This Violent Heart
SUMMER’S JOURNAL
August 2012
I promise, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Soon, everyone is going to hate me. I don’t know—maybe you will too. I hate myself for so many things, but I don’t hate myself for what I’m about to do.
Remember when you gave me the book by that Neruda guy? You read that poem to me, the one about secretly loving obscure things, and you said how much you loved it. I’ve read it so many times and thought about how perfect and simple it is, and it scares me that I may never read it again. It’s funny—when it comes to love, how much it hurts, Neruda sure knew his shit.
I don’t even care that you’ll never see this. I just needed to get it out of my head before I do this. I’ve thought about things so much, and now I know some mistakes stay with you forever, deep in your belly, rotting you from the inside out. I only hope when you find out you’ll understand and that you won’t hate me.
I could never hate you. I really wish I could.
CHAPTER 1
DEVON 2025
Empathy is a motherfucker—don’t allow it to consume you. Devon thought of her graduate school professor’s words as she listened to her young client recount the worst day of her life. It was her eighth session with Macayla Perry and the first one where the girl was finally able to give details about what happened to her six months prior.
Macayla sat across from her on the gray love seat, her hands cradling one of the fuzzy white pillows in her lap as tears streamed down her face. At first, her eyes had danced all over Devon’s office as she began to slowly rock back and forth. Then she stopped and stared, as if in a trance, at the succulent plant sitting on the low coffee table between them.
She was a pretty girl, even with her huge blue eyes puffy from crying. She had golden brown hair and delicate features that reminded Devon of a book of fairy illustrations she’d been obsessed with when she was younger, the fantastical drawings of various fay, usually nude, so alluring. Or—as her mother had called them before she threw the book in the trash—lurid.
No, Devon thought. Lurid described everything this poor teenager in front of her had gone through. She listened and knew the girl’s story was the same as so many others. A high school boy, older than Macayla. She, walking home the same way she always did, cutting across the foot-ball field. He calls out to her, offers to share a joint under the bleachers. No football practice going on. No one else around. She doesn’t know him, but she knows he’s on the team, knows he’s a big deal at school, so she’s surprised he’s talking to her. She’s only a freshman. He’s so cute, so she walks over. They smoke, talk. She feels special. Seen. He kisses her, and she likes it, but she needs to get home. She has to watch her little sister after the bus drops her off. Her mom works late. But the boy kisses her hard when she tries to push away. Then his hand is up her shirt, and she pushes harder. He leans into her until she’s on the ground, his hand wrapped around her neck. She can’t breathe.
Devon finds herself holding her breath, the sense of being strangled so real she digs her nails into her palm to stay in the moment with her client and away from her own memories.
“I . . . I just let him do it,” Macayla said, her voice barely a whisper. “It was my fault. I should’ve gone straight home.”
“Macayla, this was not your fault.” Devon waited until the girl’s eyes met hers. “None of this was your fault. No one blames you for what he did to you.”
Macayla’s mouth tightened. “Yes, they do. The kids at school—they send me messages, say I’m destroying Davis’s life. They text me all the time and spray-painted my mom’s car. They . . . they tell me I should kill myself.” More tears roll down her face, and she pulls another tissue from the box on the coffee table.
“The only one destroying Davis’s life is him because of what he did to you,” Devon said, leaning forward. “And once the hearing takes place, after you speak, everyone will know he’s a liar. They’ll hear from the police officers who helped you and see the hospital report, and then he’ll be punished.”
Devon thought of the police report her supervising psychologist had shown her, the photos of Macayla’s tiny body covered in deep-purple bruises. She had fought that piece of shit, but the boy had a good hundred pounds on her.
Macayla started rocking again, her golden brown hair half shielding her face. “I don’t want to speak at the hearing. I know my parents and the police want me to, but I . . . I can’t do it.”
“You can. You did such a great job today telling me everything. It will be the same way in the courtroom. All you need to do is tell them what you’ve told me.” She wanted to sit next to her and hold her, to tell her she knew firsthand what she was going through, but she had to keep a professional distance, something she often struggled with. Empathy is a motherfucker. “You’re stronger than you think you are, Macayla.”
After the session, Devon sat at her small corner desk, feeling drained. Something about Macayla nagged at her, reminding her of another golden brown–haired girl from long ago, a girl who had retreated to a place so deep within her own mind Devon could no longer reach her.
