Breaking the Rules Read online

  “What aren’t you telling me?” Jenn asked.

  “Jenni, he’s still alive, but—” She cut herself off again. Whatever that but was going to be, she substituted it with, “He’s strong.”

  “You need to tell me everything,” Jenn said.

  Maria exhaled hard. “I know. It’s just … he lost so much blood,” she said. “One of his teammates ended up doing a battlefield transfusion, and nearly died himself, because of it. Jenni, it’s a miracle that Dan’s still alive at all. If he didn’t have the friends that he has … This would already be a very different phone call. As it is …”

  Dear God. “Was it an IED?” Jenn asked, because it was clear Maria had gotten at least some details.

  “Indirectly,” Maria said, and her word only made sense when she added, “Dan was assisting with the civilian casualties after some kind of car bomb went off, and a sniper started shooting. He was hit.”

  “So he’s been shot,” Jenn said, meeting Jack’s steady gaze, “someplace where he lost a lot of blood. In his chest or—”

  “It was his leg,” Maria told her.

  “His leg,” Jenn told Jack, unable to keep herself from glancing down at his empty pant leg. Oh God.

  “If something goes wrong with the surgery,” Maria said, “or if he’s too weak to be operated on … He could lose his leg. And that’s one of the better-case scenarios. I really think you should wait before you go anywhere, Jenn.”

  “I don’t want to wait,” Jenn said. “Tell Savannah yes, please buy me a ticket. Tell her thank you.”

  “Jenni,” Maria started.

  “I want to be there,” Jenn said. “I need to be there when he wakes up, especially if … God, most people don’t get that chance. I’m going to be there.”

  “Jenn, he might not wake up.”

  “But he’s strong,” Jenn reminded her. “He’s a fighter. Just tell Savannah. I can be at the airport in an hour.”

  Danny was strong. He was a fighter.

  But all young men and women who went to fight wars were strong. They were all fighters. And sometimes, despite that, they died anyway.

  Jenn looked at Jack, who was still holding her hand.

  And sometimes they lost their legs.

  LAS VEGAS

  DATE UNKNOWN

  For too many years, there was no such thing as no in Neesha’s world.

  Dissent was not allowed, not without punishment.

  Years ago, when she was first brought to this awful place, punishment meant an empty belly and nothing but a hard, cold floor to sleep upon, a faucet for water, and a bucket for her waste, while locked in a tiny, empty cell. That was often all it took among the other new girls to turn a no into a yes.

  But in those early days, Neesha preferred the hunger, the bucket, and the cold floor to the pain and humiliation that came when the men—the clients or visitors, they were called—held her down with the weight of their bodies and jabbed themselves between her legs.

  It was wrong, and she would not do it ever again.

  And she screamed and cried, which frightened the visitors, and kept them from touching her. It also made the tall man with the florid face who was her new lord and master angry, so he locked her again in that cell.

  The hunger made her cry, but she still said no. And then a fellow worker, a girl who was older, saved part of her meals to share. She furtively passed the morsels through the tiny window in Neesha’s door. And so she put up with that hard, cold floor for nine whole days and nights of no, with only twinges of hunger instead of great, yawning pain.

  But the tall man—Mr. Nelson—he must have found out about the food, because the kind girl vanished. Neesha hadn’t seen her again, not even once in all of the years since.

  It was then that Mr. Nelson brought Neesha and her no into a beautiful room—more beautiful than she’d ever seen before in her entire short life—where a magnificent meal was set out on a huge table.

  He’d left her there, and Neesha, still hungry, had eaten her fill, filled, too, with hope that her grandfather, a man her mother had spoken of with such affection and respect, had somehow managed to find and rescue her.

  But when a man came in, while he was, indeed, old enough to be her grandfather, he had a face as pale and a head as bare of hair as the moon. His eyes were not like Neesha’s or her mother’s. They were blue and flatly ugly, as if his soul had already left his body.

  And although she hadn’t yet learned to speak any American, she knew what he wanted from his gestures.

