“It hasn’t been up until now, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay that way,” Kate noted, her tone inflexible. “If you want to change, you can change.”
The teen started to cry. “You damn do-gooders,” she muttered, then sobbed harder and harder. “You make it sound as if hope is out there. There’s no hope. You know that. No fucking way anybody will help me. I’m nothing but a loser.”
Hearing refrains from years of abuse and torment in the teen’s words and her tone, Kate patted the girl’s hand. “I can see how you might think that way, given the circumstances.” She took a moment to add, “However, I can tell you that there certainly is hope and that there is another way to go through life. Do you like taking drugs?”
“No,” she stated in a rebuke. “They make me sick. I hate them, but I don’t have any choice. Once you’re hooked, you’re hooked.”
“And yet I’m pretty sure that you’ve already started getting off of them because you’ve been so ill lately,” Kate pointed out.
The teen stared at Kate for a long moment. “I don’t know how that works.”
She nodded. “I don’t either, but there are ways to help reduce the effect of the drugs on a day-to-day basis,” Kate shared, with a comforting tone. “We’ll have to look into a little more. I also know somebody who might help you.”
“Yeah? What does he want?” she asked.
Such a sneer filled her expression that Kate immediately knew what this abused teen was expecting. “Not that,” Kate stated.
“Honey, they all want that,” the teen replied in a mock tone. “They say they don’t want that, but then it turns around that’s what they want. That’s what they all want. Absolutely no way they don’t.”
Wisely Kate kept her counsel quiet. She knew Simon wasn’t like that. He didn’t need to deal with anybody at this level for sex. He could get whatever the hell he wanted from the world out there just because he was drop-dead gorgeous and rich, and, of course, that was a direction she didn’t want to go in anyway.
Kate held up her hand. “Let’s go back to one of the reasons why I ended up talking to Stone. Did you know Patricia Blinker?”
The girl nodded slowly. “Yeah, I did. Her brother came and bought her,” she said, and wonder filled her tone, as if she couldn’t imagine such a thing.
“Does that sound good to you?” Kate asked curiously.
“Yeah, sure it does,” she replied. “The only way Stone lets us go is if somebody pays.”
“Okay, and how does that work?” Kate asked.
The teen sagged back into the bed, looking around the room listlessly. “I don’t have any family,” she muttered. “So ain’t nobody buying me out of this hellhole.”
“You don’t have any family?” Kate immediately questioned. “Or none that you have had any contact with?”
“Same diff,” the teen replied, as she stared at Kate. “You got to remember that there’s only so much that people will put up with in this world, and taking on losers is not one of them.”
“Sounds as if Stone really worked your self-esteem into the ground,” Kate noted, “because you’re not a loser. You’re a survivor, a fighter. Otherwise you wouldn’t still be alive right now,” she suggested. “After all the damage that he’s done, … you can work at fixing it, if you care to,” she murmured, but the girl rolled her eyes at Kate. “Right, it’s not that easy. It’s not a slam-dunk case. It’s not a Hey, one-and-done, but it is doable. And, if you wanted help to do it, people are out there who are willing to give you help. No strings attached.”
The teen sneered openly at Kate. “You really do live in that world of make-believe, don’t you?”
“Some would say yes, but, considering the work I do,” she added, “maybe not. Now I have a name down here for you—Annie Duggal.”
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s my name.”
But something in her voice had Kate eyeing her closer. “Meaning that’s the name you gave Stone? Or that’s the name that he knows you as?”
After a hesitation, the teen nodded.
“So, what’s your real name?”
She winced. “Then you’ll contact my family, won’t you?”
“It might be interesting to see what their response is.”
“No-good trash can go to hell, most likely,” she quipped. “Absolutely no way they want anything to do with me, and I don’t want the humiliation of ending up asking them for help one more time.”
“Right. So … you would rather go back with Stone, right?”
She glared at her.
“You really don’t know how your family will react, especially with the passage of time,” Kate suggested, trying to be patient. “I can talk to them and see. If they’ll be ass-hats, I won’t give them any contact information, and I won’t have them get in touch with you.”
“They wouldn’t want to get in touch anyway,” she declared in a monotone.
“What did you know about Patricia?” Kate asked, abruptly changing the conversation immediately, trying to see if she could get some information from Annie and keep the girl off balance. Kate wasn’t sure what Annie was lying about but definitely a few lies were floating around, and Kate certainly wasn’t prepared to judge the abused teen for that, not when life had thrown her so many ugly curveballs. Yet, at the same time, Kate also needed some idea of where to go and what to search for in Patricia’s life.
The teen shrugged, then answered Kate’s latest question. “Patricia was nice. Her brother kept trying to get her off the streets, kept trying to help her, and she kept trying too, but Stone was being an asshole about it. He’d loop her up on drugs, so, the next time her brother would come around, Patricia wouldn’t even be awake and cognizant enough to talk to. Stone did that a couple times, just for laughs. At one point, somebody said something to Stone about her dying of an overdose, and he seemed to back off at that point in time.” Annie gave a lifeless laugh. “But the threat was always there that he could do whatever the hell he wanted and that included killing us, which I know perfectly well I was slated for.” As she slumped back on the bed, she stared up at the world above her.
“What do you mean, slated for?” Kate asked.