Page 69 of Made
Crash!The lamp gets swept off the table. It slams to the floor, shatters. I kick the table out of my way, and it flies against the wall. There’s now just a couch between me and him, and that isn’t enough to keep me away.Nothingis enough to keep me away. I stalk towards him, rage running through my veins, my vision blurred, a pounding in my ears.
It’s taken me months to find him, this pathetic piece of shit. He fled the country after his two equally pathetic buddies were blasted out of existence by Yasmin’s dad and his shotgun. Disappeared to Mexico, undoubtedly using his family’s millions to cover his tracks. Then last week, he finally crept out from under his rock—couldn’t resist posting on his fucking Facebook page that he was back. That he was ‘partying hard’ in the Windy City before his next semester.
It wasn’t a fucking coincidence that last week Yasmin’s dad was finally convicted and sentenced for the murder of his two scumbag friends. The judge had been sympathetic, but at the end of the day he killed two ‘upstanding young men’ in cold blood. Upstanding? Those rapist fuckers as good as murdered Yasmin. They might as well have forced those pills down her throat themselves.
Now, here he is. Milton Travers III. Big man on campus, a track star, majoring in law. His whole fucking life ahead of him, while she rots in her grave. She’s dead, and it’s all because of him.
He cowers behind the couch, his face bloody from the first few punches I rained down on him. It’s running red streaks over his eyes, mixing in with his tears. He holds his hands up and smells like he might have shit himself. “Please. Please, Maddox, stop!”
“Is that what she said, you fucking bastard?” I push the couch out of the way, sliding it so hard it slams into the already broken TV. I’ve thrown this asshole all over this room already. “Is that what Yasmin said when you three raped her?”
“We were acquitted,” he bleats, still sticking to the same old story.
I prowl towards him, kick him in the stomach. He doubles over, pukes on the carpet, curls up in a defensive ball like that might help him. Nothing can help him.
I grab his stupid preppy hair and pull his bloody face up to meet mine. He whimpers. “Admit what you did, Milton. Admit it, and maybe I’ll walk away. Maybe I’ll leave here and never look back.”
“Really?” his split lip quivers, and more blood spills from his mouth. “You’ll let me go?”
I shake his head so hard I hear his teeth rattle. “Yeah. But you have to admit it, Milton. You have to tell me exactly what happened. No more lies.”
“I will, I promise, I’ll tell you everything.”
I throw him down on the floor, repulsed at any physical contact with him. “Go on.”
He shuffles back up against the wall, his whole body shaking. “We…we were drunk. And high. And it wasn’t our fault. It was all Brady’s idea anyway, and maybe Lucas’s…”
The two dead boys. Yeah. How convenient. I stay silent, knowing he’s weak. He’ll blubber it all out, the useless shitbag.
“They said she wanted it, that she was so off her head that she was begging for it. You know how she was, you remember how drunk she was.”
It takes all my willpower not to kick him in the face to shut him up. Yeah. I do remember. She’d only had two beers though, we had a row, and I left her there. I abandoned her. I can’t get away from my part in this, and it makes the rage and fury even stronger. I hate myself as much as I hate this evil asshole trembling at my feet.
“We, uh, no—not we, they, Lucas and Brady—they took her into one of the bedrooms. They started taking her clothes off. They…she didn’t fight us. If she hadn’t wanted it, why didn’t she fight us, or scream? I thought she wanted it.”
“If she was drunk, like you said. That means she was incapable of giving her consent. That means you raped her, whether she fought or not. But she did fight, didn’t she? She had your skin under her fingernails. She had bruises around her neck. And she didn’t scream because you shoved her own panties in her mouth and rammed them so deep in she almost choked.”
He stares up at me, obviously surprised that I know so much.
I know because she told me. She shared some of her story on the stand during the trial, and she told the rest to me. The jackasses on the jury didn’t believe her. The fancy lawyers her attackers’ families hired tore her to shreds. Came up with toxicology reports that showed she was smoking weed. That her blood alcohol level was sky high. They produced witnesses who said she was dancing ‘provocatively’, whatever the fuck that means. They even showed pictures of what she was wearing—a little mini skirt and a crop top. A sixteen-year-old girl at a party can’t wear a crop top without wanting to be gang-raped? Furycourses through my veins. They showed photos of her piercings, her dyed hair. They made her sound like a slut, a tramp from the poor part of the city who got herself into trouble. One of the attorneys even suggested she made the whole thing up to try and extort money from them.
It was a fucking shitshow, and all the way through, the three of them sat there looking so fucking innocent.
My girl killed herself before the verdict even came back. I suspect she knew what it would be, and she was right. She was raped by three men, then raped all over again by the justice system and by public opinion. Everyone let her down, including me.
Her dad did the right thing trying to take them out. At first, I was disappointed he failed to get them all, but now I’m glad. I’m glad Milton Travers III escaped. That means he’s mine, and I can finish the job that Yasmin’s dad started.
But is it enough to just beat the shit out of him? Could I really take another human life, much as I think he might deserve to die?
“I didn’t mean it,” he whines. “I was just…it was them, the others, they made me.”
He’s desperate now. I can hear it in his voice. “Yeah? Made you how? Did they give you fucking Viagra?”
“No, but, but…I knew they’d rip the shit out of me if I didn’t go along. You don’t know what they were like. I had no choice.”
Is he actually saying that he took part in a brutal gang rape of an innocent young woman because of fuckingpeer pressure? Because his buddies would laugh at him if he didn’t fuck a girl against her will. Jesus fucking Christ. I think I have the answer to my question. I could most definitely take another human life.
I drag him up by his collar, slam him against the wall. A framed picture falls off from the force. I get right up into hisface. “I’m going to kill you now Milton. Just like you, I have no choice.”
