The Saint
“Dude, what got into you tonight?” Heath asks, hitting the button to turn on the jets. “You were savage out there. I’m surprised they didn’t give you a technical and eject you after the second guy you injured.”
“Excessive force,” Angel agrees, clamping an ice pack to his shoulder while the rest of his body remains submerged in the scalding water bubbling around us. “You know, my cousin can get you into that fight club downtown if you want to beat the shit out of somebody. Football field is probably not the place for it.”
“Count yourself lucky I didn’t take it out on you,” I mutter.
“What’d I do?” Angel protests, looking wounded.
“Besides fingering his hot sister in front of the whole library?”
“Somebody had to do it,” Angel says, flashing a grin.
My fists clench, and I fight the urge to knock the smugness out of him.
“And hey,” he adds. “It’s not like you could do it.”
“Not while he’s still pretending she’s his sister,” Heath agrees, grinning too. But he’s watching me, waiting for a reaction while he plays with his lip ring, tonguing it like a dare. Goading me.
“She is my sister,” I growl. An image swims before me unbidden—Mercy on her knees before me, face flushed, lifting her skirt in a slow, torturous tease. Her lips parted for me, eyes wide with innocence, while I shot my load into her greedy little mouth. If Father Salvatore had asked her to bend over and hold her virgin cunt open for me, she would have broken her back to get in position before I could refuse.
“If you stop calling her your sister, maybe you can finger her next time,” Heath says.
“Or taste her,” Angel says, licking his lips in an exaggerated, lascivious gesture. “It’s not my fault you’re too much of a pussy to eat hers. Take it from me. It’s delicious.”
“I don’t fucking need this,” I say, standing and sloshing water from the hot tub as I climb out.
They both laugh, obviously having the times of their fucking lives.
“Good thinking,” Heath calls. “You shouldn’t be in a hot tub when you’re on your period anyway.”
“Fuck you,” I say, slamming out of the locker room.
They don’t understand.
Maybe they would if I told them, but how can I tell them what I did? I would have to admit that I’d also erased the video feed from the night Mercy went out, and then I’d have to explain why. Close as we are, there are some things I just can’t tell them because they don’t know what it’s been like for me.
They don’t know that I’ve spent a decade repeating the same mantra in my head—she’s my sister. She’s my sister. She’s my sister.
That when puberty hit like a ton of bricks, and I was so horny I would hump my own bed when I thought about her in the shower next to my room, sometimes I’d pull her down into my lap and rub my dick on her like an animal when she didn’t even notice because she was too innocent. That a few years later, when I thought I’d gotten hold of myself, puberty hit her, and I’d see her budding nipples poking against her shirt or the way her tiny tits bounced without the support of a bra, and I’d have to go in the bathroom and rub one out, all the while steeped in a shame so deep I couldn’t bear it. That I used to see her maxi pads in the trash can in the bathroom, and I’d take them out and jerk off into them, imagining her cunt sliding over me with the blood.
They don’t know that once, my dad found one in my drawer at home, licked clean but still bloodstained, and he made me go to an old priest to confess. And that the old priest made me watch from another room while he wrapped a wire around some other kid’s dick and shocked it while the boy pleaded and writhed in agony. Afterwards, the priest came in and told me that this was the punishment for sins of sexual transgression, and if I did something like that again, I would face the same.
I told him that my father would never let him do that to me, and he said, “Who do you think brought you here? Who brings them all here? Do you think this boy’s parents aren’t fully aware and in support of our methods of treatment?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“This was your warning,” the old creep said. “Next time, you’ll be in that room, and someone else will be here—hopefully someone who heeds their warning.”
I had nightmares about that boy’s cries for months.
But I never told Heath and Angel, because their fathers would never make them witness something like that, let alone endure it. But then, they weren’t deviants. I’m sure neither jerked off to the fantasy of his sister’s wet pussy sliding up and down his shaft while she begged him to stop before their parents caught them; or her refusing him but turning over and offering her ass so she could please him but still be a virgin when she got married.
If they did, they didn’t share it with me, so I knew not to share my indiscretions with them.
I stomp up the stairs to her dorm a few minutes later and bang on the door. She opens after a second, peering out the crack like she thinks someone is here to rob her of her precious innocence, the one she never had. She was probably rubbing it out thinking about me the whole time I was thinking about her. I just never knew it until now because I was too busy stewing in my own shame.
“We’re going to see the guy who can hack into the files,” I say. “Come on.”
