Elizabeth's Story

by Jessica Knoll

I sometimes have this reccurring dream where I can't open my eyes, but I need to see to do something important—take a final or make my way out of a burning building. I push and fight, but my eyelids feel like two metal garage doors, strapped to the ground with an iron bolt. Stress dreams, a therapist determined, years later. "But I'm not stressed," I told her, then sighed into my lap. "I'm ambivalent. About everything. It's like he used up all my energy and I have nothing good left to give to anyone." "Heartbreak is a stressful event that can take a lot out of you," she'd pointed out, and I'd thought of him then, wondered what he was doing. If he was driving his kids to Little League practice, kissing his wife on the cheek to thank her for the beautiful dinner she had made them, not a single chink in his beaming, self-righteous armor.  Not Peter, who God knows I tried to love, maybe would have truly loved if I wasn't so consumed with a hatred for the man who had my heart and bruised it indelibly. The hatred burned in me, metastasizing, with a fierceness that only love can incite.

On that day, the day that everything changed, it required so much effort to open my eyes that until the room came into focus, I was sure I was experiencing a flash of lucidity in the middle of some muddy, half-baked dream. But I was suddenly aware of the ground—cold, damp concrete—and the heavy mildew smell that seemed to pin me against it. "What the.." I moaned, every muscle and bone in my body wailing as I attempted to sit up. My head was throbbing and I couldn't make my limbs obey me. My arm was stretched overhead, my hand useless and numb. It took me a second to realize that it was bound behind me. I rolled over onto my side, seeing that my wrist had been seized by a fuzzy, leopard print handcuff. Like a set you would buy in some skanky sex shop as a joke gift to a friend on her 21st birthday.

The other cuff was buckled around a metal pipe. I pulled, hard, wincing as the metal bracelet dug into my wrist bone. The pipe didn't so much as shimmy. I scooted up into a seated position, planning on pulling harder, but I froze when I realized that something else was off.

I bought my free hand to my head and gasped. My hair was gone, sheared to spiky blonde bristles. I traced my head again and again, becoming even more frenzied as I realized that in certain spots I was nearly bald. "Jesus Christ," I whispered, my teeth chattering furiously against each other. What the ever-living fuck was going on?

The adrenaline rush seemed to clear out a few caches in my brain, and I suddenly recalled the car ride, Bridget muttering, irritably, "Finally." Bridget. She had done this to me. Drugged me—it had to be a roofie. There was certainly a market for them on campus. The LAX house perhaps the local drug dealer's most loyal customer.

Had Bridget lost her goddamn mind? I would end her for this. My anger gave me strength, and I pulled on the cuffs again and again. I'd played with a pair of these before, only I hadn't been the one chained to the bedpost. If they were anything like the pair that had bound Matt Dennison to my bed junior year, then they were cheap, and if you tried hard enough, you could break them. The secret was to snap the chain—the cuffs themselves weren't going to give.

I let out an anguished grunt when the chain finally cracked in half. My wrist was a fevered red, pulsating angrily against the leopard restraint. I climbed to my feet, careful to take my time. Even so, the blood rushed to my head and I had to hold on to the wall to keep from fainting. I wondered how long I'd been...wherever I was. My mouth was dry and my stomach twisted impatiently. I was roofied freshman year and Biz had been the one to get me home and into bed. Had been the only one who cared, the other girls not wanting to ruin their night, waving their hands and saying, "Oh, she's fine. She just drank too much." In the end, it was Biz who I really loved, fully and without complication.

Biz kept a vigil over me the entire time I slept—which was for two days straight. Is that how long I'd been gone? Was anyone looking for me? People had to be looking for me.

My vision cleared and I made my way along the edge of the room, leaning on the wall for support. I was definitely in a basement, but it wasn't a basement I recognized from any of the houses on campus. One lone bulb shivered in the center of the room, threatening to go out. I would lose my mind if I was trapped down here in the dark. I had to get out before that happened.

I made my way up the stairs and tried the door. Locked. Of course. Bridget had been watching one too many bad Lifetime movies. Even though what she had done was completely psychotic, I had a feeling I knew why she had done it.

I slept with Bridget's boyfriend last year, when she was abroad in Rome.

