Last summer, not long before me and Shanna went missing, I'd been riding home one day on the same C train.
It had been rush hour, one of those days when the trains are so packed with tired, sweaty passengers that you're pressed up tightly against everyone standing around you. You feel lucky just to be able to breathe, let alone actually have a bar to hang on to. I was sandwiched between some big guy's armpit on one side and an old grandmother on the other. And that's when I felt someone's hand press against my thigh. I couldn't see whose hand it was because of the big arm in front of my face. I tried to shift away, but the hand kept pressing into me. I was wearing a thin summer dress, so I could feel everything through the fabric. The hand crept stealthily upward, and suddenly I felt a finger pressing into me. Right between my legs. I mean really pressing into me. I screamed. Everyone stared at me. "Get the hell away!" I screamed out. The big guy moved his arm, revealing a skinny white guy with sunken eyes standing right in front of me. "Screw you, bitch!" he yelled back. "I didn't touch you!" But just then the train stopped, the doors slid open, and he hurried away, leaving me with a racing heart and an infuriating sense of violation.
It was the same guy, I realized. The same guy who'd groped me a year ago was now smoking a cigarette right across the isle. I was sure it was him.
He lifted the dark cigarette to his lips, and now I could see why he'd been struggling to use the lighter.
He was missing his three middle fingers.
He pinched the cigarette between his remaining pinky and thumb and awkwardly took another drag. His other hand was the same: a pinky and a thumb with dirty fingernails and nothing else but three scarred and scabbed stubs.
My heart raced. I stood to move away, and for a brief moment the guy caught my eye.
I'm almost certain he recognized me. He immediately looked away. At the next stop he threw down his cigarette, stubbed it out with an agitated twist of his boot, and hurried off the train just like he'd done a year ago.
