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junkyard behind Frank Dunn’s Auto Body to sleep in Nan’s old truck. She had taken it there in an attempt to get it running again, but since she’d found out it would take over two-thousand dollars to make that happen, it had stayed at Frank’s, untouched for almost a year.
    Past experience had taught me that the child welfare social worker types didn’t stake out kids for too long. Once they’d spent a solid twenty-four hours looking for you without any luck, they’d list you as a runaway and move on to the next unfortunate case. So I needed just one night away from Nan’s, maybe two, to make sure that meddling bitch Miss Thornton would be long gone before I went home. I checked the time on my watch. It was almost four in the morning. I figured I could get in another couple hours of undisturbed sleep, so I tucked myself in under my hoodie and closed my eyes.
    I tried to ignore the dust and pretend I was home in my bed at Nan’s. I curled up and had almost drifted back to sleep when I was startled by the same thunderous sound that had knocked me to my ass earlier. Careful not to be seen, I sat up and peeked over the dashboard. The yard motion light clicked on, and I saw two figures walking around in the night. They were too far away for me to see them clearly, but I heard a feminine laugh and the click-clack of heels, so one of them was probably a woman.
    I quietly sank down to the floorboard under the steering wheel and tried to make myself as small as possible. The last thing I needed was a breaking and entering charge. I think I had one of those already, anyway, and I knew that Frank Dunn wouldn’t be happy with me when he saw the trash can sized hole I’d cut in the fence in order to break into the yard.
    A solid five minutes passed before the weight of the truck I was in shifted to the driver’s side, and the unmistakable sound of moaning filled the silent night.
    Yes, it was definitely moaning, and it was close.
    The passenger side window became a wall of black leather. Metal grommets scratched at the glass each time the figure stirred.
    The moaning started moving... lower.
    I crunched myself up as small as I could, trying to make myself invisible. It was still dark out and my black hoodie covered most of me, so even if whoever it was could see through the dirty window, they would hopefully think I was just a bunch of random crap piled on the floor.
    The woman started to make exaggerated porn noises, larger- than-life sucking and groaning.
    Flashes of unwanted memories flooded my mind before I could attempt to push them out, images of the endless parades of bruised and naked bodies writhing against anyone and anything they could find. Piles of men and women littering the stained couches and floors, smearing the dripping blood from fresh needle wounds and opening scabs of older ones onto one another as they grunted and groaned like animals. The unconscious ones in the crowd were treated no differently than the conscious. Their wide-open mouths and lifeless eyes staring beyond the popcorn ceiling weren’t reason enough to stop fucking them. They were taken turns with, until someone noticed they didn’t have a pulse. I had witnessed more than one dead body being discarded from my parent’s trailer like an empty pizza box.
    Bile rose in my throat.
    The last memory that burst into my head was of the night I’d gotten the scars I kept covered. A burning took over my body when I thought of the sharpness of the knife, and the crazed look in my mother’s bloodshot eyes. My chest tightened, and I willed the memory to leave, but it was too late. I tried to take a deep breath to steady myself. Instead, I inhaled a dust cloud. I tried to stifle my cough, but instead I ended up choking. The woman outside shrieked at the same time, and I braced myself to be discovered.
    But, the woman only coughed and made a choking noise of her own. She cleared her throat and spat onto the pavement. “You were supposed to tell me