The end-of-year formal fell on a Friday in November, the same week the flyers had already turned half the town against me.
Vanessa had been talking about it since October, the night she and Damian were supposedly going to make things official. I told myself firmly it was none of my business now who he went with, or whether he went at all.
I’d promised Mrs Abernathy back in September, long before any of this, that I’d stock the family table for the night, coffee and slices for the parents and little ones who came every year to watch the students arrive under the gym lights before the doors closed to anyone over eighteen. It was one of the few good traditions this shared, complicated campus had, and I didn’t have it in me to let her down on top of everything else.
Noah came with me. I had no one to leave him with on a Friday night, and he liked watching the older kids arrive in their borrowed suits nearly as much as he liked complaining about the cold while we did it.
By eight the crowd outside had thinned. Students filed into the gym in ones and twos, the bass already thumping faintly through the walls, and I turned to pour another flask of coffee and looked up to find the space beside the table empty.
“Noah?”
Nothing. I told myself he’d wandered off to look at the fairy lights strung along the hedge, that he was six and easily distracted and probably twenty feet away crouched over something shiny. I checked the hedge. I checked the car. I checked the toilets by the hall, twice, my voice climbing higher each time I said his name.
By the time I’d circled the whole lit half of the grounds, the panic had gone past reasoning and into something with teeth. The formal noise fell away behind me as I moved further from the gym, past the fairy lights and the music, into the part of campus that had no reason to be occupied on a Friday night: the equipment sheds, the old maintenance yard, the pool block with its doors chained shut for winter.
I don’t know what made me go toward the pool block specifically. Some instinct, maybe. Some old animal part of me that knew before the rest of me did.
I didn’t hear them until it was too late. A hand closed hard over my mouth from behind. Another wrenched my arm up between my shoulder blades. Something hit me, once, viciously, against the side of my skull, and the last thing I registered before the world tilted and went dark was a voice I recognised, high and slurred with too much to drink, laughing.
I came back to myself in pieces: a cold concrete floor, chlorine and old rubber matting, the muffled thud of the formal’s bassline reaching even here, distant and absurd, a party going on a few hundred metres away while I lay bleeding on a pool deck.
There were four of them. Vanessa, still in her formal dress, ice-blue satin gone grey with dust at the hem, one strap torn loose off her shoulder and her hair coming down out of whatever it had been pinned into three hours earlier. And three boys from the basketball team I half recognised from the courts, all of them loud with drink, all of them past the point where anyone’s better sense was going to talk them down.
Noah. The thought arrived before anything else could, sharper than the pain in my skull, and I twisted to look for him and couldn’t find him in the dark and nearly screamed his name before one of the boys clamped a hand over my mouth.
I tried to move and found my limbs unwilling, the room tilting sideways every time I attempted to focus. Hands, too many hands, pulled at my clothes, at my hips, and I understood, with a horror that cut straight through the fog, exactly what they meant to do to me before anyone came looking.
I didn’t have the strength to fight it. I only had enough left to pray, with everything in me, that Noah was somewhere too far away in that dark building to see what was happening to his mother.
I did not know Damian was already crossing the dark half of the campus at a speed no formal-goer would ever have believed of him.