under his shoes (as if he weren't a mechanic's son) until the only people who could enjoy his presence were a gaggle of sycophants and the rotation of girls who briefly thought he might be a one way ticket out. (They all ran away as soon as they realized that he was less a fixer upper and much more of a bottomless pit—— just as likely to sleep his way into trapping them into a loveless, child-ridden marriage as the rest of them.)
But, with an acceptance letter to a fancy college and the most commended position on the football team under his arm, he'd only gotten worse.
Mariah had, despite how much people might insist that she hadn't, tried to run away from him that day.
A threat whispered in her ear in passing had her, as soon as the last bell rang, out of her seat and clumsily making her way through the masses of lethargic students who clogged the hallways like arteries, and into the oppressive highs of their first heat wave in nearly thirty years. Tommy caught up to her, though. Slower and weaker, there was no way to escape him.
"Now where are you going?" He asked, holding her upper arm in a vice-like grip as he dragged her around the back of the building, away from the prying eyes of other students who would not help her anyway and toward two of his cronies. "Don't you want to hang out with us?"
Mariah stumbled forward when he released her and shut her eyes in brace for an impact that never came. Billy Dinwoodie—— a big bodied, pig-faced boy on the football team—— caught her and then grabbed her by the shoulder, forcing her to her knees. She winced, and terror had gripped her.
"You're ugly as sin, you know that?"
"Gonna have to put a bag over your head just to get a damn hard on."
(The third voice, while familiar, was not one that she could give a face.)
(Surely, he was a boy she'd known her whole life, though.)
She dug her fingernails into her thighs and began to pray, silently. As one of the boys rummaged through the dumpster behind them, she asked God to have mercy on them.
