Love LockDown Read Free

friend. Were stuck in my room.’
    ‘Okay, I’m sending someone over, what’s your name?’ the older women’s voice cranks through the phone shaking vigorously in my hand.
    ‘I’m, I’m Abbi, and my friend is Melissa, please hurry I think she is hurt bad. She’s not talking, she just keeps crying.’
    ‘Ok, just stay calm sweetie, can you tell me what happened?’
    ‘He came in last night,’ I hear a bang bang bang of the stairs as my father heavy booted feet run the length of them. My door crashes into the wall as it is thrown open.
    I drop the phone on the floor still on the line.
    He stalks towards me fast. “No dad, please I’m sorry, please.” His hand wraps the girth of my fragile throat and squeezes, my airway now restricted.
    “You stupid cunt. You tell anybody about what happened and I’ll kill you, and your fucking friend. You understand you little bitch?” he screams at me.
    I faintly hear the lady on the phone asking if I’m okay, my father oblivious to her, of which I am thankful of; this moment could have been very bad if he had heard.
    I can hear the front door bang open in the distance, my mind becoming foggy, the lack of oxygen making me dizzy. I glance to the bedroom door and see four men in black uniforms.
    ‘Hands on your head and on the floor now.’ The police instruct from the door.
    My father tightens his grip before finally letting go and lying himself down.
    I gasp for air and grab my throat, willing the oxygen to enter my blood stream quickly before I pass out.
    I briefly see my father being carted out in cuffs; two women in green paramedic uniforms enter my room as the men leave our naked bodies with the ladies.
    I break down screaming, tears streaming my face.
    “It’s okay sweetheart, you’re safe now. You’re so brave for calling. Well done.” She huddled me into a blanket and wrapped me up tight before pulling me into her body and letting me weep on her.
    My ears overhear the other paramedic talking ‘311, this is 214, requiring further assistance at the scene of incident, we have an adolescent female haemorrhaging,’ and then she stops talking. What is haemorrhaging? I ask myself.
     
    *****
     
    I arrived at hospital a short while after Melissa; police patrolled the corridors and the doors to Melissa’s and my room.
    I was poked, prodded and questioned about what happened over and over again. I was then discharged into foster care. I was to live with a strange family. I didn’t get to see Melissa again, I wasn’t sure if she would want me to.
    I found out shortly after leaving that Melissa had suffered severe tearing in her vagina, her cervix had been ripped and she had suffered internal bleeding in her uterus, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy at age fourteen. The guilt I still felt over that haunts me every day, and when I sit and think of what she would be like now I want nothing more than to rip my own womb out and give it to her. She would never be a mother.
    So this moves us on to the next chapter in my life.
    Age Seventeen, just before my eighteenth birthday I ran away from care. My life going from one extreme to the other. My foster parents and family were wonderful; they made my life bearable and worth living a little, they fed me, clothed me, and loved me, sometimes a little too much. They were over protective of me, I often wondered if they thought I’d break if they let me out of their sight.
    Shortly after my seventeenth birthday they fostered a new kid. A sixteen year old boy named David. He was nice from the start, a little flirty and a whole lot gorgeous. He was a bad boy from the very wrong corners of town, he smoked weed, shagged far too much for his age and drunk a ‘little’ too much over the advised ADULT daily limit.
    He turned seventeen shortly after joining the family home.
    I still clearly remember the first day he came and what he had said to me, in all his cocky sixteen year old charm ‘Well hello there. Did it hurt when you