The Broken Sister (Sister #6) (2 page)

“HEY, SKANK. LOOK OUT!” The car with two guys swerved around her as the passenger stuck his head out of the window to yell. Kylie stuck her hands into her coat pockets and huddled deeper under it.

Tramp. Skank. Ho. Hooker. Slut. Bitch… Whore.

Kylie McKinley had been called one or more of these on many different occasions since her two and half years at Peterson College. The words rang through her head, tumbling around like dice on a craps table. She had been called such things by the very guys, or on a few occasions girls, she was sleeping with. It totally blew her mind how she was those things, when the person doing those acts with her wasn’t. She knew the scuttle that traveled around the school about her. She was easy. The girl to go to for a good time. She would do anyone, any time, for any reason.

Not true. But not totally un-true either.

She glanced over her shoulder as she crossed the street, her book bag bumping against her back as she rushed across before the next wave of cars came through. The day was cloudy and cold. Leaves blew in blustery gusts swirling up and falling down like forgotten confetti from a party. Her boots hit the sidewalk just as the breeze whipped over her, catching some frizzies off her scalp from her long hair, which she kept slicked back in a ponytail. She pushed at the stray hairs, trying to smooth them back into place. A voice was calling behind her again. This time no rude slang or names was shouted at her. Just her name.

“Ky! Wait!” It was Meredith. She smiled her greeting and they fell into step together, easy and without any drama or unease.

“Who was that yelling at you?”

Kylie sighed. Yes, so fun to relive the rude slurs she was called sometimes. “Just some asshole from last year.”

Meredith’s face crumpled. “When are you going to stop?”

“What? Stop with the boys? I wish I could, Mer. You know how much I wish I was actually a lesbian. I tried. Hard. I’m just not.”

Meredith shook her head and a reluctant laugh escaped her mouth, which was twisted up in a disapproving pucker. “Why do you have to be so difficult? Of course I didn’t mean that. I know you aren’t. I don’t expect you to. I meant letting these guys talk to you like that.”

“I don’t ‘let’ them. They just do. I have a target on my back. You know that. I’m considered one of
those
girls. One of the girls they talk to that way.”

“You don’t deserve it.” Meredith’s eyes shined with empathy. Kylie winced at the way Meredith took it all so seriously.

She put her hand to Meredith’s arm. “It’s okay. I really don’t care what they think.”

“Why does it happen?”

She shrugged. “How does a girl become a social pariah and almost blackballed? Screw the wrong guy. Or actually in my case, be careful who else wants to.”

“What?”

“I slept with a guy who had a girlfriend, a sorority sister. He was some big shot in the fraternity, I had no idea. She didn’t take too kindly to me and blamed me for what he did with me. She’s been pretty awful since and she convinced her sisters to join in the target practice. And she also encouraged the fraternity of the guy I had sex with, hence why every guy in that particular house thinks they can call me whatever they want. It means nothing to them. I’m like free wild game to be shot at.” Kylie shrugged her shoulders after the explanation.

“How can things be like this nowadays? How have we gone so backwards?”

“Maybe we never really went forward.”

Meredith shook her head. “It would have been so much easier if you’d just have fallen in love with me. I’d never treat you like this.”

Kylie squeezed Meredith’s arm with a small smile. “I know. I wish so too.” Sophomore year she’d hooked up with Meredith at the start of the year, hoping to avoid the slurs and crap like those that were just hurled at her. But it wasn’t for her, no matter how much she wanted it to be. Unfortunately, Meredith had started having strong feelings for her and still did. They were both honest with each other, still friends, even if Kylie couldn’t return the feelings. “Where are you headed?”

“Another sociology class.”

“I have a biology lab. I’ll see you, okay? Don’t let that crap get to you. You’re better than that.”

Yeah right I am
, Kylie immediately thought, but kept the obvious to herself. Meredith got upset if she spoke the truth. Kylie smiled and hugged Meredith. She held on for a second longer than necessary. It always tugged at Kylie’s conscious. She hated to hurt Meredith. But there wasn’t any way to force herself into loving girls.

