Free Trapped by Chris Jordan

mean like loop-de-loops?”
    “Yup,” says Shane. “If you like flying upside down, Waco
    will provide.”
    I almost say, I’ll kill her, then bite my tongue. The guy may
    have a leather jacket and a big mustache, but he’s not the
    young man from her photo collection.
    As it happens, the second response is from our mystery
    boy. There’s no photo, and not much of a message, just a
    succinct more details, please, but it does include a name,
    Seth Manning, and his e-mail address, [email protected].
    “This is dated six weeks ago,” Shane notes.
    “S-Man,” I say. “The folder. Can you open it?”
    “Already there.”
    The S-Man folder contains over a hundred e-mails,
    messages from S-Man and responses from flygirl91.
    “She didn’t have to mention gender,” I point out. “Flygirl
    kind of gives it away.”
    “Good point. If you don’t mind, I’d like to print these
    out,” Shane suggests. “It’ll be faster and easier than opening
    each e-mail.”
    Maybe he’s not that comfortable having me hover over his
    shoulder. Fine. Whatever, Kelly’s printer starts spitting out
    pages at a rate of twenty per minute. I sit on the edge of her
    bed, devouring her correspondence with Mr. Seth Manning,
    flight instructor and seducer of teen girls. Or maybe not.
    70
    Chris Jordan
    From the tone, right from the beginning, my darling daughter
    seems to be the aggressor.
    What have u got 2 lose? Flygirl will make it worth yr while.
    Hw old r u? Don’t lie.
    Will b 18, all legal and tender, on 4th of July.
    Two lies, actually. Her sixteenth birthday was in May, a
    few weeks before flygirl started trolling for flyboys. By the
    time Shane hands me the next batch of pages, I’m feeling
    physically ill. Partly its residual guilt, for violating her pri-
    vacy, but mostly what’s making me ill is righteous, motherly
    anger. How dare she take such outrageous risks with her life
    and well-being! There’s scarcely a broadcast of the local
    evening news that doesn’t include mention of Internet pred-
    ators. It’s not like Kelly didn’t know the danger. She just
    didn’t care. Or worse—and this might be what’s really mak-
    ing me sick—danger is precisely what she’s looking for.
    All legal and tender.
    Cool, oily sweat suddenly pours from my scalp into my
    eyes, and I barely make it to the bathroom before heaving.
    On my knees, gagging, emptying my stomach.
    Shane makes me sit on the closed toilet as he applies a cold
    cloth to my forehead. “Guess I was wrong about the toast,
    huh?”
    “Dummy.”
    “Well, it’s not the first time I’ve been dumb,” he says
    kindly, wringing the cloth out.
    “No, me. I’m the dummy. Should have known. Should
    have been checking her e-mail.”
    Trapped
    71
    “Here, hold this,” he says, pressing the cold cloth to my
    forehead. Gets a dry towel, pats the moisture from my neck.
    “You couldn’t check her e-mail, remember? And if you
    could, she’d have found another way. Your daughter is obvi-
    ously a very willful young woman.”
    “Obviously.”
    He folds the towel, slips it back on the rack. Most of the
    men I know, they’d drop it on the floor, because that’s where
    used towels go. Not Randall Shane. He’s different. Been in
    my house for an hour or so and I know that much.
    “You feeling better?” he asks, standing tall, very tall.
    “Good. I just got a hit on Seth Manning.”
    “A hit?”
    “His address. I know where he lives.”
    15. Seven Finds A Wall
    Time is squishy. Sometimes the seconds tick by in a rea-
    sonable, almost ordinary way, and Kelly counts her heart-
    beats, the pulse in her neck. One, two three, and so on. The
    highest she gets is seventy-six and then the overwhelming
    darkness seems to bend around her, a kind of dim gravity, and
    the clock in her head stops ticking and gets all squishy.
    No other way to describe it. Squishy.
    Because she can’t measure the passage of time, Kelly has
    no idea how long it takes for the paralysis to