  When she gave him her emphatic no, he smiled. And he didn’t just take what he wanted anyway, like the other men before him, hands trembling and even weeping while they’d kissed her, before she’d learned that her piercing screams would scare them away when simply sobbing wouldn’t.

  Instead, he took while he beat her, and he laughed with delight even as she screamed. And then he took some more in ways that were meant to hurt her, until she lay naked and bleeding, too stunned to cry, on that beautiful floor.

  The man washed himself after, whistling as he did so, and then he left.

  Women came in then, but they weren’t warm like her mother had been, back before she’d fallen ill and died. They cleaned Neesha and bandaged her as best they could, but they did it without any comfort or kind words. In fact, they spoke to her sternly. You reap what you sow.

  And then they brought her back to her cell, where she wept until she fell asleep.

  The door didn’t open for three very hungry, very sore days as she lay on the floor, curled up in a ball. And when it finally did open, it was once again Mr. Nelson who stood there, looking down at her as she trembled and wept with fear.

  And he took her, carrying her because her legs wouldn’t hold her. He brought her back, not to the beautiful room, thank God, but to a separate bathing room, where the cold, angry women again washed her clean.

  They braided her hair in a way that made her look even younger than she truly was, and they gave her a new dress and delivered her back to Mr. Nelson, who led her to the smaller room where she’d first lived and served the visitors, before she’d dared to say no.

  A man was in there, waiting. His hungry eyes filled with tears as he saw her, because he, too, knew that what he wanted to do was wrong because she was just a child.

  There was food laid out in there, too. It was nowhere near as sumptuous as the feast she’d had three days before. But it was hot and it smelled good and it would fill her belly and give her strength. The bed in the corner was soft and warm. Neesha knew that, as well.

  And although she didn’t speak Mr. Nelson’s language and he didn’t speak hers, he made it clear that it was her choice. She could go in.

  Or she could say no, and go back to the room where the men wouldn’t kiss her and lick her with their tremulous mouths, touch her almost reverently with their trembling hands, but instead would hit her and bite her and laugh while she screamed.

  Neesha went inside.

  And she never again said no.

  Not until years later.

  Until the day it happened.

  Until the day that Andy, the fat daytime guard, had clutched his chest and fallen, gasping and wheezing, to the ground, leaving her door unlocked and open as he shuddered and shook.

  Neesha stepped through the door and around him and quickly slipped from the wing of the building where the children were locked in their rooms. And because she’d just had a visitor who’d wanted only to watch and touch himself while she bathed and then put on the clothes and makeup of a much older woman, she was able to fade back and then pass, unnoticed, through the women’s wing, where the guards were there only to keep visitors from going where they weren’t wanted, instead of keeping the workers from escaping.

  And then there it was.

  An unguarded, open door.

  It led to an outside that wasn’t part of the small, caged, inner courtyard that she had come to know so well during her long years imprisoned here.

 
Neesha stepped through that door, marveling at a sky that stretched out to the horizon, at a sun that shone full strength upon her upturned face, a sun that was not weakened by a screen.

  But there wasn’t time to stand there, stunned by the possibility of her newfound freedom.

  She was in a parking lot, outside of a long, low, adobe structure, and she quickly lost herself among the rows of cars, ducking down to hide from anyone who might come looking for her.

  And they would come. Mr. Nelson. Or the guard named Todd.

  And if they found her? She would be punished.

  Of that Neesha had no doubt.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  LAS VEGAS

  THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2009

  They met, after school, in the coffee shop at the mall, because Eden didn’t want her mother or stepfather, Greg, to know she was back in town.

  And it was crazy, but she honestly didn’t recognize her little brother when he first walked in. Ben had grown—a lot—since she’d seen him last. He was now taller than she was. And while he’d always been skinny, he was now razor thin, as if he’d been stretched on a medieval torture rack.

