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star-nova · 5 years

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The Lives of the RiffRaff: Elsie Bolshevik-Blood

We Are the RiffRaff Rickie Johnson-The Art of War Vera Sherwood-Little Sister Kali Muburu-Hair Tracy Kwan-Vergil Franz Fawke-Hecklers James Weaver-The Preacher Mamoru Hayagawa-Three Weddings Charmain Dekker-Frankfort Talia Santiago-Queen of the City Sophia Bolshevik-Elsie’s Boyfriend

On the way to the hospital, all I can think about is just how much blood there was.

Then after that, all I can think about is how I know exactly who did this to my sister, and that I was going to beat the living shit out of him if he dared to show his face again.

While we were growing up, our father had said, “You're Elsie's big sister, Sophia. You have to guide her and protect her no matter what.” In turn, I was told that as Sophia's little sister, I had to learn from her and let her teach me all of the things that she will learn. “Mind her when you can,” our father told me, “but remember that you have your own mind.” I took it to heart, and throughout our childhood my sister was the tower of my life. We were lucky enough to be the kind of sisters that were naturally close, looking out for one-another and trading our secrets and dreams.

Now here we are, on the road to the county hospital in Frankfort, with my big sister huddled up against me as if she, or I, would die if she dared to let go. She's still crying from every kind of pain it's possible for a human being to feel—in her body, her heart, her mind, and her soul. My sister had her entire being violated, and now I have to look after her.

Except I've already failed.

I brought the guy around. I left him alone with her so I could go get a stupid pizza. What the hell was I thinking?! Somebody get me a time machine, so I can go back to that moment and say, “Pizza's ordered. Let's all head out to pick it up. We can get Orange Julius too.” Sophia loves Orange Julius. There was an Orange Julius right across the street from the pizza place. We could all be playing Diablo 3 and sipping Orange Julius right now. Actually, let me go even further back in time. I'll go back to the arcade where I picked up that piece of shit. This time, I won't even look at him. I'll walk right past him and forget I ever saw him. He'll never even know I exist.

But I don't have a time machine. I just have my sister, holding on to me for dear life in the rear of Talia Santiago's Subaru. I just have her best friend, Ellia, sitting on her other side and holding on to her, saying nothing because there's nothing that she can say. I just have a trash bag with sticky, bloody shorts and panties wrapped up inside. We're not playing Diablo. We're not drinking Orange Julius. We're going to the hospital, where they'll ask us all too many questions. I'll have to talk for Sophia, because he stole her voice when he stole the rest of her. My sister will never be Sophia Katrina Bolshevik ever again.

But I will still be Elissandra Petra Bolshevik. I'll still be her sister, who will always look after her. Even though it is all my fault...

I was the only one allowed to sit with Sophia in the hospital, and then it was only because she refused to let me go and we confirmed that I was her sister. She was given a room and they set a folded blue exam gown on the bed beside her. “I'll back out so you can change,” I told her. But she shook her head and held my hand tighter. I didn't understand what was so hard about examining her in the nightgown we'd changed her into after we'd gotten her cleaned up.

“Sophia,” I said, “you're going to have to tell them who did it.”

“I...I can't.” She had decided that her voice was for me alone.

“I know who it was,” I told her, “but you have to tell them so he can't hurt anybody else.”

Suddenly, she was terrified. “How?!” she cried. “How do you know? You can't know, Elsie!” I think she would've jumped out of the bed and bolted if I hadn't been holding her.

“Of course I know,” I said. “Who else could it have been? Sophia...I'm so damn sorry.” I held her tighter and tried my hardest to keep my tears inside; this wasn't the time for my tears, it was the time for hers. “I shouldn't have left you with him. I shouldn't have brought him round at all.”

“You can't know!” Sophia said again. “He'll do something to you, Elsie! He'll hurt you!”

Jesus Christ, is that what he told her? Is that how he managed to make his way in? I wanted to see this fucker destroyed. I wanted him to bleed from every part of his body and for the pain to be so agonizing that he'd beg for death. I wanted him alive, because death would be too kind. I patted Sophia's head and told her, “He won't do a damn thing to me, Soph. I promise. He can't do anything to me.”

Sometimes we got scared at night when we were kids. I hated thunderstorms until I was six, and Sophia's imagination tended to go a little crazy so that she would sit up until almost midnight conjuring up all kinds of ghosts, ghouls, and monsters in the dark. When this happened, we'd sleep beside eachother, because the evils lurking in the dark couldn't get us if we were together.

