Run away. Bite you. I don’t know…

So what if give this mouse a choice? Let’s say we have a very smart mouse—a circus mouse. He can understand me and I can understand him. So I say to this mouse, Mouse, you have a choice. You can either sit and be quiet and calm while I cut off your tail, or you can struggle and fight me and perhaps hurt yourself or someone else in the process, while I cut off your tail. Which will you choose, Mouse?

…

Do you see, Sara?

I’m the mouse.

Is that all you see? What was your stepfather’s aim?

He wanted to rape me.

Yes. Now why did he want to rape you?

I don’t know! What kind of question is that?

Why would anyone cut the tail off a mouse?

Because they’re sick and twisted! Because watching something suffer because its smaller and weaker than they are… makes them feel… powerful. In control.

Yes.

The stepbeast felt me relenting, giving in.

“That’s a good girl.” I heard the grin his voice. He wins. The house always wins.

I looked up, past him, and saw the stars, a full moon. I heard the sound of his buckle, his zipper. It was like a dream, just a dream.

I’m the mouse. Where’s my tail? I’m the mouse. Three blind mice. I’m the mouse. He chopped off the tail with a carving knife. No it was the butcher’s wife. Mommy it hurts. I can’t see, it’s dark. Mommy where are you going? Going? Gone? Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they…

Run!

He was too heavy. I whimpered and turned my head as he struggled with my jeans, the snap, the zipper. This wasn’t happening. I was floating away, going, going. I closed my eyes and was blind. Sound receded. He swore and yanked at my jeans, still on top of me, weighing me down.

I flashed on my dream from that morning and a jolt went through me. He was burying me. Burying me alive. Because I was… I was…

Alive!

I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry or beg or make any sound at all.

I watched him kneel up and straddle my thigh, the shape of his head blotting out the rising moon. He was determined to take off my jeans and have his way. And then he would finish the job he started two years before.

“Little help here, Sara?” He yanked one side, then the other, down my hips.

“Sure.” I brought my knee up—the one he was straddling, as hard as I could.

The stepbeast howled. He grabbed for his crotch but I did it again before he could cover up. He howled some more, swearing, calling me names, but I couldn’t hear him. The drumbeat of my own heart was too loud in my ears. He grabbed for me with his other hand, catching hold of my wrist, but with only one limb in his grasp and an aching crotch to cover, he wasn’t strong enough to hold me. Maybe he never had been.

He teetered, still groaning, and I knew if he fell my direction, it was over.

I rolled right on the asphalt, scrambling to my feet and breaking into a run, pulling my jeans up my hips as I went/

“Get back here right now!”

I almost stopped. I’d been so conditioned once upon a time that some part of me insisted I scurry back. I’m not that mouse anymore. I heard him coming after me, the shuffle and grunt. He’d put on weight in jail. I glanced behind me to see him gaining. Whatever painful impact I’d had on his crotch was clearly fading enough for him to give chase.

And the entrance to the square was behind me. Behind him.

I’d run in the wrong direction.

“Sara!” he called, coming faster now. “Get back here right now!”

I was trapped in the corner made by two giant tour busses. I could continue to run around the maze, double back, head for the exit.

“Sara!”

Or I could stay right here and wait for the end.

“Sara! Sara!”

That wasn’t the stepbeast calling.

“Dale?” I whispered.

The stepbeast grabbed my wrist in his fist, turning me around to face him and slamming me against the side of the bus. The back of my head hit the metal and I winced. I saw his face in the moonlight, the sideways sneer, his eyes glinting. He had something in his other hand. That glinted too.

“You’re nothing.” I sneered right back at him with pure disgust. “Less than nothing,”

“Now you listen to me—”

“No. Never again.”

I twisted my wrist out of his hand like I’d been taught in the self-defense class Dale had made me take—toward the thumb. I was free, just for an instant. I saw the anger and something else—fear?—in his eyes. I knew he was going to kill me then. I saw the knife come up, just a glint in the moonlight.

I dropped flat to the ground, scraping my palms on the asphalt, and rolled. The tour busses that created the square were big, boxy vehicles. They had to be, with everything the designers wanted to cram into them. When I’d joked about fans sneaking under the busses, we all laughed, because there wasn’t much room underneath, maybe ten, twelve inches at the outside edge. It would have to be a very small fan.

Or a mouse.

I shimmied my way under as fast as I could. It wasn’t quite fast enough. He grabbed my leg, pulling hard. I screamed, trapped.

“Sara! Sara!”

They were calling my name. Someone was calling my name. Dale?

“Nooo!” I grabbed onto something over my head, cold metal in the dark. I could smell a mix of motor oil and dirt. I pulled and twisted and felt him lose his grip, just for an instant. I jerked my leg back and felt my shoe slip off.

