Page 44 of Holding On

Her brown eyes glitter with sudden tears in the low light. “I’m so ashamed of my life, and I’m working toward forgiving myself. What do you know? I hate talking about this shit.”

Remembering what Nic told me on the way down, I repeat nearly verbatim what he said. “If you can just think back to where you first heard about the judge or how you came to know that there was a judge involved, that would be helpful.”

Pulling her hand away from underneath Jackson’s, she folds her arms across her chest.

“He told me he was a fucking judge. He told me he would send me to prison if I didn’t do what he said. Because nobody was goin’ to believe me. Because I’m fucking me.” Her voice is thin and tight, low and tense, and I just want to throw my arms around her. Instead, I scoot my chair closer and lean in, elbows on knees.

“Had you met him before?”

“No.”

I feel Nic’s hand on my shoulder. This is the cue to stop and talk about something else.

“What are you taking in school this fall?”

She glances at me. “Sociology, psych, algebra, and comp.”

From there, we head into talks of coffee and barista techniques, and it turns out we both won our barista face-offs. I draw her my design, a series of nested hearts with an arrow through them.

When she picks up the pen, her hand shakes. Hers is a series of four nested mountains, two clouds, and a pine tree to the right in the foreground.

“You win,” I say without hesitation. Hers is definitely more difficult to execute, and more personal.

“The mountains are the shit I had to climb.” Her voice is quiet now. She points to the drawing. “I love clouds. And I never touched a pine tree, you know, just growin’ up in the city.” She says all this for my ears—as if the two men in the room have disappeared.

“When was the first time you met this judge?”

Her gaze shifts from the piece of hotel stationary to me. “The first time he fucked me.”

I say nothing.

“I was maybe fifteen. I weighed a hundred pounds fucking wet,” she continues, as if reciting a script. “He forced me down onto the floor of a shitty building.” She raises an index finger and waggles her head. “I didn’t know where I was then. But that fucker . . . That was the only time. I was already nowhere near home.”

“How did you know?”

“Because it was freakin’ cold.” She pauses. “But I was out. I don’t know what I was on. I don’t remember if I shot up myself. All I know was that when I woke up, when I got a little bit of me still left, he was on top of me, telling me to shut up or I’d go to prison. Then that I better shut up for good and just do it.” She pauses again. “So’s I did.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

She looks right at me. “See him? No, I never did. It was just that one time. The next thing I knew, he was off me and on the fuckin’ phone. He called a trucking service and I was out of there with a bunch of other girls in an hour.”

Nic slides a glossy set of photos across the coffee table.

I lick my lips. “Could you identify him from this picture?”

Nic moves from behind me and deftly switches on the standing lamp next to the sofa.

At first, she doesn’t want to look, but then she sighs, picks up the print, and scans the five faces. I stared at them in the car, the photo taken from the folder Nic had given me to read. All the faces we’re vaguely similar: white men in their early sixties, fit, square jaws, brilliant white hair, and bow ties. Four of them look like they came directly from stock photography. The fifth, second in the row, was the image of Oliver Barr from the county website.

Slowly, her head starts to shake. “No. No, I can’t. I can’t remember. Maybe him?” A glittering gold fingernail edges along the bottom of Barr’s photo. “But I couldn’t swear it. Not on a Bible. Not in court.” She looks at all of us. “I was fucked up that day.”

Something she said earlier suddenly presents itself as a question that wasn’t asked correctly.

“Did you ever hear from him again?”

This time, her eyes widen, and she nearly shrinks into the cushions, clearly scared. “For sure. Hell yes, I did. He fucked with me the first year. Texting, calling, tracking me and the other girls.”

“How many?” asks Nic.