Page 1 of Love What's Left
1
Sydney
The straps on the hospital bed chafe my skin, and the reek of mildew burns my sinuses. The pressure of a heart beating too hard and too fast builds in my neck and chest.
I keep my eyes closed and focus on my mantra. “Your name is Sydney Walsh McRae. He’ll never give up on you. You don’t know anything else.”
“Why isn’t she cooperating?” The man’s syllables punch consonants the way his fists like to pummel my body.
“You gave her too much. She’s having a bad reaction,” the woman says.
The drug they gave me isn’t legal in this country for good reason. Trahypnofen is Rohypnol’s jacked-up cousin with a side helping of pathological people-pleaser. If I don’t die from cardiac arrest, coma, or seizures, my captors think they’ll have a perfect little puppet on their hands. I have one chance to take control before it’s too late.
I’ll give up anything . . . everything . . . before I give themhim.
Don’t let these people inside your head.There’s no room for anything but what I put there myself.
It’d beeasier to force myself into the dissociation I need if the drug made me fuzzy-headed or sleepy. Instead, my mind is open, but sharp. I’m a crab with a cracked shell, waiting for my captors to pour a new reality into it.
I could recite the mechanism for how it works in my sleep. Trahypnofen binds to the GABA-A receptor, enhancing the frequency of chloride—Stop.
The mantra.Only the mantra.I repeat it in my mind and will myself to believe it. To absorb my thoughts as truth, not their words. To know nothing but my name and thathewon’t give up on me. He’ll find me if I can hold on long enough.
“Look at me, Sydney,” the man says.
My lids lift of their own volition, and I stare back at the positively normal-looking person leaning over me.
“You already betrayed him. Without us, he’ll kill you. Don’t you remember?” he asks.
“I don’t know anything else.” The words slip past my mental leash.Shut your mouth. Stop talking.
“We’re all you have left. Be good for us, Sydney, and we’ll be good to you,” the woman says. Brooklyn accent. Sounds like—Stop thinking. Stop.
Your name is Sydney Walsh McRae. He’ll never give up on you. You don’t know anything else.
Days or Weeks Later
The assholes want something from me. Too bad for them I have zero clue who or what they’re talking about. Too bad for me too.
I huddlein the corner and wrap my arms around my knees for warmth. My hair follicles sting, my toenails ache, and every last cell in between hurts, but I figured out how to go floaty a long time ago. Eight steps from here to the dirty green door smeared with the rust of my blood.One, two, three, four, five, sixsteps to the grungy tiled bathroom attached to my concrete-block basement prison. If they tie me to the hospital bed for too long, they hose me down in there.
I named the empty toilet paper roll Howard for shits and giggles. Loneliness has stolen into my soul and swallowed it whole. Now I’m hollow on the inside and the kind of person who uses her thumbnail to scratch a face into a cardboard tube because it might be my last fingertip grip on sanity.
Or maybe that ship has already sailed. The drugs they gave me carved pieces from my mind that I’ll never get back.
When that glaring overhead lightbulb finally burns out, I’m throwing a party. No guest list or invitations, of course. Just me and my little buddy, Howard, celebrating by sleeping like the dead.
Well . . . until unending darkness replaces the unrelenting light and steals the last pittance of coherence I have left.
Hey, you can’t win’em all. Rub some dirt on it. One day at a time, sweet Jesus, when the going gets tough, girls just want to have fun.
Whatever.I’ve decided to be grateful for the light. That awful thing glaring through my eyelids 24/7 is a blessing, right? It prevents this place from becoming a sensory deprivation chamber.
I read about an experiment like that once. Some guy in a cave not only lost track of time but also of his ever-loving mind.And he did it on purpose.
I stopped eating their food days ago. Now I drink only from the bathroom faucet and flush all their drug-laced crap down the toilet. They’ll figure it out sooner or later, but, hopefully, not today.
I’m 99percent sure there are no drugs in me right now, but does it matter when my brain is fried either way?
