Stuck in a Rut.
By Rosalie Redd

Casey Church is a normal 13 year old girl, full of hopes and dreams and fears and anxieties. But in a world where there hasn’t been a girl born in over a century, what is normal?

Chapter 22.

I tossed and turned and didn’t get much sleep. I was a mess. My brain was betraying me. Neural nets reworking themselves, neurons making new connections. Estrogen altering my moods and attitudes. Face it me, you are a mess. When I did finally get to sleep, it was with tears in my eyes.

I got up and put on my new dress, fixed my hair and put on some make-up, at breakfast DeShaun alternated between staring at me, and looking at the floor when I looked back. I sighed and went back up to my room. I hid out there, and ignored DeShaun’s repeated knocks on the door.

The knocking stopped after a while, only to start up several hours later. “Go away DeShaun, I don’t want to see your face, or hear your voice!”, I stated loudly.

“What about mine?”, asked a familiar voice. I sighed and got up to let Janie in. She walked over to the desk and sat down in the chair. “She looked about the room, with its boyish clutter of car models, posters of professional local athletes.

“Still a very boyish room, I see”, she stated plainly.

“What do you want, Jane?”, I asked irritably. I emphasized the formal usage of her name.

“I came over to talk. Yes, DeShaun told me about sleeping with her. He was afraid you would find out. But Casey, it was before the rut, before you even knew each other existed. He regrets it, he hates himself for doing it.”, she said sadly.

I looked at her. She still had on an over-sized hoodie, trying to cover herself up and hide from view.

“He hurt me. He hurt me. I loved him. That cute dimple he gets when he smiles, his appreciation of classical music. Those pecs… How he could hold me and make me feel safe. The way he said that nobody else compared. All that, and he still fucked her.”, I sobbed, the tears flowing.

Janie put her arm around me, and rubbed my back. “I know it’s odd that I’m taking his side. If I were more like… her, I’d use this opportunity to claim you for my own. But I know he does love you, and I know he fell for her tricks. She is a master manipulator. She’s a sociopath, able to twist and manipulate people’s emotions and make them do her bidding. She found him at a low point, and seduced him with lies and plots of making his father mad.”

I sniffled and listened to her. She did have a point. She could manipulate people and wrap them around her finger. She had her enforcers and her little spy, after all.

I sat and thought about it. Her spy? I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. I had the beginnings of an idea. Hmm.

I looked over to Janie. “Do you know where Luna Day lives?”

She looked back at me, perplexed. “Luna Day? You mean that goth girl?”

I looked her in the face. “Yes, she has answers. Answers I need.”, I stated resolutely.

“I do, but I’m not telling you. I don’t want you going over there alone.”, she said.

“Come with me then.”, I urged. She shrank back, taking her hand off my back, she pulled her hoodie further over her face.

“I… I can’t.”, She whimpered.

Looking at her, I grabbed the hood and pulled it down, exposing her face. She pulled away and started to cry.

I moved towards her and wrapped her in as strong of a hug as I could and kissed her. She returned my kiss, but still pulled away.

“How… how can you still care for me? I’m ruined, everyone will see my wounds and everyone will know. And those that don’t will think I’m that poor girl that tried to kill myself. She ruined the rest of my life.”, she yelled between sobs. She stood up and unzipped the hoodie, yanking it off and throwing it at me. She stood there in a tank top, her arms exposed. There were stitches and sutures running the length of her forearms, from wrist to the underside of the elbow. Bisecting those were stitched slashes, perhaps 10-12 on each arm, also stitched and sutured. Her arms were a mess of bruises, stitches, and sewn-closed cuts.

I stood up and approached her. She backed up against my closet door. I simply and slowly reached out and took her hands in mine, and pulled her into a hug, then I kissed her cheek, and gave her a little nibble on the earlobe. “No matter what she did to you, you are my sexy angel. Nothing will change that.” I led her back over to the bed and we both sat down. I lifted up her right arm and carefully kissed it, down the full length of her cuts. I repeated that with her left, then I kissed each stitch on her forehead.

At the end, she stopped crying. She picked up the hoodie and put it back on, but she didn’t pull the hood over her head this time. “Let’s go see if your mother will drop us off!”, she said in a determined voice.

We pulled up in front of the house. It was a rather nondescript ranch style house. I noted it was rather small for this area of the Twin Cities. Mom let us out, making sure we both had our phones, in case of any trouble. I knew she would stick around and make sure we went in safely. I rang the doorbell, and a woman answered. She was shorter than either of us, and had the same dark hair as Luna. I was guessing this was her mother, as they both were on the petite side.

“Yes?”, she said nervously, as she looked at the two taller girls before her.

I smiled the friendliest smile I could, and asked if Luna was home. The door closed, and I heard her call for Luna. A few seconds later, the door opened, and the diminutive girl practically yanked us inside.