One night right after I'd turned six, and Sophia was almost nine, it was storming outside. I climbed into Sophia's bed and laid my head against her shoulder. Sophia felt me there and opened one eye. “What?”

“It's the thunder monster again,” I'd said, moving in closer to her. “Don't let him get me, Sophia!”

Sophia put her arm around me, tucked me into her blanket, and said, “Thunder isn't a monster, Elsie. It's just sound.”

“It's his big feet stomping,” I told her.

“No it isn't,” she said. “We learned about thunderstorms in school.”

On that night, Sophia defeated my lifelong fear with nothing but simple facts. She weaved an amazing tale of lightning bolts and sound waves, electricity and sonic booms. My six-year-old mind was enchanted by the idea of those flashy lights being so powerful that they made sound—no other lights could do that. I fell asleep comforted by the lightning sounds and by my big sister, who had to be the smartest girl in the whole wide world. She was an amazing super-girl who could defeat anything with knowledge alone.

Now, the monster is real. But when I told her he couldn't hurt me, she looked at me like she could believe it. Her weapon against my childhood fears had relied on my ability to believe. I had believed her then, so she had to believe me now.

She told me his name.

But I already knew.

I had to go back to the waiting room while Sophia was being examined.

Charmain, Talia, and Ellia were still there. None of them had anything to say. I felt like they were expecting me to be the first to talk; after all, I was Sophia's voice now. But the words were crowded out by too many thoughts. I thought about policemen and court cases. She'd be expected to testify. She'd have to stand beside that piece of shit in court, while whatever sleazy lawyer he picked up would twist everything to make it sound like she had done something wrong. How could she testify when she wouldn't be able to talk? The court won't let me speak for her. I wasn't even there when it happened. She'd have to get a lawyer. We'd have to stay in Frankfort. The last thing I wanted was to stay in Frankfort, and yet I dreaded the all-seeing eyes of Tanager's population now more than ever. They would find out. Even if we kept it under maximum security lock-and-key, somehow they would find out. She'll be too different. Her entire demeanor will change and they'll know it's because something happened. They would want to know what it was, and when they don't know, they'll pretend they do. The speculations would start, and soon they would be accepted as fact no matter what they really were. It all weighed on me so much that I started to cry. That man had fucked everything up and it was all my fault.

Charmain put her hand on my shoulder. I looked at her and saw that she was crying too. Ellia slipped her hand through mine and she, too, was crying. Only Talia wasn't crying, and she slipped outside for a smoke because she didn't know what to do with crying people. I don't think Talia can cry.

Then the nurse called me back, said Sophia wanted to see me.

“Me too?” Ellia asked, but the nurse shook her head. “I'll ask,” she told her, “but she asked for her sister specifically.”

I went in. Sophia had been crying. She held out her hands for me and I took them. There was a plainclothes lady there with a notepad. She had a badge pinned to her chest. “Is she a cop?” I asked the nurse.

“I'm not a cop,” the lady said, shaking her head. “I'm the hospital's trauma counselor.”

I held Sophia close as the events of the night were reduced to clinical jargon: they said that Sophia had suffered “severe trauma to the cervix and the vaginal area that indicated forced penetration,” that she would have to stay for a few days while they “monitored her condition and facilitated her recovery,” that she would be visited daily by the lady with the notepad, finally that a call has been placed to the county police department. The words “county police department” were, oddly enough, the most comforting things I'd heard all day. Talia Santiago ate dinner with the county police department.

The first thing I thought to ask was, “Is she still bleeding?” It was the stupidest possible question, and I mentally slapped myself because Sophia wasn't of the mind to do it.

“There was some hemorrhaging,” the nurse said. “She's healing now, but we're going to keep an eye on her.”

“How long is it going to take her to heal?” I asked, then added, “We don't live here.”

The nurse gave me that look that nurses only give when they're about to tell you what you don't want to hear. But she only said, “It could take five days, it could take two weeks. Where do you live?”

“Tanager, West Virginia,” I told her.

“I'd make plans to stick around for a little longer,” the nurse said, as cold as any ER nurse. “If your sister presses charges, you're going to be building a case.”

