Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER TWO

"So this person on the phone," Rosalyn said. "You thought they had pictures of you? And your dad knew about it?"

The car creaked forward on the road, and overhead came a great flush sound as wind pushed itself through the leaves. Tara pressed her eyes towards the darkening road. The broken, yellow line coming up intermittently now, at odd intervals. She felt hypnotized by it.

"Rosalyn, I need you to promise me that when I tell you about what happened you can't judge me, or expect me to go back home."

Rosalyn nodded her head. Her attention was split: she wanted to coax the story out of Tara, but the line indicating the gas on the dash kept creeping closer and closer to the left.

"I knew the guy had pictures of me, because Bobby was taking pictures of me, and selling them on the Internet."

All that time Bobby was capturing her sprawled out on her bed, the stairs, the kitchen table, like some welcoming prey, she had avoided the online transactions. She trusted that Bobby knew what he was doing, trusted that he wouldn't expose her personal identity, trusted that he would get the money from these anonymous buyers, and give her her share. And when she got her payment from the first series of photos – enough to pay for about a quarter of her semester's tuition in one fistful of cash – she just stopped questioning it.

But Bobby had been on his laptop, in her own house, when she'd first realized how seriously messed up their situation was.

Tara had gone downstairs to fix them some peanut butter sandwiches. When she had one crust-less sandwich for her, one with extra-peanut butter for Bobby, she'd crept back up the stairs, and had nudged her bedroom door open with her foot. She'd placed the plate of sandwiches down on her dresser. Bobby had his back to her, his neck cranked down, the blue light of the laptop's screen silhouetting his frame. She jumped on the bed, and swung her arms around his waist, pulling him downwards. She climbed over onto his stomach, and he wrapped his legs around her back. She could feel where his feet met and locked and pressed in on her tailbone. She giggled, and then stuck her elbows down onto his forearms, pinning him to the bed.

"Why are you so grumpy?" she had asked. But then she saw it. Open on the laptop screen, some conversation Bobby was having in a private messenger. As she read a few lines, she had begun to feel Bobby's shoulders circling around beneath her.

"What's wrong?" Bobby had said. "He's our most dedicated customer."

Tara's mouth had become tortured as she read the conversation. Line by line, her eyebrows had scrunched closer and closer together, and she felt her lungs begin to strangle her, felt them tighten and almost-reject the air she was forcing into them. Bobby had spun underneath her again. He flipped her elbows up, spun around on his butt, and then pinned Tara to the mattress.

"That's enough, Tara." Bobby had flicked the laptop closed. Beneath him, she'd struggled to get from out from under him, struggled to process what she'd just read.

                                                                                                 *

Next to her now in the Rabbit, Rosalyn coughed, cleared her throat. "So this guy found out where you lived?"

"Yeah," Tara said. A dryness in her throat now, where before a swelling had been. That kind of crying felt like days away now, as far from them now as Norriswood itself. "And he exposed me, Rosalyn. Somehow he knew my name, where I lived, where I went to school. Apparently there was a bunch of people on that website that liked our pictures. This creep knew it, so he doxxed us."

The Rabbit heaved, a hiccup that seemed to come from the rear of the vehicle, and Rosalyn flicked her eyes towards the gas sign. "Fuck," she said.

Tara stared straight forward. "And we couldn't even go to the cops because what we were doing was illegal and Bobby couldn't convince the guy to remove our information and then we got that phone call and dad started acting all silent like he knew what was going on but wouldn't talk to me about it and that freaked me out the most because why wouldn't he talk to me and –"

The Rabbit heaved again, this time with a vibration that shook even Tara, and then Rosalyn felt the car give out. She let the Rabbit coast, the speed of the thing slowing. Rosalyn steered the relic off the road, and braked. Flicked the key out of the ignition. The forest seemed to bloom around them then, the sound of the leaves catching the pattering rain, the gush of wind as it passed through the branches, amplified. Rosalyn thought that she had no idea where they were. Where they were going.

But hey, she thought. At least I know now why we left. She felt a flicker of excitement rise through her abdomen. "So," Rosalyn said. "What the hell do we do now?"

Tara gripped the lever and circled her hand around, until her window slid all the way down. She sat up, pressing her palms onto the door, and heaved her body up and out of the window. She sat on the door, her legs still inside the Rabbit. Rosalyn watched her the driver's seat, a girl whose body was cutoff, a girl whose head was missing.

From outside, Tara felt the rain fall onto her cheeks, her forehead. She breathed in a deep breath, her shoulder-length brown hair catching a breeze and sailing around behind her. She could smell it then, on the air, subtle. The unmistakable smell that had wafted through the roads of Norriswood her entire life, the smell that she had come to associate with the place.

Tara sat back inside the Rabbit. "I think there's a town not too far from here," she said.

Rosalyn could see something in her eyes, something that had changed within the green of her irises. "Why do you say that?"

"I can smell the pine," Tara said. "I can smell the pine, all those logs, and the sulpher of a paper mill."

Rosalyn clapped her hand against the door of the car. Heard the rain collide with the windshield in quick taps. "Great," she said. "We'll walk."