Page 39 of Horror and Chill

I close my eyes and try to quiet the storm in my head.

It would be nice, just once, to be asked. To hear someone say: “Hey, can I put my dipstick in your oil tank?” Ridiculous. But the thought makes me smile. Then the smile fades. Because the flipside is…I like not being asked. I like the danger. The taboo. The idea that someone wanted me enough to take me.

Fuck. I really need to go to therapy.

My parents and the church did a number on me. I grew up on guilt. Learned to take my shame like communion. Smile and swallow.

It is what it is.

I’m not hurting anyone but myself, so what’s the real harm?

Except now they’ve reached into this world. My classroom. My kids. That changes things.

But still, deep down, under the panic and the bile and the protective teacher instinct, there’s a darker truth pulsing under my skin.

I want to know what they’ll do next.

I’m homebefore the streetlights flicker on, but only just.

The house is quiet. No music or TV. Just me, the button, and the fading light bleeding in through the blinds. I didn’t even turn on a lamp.

I sit on the couch, cross-legged, clutching a half-eaten fluffernutter sandwich in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. My mouth is dry from all the peanut butter, but I keep eating anyway. The sweetness settles something sour in my stomach. My fingers are sticky with marshmallow fluff.

The button rests on my thigh. I keep turning it over in my palm, again and again, like it’ll eventually reveal more than what’s already written in that note. Like it’ll explain how the hell they got it.

But I already know.

I used to wear that cardigan every day. Navy blue. Cheap acrylic blend from the secondhand shop. It was too big even back then; the sleeves always swallowed my wrists. And the button literally has my initials carved into it. I remember the day I got it clear as day—it was the only gift I got that year. I cried, thinking it meant they’d forgotten about me, and Michael decided that made me ungrateful. He locked me in my room with a Bible and no food until I could recitePsalm 51without a single mistake, telling me I needed to scrub the selfishness from my soul before I could earn the right to wear it.

That cardigan was armor. A lie I wore on my back every day to keep the truth hidden underneath.

The last time I wore it, it was junior year. Sixteen years old. Just after Christmas break. I’d worn lip gloss to youth group, a tiny shimmer of pink I borrowed from a girl in choir. Harmless. I didn’t even reapply it after dinner. Barely a stain left on my mouth.

But Michael noticed.

He always noticed.

The second we walked in the front door, he told me to go upstairs and pray. No raised voice. No fury in his tone. That would’ve been too easy. No, it was quiet. Controlled. Scripted, like always. The real rage came later, in the form of righteousness.

I kneeled beside my bed for forty-five minutes while he paced behind me, reading from the Book of Proverbs.

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain…”

He made me recite the verse back. Then again. And again.

Then he asked me what I’d invited with that lip gloss.

I said nothing.

He asked again.

This time, I said, “Lust.”

Wrong answer.

He pulled me up by the elbow and dragged me into the bathroom. Debra was already there, holding the glass jar of holy water we kept on the back of the toilet. I think she thought she was helping. She always did. She believed in cleansing. In salvation. In discipline wrapped in the language of purity.

They didn’t hit me that night.