(to read Part Three, click here)

Susan noticed her feet again. Running around outside in the cold rain without shoes negated any healing effects of the vibrating foot bath. After Ronnie left her behind at the front door and bolted upstairs, she barely made it to the landing before she had to stop.

She leaned hard on the rail and drew a few deep breaths. “You’re getting too old for this impulsive shit,” she said to herself.

“Mom! She’s not online anymore!” Ronnie yelled from his room.

She groaned. “Hold on.” She slowly made her way up, using the railing like a crutch.

The look on Ronnie’s face reminded her of the time he said goodbye to a childhood friend in 6th grade. It had been hard for him, because by that age kids had formed cliquès, and he kept a few close friends rather than socializing in large groups. Although she had asked herself and Ronnie several times over the past year, again she wondered, Why hasn’t he heard from her at all? She didn’t seem to blame him for the accident. It’s like she and her mom just disappeared.

“She’s gone,” Ronnie said. “When I got here, I saw the message you said she sent, and then this.” He pointed at the computer monitor.

Her rain-soaked bangs not quite long enough to tuck behind her ears, Susan held them aside with one hand while she read.

“‘I gotta go.’ That’s it?” she said. “I’m sure she’ll be back. Just e-mail her.”

Ronnie was already on it. He pulled up his Yahoo! account and opened the message generated by Trena’s comment. Susan read the reply he typed.

“Trena. It’s me, Ronnie. I’m glad you found me! How are you? I have so many questions, I don’t know which one to ask first, so I’ll let that wait until I hear back from you.”

He went on to type about things that had happened since her departure.

——-

David sat on the toilet in his one-bedroom apartment, reading PC Magazine, trying not to think about that night’s work. He tried to wonder why the computer rag’s cover shouted, “How to pick the perfect HDTV” in bold red letters, but his mind kept wandering.

The big man’s declaration, “sounds like we got her, fellas,” kept echoing in his mind, along with, “Jerry, you go tell Anthony I want him workin’ this one.” Doing what?

His eyes wandered to the right as he thought about it, his gaze finally landing on the clothes hanging nearby. The bathroom would be considered spacious if it didn’t double as a walk-in closet.

A rhythmic thumping noise caught his ear. He finished up and walked through the closet to the kitchen, following the noise to the small corner where his space-saver washer and dryer stood. Something in the washer was out of balance. Something in there is always off balance.

David never could get things just right and keep them that way.

Not anymore. I have to warn the kid, or the girl. Or both. “But that money sure could help me get out of this cracker box apartment.”

Nope. Not gonna sell out this time. He reached into the dryer and grabbed a wet clump of jeans, then moved them to the other side. After he shut the lid, the washer whirled into action.

——-

Ronnie clicked the Send button on his Yahoo! mail. He put his head in his hands and tried to imagine how much courage it must have taken Trena to try to contact him. He hadn’t told his mom that she was in the Witness Protection Program, which had made it hard for her to understand why he held out hope that Trena might still want to talk to him.

She finally tries and I’m out in the woods with those losers.

“Son of a bitch!” Ronnie yelled.

He slammed the computer mouse on the desk and stood, kicking his chair over behind him. He stomped and squished his way to his balcony and slid the glass door so hard it smacked the door jamb. Enraged at his bad luck, he raised his foot and kicked the rail with his heel. The metal protested with a creak and a clang.

“Ronnie!” Susan said. “Stop being destructive. I’m not paying for another of your outbursts.”

Ronnie knew what she meant. A few months before, he had walked out on the patio and picked up a two-by-four, then proceeded to smash a bird feeder. He argued with his mom that no birds ever used it, anyway, but she said that wasn’t the point.

This time, she used the same excuse for him.

“I know your hormones are off the charts at this age, but you can’t break stuff every time you’re upset.”

“I’m not just upset, mom. I almost killed her, and then she ran off. I didn’t hear from her for over a year, mom. A year!”

“It wasn’t your fault, son.” Susan took a breath, sighed, lowered her voice. “You sound like you’re in love with her or something.”

“That’s not it. You know that. I just feel bad about what happened, and I thought we were friends.”

He was about to cry, and he was mad at himself for that, too. Stupid, stupid! Although Trena would be 13 to his 16 now, he still found abhorable the idea of them as a couple. When he’d met her and tried to make out with her, she was 12, and he couldn’t forgive himself for that. He’d let his desire get out of control, and she had paid the price instead of him.

He looked down at his crotch. “Sometimes I wish I could just cut this fucking thing off! I can’t even think straight sometimes,” he said. He put both hands palms-down on the rail and rested his forehead on them. Damn, my shoes are ruined.

“Whoa, buster, you want to hang onto that. Trust me. A teacher might hit on you one day, and then where would you be? I’m pretty sure you’d get a zero.”

“Quit trying to make me laugh, mom.” He chuckled, then wondered if other guys’ moms were twisted perverts.

“Besides, your grandfather’s coming into town tomorrow, I need you to be focused on him. Trena will try again.”

“You think she will?” he asked.

“I know it. You’re irresistible.”

——-

Trena sat on her bed, in the duplex she and her mom rented, trying to figure out a way to leave her house without the strange guy following her. He’d been at it for about a week, always skulking in the shadows and around corners, and tonight after she left the library was no different. She didn’t know who he was or what he wanted, but she knew it must have something to do with Larry.

She wasn’t supposed to sit without a backrest more than absolutely necessary, but sometimes she was willing to endure the pain to plop down on her bed and fold her legs up to read a few pages of her Harry Potter book.

This time, it wasn’t her pain that kept her from completely escaping into the wizard’s world.

She had tried to contact Ronnie, a risky move for someone in her position. To avoid leaving tracks on the library’s computers, she ran her Web browser from a USB key. Nothing was written to the hard drive, and when she finished she simply unplugged it and left with her privacy in her pocket.

It had ended sooner than she had hoped. Ronnie hadn’t replied to her anonymous comment on his blog nor a web chat. Maybe he’s not home tonight. She found that difficult to believe, because during the time that she lived across the parking lot from him, his bedroom light burned into the late hours almost every night. After 10 minutes of waiting for a reply to her chat, she heard the librarian’s final call for checkout. Trena had to give it up for the night.

She let the hardbound book fall to the bed. Should I give it up for good? she wondered. “Where are you, Ronnie?” She had failed at contacting Ronnie online, but she knew where he lived. If she could just get to him somehow, then she could share everything with him.

She wanted to tell him that she was healing. Only on long trips to the mall did she have to take her wheelchair, and she pushed it more than she rode in it. He would like hearing that she wasn’t the same broken little girl he had left for a moment in the hospital, only to return and find her room empty.

Perhaps vainly, she also hoped that he might notice other things that no longer looked like a little girl. She was taking on a more womanly shape, something her mother noticed and complimented. Despite her back problems, she was taller.

She smiled as she recalled the trouble their height difference caused on the night of her accident. The movies never showed things like that, so at first when Ronnie kept sliding higher, then lower, craning his neck different ways to keep kissing her, she wasn’t sure what he was doing. She finally understood when she felt something firm against her. It embarrassed her, but he was older and cute and she suddenly felt like a woman.

Then, just as quick, he stopped and tried to rush her out of there.

No other boys seemed to notice her then or now. When Larry’s pervert friends used to look at her and make her feel dirty (and a little excited), Larry didn’t even tell them to stop. “May he rot in Hell,” she said. So far in their new life, her mom hadn’t brought home anybody at all, and after what Larry put them through, Trena was sure it couldn’t get any worse.

(to be continued)