Biphobia

The door opened, and a policeman stepped quietly into the room. "I'll need to ask you all some questions." He said. "It's Christine, isn't it? How about you first? It's nothing to worry about, we just need to know if you heard or saw anything suspicious that might help us to catch the attacker."

"I told you, we didn't see anything." Christi said. "We were in our room. Dani left, and… Well, we thought she'd gone back to her room."

"Alright, I understand, but we have to ask. Please come with me, and we'll get it over quickly, then you can be on your way."

The policeman's questions were simple and straightforward, and Christi answered them as quickly as she could. She wished she hadn't been chosen first; she wanted to be back with Dani. She hated herself for having let her storm off the night before; wasn't that the one thing you were never supposed to do? Let your friends go off alone in a strange place? But she thought she was going straight back to her room! How was she supposed to know that Dani was going to wander off outside? She didn't go far, by all accounts, only to the veranda out front, but an opportunist had been passing by. A lone young lady at night was an easy target. Just as well he only had theft on his mind and nothing else.

Danika, Sherie and Rene were waiting in silence when Christi was returned to the family room. Danika's face was still pale and deathly in her ruined makeup; Rene's little face looked twisted and pained, and Sherie's was empty. Was she still embarrassed? Horrified that Rene had seen them sleeping in each other's arms? Or had the immediacy of Danika's terrible experience shunted her personal concerns to the back of her mind?

Sherie was next to be taken into the interview room. Christi took her seat, opposite Danika. She reached out and took her hand, and this time Danika didn't withdraw, but allowed her hand to be held. "It's alright now." Christi said. "You'll be alright, won't you?"

"I couldn't get back in." Danika croaked. "He took my bag. He had my key and my phone. I hammered on the door for hours but nobody came. Nobody found me until morning."

"Your hands are still cold." Christi said, tightening her grip on Danika's fingers. "We'll get back to the hotel, we'll get packed up, and we'll take you home. Alright? Just as soon as the police are finished, we'll get back and pack up, and you can be back home."

Danika nodded wordlessly. Her spare hand reached for the packet of cigarettes and withdrew another smoke. The flame didn't shudder as it had done earlier, but was quite steady as Danika lit her cigarette. "Yeah." She said at last. "Just wanna go home now."

Rene, who sat close beside Danika, put an arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze, drawing a tight smile from her mouth. "Thanks, guys." She said.

"Here's Sherie." Rene said, as the door opened. "My turn now."

"Won't be long now, ladies." The policeman at the doorway said. "You can be on your way in no time."

* * *

Christi's feet took her into the shower room. The smell of mould and decay was overpowering, the same dull time-faded colours filled the room, and the wall-tiles were filthy, apart from a few large patches that had been wiped almost clean on the walls as if with a large towel. Red lip gloss had been scrawled madly across the cleaned tiles in words as dirty as the floor: filthy slut, dirty whore, half-dyke.

Christi felt the colour drain from her face as she took in the words. Her skin tingled, goosebumps stood up on her arms and neck and back. She tried to swallow, but her throat was so tight that her saliva came straight back up, caught on the back of her tongue and momentarily choked her breath. She coughed for air, sending a frothy dribble of phlegm down her chin. Her breaths were rising with her heartbeat, and the swirling panic in the base of her skull was overriding any conscious thoughts that she tried to latch on to.

Head and neck ache temporarily forgotten under the adrenaline charge, Christi turned and ran, slipped on the mouldy floor. She fell over, cracked onto the tiles, but managed to land on mostly soft parts. As quick as she fell she was up again, running for the door, her feet skidding on the grime. She grabbed the old handle, twisted and turned and pulled, thumped the door and moaned incomprehensibly through her rapid breaths as the old door failed to budge.

She turned away from the door when it failed to open, jumped onto the wooden bench, reached for the squat high windows, tried to find a latch. Most of the latches were rusted shut but one eventually came free and the window opened; Christi sighed deeply, but her relief was short-lived, for it only twisted so far before the rusted frame seized and prevented it from moving any further. The gap was far too narrow to squeeze through.