And this guy—Henry—had developed a bit of an infatuation with me. He followed me around, showed up at my dorm room unannounced at odd hours of the night. I didn't want to make a big deal about our little thing. We'd had sex three, maybe four times tops, and then I pulled the whole, "I just don't feel right doing this to Bridget," when really the guy was just way too intense and...what's the word I'm looking for...sensual in bed. Gross. The last time we slept together I detected one glistening tear slip down his cheek and I was done. You know that line from A League of Their Own? There's no crying in baseball? Well, in my world, there is no crying in sex.

The school ended up having to get involved. They gave Henry a stern warning that he was to leave me alone or he would be expelled. Smithson would do anything to protect their favorite little money maker.

Word got around, spread all the way to Bridget in The Eternal City. I knew she was banging the doorman of The Drunken Ship, the cheesy American bar in Campo de Fiori—I had my sources. I don't think Bridget cared so much about Henry having a little fun on the side as she did the embarrassment that her boyfriend was acting like a creepy stalker freak. She came back for two weeks at the end of our junior spring semester, four months ago. We never spoke about it. I got the sense she was scared of me and would rather pretend like the whole thing never happened than confront me about it.

CLEARLY, I WAS WRONG.

I pulled harder on the door. It felt weak and wet, like it would sooner splinter down the middle than I could jimmy the lock. I descended the stairs again, looking for something to break it down. The best I could come up with was a rusty metal stool, abandoned in some dark, lonely corner.

I stabbed the leg of the stool into the door, carving out a hole just wide enough for me to wiggle my hand through and unlock the door from the outside. I felt like a prowler in one of those commercials for a home security system.

I released a heavy sigh of relief when the door finally opened. Freedom.  

Only I hadn't found freedom. Because at that very moment, Bridget came charging through the door. What happened next seemed to occur in some parallel universe. Plato's Allegory of the Cave, maybe, and it was like my shadow did it. Not me. I didn't really have it in me to do something like that. Did I?

Bridget came at me full force, shouting something nonsensical. I pivoted out of her way—only I didn't just pivot. I gave her a shove as she spun by me. I was angry. I wasn't thinking. I don't know. But this is the moment I always see in my mind's eye: Bridget hovered at the top of the basement stairs, arms outstretched, reaching, her fingers trying to dig into something that wasn't there. It all happened so fast, I always tell myself, whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and breathing hard. But the truth is it didn't. There was time for me to grab her, to change her fate. Which was Bridget tumbling down the stairs like a rag doll, arms and legs flopping as though she had no bones at all, until she landed at the foot of the stairs on that hard, cold concrete with a sickening crack.

I peered over the edge of the stairs. "Bridget?" I tried. Her head was twisted away from me at an unnatural angle, her fantastic black hair covering her face. Her chest wasn't moving.

I fled out the front door. I needed to call for help. I came onto the mighty lawn—so vast I couldn't even see a road—and stopped. There was probably a phone in the house, I realized. I turned around to take stock of where I was, where I had been kept. The house was a decrepit old Victorian. I could tell from its skeleton that it had been grand once. Smithson is situated on the Finger Lakes, in a town that used to be a popular vacation spot for wealthy Manhattanites in the 50s and 60s. Someone had lived there at one time, and lived well, but that had to have been many, many years ago.

I doubted there was a working phone inside, and even if there was, I couldn't stand the idea of going back into the house, so I kept running until I found a road. I ran and ran, sweat streaming down my face, until I came upon a gas station. It was dark and closed for the evening—God, what time was it?—but there was an outdoor pay phone around the side of the building.

I picked up the phone, my finger hovered over the 9. I froze when I saw the fuzzy handcuff, still clinging to my wrist. I imagined my mother, her hand over her exhausted heart, begging me not to cause any more trouble. "I won't make it much longer if you do," she'd warned.

And how would I explain what happened to the police? Sure, Bridget had drugged me and kidnapped me and hacked off all my hair (What else was she planning on doing?), and this could be construed as self-defense. But I knew the truth. I'd pushed her. Then I didn't help her when I could have. I'd watched enough Law & Order to know the police had ways of seeing beyond a crime scene, to what had really happened. The positioning of the body—weren't there experts who could trace the trajectory of her fall, who could tell that she hadn't gone down with momentum? She'd gone down with force.

I moved my finger so that it was positioned over the 1. Then I dialed Biz collect. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't think Biz would know either, but in that moment, she was the only person in the world who I could trust.