I’ve always been different and I’ve never really seen myself reflected in other people. What if I’d always been heading for this: a psychosis just waiting to blossom?
After a few random rounds, I parked my bike outside Polhem and sat down on a bench. My legs were shaking and I could feel my pulse pounding at my temples. I couldn’t just bike home and leave Amina.
For the hundredth time I read her text.
Everything’s ok. Sleeping. See you tomorrow. <3
I could buy the heart at the end. But ok? Periods in a text? No, not a chance. I frantically scrolled through the mile-long thread of texts we’d exchanged and found that sure enough, Amina had never ended a single text with a period. She hadn’t written that text.
It must have been Chris. He was refusing to answer my calls or texts. Had Linda Lokind been telling the truth after all? What if Chris was holding Amina prisoner? Or even worse…？
I paced up and down the street, impatient, walking into the schoolyard and up to the roundabout and back again. I went along the hedge, over to the building where Chris lived. I stared up at his window, but noticed a shadowy figure in the window next door and hurried back toward the school. As soon as I stopped, sat down, or leaned against a tree, that creeping sensation came back, tiny insect feet on my skin, unrelenting twitches of muscle that forced me back up and off again.
* * *
When the silence broke, I was in the middle of my course between the schoolyard and the playground, fifty meters from Chris’s building. Out of nowhere, the night filled with the patter of tottering footsteps, repressed screams against the asphalt.
She was running down the middle of the street. Her shirt was pulled down off one shoulder and her hair was wildly mussed like a black halo that had fallen down around her neck. Her eyes had that warrior gaze. On the handball court, people often compare her to a pit bull.
“Amina!” I cried.
She was panting hard; she glanced over her shoulder and her mouth formed a wordless scream.
At that moment, Chris came dashing around the corner behind her. One hand to his face, the other surging at his side like a sprinter.
He was chasing her.
“Run!” Amina shouted at me.
But my feet were stuck to the asphalt. Amina soon reached me and I saw her face twist.
“Run!”
I tried to find an escape route as Chris came closer and closer.
Just as I turned around, I saw the knife. A tiny movement of Amina’s hand made the blade flash in the glow of the streetlights.
Chris’s feet thundered against the asphalt.
“Come on!” I cried, dragging Amina with me.
We rounded the hedge and entered the darkness of the playground. The gravel crunched under our feet. Amina was shuddering and panting, gasping for air. It smelled like sweat and adrenaline and something else, something strong. Pepper?
“What the fuck is going on?”
Amina didn’t respond. Her gaze seemed shrouded in a thick fog. I shook her, trying to reach her, but she was completely out of it.
I took her by the wrist and forced her to look at me.
“What did he do to you?”
Her mouth opened and her lips quivered like a fish.
“I’m—sorry,” she stammered. “I broke our agreement.”
“What the fuck did he do, Amina?”
“He … he…”
The steps were coming closer. In a few seconds, we would be eye to eye with Chris.
“He raped me.”
Amina’s voice was like a kick to my gut.
“He raped you?”
An instant later, Chris rounded the corner and towered up before us. He was only a few meters away. He skidded to a stop and stood there with a hand over one eye.
I backed away. Two quick steps. I had let go of Amina but assumed she was following me.
My body tensed, my skin tightening to the breaking point. I should have been scared, I should have been terrified, but instead every cell in my body was riddled with fury. I hated him. I hated Chris Olsen so much I was about to break.
Again and again I was forced to relive my own rape: the pressure on my throat, the weight on my body, and the burning pain when he forced himself in.
How the fuck could I have let the same thing happen to Amina? If only I had listened to Linda.
Chris Olsen grunted in between gasps. He made a terrible face and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. I looked at Amina and realized that she hadn’t backed up at all. Instead she took a big step closer to Chris. The knife was trembling, threatening, in the shaky hand she had raised toward him.
“People like you don’t deserve to live,” she hissed between her teeth.