I was free!

There was more room toward the middle of the bus. I wiggled and squirmed my way across the asphalt on my belly, cursing the obscene width of the tour bus. It felt like I was crawling behind enemy lines.

“Sara!” It was Dale. Close!

“Dale!” I gasped. “I’m here!”

I slithered out from under the other side of the bus, hearing footsteps on the pavement. I stopped, still panting with the effort, seeing at least a dozen flashlights heading toward the square. I couldn’t see who was behind them in the dark, but I could hear them all, calling my name.

“I’m here!” I stood, wobbly. “Help! I’m here!”

I leaned against the bus, my head aching, trying to catch my breath.

“Sara.” Dale, panting too from his run across the parking lot. He grabbed me and hugged me so tight I could barely breathe. “Carl told me about the note. I thought… Are you okay? Was it Ben?”

So he’d had the same thought. Because the other one was so impossible it wouldn’t compute. Why would he do something so risky? He was on parole. He knew he’d go back to jail if he got caught. But the stepbeast thought he was too big for consequences. And that was exactly why he’d come after me, I realized. I was the only person alive who had “bested” him and he couldn’t stand that. He’d only spent two years in jail, but I was sure he’d spent them angry, planning ways to pay me back for what I’d done to him.

What I’d done to him.

“It’s him.” I managed to croak. “It’s the stepbeast.”

“Goddamnit!” Dale’s arms tightened around me. “Sara, why did you go!”

I heard people on the other side of the bus. Shouts, footfalls.

Someone called out, “I got him!”

“I thought it was Ben.” I sobbed against his chest.

The rest of the band had caught up, all of them out of breath, several of the crew too, all asking if I was okay.

“He’s still in there!” I cried through my tears.

Or, maybe he wasn’t. It was likely he slipped out and away during all the commotion. The thought of him out there somewhere, still. He would come for me. He did it once, he’d do it again. He would come for me until it was over. Until I was dead. Game over, he wins.

“It’s okay,” Dale murmured against my aching head. In the distance I saw the yellow lights of campus security, and behind that, some flashing reds and blues. “They got him:”

“Who? What?” Nothing was making sense.

“I got him!” I heard someone banging against the other side of the bus.

“We got him!” A woman’s voice from the other side too. I wiggled out of Dale’s arms, grabbing his flashlight and crouching down.

“Hi Pixie.”

“We got him.” She flashed me a smile. “Bear told him he should pick on someone his own size.”

It was incredible, but that made me laugh.

“Bear?” I looked up at Dale as we started to walk around the tour busses to the entrance.

“I called the cops first and had Carl tell security you were missing, I told everybody we needed to come look for you,” Dale explained. “Bear didn’t feel like walking so he, uh… borrowed a vehicle.”

“Why didn’t you ‘borrow’ one?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to hotwire a car,” he snapped, adding glumly, “And they’d already left.”

Bear ended up being my bumbling knight in shining armor, much to Dale’s chagrin. When I asked where the handcuffs came from, Pixie just grinned and dropped me a wink. Seeing the stepbeast belly down on the asphalt, hands bound behind him, made me feel a little better, but I still kept my distance.

The cops had a lot of questions but once they ran the record on Pete Holmes, they stopped asking so many and put him in the back of their police cruiser before they did. Chelsea showed up in formal eveningwear, her hair piled up. She’d had a date for the theater and when Carl called to tell her—she wouldn’t go anywhere without her mobile phone wedged into her purse—she rushed back. She couldn’t stop apologizing and I kept telling her it wasn’t her fault.

We couldn’t trace exactly where the communication had all broken down, but the stepbeast knew my full name, he had pictures of me in his wallet, and with that, he somehow had said the right things to the right people and had been taken back to the square to wait for me. It must have seemed easy to him at the time—and it was. It made me realize how close we are, all the time, to our world turning completely upside down.

By the time it was all over and Dale had tucked me into bed beside him, I was so exhausted I could barely move.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “This should have been your night. Double platinum!”

“Shh.” He spooned up against me. “You’re safe, that’s all that matters.”

I was drifting off. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then I remembered.

“What did Greg say?”

“Don’t worry about it.” He squeezed his arm around my waist. “Go to sleep.”

“I won’t be able to sleep if you don’t tell me.”

“You won’t be able to sleep if I do tell you.”

“Oh no.” I rolled toward him in the dark. “What? Tell me.”

He siged. “Greg got a call from the New York Daily News asking if he had any opinion on the rumor that Tyler Vincent is Dale Diamond’s father.”

“No,” I breathed.

“They’re running it in the morning.”

“What’s… who’s their source?”