Chapter 7

Sisters Are Forever

The rest happened very quickly.

I remember it in shards and fragments, but I remember all of it.

He pulled at my pants with another furious tug. Already loosened from the missing buttons, my jeans were suddenly around my knees.

Roughly, he pushed me backwards with his wrapped hand.

Partly because the drug made me unsteady, and partly because my jeans were now binding my legs, I immediately fell, gashing my thigh on an exposed brick.

I didn't have time to try to stop the bleeding or even register the pain.

Because in the next moment he was on top of me. He was frantically pushing up my top and muffling my mouth with the t-shirt wadded around his mutilated hand.

That's when I heard my sister's voice.

Screaming.

Shanna wasn't just screaming out in fear, though. She was saying something, I realized.

"Hey!" she called out. "It's me, you fuckhole! I'm the one you touched on the subway! I'm the one you gave the note to!"

Her speech was slurred from the ketamine, and she didn't even have the strength to sit up on the mattress he'd thrown her on.

The guy looked at my sister, then at me, and finally he turned back to Shanna again. He rose up on his knees, breathing heavily and cradling his wrapped hand.

"It was me!" Shanna sobbed. "Not her."

He was obviously confused. For a moment he just kept looking back and forth between the two of us. We looked so much alike that I could tell he was genuinely struggling to figure out who was who.

"Godammit," he mumbled, exasperated.

My thoughts were so slow and foggy that it occurred to me only now what my sister was doing.

She was trying to lure him away from me. She was trying to attract him towards her instead. To save me. At her expense.

I couldn't let him touch her.

I tried to call out, NO! Stop! She's lying!

But the only thing that emerged through my drug-numbed lips was an awkward moan. Whatever strength my sister had found to scream out with fully-formed words, I couldn't summon.