rose up, towering over Seelie as she squirmed on the floor, riding out the last of the shock. He contemplated the question.
Then he drove his boot into Seelie’s stomach. The last of her breath gusted out and she went fetal, blinded by the pain, choking as she writhed.
“Now I feel better,” he said.
* * *
Nell sat alone at a sidewalk café. She’d bought an iced coffee, hadn’t touched it. Now it was a watery slurry in front of her. She didn’t move, didn’t think. She was just…
Empty.
Her phone rang. Tyler. She wasn’t sure what to say to him, how to have this conversation, how to tell him what she’d done.
“Hey,” she said.
“Leda—” he started to say, voice fervent. She heard horns honking in the background, the cough of an engine.
“Leda gave me a choice,” she said. “I chose you and Seelie.”
“She screwed you, Nell. She screwed all of us.”
She sat up in her chair. “What?”
“They’re not taking Seelie back to Buffalo. Her father’s sending her to a place out of state, the Faraday Clinic. For ‘indefinite treatment.’”
Nell pulled the phone from her ear, set it on speaker, and opened her web browser. A placid website popped up, smiling teenagers hiking, fording a mountain stream. If your child is struggling with same-sex attraction or gender confusion, the Faraday program offers a proven, effective method of long-term correction…
“Where is she?” Nell said. “Right now?”
“In traffic, somewhere ahead of me with a couple of her dad’s goons. I’m trying to catch up.”
Headlines scrolled under her fingertip. Faraday Clinic Ruled Not Criminally Liable After Patient Suicide. Another: Faraday Patient Alleges Sexual Abuse, Chemical Torture.
“Jesus, Tyler. The quack running this place lost his medical license and had to relocate to another state just to open up shop again. Faraday is one of the reasons conversion therapy was banned in New York.”
“Brochure says you have to sign your kid over to enroll them. Full power of attorney until she’s a legal adult. They get Seelie inside those doors, they’ve got ten months to do whatever the hell they want to her.”
“I’ll call you back,” she said.
Leda picked up her office line, sounding curious. “Nell? I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you so soon.”
“We had a deal,” Nell seethed.
“Which I upheld, as promised.”
“Oh? Sending Seelie to a goddamn conversion-therapy clinic is your idea of releasing her unharmed?”
“What?”
“The Faraday Clinic. Look it up.”
Leda was silent for a moment.
“No,” she said, coming back on the line. “No, no, no. That wasn’t the agreement.”
“No shit,” Nell said.
“My agreement with her father. He promised me she wouldn’t be hurt.”
“He doesn’t think he’s hurting her,” Nell said. “He thinks he’s fixing her, getting the perfect son he wants. And if they have to spend a year hooking her up to a car battery and torturing her until she hates herself, well, what’s a little permanent psychological trauma as long as the family pictures look good? George Barron is big on appearances.”
Nell wasn’t sure what she expected. Some kind of gloating, Leda showing her true colors as a monster. Instead, she was echoing her, mirroring Nell’s panic. Her voice was muffled, soft noises of denial in the background, a snatch of something that sounded like Greek. And then a single line, so soft Nell could barely hear her: “I can’t lose another one.”
She came back to the phone. “I’ll fix this. I promise. I’ll fix this. But it might take some time.”
“Hurry.”
Nell looked to the street, the traffic a motionless wall as late afternoon flooded the grid beyond anything it was ever meant to handle.
Tyler. Hurry.
* * *
“You can’t do this to me,” Seelie said, lying on her side in the back of the van. “I have rights.”
Hackett had told her where they were taking her. And what was going to happen to her when they got there. He savored every last detail, like chewing on a juicy hamburger.
Behind the wheel, Barr shook her head. “Actually, kid, Supreme Court says you’re the property of your parents till you turn eighteen, and your dad signed all the consent forms. This whole deal is one-hundred-percent legal. Sucks to be you.”
Hackett loomed over her, smirking, and waved his stun gun. He had a real gun on his hip, a dull revolver riding under his windbreaker.
“You got the right to another dose of this. You want it? Keep talking.”
Barr tilted her face at the rearview mirror, her eyes unreadable behind her sunglasses.
“Hackett? Don’t be more of an asshole than you have to be.”