Perhaps she could break the glass? She hunted around for something hard, tried the slats in the bench until she found a loose one, pried it free and swung it towards the nearest pane. The old rotten wood was soft and light and bounced off the glass as if it was made of rubber, juddering in Christi's hands. She tried again, and again, but the glass wouldn't break. She changed position, held the slat like a pike and jabbed it towards the glass, straight into the centre. After a few jabs of increasing power, each drawing a louder grunt from Christi's mouth, the pane finally shattered, but didn't fall. She gave another few jabs, but the glass only crunched and rained down tiny dusty shards. She gave a grunt of frustration, threw the slat down onto the floor. Of course, she realised, it was security glass, bound with a lattice of steel wire glazed into it. It wasn't going to come out of the frame.

She gathered her breath, tried to calm down. She was alive, and she was mostly unhurt: her fall onto the tiles had bruised her shoulder, by the feel of things, but it wasn't serious. She'd been lucky not to have broken her arm, or cracked her jaw on the hard floor and knocked herself out cold.

Her breath was slowing at last. There was no way out of the room, and no way to call for help. All she could do was wait, and see what happened next.

How did she get into this mess?

* * *

Rene's old sedan conquered the blacktop as the clock ticked onwards. It was a long way back home, and everyone was tired. Christi's head was hurting, but it was only a mild hangover mixed with stress, nothing serious, and nothing she couldn't deal with. It would pass, in time.

Rene might have been the smallest of the four friends, but her car was the biggest. It wasn't the newest, nor the fasted, nor the best equipped -- in fact it came last in almost all other respects -- but its size alone made it the ideal choice for the road trip. It was like an old family heirloom, passed down from father to son to brother to son to sister over the decades, and although battered and well-used, it was as trusted and reliable as any late model, and it munched the miles in softly-sprung spacious comfort.

The sedan had once belonged to Rene's older brother, Brett. Christi had only met him a few times, when she'd gone to his trailer to see Rene, who sometimes stayed with him when her parents were fighting. Brett scared the crap out of Christi; his trailer was full of posters of old war movies, and gun magazines littered his fold-out table and fell off his portable TV every time she walked past. Rene had confided that he kept a gun in the trailer somewhere, although Christi had never seen it. Usually Brett spent his time outside when Christi came to visit, working on some old car with his oily hands, as if he detected that she didn't like him and did his best to stay out of her way. She recalled how she'd once peered out of the dirty slatted blinds of his trailer and seen him clean up a crowbar with an oily rag after pulling a dent out of the sedan, and then reverentially place it in the little gap between the driver's seat and the sill, where it would be readily to hand while he was driving.

She hadn't mentioned it to anybody at the time, and after a while she had forgotten about it completely, but recalling the moment all of a sudden gave her cause to surreptitiously have a tender feel under the seat with her foot; something hard and heavy was under there, where it had been left and probably forgotten about before Brett passed the car on to his younger sister.

The back of the old sedan was roomy, and for the first time on the whole road trip Christi wished they'd brought Danika's compact instead. There was a retractable armrest and enough room in the sedan for a gap of several inches between her leg and Sherie's; it would have been so much sweeter if Sherie was pressed up against her, as they were when they rode in Danika's compact. She'd never appreciated the closeness in the past, when she and Sherie had been squeezed together in the back of the little car on journeys around town. As a concession she had found Sherie's hand shortly into the journey, and although Sherie looked out of the opposite window and said nothing, they held onto each other's fingers tightly as they motored on across the blacktop.

It felt nice just to be touching Sherie's hand, even if there was no verbal communication. Every now and again she gave a light squeeze, and Sherie wordlessly returned it, much to Christi's delight.

There was still a long way to go, and they would probably have to make another motel stop before they got home, but sometime tomorrow they'd roll back into their familiar town and be able to get back to normal. Well, Danika would be able to get back to normal, in time. Christi would be there for her, if she was needed, and she was sure the others would be, too. Rene would go back to doing what she always did, and Sherie… Well, Christi and Sherie had their own new thing to explore, it seemed. It had just been a drunken encounter in a motel room, but sometime during the night it had become more than that -- it wasn't just fun, it was emotional. It was deep, and important. They had held each other through the night. They had stared into each other's eyes when they woke. They were holding hands.