She sighed as she turned down the sidewalk, bisecting the grass that led up to the main quad of the campus. Brick buildings loomed over her on both sides and the center building she was walking towards had a giant, impressive dome of glass over the top of it that housed the school’s library. Ivy trailed up the sides of the buildings, the only color besides the grass as the November landscape was totally barren and gray. Leaden sky hung almost to the ground and the trees were bare skeletal sticks reaching far up over the walkway. She breathed in the cold air, which was sharp over her lungs.

She deserved better than that.
How did Meredith figure? Kylie couldn’t fathom how Meredith of all people could believe that. She’d been there, and witnessed some of Kylie’s worst behavior. She’d slept with a lot of guys. A lot. During her freshman and sophomore years. She had done just about every drug that was available to try. It helped soothe her nerves to deal with college life. It wasn’t an easy life for Kylie.

But she didn’t quit. Nothing yet had made her quit school and she was proud of that.

She sighed as she finally entered her sociology class. What most didn’t know about her was that she was pretty intelligent. Her grades were low and her school work wasn’t stellar, but the concepts and learning? That all got in her head. She wasn’t much of a performer. Or into grades. But she was sure she’d graduate next year. That was something.

She slipped into a seat in the back. Unseen. Mostly ignored. She wasn’t all that popular. Not in the daylight or during class times. She was overlooked, ignored, whispered about. She now was a social outcast, way more so than last year. All due to the sin of sleeping with the wrong girl’s boyfriend. She was startled at first by how another female could be as evil as the one who was currently spreading gossip about her.

She listened the entire class period as the female professor talked about the merits and demerits of the media’s impact on society. They had a paper due on it by the end of the week. Kylie didn’t take any notes, but she quietly took in the professor’s entire lecture. She got up minutes before the end and slipped out to miss the crowd. She exited the building and fumbled around in her bag to find her smokes. She found a loose cigarette and lit up, inhaling and exhaling as she sighed with pleasure. While getting the cigarette all arranged, she wasn’t watching where she was going and she managed to trip over a root that had pushed up under the concrete to make an uneven lip about three inches up.

She dropped her cigarette and bag as she stumbled right into someone walking the opposite direction. She started to mutter an apology, glancing up at who she had nearly shoved herself into, when her thoughts scattered like the leaves around her feet. Her cigarette continued to smolder on the path. She stared at the guy who had caught her, his arms still under hers, almost cradling her to hold her steady. It normally would have been considered a chivalrous thing to do. He smiled at her, his white teeth shinning and dimples deepening. “You okay?” He nodded to where her foot had turned weird. He cocked his head to the side, considering her. His eyes roaming her face. “Kylie, isn’t it? I know you, right?”

Her hand started to shake. Her stomach twisted in revulsion… and fear. So much fear. It made cold sweat break out over her entire body. Her skin was hot and cold with stickiness. It was instantaneous
. It’s his smell.
His cologne. It came off his skin in a strong aroma. It was his sickly-sweet cologne smell that she remembered the most clearly, more than anything from
that night
. As she and Tommy had stood talking and flirting, she had been overwhelmed by the strong scent of him.

Thomas Tamasy. Tommy, to most. She had dreaded this moment: running into him around campus. So far she had rarely. If she saw him, she avoided him. She didn’t go to parties at his fraternity anymore. Once, in sophomore year, she had walked into her chemistry class and he was seated there. She’d walked out and dropped the class. She’d done everything to avoid being close to him. But now? Here she was in his arms. It had happened.

She snatched her arms from his grasp. She shook her head in acknowledgment he’d gotten her name right as she kept her face down and gaze glued to the ground at their feet.

He leaned down to get right in her line of vision. He smiled again. Full charm on. He was like that. Outgoing. Life of the party. Flirt and friend to all. “Hey, didn’t we… hang out some? Last year?”