A case. Lawyers and judges and courtrooms and everybody blaming and accusing and making excuses. What had happened to my sister would gain attention in Frankfort and in Tanager, whether we wanted it to or not. She wouldn't be allowed to lock it up and suffer in the comfort of her friends and family. I didn't want to cry in front of Sophia, who had much more of a right to cry than I did. But I couldn't just walk away from her either. She needed me more than little me had needed her on those nights of storms and monsters.

I asked the nurse and the counselor if they could send the others in, and if they could please leave us alone for a while. They didn't object. The counselor gave us both a half-hearted smile as she walked out. I took my big sister into my arms and we shared our tears.

The cops that did show up were not Santiagos. I hadn't seen any of them at Maven Whittaker's on that first day in Frankfort that seemed so far behind us now. They did seem to know Talia, but they eyed her with something like contempt rather than warm familiarity.

As I'd predicted, Sophia lost her voice completely when they tried to speak to her. Their arsenal of questions—Do you know the name of the man who did this to you? What did he look like? Was he a friend? Did you know him? Were you alone with him at the time?--was met with an impenetrable wall of silence. They grew increasingly irritated with every question she wouldn't answer, until finally, the bald-headed cop said, “Honey, we can't do anything with this guy if we don't even know who he is.” It was as if he was talking to a kid who refused to take a bath, and not a twenty-three-year-old rape victim traumatized into silence. I mean, what the hell did he expect from her? There was still a little bit of blood, for crying out loud!

“Patronize her more,” Talia spoke up. “She'll be all too thrilled to answer you then. Go ahead, keep on scolding her. I'm sure you'll get everything you need.”

I guess they really did know Talia. “Santiago,” the lady-cop said, “you intefere with this investigation and you'll see how well it ends for you. I don't care who your daddy is.”

“He left copious amounts of his DNA all over the place,” Talia went on in spite of Charmain and Ellia's attempts to hush her. “Take a look at her bloody shorts and figure it out your damn self.”

I didn't need her making everything worse. “I can tell you,” I spoke up, “if Sophia lets me.” I looked to Sophia for approval, but her eyes were wide with fear. “It's gonna be okay, Soph,” I tried to assure her, but I knew it wouldn't mean shit. That man had cast some kind of spell on her. She's such a tiny lady, and I had to kneel down in order to look right in her eyes. “He won't do a damn thing to me, Sophia. I'll be all right. You've gotta believe me, please.”

“Is that what he told you?” Baldy asked Sophia. “He told you he was going to hurt your sister if you said anything?”

I searched my sister's eyes and there it was, the trust. It was hiding way underneath all of her fear, meant only for me, and only I could see it. I turned to the officers and said, “Yes, he did tell her that.”

Baldy was about to say something else, but then the spell was broken. Sophia's tiny, terrified voice stammered out, “K...K-Kyle.”

Lady Cop pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down. “His name is Kyle?” she asked, with a combination of patience and eagerness for all of the unspoken truths. Sophia shrank back. She had said too much already. She looked to me, and I knew what I had to do.

“Kyle Solovski.” The name rolled off of my tongue a heavy boulder. “His name is Kyle Solovski. I knew him. I can tell you everything.” I looked to Sophia. She was pressed back against the pillow, scared that the very mention of the name would summon the monster to the room. I patted her and stood up from the bed. I looked to the others. Charmain's hands were over her mouth. Ellia took my place at the edge of the bed and wrapped her arms around her best friend. “Oh my god, Sophia...” She started to cry. Sophia was like a doll in her arms. She had no visible reaction.

But the look on Talia's face was something I'm not going to forget anytime soon. Somehow, while everybody else's emotions were all over the place throughout this entire ordeal, she had remained completely still and blank. But now, for the first time, there was something in her eyes. The rest of her hadn't changed, but there was something. As I walked out of the room with the officers to tell them everything I knew, Talia turned her head to look at me and I had to look away. I didn't know what that something was, but I didn't like it. It looked too much like blood...

Sophia was out of the hospital three days later.

They gave her instructions: make an appointment with your gynecologist, bring the paperwork from the hospital with you, here's a list of trauma counselors in your area, you should find one and see them every week, here's a list of crisis intervention services if you need them, test yourself for pregnancy in two weeks and test again three weeks after that, find yourself a good lawyer, start building up a case. The word “pregnancy” sent hot bile up my throat; if she was pregnant, he had hold of her forever. She would have to carry a creature made of his genetic material, his eyes, his ears, his face...the very idea of it made me want to break everything in my line of sight.

