Indigo: The Saving Bailey Trilogy #2 Read Free Page A

my face more than I did in that moment. Trapped and grotesque.
    I ran my fingertips over my swollen lips, coating them with blood. Rising from the bed, I pushed my vanity aside to clear a spot on the wall. With bloody fingertips I wrote something I knew I could never be: free .
    I pushed the vanity back into place.

Chapter 3
    Humans are not related to monkeys, we are related to flowers. Yes, flowers. Growing from a tiny, insignificant seed, and then spending the rest of our days struggling for nourishment from the soil and breath from the sun, pushing between sidewalk cracks, bricks and mortar, to be seen. We are all flowers, on the surface thin and frail, the petals and stem. But beneath the soil we have strong roots buried deep, mooring us down.
    •••
    I wanted to be dead; I lamented that I had not died when Trenton drowned me in the retention pond. I stumbled through the door a zombie, covered in blood, clothes falling off my body like rotting skin.
    Mom was in my bedroom making the bed; I dropped her Walther to the ground and went down with it. Bullets clinked as they rolled out of Clad’s hoodie, stopping at her feet.
    “What have you done?” Mom asked, quietly at first. “What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” Her voice grew louder and louder, like the siren of an ambulance, urgent and demanding.
    I lay on the ground, my breathing ragged, eyes trying hard to stay open. I had lost so much blood. The cut on my thigh could not clot because I had kept running.
    She saw the blood on me and thought it belonged to someone else. “Who did you kill? You’re not my daughter! I don’t even know who you are, anymore!” Mom said, shaking me. She removed her trembling hands from my shoulders and covered her face.
    “It’s my blood, Mommy,” I said in-between restricted breaths. “Only my blood… I didn’t hurt anyone.”
    She flipped me over, saw the long gash on my thigh and dissolved to tears. “Why didn’t you kill them?” she demanded. “ You should have killed them! ”
    I should have, but he stopped me. My mind slowed down and trickled out on the floor with my blood, leaving me breathless. Mom grew fuzzy and grey around the edges, and then everything went black like I had closed my eyes.
    Mom would later tell me they were still open.
    I was airlifted to Lee Memorial Hospital. “I’ve never ridden in a helicopter before,” I can recall Mom saying thoughtfully, as a paramedic pumped air into my body.
    •••
    As soon as I came to, I was bombarded with questions from men in black and women bleached white. My head spun, dizzy at all the questions. How was I to answer?
    How could I tell the police about Miemah and Trenton without fear of revulsion from the Allie? Without fear of being arrested for assaulting Miemah with a broken golf club?
    Sure, I could easily argue self-defense, but couldn’t Miemah argue the same? And what if she had seen me in the hallway at school with a gun in my hand…and then, there was Clad to worry about—he knew I had gone to school with a gun, even if Miemah didn’t.
    I decided it would be so much easier to just tell them I had no clue what happened. That I barely knew my own name, let alone how I had ended up on a stretcher, tubes invading my every body cavity.
    I faked amnesia, which wasn’t so hard because I really had blocked out most of the ordeal from memory. When their questions started to flood me, I made my eyes grow large and rested my head in my hands, pretending to know nothing of what they asked. I told them that I was Bailey Angel Sykes, and that I was in a lot of pain. Upon seeing my distress, the nurses would shoo the investigators away.
    In the time I spent in the hospital recovering, my case seemed to drop away from everyone’s minds. I threatened Mom that I would let the officers in on her abuse if she pressed the case or gave any information other than that I had miraculously showed on our doorstep half-dead and bloodied.
    If investigators did go