“I can’t believe that just happened,” Tiara whispered. “I can’t believe any of this is happening. Why would my mother send me here? Why would she sign her rights over to this place?”
“I’m sure she doesn’t know what kind of sick pervert Doctor Pierce is. Nobody does,” Elaya said.
“We have to tell somebody,” Tiara told her.
“Already thought of that,” Elaya said sadly. “But Doctor Pierce is way too good at covering his tracks. He’ll put a bunch of stuff in our records and make us out to seem like we are crazy and hallucinating. He’ll have us looking like we made the whole shit up. Trust me, he already killed that bit of hope I had, and he’ll kill yours too. The truth of the matter is, he’s right. He owns us, and there ain’t shit we can do about it. Who’s going to believe us? We’re juveniles, so that doesn’t make us very credible. And who would we even tell in the first place? You act like we can just leave or make phone calls when we want.”
“So what . . . We are just are supposed to deal with this shit?”
Elaya sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “What else can we do? We don’t got nobody on the outside that cares about us. Plus, we ain’t even got no way to get in contact with them if we did have somebody. Doctor Pierce knows what he’s doing with every girl in this place.”
Elaya felt bad that she was bursting Tiara’s bubble, but she had been suffering in here long enough to know that there was no way out. When she first got raped, she was hopeful, like Tiara was right now. She sat there night after night putting different plans together on how she could somehow get out of the facility or how she could expose Doctor Pierce. But as time went on, she realized she was in a lose-lose situation no matter what. She had already tried to think of a way that she could escape, but none of her plans were foolproof, and they all led to dead ends. She wished that she could give Tiara hope, but she couldn’t. There was nothing she could say that would make their situation any less grim than it already was. The only thing that she could promise Tiara was that it was going to get worse and more frequent, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that out loud. For tonight, she felt it was best to just let Tiara get some rest.
“At least . . . At least we have each other now,” was the best that Elaya could come up with.
Surprisingly, that sentence did seem to put Tiara at peace. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Chapter 13
After Tiara’s first “session” with Doctor Pierce he started seeing her more frequently; sometimes even three times a week. He told her that she just had a sexual aura about her, and he couldn’t stay away. He said that women older than her would kill to have the ass and hips that she had. He drugged her up and did whatever he wanted to her body for hours at a time. The things he did to her made her hate herself. She hated the way her body reacted to the acts of cruelties. It got to the point where she couldn’t even stomach to look at herself in the mirror. She never had an appetite but was forced to eat to maintain a certain weight that Doctor Pierce liked her at. Before she knew it, an entire month had passed, but it felt like an entire lifetime. She’d stopped crying herself to sleep only because being in her room with Elaya was the only part of the day she looked forward to. The two of them had many things in common, from their attitude all the way down to their tastes in music. Also, neither one of them could remember a time where they were truly happy.
During the day when Tiara wasn’t talking to Elaya or in the library reading, she was listening to the chatter of the institution workers. She quickly figured out how Doctor Pierce was getting away with sexually assaulting almost every young girl there. He had all of his workers on payroll, and they were getting a lot of perks for keeping his dirty little secrets. She was just glad that she had Elaya there to keep her sane and together. They bonded through their suffering. They both felt like they were orphans, and they both hated their mothers. Despite what they were going through in the facility, they both had hopes and plans for their lives . . . if they ever made it out. They shared many of the same goals, and if you just sat in on a random conversation of theirs, you would never be able to guess that they were suffering or that they were going through their own personal hells from how they spoke so positively and confidently about their futures. The girls had learned to rely on and cope with each other to get them through their rough times.
One night, though, Tiara knew she had finally had enough when Elaya was thrown back in the room bleeding from between her thighs. Tiara threw herself on the floor where Elaya lay in a fetal position wearing nothing but her nightgown.
“It hurts, Ti Ti!
