Author Games: Red Room

Task Six: Winona Taylor

She met the love of her life while waiting for a train back to her mother's apartment. It was 11:11 on New Year's Eve and she was trying to make it home before the ball dropped. As usual, the MBTA was out to get her and she had been waiting for what felt like an eternity when she saw him in his worn-out jeans and Real Friends tee-shirt, seemingly immune to the mind-numbing chill of that Boston winter. He was beautiful in a way that boys weren't supposed to be and he smelled like spearmint gum and marijuana when he leaned in close to ask her if she knew when the next train would arrive. She didn't but he didn't seem to mind all that much. They ended up taking am Uber together when it became clear that the train was never coming. It was the first and only time that Win went home with somebody that she didn't feel obligated to have sex with.

His mother named him Jude after the patron saint of lost causes and because of this, Win knew that this boy would save her life. She had largely abandoned religion at this point in her life— or rather, it had abandoned her— but he made her feel holy. He told her that he grew up in a rough neighborhood in New York City but never told her which one, only that he had left and never turned back when he got his acceptance letter to Boston College. He was alone there; his mother was dead and his father would rot in prison for shooting her nine times in the chest when she finally built up the courage to leave him after eighteen long, miserable years together. They were high when he told her this and she cried because he cried. Win never told him why she understood his pain, only that she did. They were the same kind of fucked up and she fell in love with him without even knowing why.

The last time Win saw him, she was half-drunk, half-dressed, and in her dorm room with a man old enough to be her father. Jude had come to California to surprise her. She knew that it had been a mistake to bring someone back to her place but she'd needed the money. And she needed to feel something. In the end, she always found a way to blame her mistakes on the emptiness that she felt whenever she wasn't sleeping around. It was the only thing that made her feel alive. Jude didn't know anything about it until that day and once he did, he didn't feel any need to stick around. She was, in his words, beyond his help. Win spent all her time trying to forget the way that he looked at her then as if he didn't even know who she was. He didn't, he never really had, and so her tears and pleas meant nothing to him because they were coming from a complete stranger. When she returned to Boston for the summer, she did not see him and she was grateful for it.

And yet, she chose him over her own mother, just as she had a year before on New Year's Eve.

The words stuck in her throat at first, they felt bitter on her tongue. Win could not believe that she was capable of such betrayal and yet, she knew that she would do it over and over again if it meant not losing the great love of her life again. Julie's eyes were glassy and red-rimmed when their captors picked her up and took her away, meekly protesting and still hazy from whatever sedative they'd used to get her there. She wished that she felt more for what she'd just done to the woman who gave her life but after everything she'd been through, the only thing on her mind was the relief she felt when the door slammed shut behind them and everything was silent. She and Jude locked eyes and she saw her own trauma and fear looking back at her. Win didn't know what they'd done to him before they brought him to her. She was afraid to ask.

He looked at her like she was a monster and maybe she was. But Win was so beyond caring, so beyond feeling. If she ever made it out of this place alive, she'd probably kill herself to escape from her inevitable feelings of guilt but she knew that they would never let her go. She'd been kidnapped, she'd been beaten, she'd been raped, and now she had been forced to send her own mother to what she knew would be a drawn-out, grisly death. Even though she felt justified in her decision after everything that Julie had done to her, there was no feeling of satisfaction in the revenge that she had taken upon her mother. And it was an act that would haunt her for the rest of her life, no matter how much time she had left.

"This is all my fault."

She spoke and found that she no longer recognized her own voice. He flinched at the sound.

"I know."

Even then, she still loved him.

But he would never love her after what she'd done.