The Never List

sober up. I hope so anyway.” She sighed.
    I was amazed at this girl’s capacity for what sounded like forgiveness.
    “Aren’t you—don’t you hate him?”
    “Oh, what for?” She sighed again, more deeply this time, and looked up at the dim light above us. “He was really just following his fate. No point in using up my hatred on him. It is what it is. I got dealt this hand—no use suffering regret as well as pain. Right now I just have to figure out each morning if and how I am going to survive the day. I don’t mean, like, psychologically. I mean literally. Will. I. Live. Through. The. Day. Some girls don’t come back.”
    “Maybe they escape,” I said hopefully.
    “No way. Like I said. Look at these girls.” She gestured broadly at the girls in the van without turning to face them. “They look like they’re plotting an escape? They all believe in the network, don’t you girls?” She kept her eyes locked on us as she said it. “And you know, maybe they’re right. We’re marked, after all.”
    “Marked how?” Tracy sat up straight at that.
    “They brand us.” She said it leaning forward, almost spitting out the words. And then she sat back smugly to watch our reactions.
    Neither of us batted an eyelash. “Explain. Details,” Tracy ordered in a flat voice.
    The girl pointed to her hip. “A brand. Right there. They say that everyone out there in the ‘network’—in the underworld, I guess you’d call it—knows their mark. Like cattle herders. And if we get caught by anyone out there, we’ll be returned to our rightful owners.”
    “What does it look like?” I asked, terrified because I had an idea I knew the answer.
    “Hard to say. I don’t like to look at it too much. They rarely heal just right, so on some girls it just looks like a little lump of twisted flesh. I guess those in the network have special skills at reading scar tissue. I suppose you could say it looks maybe like a bull’s head, except the horns kinda go straight out and then up.” She held her hands above her head, with index fingers pointed out, to demonstrate.
    “Could it be … is it possible that it’s a headless man with his arms out? You know, with a body sort of like that Leonardo da Vinci drawing?”
    She shrugged, whether at the concept of the headless man or the reference to Da Vinci I couldn’t tell. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
    I half stood up, nearly hitting my head on the roof of the van, and shifted sideways a bit, unbuttoned my pants, and pulled my jeans down just past my hip. I pointed to my mark, my own little lump of twisted flesh.
    “Does it look like this?” I almost shouted, choking out the words.
    The girl put her fingers to her lips and whispered to me angrily, “Shut up! You don’t want them to have to stop the van to see what’s going on.”
    She leaned closer, and I pushed my hip forward to move it more directly under the light. She studied it carefully, then shrugged again.
    “Yeah, that could be it. Like I said, hard to say.” She gulped and suddenly looked afraid. “Wait a minute. Does this mean you werein the network when you were young, and you escaped, and you’ve … you’ve been brought back? So they aren’t just bullshitting? And that’s why you’re, like, so old?”
    I felt Tracy shudder beside me. Was she right? We were both thinking it. Had we been led back into the “network” after all this time, back to our rightful owners ? Were the ten years in between the fantasy, and now we were back to reality?
    “So,” she continued, leaning back and eyeing us, “so I don’t need to tell you what you’re in for? You know?”
    Tracy leaned forward toward her. Their faces were almost touching there in the near dark, under the soft glow of the single light overhead.
    “Listen, what we lived through was something much worse. I was held captive in a goddamn cellar by a goddamn psychopath for five years, chained to a wall, brought upstairs only for torture.” She leaned back, expecting the shock to register on the girl’s face. Instead she shrugged.
    “Sounds a hell of a lot easier than this. Sounds to me like you just had one john. One john is easier than hundreds of johns. Simple math. With one john, I don’t care how psycho he is, you can figure him out a little bit. Understand how he works. Plan ahead. Manipulate. Not a lot. But enough to make it hurt a little less. When you’ve got new johns all the time, who the hell knows.”
    Tracy said, “You