Page 89 of Like A Moth To A Flame

Thankfully, the accompanying picture of my kidnapper had been torn off. I was grateful for that small courtesy. I don’t know if I could sit here and look at his face now, even on a good day. Oddly, his name and age had been highlighted in thick yellow ink that stood out like a waving flag.

What did that mean?

Sighing, I passed the article to Amelia and picked up the next folder. This one was considerably thicker. Flipping it open, a stackof police reports greeted me. It began with my missing persons report, filed by my dad when he returned home after a shift and found the house empty. Next was a stack of papers, all with sightings and unsubstantiated reports, suspect interviews, and subpoenas for camera footage. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been any cameras on that part of the road. Now, just like many times before, I wondered if that was why he took me where he had.

Then, there was a stack of reports about the day they found me. I’d been found in the same clothes he took me in, stained in blood and grime. My hair was knotted, and the handcuffs around my wrists had dug so far into my flesh that they’d left permanent scars that I still had to this day.

An ache flashed through my wrist and I forced myself to snap the folder shut, shaking my head. I couldn’t look through that right now.

I passed the folder to Amelia and picked up the next one. Flipping it open, it was the interview transcript from the suspect’s interrogation. Along the edge of the stack, a bright red flag waved at me like a beacon, and I flipped to it. It was an annotation tab, and it pointed directly at a line highlighted directly in the middle of the page.

AW: So you took her

MJ: Yes. I had to.

AW: Because you thought it would be fun?

MJ:Suspect laughs.No, nothing like that.

AW: Can you tell me why?

MJ: I had to. I had to make him happy. He was confused, and he—

AW: Confused? Who was confused?

MJ: My son, Billy.

AW: And how was he confused?

Long pause

MJ: He said he was gay, see? He said he liked men, and see, we just— we can’t be havin’ that.

AW: He said he was gay, and so you took this girl. Why?

MJ: To snap him out of it! He was c-confused! He didn’t know what he was saying.

My stomach did painful flips, and I had to force myself to close the folder, shoving it away. It skidded across the coffee table, knocking into long empty beer bottles with a musical clink and sending forgotten bottle caps sliding across the wood and clattering to the ground.

The room fell into a heavy silence. My mind raced as I tried to grasp onto everything I’d just read and the twisted reasoning behind them. How could someone be driven to commit such atrocities? Out of fear and ignorance? The image of a young boy struggling with his identity, only to have his confusion exploited in the most horrifying way, filled me with a mix of anger and sorrow that I didn’t know what to do with.

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard to free the back of my throat from the taste of bile that rose up my esophagus.

“If you don’t wanna talk about it, we can—”

“He took me as s-some kind of… experiment?” I said, turning to look at her. “A-all this time I thought he was just a sick, dementedpervert, but now? It’s worse. It’s so muchworse, and I just want to peel my skin off.”

“Ness, h-hold on,” she held her hands up to stop me. “What do you mean?”

Swiping the file folder off the table, I handed it to her, and her fingers shook as she flipped to the annotated page.

Her breath hitched as she read the words on the page, her eyes wide with shock. Then, with a trembling hand, she reached out and touched the red flag, as if it would somehow provide an explanation or even absolution.

But it didn’t. It just served as a cruel reminder of the horrors that had been inflicted on me, all in the name of misguided morality.

“Your kidnapper thought he was doing it to help his family? He was trying to make his confused son straight? Oh my god, Ness.” I put a comforting hand on her shoulder as she took it all in. I was comforting her. It felt strange, and alien, but I didn’t know what else to do with my hands. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

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