iBoy by Kevin Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

back in there . . . not yet, anyway. It makes me feel . . . you know . . .” She shrugged. “So I’ve been staying in here.”
    “It must have been terrible,” I said, without thinking. “I mean, what happened . . .”
    “Yeah . . .” she muttered. “Yeah, it was terrible . . .”
    “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to —”
    “No, no . . .” Lucy said. “It’s all right . . . honestly. It happened . . . there’s no point trying to pretend that it didn’t, is there?” She looked at me. “It happened , Tom.”
    “I know . . . and I’m so sorry. I’m sorry it happened, Luce.”
    “Me too,” she said sadly.
    “Can you . . .? I mean, do you want to . . . ?”
    “What? Talk about it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What for? What’s the point? I mean, talking about it isn’t going to change anything, is it?”
    “No, I suppose not . . .”
    She looked at me, her eyes wet with tears now. “I can’t, Tom. I can’t do it. I know I should, but I can’t.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I can’t say anything . . . you know, to the police. I can’t tell anyone. I just can’t . . .”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    I wasn’t just agreeing with her because it was the easiest thing to do, I was agreeing with her because she was right. If she knew who her attackers were — and I was pretty sure that she did — her life wouldn’t be worth living if she gave those names to the police. She’d have to endure an endless nightmare of threats, abuse, verbal and physical assaults . . . maybe even worse.
    “And the thing is,” Lucy said quietly, her voice trembling, “the thing is . . . even if I did, you know . . . even if I did tell the police who did it, they’d still get away with it, wouldn’t they?”
    “Well . . .”
    She shook her head. “Come on, Tom, you know how it works. Even if I could identify them, give the police names . . . I mean, it doesn’t matter how much evidence the police have got. DNA, fingerprints, whatever . . . none of it makes any difference.” Her voice was still trembling, but now it was tinged with anger, too. “All they’d have to say was that it was consensual . . . I agreed to it. You know, because I’m a slag . . . I mean, it says so on my door, doesn’t it?”
    She was getting really upset now, and I was tempted to get up and put my arms round her, just hold her for a while, but — again — I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.
    “What about Ben?” I said to her.
    “Ben?” she said, almost spitting out his name. “What about him?”
    “Well, they can’t say that he agreed to being beaten up, can they?”
    She shook her head. “Ben won’t say anything. He’s too scared. He’s already told the police that he couldn’t see their faces because they were all wearing hoods or balaclavas.”
    “Were they?”
    “What?”
    “Wearing hoods?”
    She looked at me, hesitating. “Some of them were . . . but not the ones who actually did it.” She took a shallow breath. “They wanted me to know who they were . . . and they wanted me to know that they didn’t care that I knew, because they knew there was nothing I could do about it.”
    She was crying silently now, mute tears pouring down her face, and all I could do was sit there, trying hard not to cry myself, feeling more helpless than I’d ever felt before. I just didn’t know what to do. Should I try to comfort her? Would she want to be comforted? Was comfort even the right thing to consider? Or should I just sit here, listening to her cry . . . should I just be here for her?
    As I thought about all this, I could feel my wound throbbing, and I guessed there was something going on inside my head, some cyber-connected part of me that was trying to do what it thought was the right thing . . .
    But, just for the moment, I didn’t want anything to do with that. Whatever it was, whatever it was doing, it wasn’t right for now.
    “Is your head all right?” Lucy asked me, sniffing back tears and giving