black, accompanied by the biggest dog I’d ever seen. It was the stuff of nightmares and for a couple of seconds I thought: Wake up, wake up. This is not happening. There was blood. Tess was screaming. You were still and silent on the ground, curled up on your side. And then he hit Tess, threw her over his shoulder like she weighed nothing, which she didn’t. She didn’t weigh a thing—a dragonfly, a flower petal of a girl. He grabbed you by the wrist and started dragging your unconscious body over the ground. You were slack, a rag doll, blood trailing from your mouth in a line.
Looking back, what I should have done was run. I should have gone for help. The nearest house was minutes away on my bike. Good old Mrs. Newman. She would have heard me screaming as I rode, she’d have the phone in her hand by the time I got to her porch. We all might have survived if I’d done that. Kreskey’s car was parked a good mile away, we’d later learn. The police would have been on him before he made it there with you. You’d have woken up and maybe fought again.
But I didn’t do that. I climbed off the bike and grabbed the pump that was mounted on the bar. PS—this is not an effective weapon. I would learn that too late.
“Hey,” I yelled. My voice was high-pitched and weak. “Hey, let them go!”
And I ran, yelling like a warrior, toward the man who was trying to hurt my friends.
Later, one of my many, many shrinks postulated that it was my obsession with superheroes, my video-game addiction, and my penchant for the heroes of spy movies and novels—Mission Impossible, Bourne, Bond—that contributed to the idea that I could take on and best a man like Eugene Kreskey. He weighed in at two hundred seventy-five pounds; I was barely over a hundred. He stood over six feet tall and was by all accounts preternaturally strong. My arms looked like Wikki Stix; you and Tess were both taller.
Kreskey was a violent sociopath, newly released from a psychiatric facility and living alone in a house he’d inherited from his deceased parents. And of course, there was the dog, a vicious, abused German shepherd he’d trained to hunt. Wolf—who I’d get to know well.
I agree with that shrink. What did I know then about real violence, about true evil? My mind was filled with fantasies—about myself, about the world. I was fully indoctrinated into the lie of good-always-triumphs-over-evil, even when good is an ant and evil is a mountain. There was no way the hero ever lost. And in that scenario, in my adolescent mind, I was the hero. I was going to save you.
Of course, I never had a chance; I know that now. It only took a single blow to the jaw, Kreskey’s favorite backhand strike. All the power of that giant shoulder radiating into the knuckles. My jaw shattered; I was instantly stunned into submission.
Wow. The pain. How it blasts down your neck and up to the crown of your head. It steals your breath, your voice. I know you understand. That first time that anyone ever hits you?
I had a slight advantage in that I’d been in a fight or two on the playground, so I knew the shock of it, the flood of adrenaline, the rage, the fear. But those playground wimp-fests didn’t prepare me for real violence, the intentional action of an evil man wanting to do irreparable harm. Your whole body goes into a chemical revolt. I bled and bled, lay there weeping in pain, helpless. He dropped you to deal with me; he couldn’t take us all. Then I was the one being dragged, Tess still over his shoulder. I thought she might be dead. Her head was tilted. I’d never seen skin so white. Her hands just flopped around. She wasn’t wearing her glasses.
He grunted, angry, his moon-face red.
“Find it,” he yelled at the dog. “Bring it to me.”
It. He meant you.
Because when I looked around, you were gone, Lara. Laraine. LAH-raine, as your father was quick to remind anyone who dared to mispronounce it—because it was about him, wasn’t it, your name? The dog ran back behind us, and Kreskey kept walking, lumbering really. He muttered. Stupidlittlebitchstupidlittlebitch. He was slow, plodding, crazy as a shithouse rat. His breathing was a painful wheeze. He thought you got away, that you were running for help.