Tears threatened to blind her. Her eyes ached. They were burning with the unshed salty tears. She kept her head down. She shut her eyes to keep them in and the images out. She never dreamed he’d bring this up. “Maybe…” she mumbled, barely coherent.

Hanging out? That’s what he thought it was? That’s what he called it? He raped her. Of all the things that happened to her since school started, much of her behavior and actions were self-induced, but she hadn’t deserved what this boy had done to her. But then again, she wasn’t entirely sure of the facts. She couldn’t one hundred percent say.

So she never did. She didn’t tell anyone. She went to the campus clinic and monitored herself for sexually transmitted diseases and had taken medication to make sure she didn’t get pregnant. That was the only medical help she got.

But she was eighty-five percent completely sure he had raped her while she’d been passed out.

But then, here he was, all smiles on his handsome, all-American, pretty face. Maybe she had it all wrong. He had even brought it up. So if he had raped her or at the very least taken advantage of her, why would he bring it up? Could this be real? What she pictured about him? She didn’t remember much about that night… could she be wrong? That night was fuzzy. So fuzzy that she could not for sure tell anyone what happened or what it felt like. She had clearer memories of the evening when she got to the fraternity and an ABC party was raging. She knew an ABC party meant to wear
anything but clothes
but she hadn’t done so. People were dressed in duct tape, newspaper, pillows somehow plastered in the right places, and sheets. It was funny. A prank. Fun. She had gone there because she had been admiring Tommy, who was a year older than her, ever since she first spotted him on campus her second week at Peterson. She’d made it her business to follow him and figure out where he was going to be. She figured out he was pledging the biggest fraternity on campus and made it her entire focus to be at those parties. To be one of their groupies. But she’d held back, kept herself away from Tommy. She’d been unsure he’d be interested in mousy, skinny, freaky her. She was sure he would not. So she admired from a distance, tongue-tied in wonder if he ever even passed by her.

She had sex with a friend of his. And then hung with that friend another night and Tommy had come to the party. That’s all she wanted: him. Her sole focus was on him. She wasn’t sure why exactly. Maybe his looks. Sure. But there were a lot of cute guys at college. Maybe it was because he was unattainable for someone like her, so she enjoyed the fantasy of it.

She had gone to the party for Tommy, and ended up getting him. Just not in a way she had ever considered getting it.

But he was staring at her, now over two years later, and a small smirk started to climb up his cheeks. Oh yes, he was remembering it. He was remembering who she was and how he knew her and… most likely, what he did to her that only he could remember. Because Lord knew, no matter how hard she tried to remember, for she had desperately tried to get the images to form and take shape in her brain and give her some idea of what had happened to her that night. She could not figure it out. She could not play the picture she so knew happened to her.

But he remembered.

His smiled changed, his eyes gleamed and his fingers shot out to dig into her wrist. How had she not seen the Mr. Hyde behind his gorgeous and fake Dr. Jekyll on the outside? He liked what he was remembering. Kylie gasped and tugged her arm back. She jerked her book bag back up onto her shoulder, tapped the cigarette with her foot, and then simply passed around him. Running away.

She was shaking. Her entire body was trembling and her stomach was gushing up acid into her esophagus. She made it towards the outer perimeter of campus before she ducked behind a tree and collapsed onto her knees, catching herself on her hands as she started throwing up all over the grass. Snot streamed down her face to mix with the bile now heaving from her.

When she was done, when there was nothing left for her stomach to spew out of her, she fell back away from it to her butt and pulled her knees to her chest, burying her face in her knees.

She had tried so hard to avoid him. She had succeeded thus far. She had started to gain some of her confidence back. She’d quit doing the drugs she’d used, at first to try and block out that something happened to her, and later, to maybe try and tap into it. As if while high she could flush out the memories that had to be lurking somewhere up in her mind. But no. Nothing. Other than how she woke that morning with the absolute assertion something very bad had taken place.