Sherie shifted in her seat, stretched, turned her head away from the window and settled back down. A moment later her grip became slack, and she began to slide across the old beige velour seat towards the centre armrest. Quickly Christi flipped up the armrest and scooted across the seat, pressing herself against Sherie's body before she toppled over. Sherie's head lolled and rested onto her shoulder.

In the front passenger seat Danika reached for the sun visor, flipped it down. Her dark eyes appeared in the vanity mirror, locked emptily with Christi's.

"What are you two doing?" She said flatly.

"Sherie fell asleep." Christi whispered. "I'm just holding her up."

The mirror flipped up again, and Danika returned her eyes to the passing signposts and billboards. Sherie gave a mumble, lifted her head for a moment, then twisted fully in the seat, curled up against Christi's body, rested her head comfortably into her shoulder and closed her eyes once more.

Her hand was still nestled in Christi's, and Christi stroked it gently, down low where no curious eyes in a retractable vanity mirror could see. She heard Sherie's contented breaths and felt them fan the giddy warmth in her heart. Let Sherie use her as a mattress and pillow; the closeness was wonderful. She'd never met anyone who was so comfortable with her, who could curl into her and fall asleep like that. The fact that Sherie was a girl, and her best friend, only made it so much better. She already knew Sherie. She already knew what she was like to be around, and what nasty surprises her personality might inflict. She didn't have to get to know anybody new, or go through that awkward first few weeks until she felt comfortable to open up to a stranger. She could open up to Sherie any time, because she already loved her as a friend.

She just wanted to be home, to be able to share more of Sherie's warmth and trust, out of the prying eyes of her friends. She wanted to get back to that Round Two that she'd promised in the motel room. She wanted to explore this new thing to its fullest. She had discovered the joy of loving a girl, and she was anxious to discover more.

She blinked. Her heart was racing and her throat tight. Partly it was anticipation, happiness and emotional excitement, but part of it was undeniably something more, and it didn't do to think about that sort of thing while stuck in the back of a car on a long road trip. She'd get fidgety, and then she'd wake Sherie, and then there'd be no excuse for them to snuggle so close together on the back seat, and she'd have to deal with her fidgeting alone.

They pulled off the highway before the afternoon drew to a close and stopped near a rank of shops. Sherie woke up, looked around groggily. "Why are we stopping?" She asked.

"Dani wants to get something from a pharmacy." Rene said.

"Just something to help me sleep." Danika added.

"You want me to come with you?" Christi asked. "You don't have any money."

"I'll be alright, Rene gave me some cash earlier. Do you guys want anything?"

"I'm fine." Christi said. "Don't get anything too strong, will you?"

Danika forced a laugh. "I think as a junior pharmacist, I'm qualified to buy myself some sleeping tablets."

Christi smiled flatly in return, although Danika couldn't see her. Her reply could have been read as affronted, even offended, but Christi knew her well enough to know that she was trying to make light of a bad situation. She still looked and sounded utterly miserable, but she was trying.

"Anybody else? No? Alright, I'll be right back."

Danika didn't take long to get what she needed, and soon enough they were back on the road, in the endless hum of tyres on road as miles of blacktop rolled under the old car. Regular signs and billboards had given way to empty fields and copses. There were a few warehouses and farm buildings in the distance, a few scattered houses, but the area seemed mostly deserted. Eventually an old white building came into view, its paint faded to green and grey and its façade cracked and deteriorated, its windows caked with grime and lifeless beyond. It looked like an old school, or perhaps a hospital, although it obviously hadn't been used for a long time.

Christi turned her head to look as it rolled past, but looked back to the road ahead before her twisting could wake Sherie, who was asleep on her shoulder once more. She caught sight of the back of Danika's head, looking in the direction of the building for some time after it had disappeared from view, before she too turned her head to the front and focussed towards the darkening sky.

"It's getting late." Rene said, after another half-hour had passed. "Sorry, but I'm really tired, we'll have to stop at the next motel. We can get some food and get some sleep, and start afresh in the morning. We'll be home by mid-afternoon tomorrow."

