Chapter 53: Regroup

Juanita, Mary and Tonya were entering their homes as Rachel was upstairs stepping out of Jorge’s room. Thus when Rachel leaves the house, she is met with an empty street. She would have preferred it this way.

Running a gauntlet of emotions, she finds herself needing bring herself down from them. In the least, it has been a long and trying day. The walk to the mall did not clear her mind, which will be made worse if she meets up with the girls she got away from.

She makes it to the block before the mall area, where the busses go to and from the hospital area. Since there are no lights but a four-way STOP signs, she stops at the corner and looks around for traffic. A bus pulls up to its stop across the street, making Rachel wait for it to leave. When it does, Wandaline, Rachel R. and Grace were across the street from her, looking dead at her as she does of them.

With little traffic as there is in Pouncefeild, they all cross the street; Wandaline, Rachel R. and Grace towards Rachel; and Rachel to the opposite caddy-corner of the intersection. They stop in the middle of the intersection grid.

“Where are you going?”, Rachel R. asks in an annoyed tone.

“None of your business.”, Rachel says as she makes her way around them to the corner she had targeted. In a few seconds they all get there, stopping on the sidewalk’s concrete corner.

“Now what’s going on? You left us on the beach during a storm and...”, Rachel R. started to say but is interrupted.

“I got home, alright! And Jorge and Francis got busted fucking in my house by Grandmother, Dr. Leary, (pointing at Wandaline) your mother and (pointing at Rachel R.) your mother.”, Rachel tells her.

“That’s impossible! Mom’s at work in New York City!”, Rachel R. says.

“Oh yeah? You got a cellphone, call your home.”, Rachel tells her.

Rachel R. does as she is told and calls her home. After a couple of rings, the phone on the other end is answered. “Hello. Mom? I’m with Grace and Wandaline, OK. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”, she says on her side of the conversation.  Closing the cellphone and puts it in her bag before looking at her name sake. “Alright. Something is going on, I have to go but this is not over. Not by a long shot.”

Rachel R. walks across the street and walks up the block to her house in a slightly hurried pace, leaving Grace and Wandaline behind. Before the others can say anything to her, Rachel throws a similar comment at Wandaline.

“You should be going home too and check on your mother.”, Rachel tells her.

“I’ll be round tomorrow morning for you then.”, Wandaline says before walking away from Rachel and Grace. After seeing her walk away past a block, Grace turns to Rachel.

“We,  she most of all, was trying to help you.”, Grace tells her.

“You all, especially her, can not help me. Not after being raped. You would not understand what I went through to help me.”, Rachel tells her angrily.

“You don’t know me to say that.”, Grace responses in the same tone, “If I was raped, I keep it a secret from everybody. I do know what it is to be held down by force and to do things that I would not normally do. I do know that it is like to have my clothes torn off me while being forced, to be felt up roughly, to have my hair pulled to make me face something I did not want to face, to cry ‘Please Stop!’ but it continues. So don’t tell me that I don’t know because I do.”

Rachel stands there somewhere between miffed and awe. But her mind has been already set to her original mind set.

“You can hold it in or you can talk about it. Either way in the end you need to deal with this on your own. You think Fernando would want you to be a stupid bitch? He does not know what happened, you are trying to keep him from knowing. Now he has another sister instead of a brother. What is he going to think?”, Grace adds on to the comments.

It makes Rachel think. The rape was not her fault, but almost everything else was. And it makes her think that its time to uncover the cover up she has created, and maybe apologize to all involved. But she cant, for she is not allowed home until 6o’clock in the minimum. And perhaps not after she gets home because the first person she is to apologize to is sleeping for another 24 hours. ‘What have I done?’ she thinks to herself.

“You’re coming with me.”, Rachel tells Grace as she grabs onto her wrist and starts hauling her towards the direction of the mall.

It took almost half a block for pulling back and complaining for Grace to get her attention. “You mind!”, Grace yells and manages to yank her arm from Rachel’s grasp.

This causes Rachel to stop and turn to face her.

“If you are not going to push me off the edge of the safety barriers, consider this a date. Movie and a dinner, you and me.”, Rachel grabs her wrist again and hauls her the remaining block and a half to the mall.

End of Chapter 53