I couldn’t answer. I could barely keep upright. If I tried to move, I was certain that my legs would give out beneath me.
The phone rang.
We both looked over at it.
“Well, shit, that spoiled the mood,” he said. “I should get going anyway. Think about what I said. Think about it a lot. Don’t think about anything else. The next time you see me, it won’t be another warning. It will be the beginning of the most nightmarish, horrific experience you can possibly imagine.”
The phone stopped ringing.
The man lowered the gun.
“Nice to meet you in person,” he said. “Gerald told me a lot about you.”
He walked out of the living room and into the kitchen. A moment later, I heard him open and close the back door.
My legs gave out beneath me. I collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath.
My lungs began to burn. I really couldn’t breathe.
Oh my God, was I going to die right here on my living room floor? I tried to calm myself down, to take a slow, gentle breath, but I couldn’t make it work.
I had to get up. I couldn’t let Mom come home and find me like this. I’d immediately be upgraded from talking to a shrink to being locked away in an asylum.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I managed to take a shallow breath. Then another. Then another.
Okay, good. I wasn’t going to die here.
I crawled over to the couch and managed to climb up onto it. Not surprisingly, I was sweating like I’d run around the block with a high fever.
I closed my eyes, focused on my breathing, and tried to calm down.
A couple of minutes later, I figured I was as calm as I could possibly get, given the circumstances.
There was no way I could convince myself that this was good, but it definitely made things simpler, right? No more wondering if Mr. Martin was bluffing. Everything was very straightforward: If I went after Mr. Martin, this psychopath would come after me and my parents.
I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up.
Puking on the living room couch would not be a good idea. I staggered out of the living room, down the hallway, and into the bathroom, where I almost made it to the toilet before vomiting. The second batch made it into the toilet, and then I crouched there for a while, coughing and spitting.
At least the bathroom had a tile floor. Much easier to clean up.
The phone rang while I was wiping up the generous portion of barf with toilet paper. It was most likely Tina. I didn’t want to answer until I’d cleaned up the bathroom—which had stench that would make your eyes water right now—so after flushing the tissue, I wiped it down with a wet rag, and then sprayed Lysol around the room. If Mom got home before the aroma faded, she’d probably think I was trying to hide the smell of marijuana, but that was better than her suspecting the truth.
I walked out of the bathroom as the phone rang again. This time I answered. “Hello?”
“Hello, Curtis.” It was most definitely not Tina.
“Uh, hi, Mr. Martin.” I thought the phone receiver might slip out of my hand.
“Did you have an interesting talk with my friend?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he make his point very clear?”
“Uh-huh. It was already clear, though. I don’t know why they came to talk to you, but it wasn’t because of me.”
“I believe you.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you scared right now, Curtis?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to really think hard about how frightened you are. Burn it into your memory. Because the agreement that you and I have isn’t just for the next few days, or weeks, or months, or years. This is for the rest of our lives. And so when you start to feel comfortable, like maybe you might not be in danger any more, I want you to remember exactly how you feel in this very moment. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Really glad. I’ll let you go now. You probably have homework.”
Mr. Martin hung up.
I hung up as well. The receiver had a thick sheen of perspiration on it, so I wiped it off with the bottom of my shirt. And to think, for a while this had been a pretty good day.
The phone rang again. Was it Tina this time, or more taunting from Mr. Martin?
“Hello?”
“Hi, Curtis. It’s Tina.”
“Hi.”
“I tried to call earlier but you didn’t answer, and then the line was busy.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry.”
“Are you okay? You don’t sound okay.”
“I’m not very okay, no.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You tell me what you found out first, though I pretty much already know.”
“Gerald Martin was taken in for questioning but he wasn’t arrested. Apparently he’s been a suspect the entire time but they don’t have enough evidence to charge him.”
“Yep. I knew that.”
“Now tell me what’s wrong.”
I told her about how my last ten minutes had gone. I almost left out the part about the man threatening to rape my mom while I watched, but no, Tina needed to know just how depraved these men were, since I was going to continue to insist that we couldn’t be together outside of school.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“But he didn’t hurt you?”
“Not physically, no. Mentally, I’m pretty much insane now.”
“At least you can joke about it.”
“That wasn’t really a joke.”
“So what’s your next step?” Tina
