~Emmalyn~
"She'll be easy. She's about as innocent as they come."
"Excellent."
I could hear their muffled voices through the door from where I was gagged and tied up. I shook with fear, chest heaving with each labored breath I futilely tried to even out. My mind hadn't quite caught up with the situation. I couldn't believe what was happening.
The door burst open, then. Mike and Nate walked through, looking smug and cruel. They were not the people I thought I had known.
Mike knelt behind me and yanked the gag away from my mouth. "Hey, babe," he smirked.
I spat in his face.
He chuckled humorlessly, wiping the spit from his cheek. "Aw, now, come on. Don't be like that."
"Why are you doing this?" I croaked, throat dry and raspy.
He laughed. "You were way too easy," he remarked. "Desperate and naïve."
I frowned. "Excuse me?"
"Nate!" he called. Nate reappeared with a video camera. My eyes widened.
"What are you doing with that?" I demanded.
"It'll be a big hit," Mike continued with his sick fantasy. "Now, are you going to comply, or am I going to have to force you?"
"Don't do this, Mike," I begged, feeling my heart breaking. It landed in shards at my feet. "Please."
He crawled toward me, every part predatory and monstrous. "It was always going to happen," he whispered, and then louder to Nate, "Roll film!"
Then next thing I knew his hands were ripping apart my shirt.
~*~
I shot up in bed, gasping. My hair was in sweaty tangles about my face. My chest heaved. I cast fleeting glances around my room. It was just starting to get dark. My nap had turned into quite a long snooze.
"You'll look beautiful on video."
I hitched forward, gripping the blankets tighter around me.
"All this hair . . ."
"No, no, no," I whispered, rocking back and forth. "Go away. You can't hurt me. Go away."
"I will find you, Emma. I swear I will."
I clamped my hands over my ears. "No!"
"Emma?" a different voice called, breaking through my thoughts. "You better hurry up or you'll be late for the dance!"
Dance? What dance?
"Somebody hold her down! I can't grab her legs!"
I felt sick all of a sudden as the wretched memories cascaded over me. I leapt from bed, stumbling over my feet in my hurry to get to the bathroom. I slammed the door behind me, barely making it in time to the toilet. I vomited, heaving long after I had finished. I reached up blindly for a towel and dragged it across my face, breathing hoarsely.
"We already got a thousand hits, man!"
"I know. Get the camera ready, Nate, we're rolling again."
"Gotcha."
"Don't worry, Emma," he smiled at my trembling, naked form in the corner, tainted with blood. "You'll be a huge sensation."
I crawled away on the cold bathroom tile, mind blank except for his leering voice. Would I never be free from him? Would he always haunt me?
It came to me, then. Abruptly, all-consuming.
I would never be free.
It would be like this for the rest of my life. Nightmares and fears and daydreams of monsters. He had a hold on my sanity and he had destroyed it. Shredded it to unsalvageable pieces.
My gaze flashed to the cabinets above the sink. Once upon a time I had tried to solve the pain. To extinguish it. But it didn't work. They were able to save me.
My breath caught in my throat.
Maybe this time they wouldn't.
A new kind of desperate hope filled my chest as I pulled myself to my knees, shaking something terrible. I grabbed the cold knob and wrenched it open. I wasn't sure what bottle my fingers wrapped around, and I didn't necessarily care. I collapsed back to the floor, trying my hardest to unscrew the stupid cap.
They can't save you, you have to save yourself.
I cried out in agitation. Why wouldn't the damn thing open?
This is the only way. The only way out.
I finally popped off the cap, but my hands quaked so bad the pills scattered everywhere. I tossed the bottle aside and in a frenzy hurriedly gathered up all the tablets.
How else can you be free?
I tossed a handful into my mouth, not willing to do anything until I had all of them in there. Maybe then it would work. Maybe then they couldn't freaking save me and pull me back into the nightmare.
I felt off. Insane. Out of my mind.
But it was strangely liberating. Like in finally losing myself, I was opening the door to a new possibility. One with drastic ways of getting to it, but it was there all the same.
Do it, my mind screamed at me, the same time that inner conflicting factor countered with, throw them away, you're better than that.
The only thing was, that inner saint trying to save me, it's voice was quiet. Insignificant. My mind was open to blackness and getting away and right then all I wanted to do was get away.
I gathered more pills, oblivious to the door when it opened.
"Emma, how long can a-Emma!"
The next thing I knew there was frantic screaming and words, and hands on me. They swatted the pills out of my hand. That made me angry. Who were they to deny me my one escape?
And then there was a hand around the back of my neck, forcing my head down.
"Spit!" the voice demanded. "Emmalyn you better spit that crap up right now!"
I wanted to defy the voice and swallow, but with the angle I was at my mouth opened automatically and the pills slid out, skidding against the floor.
My mother crouched beside me, her eyes wide as they stared into my own. A pang of something swept through me, but I ignored it to make room for the rage. She was my mother. Wasn't she supposed to do what was best for me?
"Stop it!" I screamed, wrenching away from her. I heard Mike's voice laughing at me, laughing at my current state of hysteria. And I just couldn't take it.
I dove for the remaining pills on the ground, but my mother held me back. I thrashed against her wildly, tears falling down my face. "No!" I shrieked, voice cracking. "I wanna die!" I shouted, meaning every word. Mike's face flashed in my mind and I shuddered as a sob tore through me. "Just let me die! Why won't you let me die?"
"Oh, honey," she breathed, tears in her voice as well. She pulled me into her. I continued fighting it halfheartedly, sudden exhaustion and weariness depleting my energy.
"Please just let me die," I begged, the tears falling at a rapid rate. "Please."
"Never," she whispered in my ear. "I made it, and so will you."
~*~
After he was incarcerated, they couldn't erase all the videos.
That was the thing about the web. Everybody could access it. People could download videos, and spread them, and save them, and in that way, I would never be free.
Somewhere out there, some guy was sating his twisted hunger, watching Mike rip into me and steal everything I had.
Somewhere, my innocence was being violated again and again.
I was chained to those videos, chained to the hundreds of thousands of hits they received, to the leering comments, the heartless jabs. I was a face, an object, satisfaction.
I was not Emmalyn Hall.
I didn't know who I was anymore.
For some reason, watching the flourescent lights fly by me while I was wheeled down the corridor of the hospital, this came to mind. The whole freedom and imrisonment concept gnawed at me. Maybe I was never meant to be free. Maybe that would never happen. At sixteen years old, the worst thing I had seen was on Criminal Minds. You don't ever imagine, not in a million years, that the same could happen to you.
You just don't.
Not until it does. Not until you're in bits and pieces scattered all over the place, trying but failing to put yourself back together, unwilling to acknowledge the fact that you'll never be completely whole ever again.
Anyway, my father tried and tried and tried to get my face off the internet. He hired every person he could, ran through savings, fought through my tears and his tears and my mother's tears. In the end, it was never enough. It would never be enough.
Because somewhere out there, I was on some pervert's phone. I put him to sleep every night, or woke him up every morning.
I was shame personified.
Ten years, twenty years could pass, and time would fade some scars, but they would never leave me completely. That was the thing about mental blemishes. Nothing eroded the nightmares.
And so no matter what I did, no matter who I talked to, and no matter how much medication I took, I would never be free.
And somewhere out there, locked in a jail cell with a shit-eating grin on his face, was a man who wanted it that way forever. There was a man who played a heartless game with me.
And he had won.