Free Revenge by Meli Raine Page B

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    “You look like you’re overheating,” Daniel says, fear in his voice. “It’s a hot day, but you turned bright red so fast, Carrie. And now you’re sweating. Are you having a heart attack or something?”
    Only down below , I think.
    Daniel takes my arm and pulls me away from Mark’s place. “How about we walk? You could use some fresh air.”
    We walk in silence to my trailer. Daniel breaks the quiet by saying, “Oh. Yeah. Mom asked me to tell you to make sure you forward your mail.”
    “I what ?” Of all the sentences Daniel could say to me, that wasn’t one I was expecting.  
    “Forward your mail. She said she hasn’t received any mail for you and is worried you forgot to put i n a mail forwarding order.”
    “Does she need to remind me to eat all my veggies and brush my teeth before bed?” I joke.
    He grins. “You forgot to wipe your ass.”
    We laugh. It feels weird. Good, in that it relieves tension, but it’s like the kind of laugh you give after someone farts and everyone heard it.  
    “ Tell her I’ll do it this morning before I go to the shelter to help out,” I say.  
    “Wipe your ass?” Daniel jokes.  
    I elbow him and he laughs, a belly laugh. A real chuckle. The a wkwardness is gone. We’re back to being silly kids again.
    Daniel gives me a salute and walks back to the main house without another word.  
    Instead of going to my trailer, I climb in my car, insert the key in the ignition, and close my eyes.
    Turn over.
    Ah. For once, my beater car listens to me. The air ripples with the putt-putt-putt of my engine as I back up, then drive the five minutes to the p ost o ffice before it closes.
    Elaine is right. I should have forwarded my mail earlier in the week. And she’s doubly right: I did forg e t to do it when I left Oklahoma City. Taking care of basic life issues was dead last on my list of things to worry about. Once the job at Yates was dangled in front of me, I got out of Oklahoma as fast as I could.  
    Mark’s touch lingers on my skin as I hold the pen in my hand, filling out the form. I showered, and my hair is wet and limp in my face. One strand dangles over the paper, damp enough to be dark but not so wet that it drips on the paper.
    I finish the mail forwarding form and slip it in the post office mailbox. The line is long and filled with college kids holding package slips. I wonder why their parents didn’t send them packages to their dorm rooms.
    I shrug. Not my problem. I climb back in the car and start to drive back, to change clothes and sit and stare at the ceiling for a thousand years as I try to understand the past week of my life.
    I reach for my phone to call Amy and—
    Oh, God.
    I c an’t call Amy.
    A hole starts to grow inside me, like a piece of wet clay on a potter’s wheel. If you take a piece and straddle the spinning wheel, with a single fingertip you can create an instantaneous crater. The clay separates, parting like Moses at the Red Sea. It’s marvelous to make your hands do that, to have command over a swiftly-moving piece of anything.  
    And to turn it into something else, even temporarily.
    When I realize I can’t call Amy, m y chest feels like the hole a potter makes in the center of a grey blob.
    My best friend is being held against her will by some asshole who thinks he has the right to kidnap her. There is a piece of human excrement who calls himself human out there, preying on women and hoarding them. Hurting them.  
    Cutting off their arms and legs.
    Amy might be—
    A wave of utter pain rolls through me like a whip being cracked. A sharp pain jolts me, my eyes blurring. It’s hard to watch the road.  
    Then the bile fills the back of my throat. I smell something burning.
    I t’s my brain.
    Over and over, for the past three years, I have had a single thought. It makes up the fabric of my life. This thought is the first thing I think when I wake up. It’s my last thought before I sleep. In my dreams, it repeats in an