Sometimes she wondered if she had chosen the wrong field of work. She’d spent the first few years of her adulthood working various shift jobs until she found sex work. Dominating rich men had paid the bills and a good chunk of her student loans before it all ended with one bad decision. Then came bartender work while she got her master’s degree, a requirement to be a therapist in Oklahoma. She had also taken on a side job as a burlesque performer, which was much safer than the dominatrix work but didn’t pay nearly as much. She’d learned it could be an expensive line of work, with the cost of extravagant outfits, but she had gotten by with making her own and borrowing costume pieces from other, more seasoned performers.
Now, she was almost done with her practicum and would be able to take on clients without supervision. She always thought becoming a counselor would allow her to understand what drove people to do the most horrendous things to each other. To themselves.
She closed her eyes, and a beautiful girl’s sun-soaked face, mouth open wide and laughing, flashed across her mind, threatening to undo her. She swallowed over the fullness in her throat, the tears trying to emerge, but she tucked them away.
She needed to understand. She had to know how to piece someone like Macayla back together after someone else had taken a sledgehammer to them.
“You think she’s okay for next week?”
Dr. Paulette Bailey, her supervisor, entered the office, making the intimate space somehow cozier by her calming presence. Like Devon, Paulette had the sensual curves of a woman who didn’t skip on desserts, but the older woman’s heart-shaped face and smiling brown eyes reminded Devon of her favorite seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Higgins, whom she’d had a huge crush on, a confusing combination that made Devon sometimes turn shy around her.
“The hearing?” Devon said. “Yeah. I think she’ll be okay. She recounted all the way through today.”
Paulette sat on the arm of the love seat. “Well, the state has plenty to go on. And with her testimony, he won’t walk.”
Devon bit her tongue. Macayla’s rapist came from a wealthy family, and he had one of the best defense lawyers in Oklahoma. Money just might buy him a slap on the wrist. She knew the defense would do anything possible to grind that fifteen-year-old girl into the ground. Didn’t matter that she’d been a virgin; they’d somehow make it seem like she wanted it, like she sought him out. Nothing mattered if a perpetrator had enough money to rewrite history. She’d learned the hard way how society had a high tolerance for the suffering of women.
She’d seen too many sexual predators walk and feared her own would do the same. Memories of the year before came to her uninvited. Memories of taking a job she never should’ve taken. The job was for a bunch of mostly older rich men seeking a professional dominatrix for a private party at the infamous Coulter mansion. What they really wanted was to imprison and torture . . . and rape. She had survived, and intense trauma therapy had helped her regain control of her life, but she doubted the men involved would ever be prosecuted, not with how their money and connections kept the court case tied up. Still, she wanted her day in court, however long it took. She needed to face the men who’d hurt her, to show them she was no longer afraid of them, and she wanted the same closure for Macayla.
“You okay, Devon?” Paulette’s kind eyes turned worried.
“Yeah. Just tired is all.” She turned to face her computer to avoid Paulette’s analytic gaze. The woman could read body language better than anyone she knew, which she supposed was why Paulette was so good at her job, but it made Devon hyperaware of everything she said or did in front of her. “I’m just going to finish this charting before I head out.”
She heard Paulette shift from the edge of the love seat. “Do something fun for yourself this weekend, okay? Decompress.”
Without turning away from her computer screen, Devon nodded, her thoughts toggling between Macayla’s tear-streaked cheeks and the sun-drenched face of her memories while suppressing thoughts of everything that had happened to her and the other women she was held with the year before. A dread tunneled its way into her stomach, twisting and tightening until she thought she’d double over in front of her supervisor. She had to keep herself together, at least long enough to do her charting and drive home.
The sunset brushed pinks and purples across the expansive sky as she drove to her small apartment on the east side. Rent was cheaper there than in central Oklahoma City, but the neighborhoods were rougher. When she’d first moved in, there was a food desert, and she had to drive far to get any kind of fresh produce or meat. But even the east side was becoming gentrified, driving up housing costs. A beautiful, huge grocery store and new restaurants seemed to sprout up overnight, and then the investors came, flipping the older houses and raising property taxes for the mostly Black and brown area of town. With Oklahoma’s overall low cost of living, she knew more out-of-state investors would come. Eventually, if she didn’t start earning more, she’d be priced out of her apartment and would likely have to get a roommate.
However expensive living got in the city, Devon knew she’d never move back to Arkana, the rural town she’d called home for most of her life. She would rather live in a shoebox than go back. The thought alone caused her chest to seize, her breath trapped and aching with too many memories.
Someone was parked in her designated spot, so she had to circle around the apartment complex a couple of times before she found another. As she exited her car and entered the furnace of June’s heat, that sickening dread squirmed in her stomach again. She told herself it was because of her session with Macayla, but she knew that wasn’t the real reason.
No, the dread was because of a completely different girl, a girl Devon had fought for thirteen years to forget.
