Dollie—present day
Ilisten as the silence around me fills with the screams of victims.
My screams.
Ambrose screams so loud that his voice breaks.
A laugh echoes, too, rumbling deep from the round belly of a monster dressed in polka dots.
I’m sitting in his basement on that cold wooden dresser.
His big, flappy shoes bring him closer, and I focus on the too-round toes of his shoes as he drags Ambrose down the stairs without his clothes. He tosses him into the water and gets in behind him.
There’s blood on my stepbrother’s legs, but I don’t see any grazes on that part of his body, and he doesn’t have a condition like mine that would cause him to bleed from that area.
“Wash yourself, boy. I can’t touch you again.” Chuckles forces a false laugh, and Ambrose cries.
One single tear falls to his trembling lips before they move, telling me, “Turn around.”
“Ambrose,” I whisper in response to someone gently calling my name.
I open my eyes and push myself up in a fluster, finding that I’m no longer on the hard foyer floor and, somehow, on the chaise in the reading room, surrounded by the mess.
Spinning around to look for the clown or Shane, my face lands in someone’s hands as they kneel before me. My hair, brushed from my face in an unusual way, falls into my eyes at the sound of my name again.
“Dollie, are you okay?”
I stay silent, and my eyes flick to the ceiling before focusing on the person who called me.
Annabelle.
What is she doing here?
Blinking in her image, so different from how I remember the girl who was once my friend. The person I confided in through the mourning of my parents, and who sat with me while I spiraled and never made it to Ambrose’s trial.
“How did I get in here?”
“I didn’t see. You were here when I got here. What happened? Why have you been crying?” She swipes at the mascara stain below my eyes before setting her hands in her lap. “What the fuck happened in this room?”
She’s asking too many questions, and I have one of my own, “Where are they?”
“Who are we talking about?”
I don’t answer.
Jittery movements push my legs over the edge of the chair, but I’m not ready to stand yet.
My eyes catch on the mess behind Annabelle, torturing me with all the broken trinkets and destroyed memories again.
“Shane?” I call out, with a voice just as jittery as my movements.
There’s no answer.
“Does Shane drive a Mercedes?”
“Yeah. Is it wrecked?”
“No, why would it be? What happened? Did he make this fucking mess?” Annabelle points over her shoulder with a manicured fingernail. Then, with a gentle hand, she thumbs the bruise on my neck. “Did he do this, too?”
