Chapter 20: Epilogue

Amy refused to cooperate with the prosecutors.

She would never forget the day they made her sit in that office downtown to watch video after video of her masturbating. The videos had been taken by her father, they told her, who had secretly recorded her for several months. Obviously they had hoped that this betrayal of her privacy would make her so angry that she'd agree to testify against him, to say he had raped her. They had him on murder, cold. But they wanted him on child molestation too. But she didn't take their bait.

Her father's attorneys also wanted her cooperation. They wanted her to say that the victim, Dennis Milsing, had raped her, and that her dad had found out and gone berserk. They wanted to use this story, to use her, as some basis for an insanity plea. She had no interest in that deal though, either.

The prosecutors had managed to put together only pieces of the larger truth. They could prove that her dad had videotaped her masturbating with a dildo. They couldn't prove he'd ever touched her. They could prove he'd killed Dennis Milsing. They couldn't provide a convincing motive.

Only two people alive really knew the whole story: Amy, and her dad. And he wasn't helping either side anymore than she was. His repeated explanation for killing his former boss was that the guy "was an asshole". The tapes of his daughter masturbating? Responsible parenting. And so the circle of logic went.

Even without her cooperation, the prosecutors eventually convicted her father of murder in the first degree. Without Amy's testimony, her father's defense attorney's claim of temporary insanity (brought on by the knowledge that his daughter had been raped) couldn't fly. Amy wasn't there to watch the verdict handed down though. She was too busy begging for water at the time.

That first foster family she'd gone to had been as bad as she'd always feared, back when she'd considered going to the police about her father's abuse. It was almost as though the District Attorney's Office had made sure she'd end up in a rank shithole to punish her for not cooperating with their case. The house was a small, single story ranch in the most ghetto parts of the city, and Amy was just one of four foster kids the state had entrusted Charles and Sarah Farris to care for. Charles, the red-necked slob, had taken an immediate liking to her. The other children he and his wife had taken in were a lot younger: a black six-year-old and his littler sister, and a mentally retarded girl only a couple of years older than them.

Amy had had to share a room with the retarded girl, and that was difficult. But the real hell began when Charles started groping her thighs underneath the table during supper. Amy, coming from where she did, didn't protest this, but she certainly didn't encourage it. And then things got worse when he eventually, inevitably, forced her to shower with him one day.

Summer had only just started and she'd been living with these hicks for six weeks or so when he did that. She hadn't been fucked since winter was still around, that great and horrible day Elissa and she had entertained those boys at the Cleveland Mall. She still remembered that part of the day fondly.

Amy had cried without pleasure when the old, scrawny man had forced her against the back of the shower stall and began to bite her neck. When he turned her around in the steaming hot shower and began pressing his dick against her adolescent butt she'd struggled wildly, but to no avail. He was scrawny but he was strong and it didn't take him long to press his cock inside her pussy from behind. Once he got in her she'd sobbed pathetically, like a little girl, even as he groped her tits and hissed in her ear that she must "love it"; that she must "love" the feeling of his dick.

She honestly hadn't, at first. His raping instrument hurt physically but the emotional pain was even worse. Memories of her dad, of what'd he'd done, of how she'd ended up here... it'd been awful. Traumatizing. So Amy had sobbed hysterically: she'd sobbed loud and hard as her foster-father brutally raped her pussy.

But the worst thing about that vile rape was that since Amy hadn't so much as masturbated in months her perpetually horny young body had actually given in to the stimulation right at the end of Farris' fucking. In order to cover up the orgasm that inevitably exploded between her legs Amy was forced to cry and sob so loud that she was practically screaming by the time he finally filled her 14-year-old cunt with his goo under that hot stream of water.

It became clear to the 14-year-old during the next couple of weeks that Sarah Farris was well aware of her husband's actions. Charles groped her boldly wherever she went, after all, whether in front of the youngsters or even his own wife. In less than a week he was forcing Amy to share the married couple's bed with them, making the 14-year-old watch as he fucked Sarah, a 40ish woman who was incredibly overweight, and eventually telling his wife to watch as he fucked her.

This was her lot in life, Amy's broken mind began to tell itself. She was always going to be a victim, she would always be at the mercy of stronger, merciless people. Just because some corrupt, inept justice system thought it had saved her didn't mean it actually had. Nothing would ever change the fact that she would always be raped, and hurt, and taken advantage of.

But then came the day when letting Charles fuck her no longer sufficed. He wanted her to do the fucking, now... while Sarah recorded it all for posterity. Her foster-parent explained it to her as though she was a little child, using simple, short words to argue his case.

"When we record it, it feels better," he said. "For both of us. Ya'll most of all. And then we kin look back later and 'member how good we felt... wouldn't ya like that?"

Amy was disgusted. She absolutely refused, though she knew she really had no choice. Her defiance incensed both him and his wife. And that's how the 14-year-old ended up locked away in the cellar for almost five days, without food or water. She might have died had the retarded girl, who Amy had so thoughtlessly written off weeks before, hadn't poured cups of water under the doorway for her to lap up greedily like a dog.

When her social worker made a surprise visit, Sarah, Charles' wife, came down to the basement to wake up Amy. After getting slapped a few times Amy came-to and heard the fat woman make her threats: pain, torture, etc. She would suffer, the girl was told, unless she played along.

"Keep yer mouth shut 'n only tell'em you're happy, geddit?" Mrs. Farris demanded.

Amy had pretended to be scared. She wasn't, though. She was starving and dehydrated, but she wasn't scared of any threats. Not anymore. So after being hurriedly dressed in clean clothes and presented to the pudgy black woman assigned to her case, Amy didn't say what Sarah and Charles had wanted her to. Nor did she speak the truth. All she did was run out of the house as fast as her weak body could take her, not trusting this 'social worker', not trusting anybody.

"She's a trouble maker, see!" Amy heard Charles yell as she ran. Amy would never forget those words.

The girl tried her best to hide. She made it out of the crappy subdivision and into a lightly wooded area where she followed a creek for nearly fifteen minutes. The sounds of her pursuers disappeared and eventually she got to a busy road. After hiding out in the weeds for a while (mostly to catch her breath and make sure no one had followed her), the malnourished girl crept to the road and began walking east. She had no idea where she was going, only that she wanted to get as far away as possible from that awful foster home, that awful state-run foster-care system.