Page 84 of The Villain

She’s in the yearbook for the second high school. A junior in this year.

Her hair is blond. The sight is startling. Her happy, innocent grin is nothing like her regular expressions. Tera’s right. It’s weird. She looks like anyone else on the page. A kid with an unknown future ahead.

Evangeline Lane. My Evie.

Looking up her name in an algorithm only gets me info until a year after she was released from juvie. Then she disappears.

Tera’s doing, I’m sure. Why?

I open each tab as they pop up from the algorithm I created.

She was tentatively diagnosed with psychopathy as a kid and heavily medicated at first. She went to another doctor, who frowned on the medication use. According to her records she was slowly weaned off due to her age. She started behaving ‘normally’ so the psychiatrist left it alone.

Evie changed to make sure she didn’t have to take medicine like that again. Reading about some of the side effects of the various meds has me grinding my teeth. They turned her into a zombie. Her mother is recorded as being concerned because she would sit and stare at things all day without speaking.

Both her parents are still living. She has five siblings. Jesus. None of them show any signs of mental health issues. Evie had older and younger siblings to help her with the imitation.

I find a single social media account.

At first it’s fun pictures. She is at a dance recital. Ballet. Another at some kind of dance studio. Not ballet, something different that I don’t recognize. Each picture is a different type of dance class. No wonder she dances so well.

Then it’s photos of her with different boys her age, never the same one twice, but always smiling. It’s odd to see the carefree enthusiastic version of her. It doesn’t feel right.

The more pictures I see, the more the comments build up. People calling her a slut and shameless. She never responds to any of them. She continues posting her pictures without a single word.

Her posts stop suddenly. One day happy, the next day nothing. It didn’t stop people from writing on her feed though. Calling her a lying whore. Saying no one would ever believe her.

My gut starts rolling and I feel sick. Please don’t let this be what I think it is.

I look up the dates the feed stopped. Then I force myself to look at the local newspaper.

Not Evie. Please.

No one up there is listening, as usual.

A week after her posts stopped her name comes up in an article.

High school student Evangeline Lane accuses several others in a sexual assault.

My stomach drops out and I have to take a few deep breaths before I can keep going.

The news article mocks the entire thing. She was drugged at a party and locked in a basement. Beaten, raped, and released the next morning. She walked to the fucking hospital with a broken leg and checked herself in.

She had to have a surgery to fix the break and her vocal chords got damaged from the intubation. All of her allegations were written down instead of spoken.

The article brings up her mental health and suddenly everything gets dropped. They assure the public that the ‘mentally damaged accuser’ will be hospitalized for her own health and safety.

I put my head between my knees and take deep breaths. She is ok. I just saw her. I have a reason to keep going, I just need to get it done.

I want names.

I need them.

I can’t find any further mention of it. I do find the intake for the facility she was held in. Six months’ worth of punishment for telling the truth. No one believed her. She was released for good behavior. The place gets sued and a couple of doctors are fired within a week of her release.

Because she left that place and marched to her high school to confront her attackers.

A new article proclaims a star football player was assaulted on the field after practice hours by another student recently released from the psychiatric ward. Evangeline Lane. He was hospitalized and the prognosis was he would never play the game again. James Enderson.

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