“Now?” she asks.
“Yeah, now,” I say. “What, you got a date?”
“No,” she says, scowling through the crack at me. “Don’t you? It’s Saturday night.”
“I don’t fuck after games,” I say, which isn’t entirely true, but she doesn’t need to know my habits. If she cared that much, she could put up her own damn cameras and watch me.
“Okay,” she says, opening the door to let me in. “Just let me get ready.”
I step inside her homey little room, lit by a couple candles and a stained-glass flower lamp on her bedside table. Soft Christmas music playing from a small speaker in the corner next to her teapot, and her teacup sits upside down with the saucer, as if just washed, beside a tin of cookies. The room smells sweet and buttery, like baked goods. Her cat stands from where he was curled up on the handmade blanket, against the teddy bear I gave her when we were kids. He stretches his back in an arch before hopping off the bed to prowl over and wind himself between my feet.
Suddenly I feel crude and out of place in the soft, cozy little haven she’s made for herself. It’s everything she always loved, everything our parents wouldn’t allow her at home. Mom wanted to hire a decorator, make sure the art on the walls was sized and spaced correctly, that it complemented the décor, that each item in the room had purpose and beauty and didn’t create a sense of clutter. My father insisted every room be presentable in case someone from the church stopped by, as if they would insist on looking into the bedrooms. And so, our bedrooms looked like the rooms a church elder would imagine for a child, not the rooms of actual children.
Now, Mercy’s room is all her own, full of quirky, girlie things. She’s embraced her feminine, but not in the overly pink, sparkly art Mom put up when she was little, or the overly flowery, frilly things she chose when Mercy became a teen. This room looks like the inside of a cottage where an eclectic, old woman lives alone in the forest rather than the dorm room of an eighteen-year-old college student.
This time, when Mercy steps into her closet to change out of her flannel nightgown, I look away. I picture the bruises on her knees from where she knelt for me, and I have to adjust myself.
“Why can’t we go to Nate Swift?” she asks from behind the door. “Manson says he’s the best.”
“Manson probably wants to fuck him,” I say, annoyed that she dropped another man’s name, like she trusts him more than me.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Baron’s just as good,” I snap. “Besides, Manson plays hockey with the Sinners. You shouldn’t even be talking to him.”
“According to you, I shouldn’t be talking to anyone.”
“If you chose someone better to talk to, I wouldn’t object,” I say. “Manson has connections with the Disciples through the team. Nate’s family has their own connections. You can’t trust any of them. The Dolce kid isn’t from around here. He doesn’t have any loyalties except to his own family.”
“What about Annabel Lee?” she asks. “Am I allowed to talk to her, since she’s a North?”
“Yes,” I say grudgingly, though Annabel Lee is a wildcard even in Angel’s family. There were even rumors she was hanging with one of the Sincero boys at one point. But that’s for Angel and his family to deal with. It’s not our business, and I respect that they handle things in their own way, and it might be different than ours.
Heath and Eternity were different from us too. Their mom grew up in the trailer park on the east side of town, and even though they didn’t, they were always a little rough around the edges, seemingly oblivious to the rules of polite society that our parents instilled in us—forks on the left of the plate, spoons on the right; use your manners; don’t talk about money, politics, religion. Eternity could pocket mascara and candy at the store while we were right beside her, and we’d never see her do it. Heath could also shoplift without batting an eye, while Angel, whose parents were professional criminals, always balked at the idea.
So maybe he’s the wildcard in his family, not Annabel Lee. Maybe that’s why we all fit. We didn’t belong anywhere else, not even with our families, but we always belonged with each other.
For the first time, I really think about what we’re doing, the implications if we find something. If what Mercy said is true, and we can find Eternity, what happens then? Will we all be together, belong to each other, like we did before?
I get the distinct sensation that I’m being as na?ve as Mercy. There’s a reason Eternity disappeared, and it wasn’t just because she got in the wrong car on the wrong day. A reason none of us ever saw her again. There’s a reason she never came back, and a reason no one ever tracked her down. And maybe those reasons are bigger than any of us—big enough to swallow people like the river swallowed the body that washed up a month later, the one they claimed was Eternity. Big enough to bury us the way we buried the secret of what happened that day. We’re more likely to find our own graves than hers; more likely to join the list of people who disappeared from Faulkner than find someone else who did.
But I’m not letting Mercy do this alone, so if she disappears, I’m disappearing with her. Whatever happens, at least this time, we’ll be together.