Chapter 5: The Station Wagon

We were in motion. The geometry was no longer confined to rooms and hallways. It was mobile, sealed in steel and glass, hurtling west. The points of shame were now locked in orbit, with new, horrifying laws of gravity and permission dictating their pull. The paper bag sat between us, a silent engine for the journey to come.

We had always called it the station wagon. No matter what bulky, wood-paneled vehicle my parents bought to haul all four of us, whether it was technically a Suburban, a Chevy Nomad, or anything else, it was simply “the station wagon.” A generic label for the rolling container of our family life. Now, as it carried us away from the only home we’d ever known, the name felt like a cruel joke. This was no ordinary family car. It was a mobile cell, a glass-walled exhibit, a chassis for our unraveling.

The world outside the tinted windows began to blur as we pulled out of the driveway and onto our quiet street. Inside, the silence was a taut wire. Then, with a sudden, pragmatic shift, Megan moved. She leaned forward from the far back bench, her movements efficient and eerily calm. She gathered the few items on the center seat: a stray towel, the ominous paper bag, and placed them on the floor behind her. Then, without a word, she slid forward onto the middle bench beside Ashley, crowding us closer.

What happened next unfolded before I could process it, a silent choreography of violation. Megan reached over and took my right hand, the one that had been resting limply around Ashley’s shoulders. Ashley stiffened, a tiny intake of breath her only protest. Megan’s grip was firm, instructional. She guided my hand down, past the plane of Ashley’s stomach, until my palm was pressed flat against the vulnerable warmth between her legs. I felt Ashley’s whole body tense as a wire pulled tight and then, with a shuddering exhale, release. The tension she’d been holding since dawn melted into a terrible, passive surrender.

Megan wasn’t finished. With her other hand, she rubbed Ashley’s cheek in a gesture that might have been sisterly comfort in another life, but here felt like a surgeon’s prep. Then she returned her focus to my captured hand. Her fingers wrapped around mine, guiding them closer, parting. A push, insistent and precise, and my fingers slipped inside Ashley. The intimacy was appalling, a theft performed in broad daylight, inches from my parents’ oblivious backs. At the same time, Megan took my left arm and draped it around Ashley’s back, nestling my hand beneath the soft, unresisting weight of her breast, completing the circuit of forced connection.

I sat frozen, my face burning, my mind screaming. Ashley’s head was bowed, her hair a curtain hiding her expression, but her shallow, rhythmic breathing vibrated through my arm. Megan, her task apparently complete for the moment, settled back on the seat. She then turned her attention to Claire, who was already moving from the far back. With a fluid, resigned motion, Claire joined us on the middle bench, squeezing in on the other side of Megan. The station wagon’s interior, once a space of road trip games and sibling squabbles, was now a confessional of flesh.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Claire and Megan facing each other, their heads close. They weren’t looking at the passing houses, the familiar trees of Cedar Springs bleeding away. They were whispering, their lips barely moving, discussing something with a frightening intensity. Plotting our survival in this new world, or perhaps just mapping the contours of our shared damnation.

We drove past the heart of our small town. The quaint downtown storefronts, the library where I’d spent summer afternoons, the park, all of it slid by like scenery from a life I’d already left. We turned onto 17 Mile Road, then merged onto US-131, the highway carrying us toward the sprawl of Grand Rapids. The parents, for their part, spoke only to each other, their conversation a low murmur about mileage and exits, as if the back of the wagon held nothing more remarkable than luggage.

As the skyline of Grand Rapids emerged, Mom’s voice cut through the haze of my shock. She didn’t turn around. “We’ll stop in South Haven to see the lake,” she announced, her tone breezy, normal, as if suggesting a scenic detour on any other family vacation. “Dad will need to refuel there anyway, before we get back on the road.” The casualness of it was its own kind of violence. A trip to the water’s edge. A tourist stop. For three naked girls and their shell-shocked brother.

The car rolled on, swallowed by the metro traffic. The normality outside the glass made the obscenity within feel even more surreal. It was then, in the humming silence punctuated only by the road noise and Ashley’s quiet, rhythmic tension around my imprisoned fingers, that she spoke. Her voice was a thin, strained whisper, meant only for Megan.

“We’re not ... we’re not doing a good enough job,” she breathed, the words trembling. “With your ... condition.” She shifted slightly, a movement that emphasized the purpose of my trapped hand. “We need to be better. Taking care of it. At bending it to the will we are given.”

