Page 79 of Riot Rules
I wrap my mouth around the neck of the bottle, pouring the whiskey straight into my mouth. I won’t justify his question with a response. If he’s trying to suggest that I don’t know Carrie, then he’s barking up the wrong tree. I do know her. She hasn’t given me every detail of her past, but so fucking what? That doesn’t mean anything.
Alderman crosses his arms over his chest, looking down at the filthy rubber mats on the floor behind the bar. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was grossed out by them. “I’m going to do something I’m not very comfortable with now, Dashiell,” he says. “I’m going to break Carina’s confidence, because I know she never will.”
“You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows rise an inch. “So, you know her name’s not Carina, then?”
This bastard’s trying to get inside my head. I don’t know why, when something like this can so easily be disproven, but heis. “You’re lying.”
“It’s Hannah. Hannah Rose Ashford.”
Lies. Lies, lies, and more lies.
“Six years ago, I found her on the side of the road just outside Grove Hill, Alabama. It was the middle of February, a cold, rainy night, and she was running down the side of the freeway. Completely naked.”
“What is this, man? Why the hell would you make something like that up?”
“Do I look like I’m lying to you, shithead?” His eyes are even. Steady. Focused and serious. “I offered to take her to the cops, but she said no. She was covered in blood.”
I flinch away from the unpleasant scene he’s painting. I don’t believe him. He’s lying. For some unknown reason, he’s spinning me a load of bullshit that he really wants me to believe, and it’s so vile that I can’t even tolerate imagining it.
“She didn’t even put up a fight when I stopped the car and put her in the passenger seat. She was in shock. Her eyes were unfocused. She had this hoody in her hand that reeked of cigarette smoke. She sat there in silence, listening for a long time, and I just drove. I told her I was heading to the west coast. I told her I would take her with me if she wanted me to. I had every intention of finding her a safe home once I reached my destination, but then somewhere around the Wyoming-Montana boarder she started talking. Opened her mouth and couldn’t stop. Her mother was with this evil piece of work called Jason. An addict. Anything he could get his hands on, he snorted, smoked, swallowed or put in his arm. Her mom goes to work one night, and Jason wants her to leave Hannah at home. The woman can’t say anything, because Jason will beat the living shit out of her for talking back. So, she goes. She leaves her eleven-year-old daughter with this disgusting asshole. Jason invites his friends over. One of them, Kevin, deals smack. Starts sharing his wares around. And Hannah? She’s stuck in the middle of all of this, wondering when something bad is gonna happen. And it does.”
“Stop.”
Alderman’s eyes bore into me. “Jason can’t afford his heroin, so Kevin makes him a deal. He offers a trade. Hannah for the drugs.”
“Bullshit. Just…Christ, you’re sick. Where do you get off, making that shit up? That’sdark.”
“Only, Hannah’s smart. The sick fucker offers to get her high, and she says yes, because being high is better than being fully conscious when you’re about to be raped, right? And then the guy’s feeling her up, touching her places she doesn’t want to be touched, and the needle full of heroin is just sitting there—”
“STOP!”
Okay, I believe him. I don’t want to admit it, but Ibelievehim, and picturing this, knowing that Carrie went through it—I can’t fucking take it. I can’t take that I wasn’t there to protect her. I couldn’t have been. I was still in England. I was still a child. I would have died saving her from that kind of horror if I’d had the chance, though.
Alderman leans forward, planting his hands on the bar. “Oh, I’m not done. She picked up the needle and she drove it into that motherfucker’s eye. Shot all that H straight into his brain. Took him five seconds to die, but his body just…kept…shaking. I looked it up on the local news a couple of days later, once I had her safe in Seattle. Took some finding. Even backwater bumfuck nowhere Alabama news sites don’t bother reporting about dirty fuckers dying of their addictions. The guy had two prior convictions for child molestation. One for assault and battery. He was a welter weight boxer, too. Could have given a grown man a decent run for his money, but he was taken down by a skinny eleven-year-old girl.That’sthe girl you’ve been fucking,” he says, looking away as he runs his tongue over his teeth. “I assume you’ve been fucking her. I can’t think of any other reason a kid your age would be sneaking out of a girl’s bedroom in the middle of the night, prancing around like he’s some kind of fucking rock star.”
She killed him? She stabbed that guy in the eye with a needle full of heroin. I can’t wrap my head around anything else. I should be paying attention to the dangerous edge in Alderman’s voice while he talks about me fucking Carrie, but my mind’s snagged on that one piece of information and it’s repeating over it like a skipping record, unable to move on.
“Why are you telling me this?” I whisper.
“Why do you think? Let’s do a little review, shall we?” He pouts, pretending to think. “I get a phone call from your Principal, telling me that your nosy ass roommate is sniffing around in records that are sealed, that have nothing to do with him. Then, I detect a breach in the school’s firewall. Likely from the same asshole, right? And then,THEN,” he says, emphasizing the word, “you hold a party at that little fuck pad you share with your friends. There are drugs everywhere—something I know Carrie would not have been comfortable aboutfor obvious fucking reasons—and then one of her friends goes missing. There are cops crawling all over the academy. People are starting to look too closely at things they shouldn’t be looking at. Do you know what would happen to Carrie if the cops dragged her back to Grove Hill?”
My mouth is dry as ash. I can’t breathe. Can’t swallow. “She was eleven, for fuck’s sake. She was defending herself.”
“Right. But there’ll be an inquisition. A hearing. This is the deep south, not Surrey, England. There’s every chance they’ll find her guilty of some bullshit charge and send her to juvie for a year at least. A year might not be much to you or me, but what do you think a year in a place like that would do to Hannah? Sweet, kind, honest, smart, loyal Hannah?” His expression makes me want to vomit, because he doesn’t look very threatening anymore. He looks horrified, like he knows what it’ll do to her and it’s nothing good. “I don’t want to find out. Ifyou’rewilling to find out, then you should be very, very scared, because that means you’ve been screwing a girl that I care very deeply about, and you have zero respect for her. And that, my friend, will one hundred percent lead to you losing both of your balls.”
“What…” Jesus, I can’t think straight. My hand is screaming in agony, but the pain’s hardly background noise at this point. The image of Carrie, eleven years old, being groped and manhandled by a tweaker. Having to act so rashly and defend herself at such a young age, because she wasafraid…
I swallow down the bile climbing up the back of my throat. “What do you want me to do?”
“Do what fuck boys like you do best,” Alderman snaps. “Break her heart. Move on. Make sure she never fucking wants to have anything to do with you or your friends again. The further she is away from you and your roommates, the safer she’ll be.”
I think. Process. Try to, at least. And when that turns out to be impossible, I take a deep drink from the bottle of whiskey. A second. A third. When I come up for air, I say, “Why? Why did you pick her up on the road? Why are you here now? Are you in love with her or something?”
Open disgust ripples across his face. “You should feel dirty for asking me something like that. I helped her because she reminded me of another friend I tried hard to help once.”
“Oh. So, one success story, playing the good Samaritan, and you thought you were qualified to—”