  But the biggest change was to his clothing and hair. He’d always been a kind of geeky, dorky little redheaded kid, but now he was dressed like a Hollywood vampire, in black jeans, black T-shirt, clunky black sneakers, and a black overcoat that actually billowed behind him when he walked.

  Eden had to admit the effect was striking. With his hair down to his shoulders and dyed a relentless, unforgiving midnight black, and with heavy eyeliner around his eyes, with the remains of black fingernail polish peeling from his chewed fingernails, the look accentuated his pale complexion and his blue eyes.

  Both of which he’d gotten from his father, an Air Force officer their mother had hooked up with briefly after Eden, Dan, and their older sister Sandy’s father, Daniel Gillman the second, had moved out for good.

  Because they were only separated but not divorced, and because the Air Force captain was both married and a total son of a bitch, when Eden’s mother, Ivette, got pregnant and Ben was born, she put Daniel Gillman the second’s name down on the birth certificate, in the slot that said father.

  Which had led to a lot of shouting and name-calling when their divorce finally went through, and paying child support became mandatory.

  But Ivette had tried to pretend that then-five-year-old Ben was the result of a night she and Daniel had spent together when he’d returned to Fort Bragg, and she’d gone up to see him in Fayetteville. Daniel had been pretty drunk at the time—it was no wonder he didn’t remember any of it.

  Of course he didn’t remember it, because it hadn’t happened.

  But because Ivette was not only a loser, but was also drawn to men who were losers as well, and because Eden’s father was a son of a bitch, too, he didn’t think about the damage that his words might do to a child when he used Ben with his blue eyes and red hair as Exhibit A. He didn’t need a paternity test, he’d shouted, because there was no way a child this ugly, scrawny, and fair-complexioned could possibly be his.

  It had been Ben’s first meeting with his estranged “dad,” and all of his fantasy expectations had been cruelly dashed.

  As he grew, he continued to see himself only as ugly. Try as she might, Eden hadn’t been able to change his mind about that. Because, bottom line, he wanted the same brown eyes and thick, dark hair that she and Danny and Sandy all had. He wanted to be a full, not a faux Gillman.

  Eden stared at Ben now, dumbstruck. As she forced herself to greet and embrace this exotic stranger that her little brother had become, she wondered if he realized just how handsome—movie-star worthy, in fact—he was going to be in a few more years, when he filled out.

  “Thank you for coming to Vegas,” he said as he hugged her in return. “I would’ve just left home, the way you did, but …”

  “Your diabetes,” Eden said. He’d eventually run out of insulin.

  She felt him nod. “I’d have to come back home. Or die.”

  His voice was different, too—it was now deeper than hers. It had always pissed him off, the way he’d often been called “ma’am” when he’d answered the phone.

  Eden’s voice had always been unusually low and husky, even when she was a child, and she’d turned it into a game—a contest—so that Ben would stop feeling bad. She would pitch her voice even lower to try to get the people who called to address her as “sir.” Ben, in turn, had to try to get people to call him “ma’am,” and whoever scored the most number of hits during the week got to choose the TV shows they’d watch on Saturday mornings, when their mother was sleeping late with whichever husband or boyfriend was currently sharing her bed.

  Ben always won, but it didn’t matter. Eden had always let her little brother choose anyway.

  But those days were long gone. No one would mistake Ben for a “ma’am” ever again. Unless, of course, he threw away the Goth look and dressed in drag. That could work. He was going to be that pretty.

  “How are you?” he asked as he hugged her. “Eedie, I’m so sorry about the baby.”

  Eden closed her eyes, refusing to go back there, but knowing it didn’t matter. Whether she focused on it or not, for the rest of her life, she was going to walk around with an empty space in her heart. “Yeah, that sucked. Let’s not talk about it.”

  “I didn’t want to not say anything,” he told her. “Not just about the baby, but, well, about Izzy, too. He was cool. He, um, came looking for you after you, you know, left.”

  “He did?” She pulled back to look up into her little brother’s eyes.

  Ben nodded. “He gave me his e-mail address and his phone number and, um, some money. A lot of money, actually. Three hundred dollars. He said I should hide it where no one would find it—it should be my emergency fund.”

