Free Chosen Ones by Tiffany Truitt Page B

you, you will ignore her. Do you understand?”
    I nodded. Somehow I couldn’t find the courage to speak to this woman as we entered the room.
    Lying on the bed was a young girl with her back toward me—the two glaring red slash marks standing out against the pale skin of her neck. She was curled into a ball, her hands pressed against her heart. Spots of blood covered the sheets. As I stepped farther into the room, I began to see how wild this girl looked. Her nightgown barely clothed her body, and she made no attempt to cover herself as we approached.
    “Help me get her up,” Gwen commanded.
    As my hands made contact with her arm, the girl shrieked. She began to blindly lash out, hitting me in the arms.
    “Calm down, child,” I heard Gwen say from somewhere in the darkness. “Damn it, girl! Make yourself useful and help me hold her down!”
    I applied as much pressure to the girl’s body as I could muster. I was barely able to hold her in place as she continued to squirm with a force that seemed unnatural coming from someone so small. How old was this girl? She couldn’t be sixteen. And yet one was not allowed to take on someone’s punishment until she was of age.
    My supervisor pulled a syringe from her pocket and without hesitation stuck it into the girl’s arm. I felt her body begin to convulse. Tears ran down her face and she attempted to yell out, but all she could do was grunt.
    Slowly, the girl became still. I could hear her breathing return to normal. She was mumbling something as the contents of the syringe lulled her to sleep, but it was difficult to make much sense of it.
    “Stay with her. Don’t let her move. I will be right back,” my supervisor said coldly. She was beginning to be a mystery I knew I would never want to understand.
    The girl continued to mumble, and I felt the need to hear what she was saying. Maybe it was my endless fascination with other people’s pain, my constant need to know I was not alone in feeling the world offered me little else. I sank to my knees and leaned closer to the girl. Without warning, she clamped her hand onto my arm. In her grip existed a strength that didn’t seem possible.
    “I thought I said no,” she gasped. “I thought I said no.”
    She began to cry again. I tried to pull my arm from her grip. I knew my supervisor would be back any minute, but she held on tightly. She kept muttering the same words over and over.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    My supervisor stared down at me with contempt. I couldn’t find my voice. I yanked with all my strength, stumbling and landing on my backside.
    “Get up and help me wash her,” she snapped, throwing me a rag.
    I felt uncomfortable as I helped my supervisor undress the girl. The sight of her nakedness caused my skin to erupt in patches of heat. I couldn’t imagine ever being so vulnerable. The girl had slipped into unconsciousness; I wondered, had she been awake, if she would have protested our actions.
    Her words still rang in my ears: I thought I said no .
    Her body was so marked up, the attempt to destroy it, own it, rewrite it so painfully obvious. I wanted to ask what had happened. But I couldn’t speak.
    I helped to clean the blood that was smeared on the insides of her thighs. I wiped down her arms that appeared to be covered in newly formed bruises. I washed her neck, which was strangely covered with bite marks.
    I cleaned it all away.
    It wasn’t so different from the blood I’d helped clean down below. It was just another Templeton secret that I was helping to keep hidden. And for some reason, I felt terrible doing it.
    When we were done I followed my supervisor out of the room. My head was throbbing in a way that had suddenly become unwelcome. I didn’t want the pain anymore. I had felt enough pain for one day.
    Enough for a lifetime.
    “Wait,” I whispered as my supervisor moved to go down the stairs.
    She stopped, keeping her back toward me. “I didn’t think you would