She said it while I was working my fingers inside her, a clinical assessment of my unwanted arousal amidst her own violation. The lesson was being absorbed, internalized. Their punishment was becoming their purpose. My body was their responsibility, my compliance their metric. And the open road stretched ahead, an endless runway for our disgrace.

I could feel the low-grade vibration of the highway through the seat, a steady hum that seemed to sync with the frantic pulse in my own skull. My fingers still, impossibly, held inside, Ashley had gone from feeling like an invasion to a strange, terrible fixture. They weren’t my own anymore; they were a tool she gripped with a silent, desperate need, a single point of anchored reality in her spinning world. They hadn’t once slipped out. Her body, in its tense acquiescence, wouldn’t allow it.

As the cityscape began to thin, giving way to the promise of orchards and then the lake, billboards for South Haven’s beaches and marinas started to flash by. Sunset Views! Public Docks! The cheerful slogans were like taunts. It was then that Claire leaned forward, her breath warm on my ear, her voice a low, conspiratorial rasp that sliced through the drone of the engine.

“You see them too,” she said, her eyes fixed on the passing advertisement for ice cream and kayak rentals. She wasn’t talking to me, or to Ashley, but to some shared, monstrous understanding between the three of them. “Ashley, Megan ... look at him.” Her gaze flicked down to where my arm disappeared around Ashley, to the subtle, telling shift of my clothed hips. “He’s ... responding. Even now. Even to this.”

She said it not with disgust, but with a cold, analytical clarity. It was an observation, a data point in the experiment we were all trapped in. And instantly, I felt it as a hot, writhing knot of shame and a traitorous, undeniable physical truth. She was right. In the midst of the horror, my body was betraying me, reacting to the illicit warmth, the forbidden intimacy, the sheer overwhelming sensory overload. Ashley felt it too; a slight, reflexive clench around my fingers, and a tiny, shuddering sigh escaped her lips, a sound of profound self-loathing.

We all knew. The knowledge hung in the close, towel-scented air of the wagon. And we all knew, with a sickening certainty, that our parents knew. The tilt of the rearview mirror was a dead giveaway. Dad’s eyes, in that sliver of reflected glass, weren’t fixed on the road behind us. They were watching the tableau in the middle seat. He had been watching the entire time. The fact that he and Mom had been talking quietly, calmly about gasoline and rest stops this whole time while their son fingered their naked daughter in the backseat made it infinitely worse. This wasn’t a lapse in their attention; it was part of the curriculum. Our performance was being monitored.

Then Megan leaned in, her movement mirroring Claire’s, closing the circle. Her face was pale, her expression one of grim, exhausted resolution. “Ashley told you,” she murmured, her voice barely audible over the road noise. Her eyes locked with mine, and in them, I saw no anger, just a vast, flat sea of accepted reality. “Our punishment is exposure. Total. Unflinching.” She let the word hang, its meaning expanding far beyond nakedness. It meant exposure to every flinch, every tremor, every humiliating physiological response. It meant being seen in every possible way.

Her gaze then flicked to the navy-blue sweater, Dad’s old cable-knit, still folded unused on the floor near the paper bag. It was a symbol, a tiny island of potential modesty in our sea of enforced bareness.

“No one,” Megan stated, her voice dropping to a fierce, final whisper, “touches that sweater. Not ever. You understand, Sam? That’s the line. We don’t hide. We don’t get to hide. Not from the world, and not from each other. Especially not from you.”

Ashley, her face still hidden, gave the smallest nod against my shoulder, her agreement felt in the tense line of her neck. The sweater was a test, a temptation to fail. To reach for it would be to reject the “authenticity” our parents had decreed, to prove we hadn’t learned the value of the “privilege” we’d lost.

The message was clear. My unwanted arousal, Dad’s watchful eye in the mirror, the untouched sweater, they were all interconnected parts of the same brutal equation. We were to be a closed system of mutual exposure, with me as the clothed, yet utterly compromised, center. The station wagon carried us onward, a sealed ecosystem of shame, rolling toward the vast, open expanse of the lake, where the exposure would cease to be metaphorical and become terrifyingly, publicly real.

The station wagon’s turn signal clicked like a metronome counting down to judgment as Dad wheeled us off the highway and into the gravel lot of a service station. It was a classic 1992 pit-stop: weathered white siding, fluorescent lights buzzing against the deepening afternoon, two battered gas pumps out front, and a sign for “ICE & BAIT” in faded letters. Beyond the small building, through a fringe of trees, the immense, hazy blue of Lake Michigan glimmered, a postcard vista that felt like a taunt.