Page 24 of One of Our Own

She looked up at me. “Do you… do you think you could be there?”

“When you talk to the police, to give a statement?”

She nodded.

“As long as that’s okay with the officers. I’ve never been in a situation like this, so I don’t know what the protocol is, but I don’t see why not. If you want me there, I’d certainly be there for you.” The thought of it made me sick, but I’d do anything to help her.

Her face relaxed and she wiped her eyes. “Okay, I’ll ask. Oh, and one more thing? Can you tell my mom all of that for me, too? I feel like you can explain it better. I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

“Of course, sweetie. Anything you need.” Maybe this would be the thing I could do to make it right by her, after everything I’d done wrong. To be there with her when she gave her statement and help her put away the boys who’d hurt her? It might make all of the pain worth it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I sat next to Chloe, holding her hand as she went through the gruesome details of her attack with the detectives. It’d been over an hour but we were almost finished.

The conversation with Mrs. Danes beforehand had gone well. She grabbed my arm after I explained Chloe’s feelings and her desire to have me sit in on the forensic interview, and she said, “Would you do that? Would you help her get through it?” Her eyes held trauma similar to Chloe’s. Someone needed to find her a therapist, too. “It’s just so hard for me to hear how they hurt her. I can barely stand it. I feel it in my bones. And the anger. I’ve never felt anything like it.” She shuddered. Her jaws clenched automatically. “But I want to be there for her. I really do.”

“How about this? If she gets really upset and seems like she needs you, then I’ll have them stop the interview, and I’ll come get you.”

“We could do that?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Stan agreed to it without a second thought, and Mrs. Danes was visibly relieved. I might’ve felt the same way if I were hearing it from my own child.

Chloe did a great job. I was so proud of her. There were parts of her statement that would haunt me for years: when shedescribed the way they held her face down in the pillow, and how she had to walk three miles home from the party bleeding. But as brutal as it’d been to hear, it didn’t compare to what she’d been through, and I could handle being there for her statement as long as it brought her justice.

“Is there anything else? Anything else you can think of that might help us find the boys who did this to you?” Detective Wallace asked. Stan was there, too, along with the victim’s advocate assigned to Chloe.

Chloe’s eyes were red and puffy. She wore the same hoodie she’d had on when we first met, like a security blanket wrapped around her. We’d already taken two breaks when she’d broken down uncontrollably. Mrs. Danes came in to soothe her and left once Chloe felt ready to start again. It was a grueling process, but she was almost through it. She had to be exhausted. I hoped they’d let her take a nap after this.

“Anything at all.” Stan’s voice joined his partner’s. “A smell? Like, maybe one of them had a distinct cologne or body odor?”

She shook her head. “I just remember the laughing. I hear their laughs on a loop in my head.” It’s the one thing she said over and over again. That part of the experience was cemented inside her.

Detective Wallace had explained earlier that our senses were remarkably accurate and helpful in identifying people. Especially with trauma victims, because trauma heightened our senses so much. Sometimes one compensated for the loss of another, so it made sense that Chloe would remember a sound so vividly when her sight was blocked out. If we could bring in every high school boy at Buckley and ask them to laugh, we’d probably find her attackers. But we couldn’t do that.

She casually shrugged. “There is one more thing. But it’s kind of embarrassing…”

“Don’t be embarrassed, Chloe,” I reassured her. “You’re the victim of a crime, the survivor of an attack. Be proud of yourself for coming forward.”

“Well… I think… I think…” Her cheeks flushed with humiliation and shame. She took a deep breath. “I think one of them might have taken my underwear.”

Detective Wallace sat straight up in his chair the moment she said it. He couldn’t hide his how-could-you-forget-something-that-important look as he stared at her. Stan wore the same dazed expression. But I don’t think she’d been hiding this. I think she hadn’t remembered until now. It was another marker of trauma, her mind wiping the memory from her until she was ready for it. The same thing happened to me—I remembered details of my attack months after the police interview. Trauma memories played by their own rules. You couldn’t force them to appear or tell them what to do.

Or maybe it was because she was so young, and teenagers were always forgetting things. Either way, I knew Chloe by now—it wasn’t intentional.

“Tell me more about it,” Detective Wallace pressed, working hard to keep himself from rapid-firing questions at her. I could see it in the way he worked his jaw. How he was at the edge of his seat like it was difficult to stay put.

Chloe cringed and shrank into herself. I put my hand gently on her back. Gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “I just remember lying on my stomach with my head smashed in the pillow. I could barely breathe. Looking to the side with just one eye. And then… then, my underwear. My underwear was there on the pillow. Just sitting there next to me. I remember thinking,How’d it get up there? What’s my underwear doing on the pillow?It was the moment I knew something was really wrong.” She pulled her handout from mine and twisted her hands together anxiously on her lap. “And then all the blurry stuff, you know? Like before? How I was telling you? It was like that. But I think somebody grabbed it. They put it around their wrist like a bracelet.”

Stan nodded. His face went back to the blank slate he’d managed to wear most of the interview. “What did the underwear look like? Can you describe them for us?”

She turned bright red and looked at the floor. “So embarrassing… they were…” She cleared her throat. “They were white and said ‘Yummy.’ Oh, and they had an ice cream cone in the front…”

The information throttled me. The air was gone from my lungs immediately. My body was revolting against the violent memory forcing its way to the surface. Every muscle straining to move, to jump up from my chair and run as fast as I could, so the memory wouldn’t catch me. But it did.

The underwear I’d found in Hunter’s closet on the day I went searching. I remember they were white, and had writing on them. Did it say “Yummy”? I’d scrunched them into a ball and tossed them into his hamper as quickly as I could, but I could’ve sworn there was writing. Maybe I was wrong. I desperately wanted to be wrong. The room spun. Hit me like vertigo. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t breathe. My heart was pounding. Not just in my chest, but in my ears, a violent whooshing sound.

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