  Eden stared at him. “Three hundred …?”

  Ben nodded again. “He said that you told him you were worried about me, but that you were in a place right then—on account of Pinkie dying—where you had to focus on taking care of yourself. He said if I needed any help, for any reason, that I could call him. If you hadn’t e-mailed me and told me you were coming back … I don’t know. I think I would’ve done it. You know. Called Izzy.”

  Great. All she needed was Izzy showing up. She could picture him, striding into this coffee shop in his cargo shorts and clunky boots, ready to save the day. Lord help her … “But you didn’t call him, right?” Eden verified.

  “No.” Ben paused. “So what happened? That e-mail you sent me last year, right before you got married … It sounded like you really liked him.”

  Eden just shook her head. She hadn’t come all this way to talk about her problems. Not that Izzy Zanella was her problem any longer.

  She forced a smile and changed the subject. “So this is weird—you being so tall. You were so sure you’d be four foot eleven forever. I told you you’d grow.”

  Ben gave her a crooked half smile at that. “Yeah, I get these spurts and … It’s been expensive. Always needing bigger clothes?” He gestured to himself. “This way, it’s like a uniform. A pair of black jeans and a few T-shirts and I’m set—until I outgrow ’em.”

  “But that’s not the only reason you dress like that,” she pointed out.

  “No,” he agreed. “It’s a multipurpose outfit. It really pisses Greg off. For a while I had a denim jacket that some asshole wrote faggot on the back of, so I added the words Yes, I am a … and I wore it everywhere. Until Greg burned it.”

  Eden looked up at him. “Are you really sure that you’re … You know.”

  Something changed in his eyes, and she knew that she’d just made a blunder.

  “Sorry,” she quickly said, but he spoke over her.

  “Gay,” he said. “You’re allowed to say the word. And yes, I’m very sure. Don’t tell me that’s a problem for you, too?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said, far more sharply than she’d intended.
But then she realized that being spoken to sharply was exactly what he needed in order to erase that defensive, wary look from his eyes. So she kept going. “Stupid would be a problem. Gay is …” She realized that she’d automatically lowered her voice to say that word, gay, so she started over. “Gay is not.” She said it even louder. “Gay is not a problem. If Pinkie had been gay—if Pinkie had lived … Lord, Ben, what I wouldn’t give for Pinkie to be alive and gay.”

  She felt her face crumple, felt her eyes well, and Ben hugged her again. And it was weird that he was bigger than she was, that his arms were long enough to wrap around her, instead of just around her neck. But he didn’t just look, feel, and sound different, he smelled different, too.

  And as he started to murmur, “I’m so sorry,” Eden cut him off, pulling back to look at him through narrowed eyes.

  “Do you smoke?” she asked him. “Ben …”

  He looked abashed. “Sort of,” he said. “I mean, yes, but not really.”

  “Grandpa Ramsey died of lung cancer,” Eden reminded him.

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t,” he said. “Inhale.”

  Did he really expect her to believe him? “If we can pull this off,” Eden said, “and you’re living with me? You are not smoking in my house. Read my lips. Not.”

  “No,” he said. “I know. It’s really just … It’s a prop,” he said, gesturing to himself. “Part of the … persona. I really don’t inhale. I just light ’em and …”

  Okay, so maybe she did believe him—which meant that he was still a dork inside. Which was a relief. “Then you’ll have to keep your props out of my house.”

  Ben laughed at that, but his smile was twisted. “You want to know something funny? In Greg’s house, I’m allowed to smoke, but I can’t be gay.”

  “Our house. I meant to say our house,” Eden corrected herself as they both sat down at the little table where she’d been filling out a job application. “And screw Greg. In his house, I couldn’t be me, either. He’s a creep.”

  There was a “Help Wanted” sign in the window, and applying for a job was a way to use the table without having to buy anything. Expensive coffee and pastries weren’t in Eden’s strict budget.