Forgive and Never Forget (GirlxGirl)

Chapter Four: The Familiar Face

It was loud. So loud in fact, that Robin-Jay was concerned it would shatter her windshield. The loud pounding brought her back to that awful day. She was only four years old.

One gunshot. Two gunshots. Three gunshots.

She thought she would be safe in her car during the strong storm, but the rain grew louder and louder every drop.

Four gunshots. Five gunshots. Six gunshots.

She continued to count the pounding of the raindrops.

Seven gunshots. Eight. Nine.

Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

She waited for one more. She remembered hearing thirteen after all.

Little Robin-Jay couldn't hear it anymore though. Her shaky hands were over her ears the only thing she could hear was her heavy breathing. The cabinet was dark and small, but still large enough for her to lock herself in. The violent group didn't know of her existence, they only came for her mother as revenge over her grandparent's gang. It was a gang war.

She let her long curly hair cover her face as if it would help protect her. She tightly held the hem of the t-shirt that belonged to her mum, so it was large on her thin four-year-old body. She heard one scream after the first gunshot, then heard her dear mother fall to her knees. Twelve more gunshots were fired. Robin-Jay didn't understand the point of shooting twelve more times. They could have just let her bleed out and suffer to die slowly from the first one, at least that's what Robin-Jay would have done if she were really trying to install fear into someone. False hope of surviving stacks up more fear in a person once they realize that there was no point in trying after all.

There was a small crack in the cabinet that allowed Robin-Jay to see everything. She watched as the group dismembered her mum's body. Her mum's blood stained the rug that Robin-Jay often loved to play on. Even after the gang members finished erasing every piece of evidence and sent her mum's decapitated head to her grandparents as a sign of their accomplishment, Robin-Jay continued to hide in the cabinet. She didn't leave it for three days. No food or water, just her alone in the cabinet with the smell of old blood in the air.

Snap out of it, Robin, she tried to tell herself, but even so, she stayed in a ball in the driver's seat of her car. In her mind, though, she was still in the wooden cabinet. She was still watching her mother be shot and cut apart. She was still watching them individually take out her mother's guts from her torso. She was still watching them put her mother's organs into separated bins. She was still watching them roll up the blood-stained rug.

In Robin-Jay's mind, she was still that four-year-old girl.

Finally, Robin-Jay was able to open her eyes again and removed her hands from her ears, reminding herself where she was. She wasn't in that dark cabinet anymore, she was in her car during a hurricane. What she heard was not gunshots, it was the loud raindrops on her windshield. She didn't need to worry about watching her mother die anymore. She didn't need to remember the smell of her mum's irony blood in the air. She didn't need to worry about any of that anymore because she wasn't still four years old, she was twenty years old. She could fend for herself.

"I can't stay here," Robin-Jay mumbled to herself. If she decided to stay in her car, she might not be able to drive anywhere because of how quickly the streets were starting to flood. Not only that, but it was starting to become unbearably cold ever since she decided to turn off the heater to save gasoline.

She thought that if she started driving away at that moment, then maybe she could avoid being stuck in her car during the storm. She remembered how Samuel asked her to stay with the family, but even after all he and his husband had done for her, she still found it hard to even consider them family. None of them were related to her after all. The only family she had was her mum. She never knew who her father was since her mum didn't even know.