Resist (Songs of Submission #6) Read Online Free PDF

owned him. Those pictures were lies.
    “Monica?” Darren watched me as he filled the pot with water.
    “What?”
    “Are you okay?”
    “It barely says anything. Arrested at the airport on domestic abuse charges brought by his ex-wife. History of kinky activity. Wife declines comment because she’s ‘too upset,’ Oh, and I’m an unidentified female passenger. His little trick fuck whore. Remind me never to look at the internet again.” I pushed the laptop away and turned to my pile of crap. I could have stalled and pretended to rummage through my stuff, but I knew exactly where that manila envelope was. I ran my hands over it, the aged edges, the curled flap.
    “That what I think it is?” Darren asked.
    “Yeah. Did you open it?”
    “It’s long and involved, so I just put it back.” He looked at me over the edge of his coffee cup.
    “Great. Long and involved.” I slid out the contents. Eight and a half by eleven printed pages, stapled. About twenty pages, pure text. Double-spaced with wide margins. Markings all over it in red pencil. Lines. Scribblings. Hash marks. Slashes. Across the top: Lloyd Willman/Evert Toth, ed.
    “It looks like someone’s term paper.”
    He looked over my shoulder. “I think the ed. means editor . My first assumption was that it was a newspaper article.”
    “Fan-freaking-tastic.”
    “And unpublished, looks like. Or it wouldn’t look like something someone handed in for eleventh grade finals. My sister was a scary girl. I think digging dirt on people was more fun for her than actually trying to get them to sign her.”
    “When do you have to leave?” I asked.
    “Fifteen minutes.”
    I threw myself on the couch. I flipped through. All words and marks. I looked up at Darren, who was wiping down the counter. I cleared my throat.
    He didn’t look up when he said, “You’re stalling.”
    “Why would I stall?”
    “You tell me.”
    I had a hundred answers.
    Because I know half-truths and pieces of a story.
    Because I’m committed to a man who is still a mystery to me.
    Because I love him, and I will stand by him, no matter what the papers say.
    Because Jonathan lies.
    So I didn’t answer but tilted my head down and read.

Chapter 8.
    The star of the article was the rain.
    There had been a winter of storms. I was nine. Dad was away, as usual. Christmas sucked because we were broke and the crawlspace flooded. Pebbles from the driveway of what became the Montessori school came in on a tide of floodwater, pecking the north side of the house for hours.
    I hadn’t done the math before. Why would I? Why would I remind myself that I was in third grade when he was busy having sex and falling in love? But that was the year I learned multiplication and long division and the year Jonathan lost Rachel.
    The story wasn’t much different than I’d imagined. A party had started out as a family affair for Sheila Drazen, and it became wilder and more drug-infused once the adults left and the kids arrived. The police found a bong containing chartreuse absinthe, the remnants of White Widow bud, and sixteen-year-old Jonathan S. Drazen III’s DNA.
    What happened after was the stuff of police procedurals, but according to witnesses, Jonathan argued with his girlfriend, Rachel Demarest. She grabbed his keys and ran into the rain. Everyone assumed she was keeping his fucked-up ass from driving. The next morning, Jonathan was found passed out on the muddy front lawn of a house a quarter mile off, and his waterlogged car was found on the beach three miles south with no girlfriend in it. A day and a half later, he was committed to Westonwood after an almost successful suicide attempt. It wasn’t a half-hearted cry for help; he did almost die of heart failure.
    Three months in Westonwood. The place was known for its lockdown: no phone, no radio. Nothing. A prison for the rich and disturbed.
    But while he was away, his world was not quiet. What had happened during the rains had rippled outward in