Culling

Part I • Chapter XI

Mr Blackbourne started pacing back and forth, everyone watching him. "We will have to discuss what our options are later, we won't let him get away with this kind of depravity. In the meantime, Miss Sorenson, it might be best if you refrain from using the bath or the shared restroom facilities and stay with the showers in our room."

I sucked in a sharp breath as I fought through the sudden surge of panic. 

I couldn't shower in our rooms, or anywhere else either. 

I didn't want to tell them, because if I told them they would know the kind of person they had taken in and befriended. However, if they were willing to put their lives on the line to fight for my honor, how could I not trust them enough to tell them the truth?

The murmuring of low voices around me brought me back into the present. I realized that at some point during my internal monologue and panic attack, I must have pulled my knees up to my chest. I had also been rocking back and forth and shaking. 

I stopped the rocking, the shaking I couldn't do much about at present.

"Sang." Kota had pulled me closer into his side. "Sang, why don't you want to use the showers? Do we make you uncomfortable being in the next room? We can always go somewhere else if you need us to - if it makes you feel safer. Is that why you waited until the middle of the night to bathe, when you thought everyone was sleeping?"

"That's not it." I was still hugging my knees, but the presence of the boys around me were giving me a strength that I didn't know that I had in me. 

They were nice people, maybe they would still want to be friends with me after they knew. "I... I'm not a good person, and it is a lot of drama being involved with me." 

This was it, I was going to have to tell them.

"Why do you say you aren't a good person, Sang?" It was Dr Green this time, he had been kneeling in front of me and seemed to have been visually scanning me for injuries.

I was pushing my finger at my lip. "I can't take showers. I wasn't very good at following instructions growing up and made my moth... step-mother punish me. I broke lot of rules - she didn't always catch me, but when I was caught I got into trouble."

Dr Green reached forward and grabbed my hand, pulling it towards him and holding it there firmly. His green eyes were peering into mine now, and the usual cheerfulness seemed to be tinged in both sympathy and apprehension. "What do you mean? What kind of rules?"

They shouldn't feel sorry for me though, this was my own fault. If I told them, they would see that I don't deserve their sympathy. 

"I wasn't supposed to talk to go into town or talk to strangers. She told me all about how girls would be kidnapped or raped. I argued with her and told her that I didn't think the world was that bad, but she said that I was wrong. I still wanted to go out, I didn't like being stuck at home. Normally I snuck out into the woods, or looked around town, and she never knew. But there were times she caught me. That's when I got punished."

I wanted to say how I felt, I still felt defiant to this day. I knew I was right about humanity. "I still don't believe her though, you know. Not everyone is a bad person. I still think she's wrong."

"So you are telling me that you would be punished for simply leaving the house, looking at or talking to other people?" Dr Green reached up with his other hand and directed my head up for me to look at him, during my admission I had started looking at the floor.

"Well... yes." I shrugged a bit. I knew the whole thing sounded somewhat abnormal, but was it really that much out of the norm? I mean, girls were outnumbered.