Page 86 of Serpentine Valentine
“You’re capable of anything,” Mina said, waving her hand in dismissal. “That’s why these nice officers are here, to take you into the station for questioning.” She stepped forward, forcing Juno to let me go and step away. Only then did she get close enough to whisper in my ear. “I told you not to fuck with me, Lex. Let this be a lesson you stew on in prison on aggravated assault charges.”
When she pulled away to smile almost serenely into my face, triumphant in the knowledge that she’d won, I felt…bewildered.
“What kind of woman are you that you cheer for another woman’s downfall?” I whispered, falling apart but genuinely curious. “How can you perpetuate violence against women and sleep at night?”
“I take a sleeping pill,” she said flippantly, tossing her hair as she turned so it flicked me in the face.
The slumbering rage in me flickered under the debris of despair in my chest, tempted to grab her by that hair and sink my fist into her perfectly groomed face. But that would have been playing into her hand.
That would have been proving to her and all the others on campus––including Luna––that I was just a vessel of violence and vengeancewithout a conscience or morals.
So I stood there, mute and dumb, as the cops approached and took me away for questioning. Away from Luna.
Every step away from her felt like a razor blade to the heart she’d regrown in my chest, but I refused to cry because I didn’t deserve to cave into self-pity when I’d inflicted the pain on myself.
“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.”
––Buddha
Lex
“Hi,”I said, “my name is Lex.”
“Hello, Lex,” everyone echoed, a ritual we’d taken from other help group meetings and applied to our own.
It had been three days since Mina Pallas had the police drag me out of the hospital for questioning and forbade me from visiting Luna.
Three days of agony.
But if the breakup with Luna had taught me anything, it was not to stew.
If I let the emotions overtake me…well, it felt like I’d die, and I wasn’t sure I meant that metaphorically.
The first thing I did after the police were forced to cut me loose due to lack of evidence was organize the first meeting of Acheron’s new Women’s Sexual Assault Support. The group was sponsored by Professor Diana Strong, and it was surprisingly, and heart-breakingly, well attended. About twenty girls sat around the circle in blue plastic chairs, all of themstaring at me with none of the usual anger or fear. They all looked…hopeful.
Hopeful because they believed hearing from the most infamous sexual assault survivor on campus might help them work through their own trauma.
Truth be told, I didn’t want to talk about it.
Of course, I didn’t.
I never did.
To speak about the act of destruction Morgan had doled out to me was to open along the seams of tender scars and reopen the wounds. It was to be blooded and flayed in front of other people, in front of strangers. My track record reputationally wasn’t stellar, to say the least, and it made bile rise to the back of my throat to have to prostrate myself like this before these twenty women.
There were only two reasons I was doing it.
One, Rhea and Dahlia had helped me realize that violence against our attackers just wasn’t enough. Like anything, healing needed a multipronged approach. So along with the self-defense classes my sisters and I held once a week in the gym, we’d also decided on this.
A group.
A safe place for survivors to come together and mourn what had been taken from them. To celebrate each other for our little steps forward beyond the trauma that threatened to drown us in darkness. To be together instead of alone. A pack of women wolves unafraid to show their teeth.
And two, I did it for and because of Luna.
She’d been right, as much as I was loathe to admit it, when she said my overwhelming fixation on vengeance had left me in some kind of thrall to my abusers and my trauma. How would I feel when all was said and done, justice served cold and mean to everyone who deserved it? Empty.Because even though I’d come back to Acheron, risen from the ashes of who I’d used to be and reformed myself as something stronger, crueler, I’d done so based entirely on the principle of revenge. Who would I be without it?
A vessel without fuel stalled on the side of the road of my life.