* * *

Christi's breath had slowed down enough to allow her to think. Her shivers returned, and her shoulder throbbed where it had hit the tiles, but at least her headache and dizziness seemed to be clearing, and her brain was at last beginning to work properly again. There was no point in panicking, if she could help it. What was outside? Was there anyway to get help?

She climbed up onto the bench again, lifted herself as close as she could to the half-open window and peered as best she could through the gap. Cold autumn air blew beyond; a few brown-leaved trees were visible, damp in a midday mist, and a leaf-strewn overgrown lawn stretched all the way to a distant lattice fence topped with barbed wire and intermittently signed with warning notices. There was a small parking lot off to one side where an old and dirty SUV was parked, and the distant sound of a diesel generator made the air throb in rhythmic pulses.

There seemed to be little use in crying for help. Far from being unheard, her cries might attract the attention of whoever had locked her in the room, stripped her naked, daubed lip gloss on her belly and written offensive slogans on the walls.

She looked back at the door. It was old, covered with cracked and faded paint, and although it looked heavy, the frame was probably as rotten as the bench slats. Christi took a few steps towards it, took a firm grip on the handle, and thrust into the door with her shoulder. It moved just the tiniest fraction, and the frame creaked reassuringly.

Yes -- with enough force, she might be able to break it down. She tried again, harder, and again, and again, each time harder, each time bringing a louder creak from the frame. With each thump of her shoulder if felt like the door was bouncing far out into the corridor beyond, but Christi's heart sank when she fixed her eyes on the frame for one final shunt, and saw that while it felt like it was moving almost out of its mountings, it was in fact moving only a nail's width.

She stopped, regained her breath. She sat on the bench, rubbing her shoulder tenderly where she had made it sore with her barging. The discarded bench slat lay on the floor, a long stout shaft of rotting wood, and an idea came to her: maybe she could use it as a lever to crow open the door. She jumped up from the bench, picked up the slat, positioned it against the door handle and levered against the concrete wall. The door creaked and the frame bent, the handle twisted and its screws began to pull from the wood. Christi stopped, regained her breath, then pushed with all her might, feet skittering on the damp floor, jaw clenched against the effort and against the roughness of the rotten wood digging into her bare skin.

With a sudden crack the frame gave way and the door flew outwards in a cloud of dust and splinters. The slat dropped away and Christi tumbled, landed deftly on her hands and bounced back up again unscathed.

As quick as she was on her feet she was out of the broken door, darting into a long dark concrete-walled corridor floored with dusty black tiles and painted in cracked off-white paint. Dull white light shone into the opposite end of the corridor and she ran for it, feet squeaking on the tiles as she reached its end and skidded into another corridor that crossed it at right-angles. A windowed exit lay at each end of the new corridor; she ran for the closest, a wide set of doors that led out of a low entry porch.

She had reached the escape handles when she heard a terrified, blood-curdling scream. Her breath caught in her throat and she span like a top, fell backwards into the door, crashed against it with a wooden rattle, stood deathly still. Misty footprints on the dirty tiles led back the way she had come, but there was no other movement; not even dust swirled in the empty shadows.

"Christi!" Came the piercing scream again, echoing around the hollow corridors of the abandoned building like some over-effected techno song. "Christi, help me, please!"

Sherie! Christi pushed away from the door with all her strength, her heart pounding as her legs took her back down the corridor the way she had come. She retraced her fading footsteps, back into the shadows, back to where she had been trapped. She heard a rapid thumping and came to another door, further into the darkness, from where the sound came.

"Sherie!" She shouted, pressing her face against the frosted glass. It was almost dark beyond, but she made out a subtle movement, a shine of blonde hair and pink skin in the pale light from the window.

"Christi!" Shouted the face on the inside of the door. The handle rattled as the head bobbed up and down frantically.

"Stand away from the door!" Christi shouted into the glass, her ears assaulted by the reflection of her voice. She stood back, took a run up and thrust her shoulder into the door. It boomed and twisted, but resisted her impact. She tried again, and again, and on her fourth effort the door burst open with a crack of splintering wood. "Sherie!" She shouted once more as she fell into the dark room, grabbed hold of the naked figure before her and took her into a tight embrace. "Sherie…"