Experiment Number One (Slow Updates)

Chapter Five

My eyes fluttered over to Adri again, making sure that she wasn't looking, and I sat up, draping my arm around Jace from the front and crawling up to sit on his lap like it was a backwards chair. I leaned up and gently placed a kiss on his lips, causing him to open his eyes and look at me with a mix of curiosity and affection.

"I know you have to leave soon, and I know you won't be gone for long. I just thought though, that you'd want something to keep you safe, so that was a good luck kiss," I said quietly, not quite whispering. Adri kept her head down, giving Jace and I as much privacy as was possible in the small alley.

Jace nodded his head and we kissed one more time before he stood up and bid us farewell. As he jogged off into the rugged streets of this broken city, I decided to use my time well. I stood up and walked over to the corner of the building, peeking my head around the corner to see the facility several hundred yards away. Men swarmed out of the doors before they all started yelling and pushing people back inside.

That confused me. Why did they have to go back inside? And why was the building basically an oversized shack from the outside? It was torn up and looked almost the same as the rest of this place. Pushing the thoughts out of my head, I turned around towards Adri, who hadn't moved, and stared at her for a few moments.

"Are you alright?" I asked. She was quiet for a moment before she lifted her head and I saw silent tears running down her face.

"The only reason that I go on is because I have amazing friends like you and Jace." I knew what she meant. We sat there a moment, thinking about the misery of having been taken forcibly from our families and then coming to this place, wondering if our families were even alive. "Sometimes, I would just sit there and curse this world for being so cruel. It's awful to be taken from the only people who ever loved you.

"And yeah, my life wasn't perfect. I was not saying it was. All I knew was that I'd rather go home to my family, no matter how screwed up we were, and be with them than be here. None of this looks the same. I guess I just had never been to this part of town before. I had no idea how far we were from where I lived," Adri said, sobbing aloud now. She'd given up all but a sliver of hope, finding the world we were in too different to be the same. Her face had fallen and it killed me to see her this way.

I sat down next to Adri and she laid her head on my shoulder. For a while, we were silent, thinking of the families we longed for and holding each other like a security blanket.

"What was your family like?" I asked quietly.

"Well, I have a mom and dad, divorced, and then I have a younger sister. I love my mom and sister."

"Don't you love your dad?" I asked. She was quiet for another moment, more tears sliding down her face.

"They're... they're divorced," she repeated, her voice cracking.

"You don't have to answer, but what happened with your dad?" A moment later she answered.

"When I was younger and my parents were still together, my mom was pregnant. She was still allowed to drive, so she went to the store to buy more baby stuff. They weren't expecting another kid so they'd gotten rid of the stuff from when I was a baby. My dad and I were wrestling around and I was having fun. He picked me up and roared at me. He brought me into his bedroom and dropped me on the bed. He kept smiling at me and I thought he was just playing. But before I knew what was happening, he was taking off my pants." At this point in the story, Adri was sobbing loudly and she wasn't able to continue. I had a pretty good idea of what happened though.

Tears welled up in my eyes and I shook my head. "Did you tell your mom?" I asked. Silently, I was pleading that she had. Men like him are scum.

"Y-yeah. Yeah I did. But it wasn't until five years of abuse when I found out at school that it wasn't right. He told me... he said it was normal. He said everybody did it but that I shouldn't tell mommy. He said that it was private and mommy would hate me if I talked about it. I loved her and I never wanted her to hate me. When my school was talking about sexual abuse, I talked to my teacher after school. I was perfectly calm when I said my dad did those things to me and she started crying and hugging me.