The Sixes

***

AFTER HER CLOTHES were shredded, she finally confided in a teacher, who brought her to the headmistress. The woman had listened, nodded, expressed concern and said that the school would not only investigate but also reimburse her for some of the clothing. But at the same time the headmistress, with her too-pert nose in the air, had seemed unsympathetic, as if she’d been forced to discuss something that she found trivial, the problem of a student too wimpy to fight her own battles and take care of herself.

Later she thought about the choice of the word investigate. That word never suggested that the culprits in Fortuna—because surely it was them—would be brought to justice. And from what she knew, no one ever was.

But at least after that things were quiet. Spring came. She met a boy from a coed prep school nearby, and they had coffee twice in town. To her relief, life seemed normal again. Maybe, she thought, Fortuna had moved on to someone else.

On Easter weekend she stayed on campus to work—she had so much to do leading up to finals. The fact that the campus was nearly deserted was actually a relief to her. And then on Saturday night, as she was walking back to the dorm, the boys had grabbed her.

She never saw their faces. They came up behind her and threw a hood over her head. From the sound of them muttering to each other, she knew that there were three of them, and they weren’t that old. They led her to a car and threw her in the back seat.

She thought she would be raped, and she was out of her mind with fear. But after a ten-minute drive they yanked her out of the car and forced her into some kind of crawl space. And then they sealed it shut.

She could barely breathe. It was cold and damp, and she thought she heard rats, scampering somewhere near her. Although she knew they must have driven away, she called out, again and again, to no avail. She tried to push, too, at what she thought was the opening, but she was too wedged in to create any force.

For the next thirty-six hours, she just lay there in the total dark, weeping sometimes, wetting herself. She pretended her mother was next to her, telling her to hold on, to be strong. She knew people would start to look for her, but how would they ever guess she was in this place? She was certain that she was going to die.