Sophia herself had no outward reaction. When she returned to the flat, she went right to our room, which was full of flowers and gifts sent by the Santiago family. There was a $40 gift card to Orange Julius in there, and I asked Sophia if it was okay to use it. She nodded, but her voice was all locked up again.

“I'll get us a pizza too,” I told her, and left her alone. Talia had gone out somewhere, but left the Subaru behind. “Tell Talia I borrowed her van,” I told Charmain and Ellia, who were sitting stone-faced in front of the TV. I knew they weren't going anywhere.

When I got back, everyone was exactly as I had left them. Sophia was lying on her stomach on the bed. I sat the pizza box down on the bedside table and set her Orange Julius on the pillow. “We should talk to Judge Whittaker,” I said.

“About what?” Sophia didn't look at me or at anything.

“He can help us find a lawyer,” I told her.

“I'm not pressing charges.” Sophia's voice was just barely above a whisper.

I felt like I'd been punched right in the gut. He was going to walk free. He'd get to sleep in a warm bed every night, walk the streets every day, passing by everyone around him who would never even know that he was a monster. He could destroy my sister's life and still go on to live his own. I was going to be sick. I knew that if I started crying, Sophia would think she had done something wrong. So I tried to swallow it all back with an Orange Julius and I did absolutely nothing.

We stayed in our room, choking back pizza and smoothies and not saying a word. I looked at all of the gifts from Talia's family and I thought about our own parents back in Mill Point. Were they going to find out? Would Sophia tell them? How the hell would they react? Did they have to know? Life had been so simple, now everything was a question. I looked to Sophia, and she looked like a doll with a blank face painted on. For the first time in my life, I couldn't read her thoughts. My sister had been a closed book to everyone but me. Now, even I was shut out, and it killed me with the worst pain I had ever felt. I needed to sleep in her bed tonight, like I did when we were kids and I was scared. I was terribly scared now, scared that I'd lost her.

Sophia must have dozed off. I nudge her and she doesn't react. I cover her up with the blanket and start cleaning up the drinks and the pizza. Somebody rings the doorbell—I know it's not one of Talia's brothers because they always bang on the door. Sophia stirs back to life then, and I say, “Be right back, kid” and go see who's at the door.

Sheriff Carlo Santiago is out there talking to Ellia. He looks over her head at me. “Hey, Elsie,” he says. “How's your sister doing?”

“'Bout as well as you'd expect,” I tell him. “What's up?”

“I just...I have a bit of news for you.” He eyes his daughter, lounging on the armchair with both feet propped up on the arm. “Mind if I come in?”

“Go ahead.” Talia nods and folds her hands over her chest.

Carlo steps in and Charmain scoots over on the couch to make room for him. I sit up on the arm beside her. Ellia stays by the door. In a dark corner of the hallway, I can make out Sophia's image. She doesn't want to be seen, and I don't let on that I see her.

Carlo passes his eyes over all of us. If he sees Sophia, he doesn't let on. “I just thought you all should know,” he says grimly, “that Kyle Solovski has been found dead. A man found him behind the old Clairmont theater and called us in. He'd been shot clean through the eyes—blood everywhere. We think he might've done it to himself.”

Dead. Found dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. The words spin around and around in my head. Kyle Solovski. Found dead. Shot. Blood. Blood everywhere. I lock eyes with Charmain, who mouths “Ta-li-a” and then quickly looks at her knees. Talia doesn't look at her father, or at us, or at anybody. She's suddenly very interested in something invisible directly in front of her nose. I remembered something, and I'm going to be sick. I have to go to the bathroom.

“Ex...excuse me,” I say, getting up. Carlo nods. I hurry to Sophia, and I find her paralyzed and pressed against the door to our room. I get down on the floor with her and hold her. “He won't ever hurt anybody, not ever again,” I say. “He'll never get to hurt another girl like he hurt you.” He isn't going to walk free. She doesn't have to press charges. There doesn't have to be court, or lawyers. Kyle Solovski was dead and gone the moment I spoke his name in front of everybody at that hospital. We think he might've done it to himself. Done it to himself. As far as the world was concerned, Kyle Solovski had shot himself. The truth was only for us to know...

The next day, Talia says we're going back to Tanager.

Nobody objects.

#Fiction by Me #The Lives of the RiffRaff #work in progress #writing

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