Leading us both to a small room at the back of the house, Luna opened the door and led us in. Her room was small, and excessively girly. Pictures of black cats and night scenes of scarecrows and bats covered the walls. The walls themselves were dark purple, and the curtains and bed coverings were black.

“What are you doing here?”, she asked timidly, keeping her voice down to a whisper. “Dad is asleep, and it’s not wise to wake him after he gets home from work.”

I could sense that she and her mother were afraid of her father. I spoke quietly, “We came because of what you led us to, I only saw the pictures of the abused and dead animals. My parents kept the rest from me, but I figured out that there was something bad in those things you directed me to.”

Luna sighed and directed us to sit down on the bed. She walked over to a corner of the room, and pulled up the corner of the carpet. She took out a switchblade, and popped it open, prying up the corner of a loose floorboard. From the space underneath, she produced a plastic bag.

“These are copies of what I sent you to get.”, she said as she sat down beside us. She turned on her computer, an older model desktop that had seen better days. Adjusting the volume, she clicked on a folder on the desktop. Janie and I sat in stunned silence, as we listened to Marcia talking about her plans to drug a boy named Adam. She went on to explain about how the drug would make him passive and susceptible to suggestion.

Luna paused the playback. “She monitored Adam, and when she saw he was entering the rut, she went through with her plan, drugging him.”, she stated. “Adam was a gifted football player, and she saw him as an obstacle for her plans for DeShaun. Adam, having been drugged, was convinced to submit to being changed. She got rid of Adam, and then while he was undergoing the change, she ‘befriended her’, and won her over to her side. That’s how Amy Wilder became her recruit.”

I gasped at the level of evilness, but Luna continued. “A few weeks later, when Amy’s brother Manny began his rut, she did the same thing, ensuring that both siblings would end up loyal to her.”

Janie and I both sat there dumbfounded. “Yes, now you see what sort of evil you were dealing with.”, she said sadly.

Janie spoke up. “If she was that bad, and you knew it… why did you end up with her?”

Luna sighed again. “As you can obviously see, I’m not very big. Even when I was Luke, I was resigned to the fact that I would end up a girl. So I gave up my male interests, and adopted the mindset of a girl. I started to grow my hair out, even before the rut. But there were downsides to that. Being small and feminine, I was a target for boys and girls alike.”

Luna stopped for a moment to compose herself, and we waited for her to continue. “I would get beaten up almost every day, until I met Mark. Everyone was scared of him, even the larger bullies. So I stayed with him for safety. And when I met Anthony, I accepted my fate and became Luna. But Marc was also transitioning at that time, and she didn’t want to lose me. She thought I was her willing advisor, but I was just in it for the protection. At the same time, I saw the cruelty and manipulation she used to get what she wanted, and if she couldn’t get something herself, her mother’s influence could.”

I looked at her and then I looked at Janie. Janie spoke up next. “How did you survive, seeing all that?”

Luna smiled. “When she got her mother to offer Anthony’s father a lucrative job out of state, I was pissed. I had been gathering information in secret, using hidden mics and recorders, just to have leverage on her. But that was the last straw. I stepped up my monitoring of her and her mother. It’s funny, but Marcia’s mother liked me, and called me ‘the second daughter she never had’, I had them fooled. But I knew that if the information I had got out, they would know it was me. Mom is too sickly to work, and Dad makes barely enough to pay the bills. I needed someone with better resources, in other words, I needed you.”

She turned and looked at Janie. “I’m sorry you got hurt. I was out of the loop on that. I thought she would go after Casey, and so I had him under observation. You weren’t on my radar, and I won’t forgive myself for that oversight.”

Janie gave the small girl a big bear hug. “It’s okay”, she said. “We are only human after all.”

Luna looked at me and then spoke again. “I know you are angry with DeShaun right now, and I know you are hurting. But it’s not his fault, at least not entirely. She is a cold manipulative bitch. I saw the obsession she has with him. I mean, I get it. He’s hot.” She paused and blushed.

I giggled. “That he is.”, I said laughing.

She cleared her throat and continued. “You need to understand. Marcia has been twisted so badly by her mother and her family expectations, that she will do or say anything, she will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate. It’s been drilled into her head since she was a little boy that she actually has been a girl this whole time. That was the start of her mental issues. Her mother essentially created a severe case of gender dysphoria, causing Marc to disassociate with his gender, and to even hate being male. He used to take his anger out on animals and there are rumors of small children in the neighborhood ending up with mysterious injuries. Furthermore, I think he developed schizophrenia, and possibly even multiple personality disorder. And in that mass of insanity he developed an obsession with DeShaun, and manipulated him into eventually sleeping with her.”

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