Page 7 of I Will Break You
Part of me is relieved she's not pushing about last night, but the question stirs a new wave of anxiety. I open my phone and scroll to the photos app, where I show her the picture I took of what I received. It’s so disturbing that I can’t bear to look.
She stares at the image for several tense seconds before saying, “This is AI.”
“What makes you think that?” I ask.
She switches to the web browser, taps in a few words, and brings up a picture of Jack Nicholson. “Does that look familiar?”
I shake my head.
“It’s fromOne Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.Someone must have used AI to create an image of you at…” She scrolls back to the offensive image. “How old are you there, nine, ten?”
“No idea, but it’s not AI.”
“How would you know?”
“It has the exact location of my scars.” I point at the horizontal line running from the left side of my waist that disappears into my midsection and then the deep line running down the length of my belly on the right.
Myra gasps. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s because I’ve never shown them in public,” I mutter.
“What do you think is happening, then?” she asks.
I tilt my head, letting a curtain of blonde curls flop down over my left eye. My early childhood is a brick wall of nothingness. It’s like my life began a few weeks before I turned eleven, yet I could read, write, perform math, and recognize my parents.
“That photo is real,” I reply. “What else but electric shock treatments could wipe out the entire memory of my childhood?”
“But you said there was a car accident?—”
“That’s what my mom and dad told me, but this photo says otherwise.”
“Have you called them?”
I exhale a tired sigh at the memory. “They were the second people I called, after the police.”
“Why did you call the cops?”
I reach across and scroll to the next photo. “Because there was a note in the envelope, saying that my time was up and I would scream on some table.”
“What does that mean?”
I hold my breath, shake my head, and stare into my lap. Anything to avoid looking her in the eye.
“Amy?” she asks.
As much as I want to confide in Myra about what happened after the police left my house, I can’t. Telling her that I killed a man would make her an accessory to murder, and I can’t let that happen again. I learned that painful lesson the last time.
When we were students at Tourgis Academy, I made the mistake of confiding in her about my relationship with Mr.Lawson, the predator who taught us music. I was so impressionable at the time and wasn’t getting attention from Mom and Dad.
He filled that gaping hole in my heart and took advantage. Months after things got sexual, my period stopped, and he invited me to his apartment one Friday night for a special dinner. The next day, I found out he’d tricked me into taking an abortion pill.
I didn’t understand what was happening until after I’d collapsed with painful cramps and started hemorrhaging. I begged him to call 911 but he said I would be fine in the morning. He only spoke up after I thought I was dying and tried to call Mom for help. The following week, I asked him to meet me in the roof garden to talk.
Let’s just say he fell to his demise.
Everyone believed Mr. Lawson’s death was a suicide until Myra called her sister, Martina, for advice and swore her to secrecy. At the time, Martina was a law student, and she promptly reported me to the police, leading to my arrest in the middle of Biology.
What happened next was a shit show that would have gotten me sent to jail if I hadn’t been thirteen. Mom and Dad got Dr. Saint to help me plead insanity, I got expelled, my juvenile record got sealed the day I turned eighteen, and I learned a painful lesson about keeping quiet.