Although Dad seemed kinda excited I was promoted to assistant manager and had held down a job at the same place for ten months, Mom wasn’t all that impressed. And Caylen, home for a family dinner (this devised, I guessed, by Mom, who liked having her son around mostly because I thought she got off on how they could gang up on me), shared in his Caylen way he thought all this proved I was still a fuckup.
Even if I didn’t make my car break down.
“It’s called regular maintenance, Cady,” he’d sneered. “You might look into it.”
Like I didn’t know about oil changes. I did and I got them even when it bit into my bank account to do it. My car didn’t break down because of oil changes and switching out plugs and filters. My car broke down because it was old and mostly a piece of shit.
And even though I didn’t kick myself out of my apartment.
“You live in a place like that, those things are gonna happen,” Caylen had said.
Like he knew what happened when you lived in a dump. He’d bought his first condo, and it was a nice one, a year out of college.
I thought Dad was going to help out, but Mom put the kibosh on that right away, stating, “This is the life you chose, Cady. If you’re on the outs with those friends of yours, it’s bad manners to say I told you so, but I did, actually, tell you so. But when you choose a life like that you have to learn to handle it when things like this happen. So no, you can’t have a loan. But you can come back home if you enroll at least in community college for some kind of advanced education. At this point I don’t care if you become a nail technician. At least it’ll be a skill. You can continue to have that job, pay us rent, and we’ll be fair about that so you can use the rest of your salary, as it were, on your tuition and to save up so you can move out, for good the next time.”
I didn’t want to be a nail technician. I wanted to be a clothing buyer. I wanted to learn about fashion. I wanted to travel, go to trade shows and fashion shows and artist shows. I wanted to discover new trends. I wanted to beautify people (not just their nails). Find awesome shit for them that would make them feel they could take on the world.
I was willing to work at it. Learn it. Live it. Give it time. I didn’t expect it to be handed to me, to walk into Neiman Marcus and have them yell, “Thank God you’ve finally arrived! What had we ever done without you?”
And I was twenty-three, not thirteen.
My mom telling me I could “continue to have that job” then telling me what I was going to do with the money I made in it and with my future was totally uncool.
Unfortunately as bad as I wanted to be an adult and prove to them I was, instead of taking a deep breath and communicating calmly, Caylen was his normal conceited, superior asshole and Mom was Mom and she tripped all my triggers, so I lost it.
Which meant I lost any support I might have had from Dad.
In fact, they’d kicked me out.
So now I had a car that might run for the next few days, weeks, months or I hoped years, but I had twenty-eight days to move out of my apartment and my only choice was Lonnie and Maria, who I hadn’t talked to about any of this and they didn’t have a huge place either. I’d have to sleep on the couch. And they might not even say yes.
To all this I did what I often would do because my brother was right.
I was a fuckup.
So I might as well embrace the fuckup that was me.
I decided to screw it all, so I screwed it all.
Therefore I was hammered and I was in The Trench at Wild Bill’s Rally, the music loud, the crush of bodies undulating around me, the bottle of beer in my hand long forgotten as I swayed with the music and sang it at the top of my lungs.
It felt good.
No, it felt great. To be around people who didn’t care I didn’t have a college degree. To be around people who lived life, they didn’t strategize every move in it. To be there and feel alive. To be there and not to be alone.
To be there and feel free.
That was, it felt great until they moved in.
They being two guys, who either knew each other and didn’t mind crossing swords or who were silently vying to get the drunk chick out of The Trench and into a tent so they could have their way with her.
I wasn’t in the mood to have anyone have their way with me so I decided to make that clear.
My first couple of maneuvers, letting the movement of the crowd suck me in and pull me away, didn’t work.
They followed.
My second maneuver, saying, “Hey, uncool!” when one touched the side of my tit then I twisted around, saying, “Hey, stop that!” when the other one positioned behind me and started to grind into my ass also didn’t work.
And pushing off, grabbing their wrists and pulling their hands away didn’t work either.
“Stop it, you assholes!” I screamed, dropping my beer without a thought and moving more violently now that they had me fenced in, one at the front, one at the back, pressing closer, eyes to my body, hands to my body, bodies to my body, squeezing in.
My scream was swallowed by the music, the buzz, the flesh, lost in a haze of people gone on booze and drugs and the vibe.
No one was paying any attention to me.
Such was The Trench.
It could be awesome (but mostly only if you had a least a girlfriend taking your back, which stupidly I did not).
It could be not awesome at all.
Like now.
I tried to yank sideways but the guy behind me shoved me back between them.
They were working together.
Shit.
They wanted a gang bang, and as Wild Bill’s Rally was an annual get-together for a lot of motorcycle clubs, this gang bang could be more than just three, they were just the ones sent in to find the prey.
That thought made the anger that had killed my buzz rocket straight to panic and suddenly it was a lot of hands, arms, shoving, pressing, grinding, grunts and shouts from me and low chuckles from them.
They were getting off on this.
One of them bit my shoulder and I cried out, turning around with effort in the small space they’d given me and cupping a hand under his chin to push him off.
He jerked away, and when his wild, bright, fucked-up eyes came back to me I realized he liked it like that.
Shit.
The other guy reached around and grabbed tight on my breast.
I whirled the other way, forcing both hands between us and pushing with everything I had, shrieking, “Fuck off!”
The guy now behind me was sliding a hand from my hip around to the front, down, almost there, and terror ran thick in my veins when suddenly I was slamming into the people beside me.
“Hey!” and “Watch it!” were shouted at me but all I could do was stand there, not looking at the stage, not struggling, not running, instead watching Tony land a fist solidly in the face of the guy who’d ended things behind me.
The guy didn’t even get the chance to lift a hand. One punch and he was out, sinking down and hitting bodies who just shuffled away and let him fall to the turf.
The other guy tried to get the jump on him but Tony instantly readjusted, putting the guy in a headlock and squeezing, squeezing—the guy kicked and spat and tore at Tony’s arm—but he kept squeezing until the guy lost consciousness and floated to the ground.
He barely hit before Tony turned to me, grabbed my hand in an iron-tight hold and started dragging me through the crowd. Using how he walked now in a practical way, he shouldered through people both stoned who didn’t notice it or stoned who didn’t like it but took one look at Tony and didn’t say shit about it.
In no time, an almost impossible occurrence with The Trench—you went in understanding it spit you out when it was done with you and no sooner—we were at the edges, but Tony didn’t stop there.
He dragged me through people, campfires, tents and pop-top campers to what seemed in the dark like a sky-blue with a thick stripe of baby-blue, old Chevy pickup.
He stopped me at the tail and turned while yanking me around and almost into his body.
He lifted up my hand beside us, shook it and gritted out, “Jesus, fuck, Cady. Fuck!”
I stared at him, not at a loss to what had just happened—not the part where he downed two dudes in probably two minutes, not the part where I was in a serious situation no woman wanted to find herself in—and I did it speechless.