Cupid in Captivity is now available on Amazon. Chapter 1 can be read below.
I wrote my first novel in junior high (a novella actually but it was longer than my previous stories--it felt like a novel). It is about a teenage girl who is kidnapped by a group of older teens who in retrospect rather resemble the snotty kids in Pretty in Pink. If I remember correctly (the novella is buried in a box somewhere), the teenage protagonist is kidnapped alongside the child who is the actual target.
I wrote the novel before Pretty in Pink came out (yes, I am that old) but I don't doubt that James Spader et al. were floating about in the ether. The leader of the group was named Billy and had many of the characteristics associated with appealing vaguely amoral bad guys, such as Spike and Crowley.
The story never completely went away. I tried updating it a few years ago, flipping the roles, and adding a mythological aspect (which I ended up using here): Billy became victim rather than kidnapper. The magazine I submitted it to was obviously engaged enough to send me a personal note but bothered by the underlying thread of violence. Stockholm Syndrome is simply not as attractive as it used to be.
I kept playing around with the idea in my head, and I discovered that with age, comes a change in perspective. The aftermath of the kidnapping is now the part that interests me the most. So here is the story revised and expanded with a kernel of the original idea.
The second novel in this series, Ithax's Offspring on Mars, will be released on April 12, 2021, the first day that a human--Yugi Gagarin--entered space.
The books in this series are not related by genre or characters. They range from suspense to space sci-fi to contemporary fantasy. However, they are thematically related. They satirize human attitudes that attempt to label and categorize events and personalities at the expense of experience, transcendence, and individuality.
Romance is larger than petty politics. Cupid in Captivity
Part I
Chapter 1
The hospital felt stranger than the shack.
Not a shack, Billy reminded himself. A cottage with running water. The only heat came from a thrumming space heater—but that could be because the boiler or furnace was shut down for the winter.
Or, more likely, because lots of summer cottages didn't bother with heat and used above-ground pipes. The floors were wooden, not dirt. Sneaker against wood as his kidnapper moved between an area with a sink and the bed.
Billy told the police about the wooden floors, not about the sneakers. He told them quite a lot.
“Thursday night, I was leaving school. Debate team.”
Debate team gave the impression Billy had been participating. He hadn't. Ernest convictions based on acquired media phrases exasperated him. So much effort for so little result. His peers, when frustrated, tended to fall back on declarations, such as, “I’m so offended!” and “How can you think that!” until weary moderators called for a rest.
Still, listening to the types of arguments people made when pushed had its value. Not that his classmates pushed very hard. Environmentalism versus industry. It didn't seem to occur to anyone, even the teachers, to pick a topic of actual interest and impact, like a debate between environmentalists of varying schools or a debate on preferred industry responses, from branding to buying up carbon credits.
He left when the debaters starting arguing end-of-the-world scenarios, which was futile as well as illogical. He got in his car, got pulled into a chokehold, got chloroformed.
He didn't mention that the chokehold was lightly applied and that he didn't struggle. Much. A reflex, a rejection at being alarmed—sure. But what was happening wasn't boring. Always an opportunity to learn more.
He didn't repeat that thought to the police. Yeah, teens are stupid. We have sex without condoms. We drive without seat belts. We never think, “Oh, this will kill me.”
He could see that thought and others lurking behind Lieutenant Davis's reasonably expressionless face. She was ready to find Billy stupid in some way. She also knew that a properly applied chokehold would take less than three minutes. And that chloroform would take more than five. Billy was purposefully vague about times. I was dazed.
The doctors pronounced Billy fine—at least as far as blood circulation and brain damage were concerned. But he was the victim, so Lieutenant Davis said without obvious skepticism, “And when you woke up?”
“Head ached. I was handcuffed to a bed, wrists and legs. Eyes covered. Had a blanket over me. Kidnapper gave me pills.”
“One kidnapper?”
Billy allowed himself to pause as if considering. He could use a breather in any case. His head pounded as much as it had that first morning in the cottage before his kidnapper gave him aspirin and had him drink a lot of water through a straw. The hospital was filled with undying echoes. Light in his private room was dim, but overhead lights lurked just beyond the room door. And he was cold, colder than in the cottage. The space heater had been a good one.
“I guess,” he said finally even though he was positive there was only one kidnapper.
“He? She?”
“He,” Billy said because it seemed a little too witless not to guess sex, even with his eyes covered. Weight. Walk. Whatever his peers wanted to believe about the evils of biological profiling and the duty of being non-judgmental, Billy doubted that a woman could have grabbed him so easily in the car or lugged his 5'8” 140-pound self anywhere without causing him more damage.
So far, other than the left wrist which got pinched by the handcuffs in the final nine hours (I slept wrong), he didn't seem to be suffering much physically. He really hoped they didn't send in a priest or the secular equivalent to look after his supposed emotional trauma.
Lieutenant Davis said, “You were fed?”
“Yeah.”
Mostly crackers, cheese, yogurt and water, all with plastic utensils and cups. He wore adult diapers, which the kidnapper changed regularly over the first twenty-four hours. Billy was too tired to figure out whether that was supposed to embarrass him as a teen or not, so he simply relayed the information matter-of-factly. Personally, he thought it rather brilliant. He'd always wondered why terrorists and such let hostages go to the bathroom. If they weren't worried about killing their victims, why would they care about said victims’ personal comfort? After consideration, he supposed that living conditions mattered even to soulless terrorists. Nobody wants to hang out in a latrine.
And his kidnapper, Billy believed, was not soulless.
“The iPod we found isn't yours.”
“No. The kidnapper left it for me to listen to.”
Billy rather thought the kidnapper should have taken the iPod away. Leaving it behind indicated confidence that it couldn't be traced back to anyone. Had it been stolen? On a trip to Boston? Portland was a small enough city, an iPod stolen off a local bus might still turn up in a police report. Stolen out of a lost and found box? Maybe. Still, Billy thought it careless.
“Jules Verne?” the police officer said skeptically. “The kidnapper left you alone to listen to Journey to the Center of the Earth?”
Billy shrugged. “To send me to sleep? I mean—yawnsville.”
That earned a glare—Brain dead teen who can only enjoy Twitter and pretentious music with trivializing lyrics—and Billy tried not to obviously relax. Because he liked Jules Verne. He'd read all the novels and a biography. Voluntarily. He had opinions about the movies, which he never shared with anyone. Except there was evidence for his preferences out there in the world.
The questions continued. No, the kidnapper never spoke. Yes, the kidnapper left me alone part of the second day. When I woke early the third day, I was alone. The police arrived a few hours later.
“Do you know why the kidnapper didn't ask for more money?”
The Stowe family lawyer, Mr. Jamison, raised his head. He spent most of the questioning seated at a tiny table on the other side of the hospital room, working through business documents.
Now, he said, “Not really within Billy's purview.”
It was actually. Billy was well-aware of how much his family was worth. With more time, the kidnapper probably could have collected several million for his return. Out of available family cash, seventy thousand was low.
Withdraw the money the same day. Drop it in a waterproof bag on a long, deserted road. Then call in the police. His family could have built a bonfire and burnt the ransom and felt as little damage. Fairly brilliant if all one wanted was enough money to pay for two years of college or a down payment on a condo.
Billy shrugged anyway.
A few more questions. The lawyer claimed Billy needed to rest (Billy suspected Jamison had a deposition to get to). The lieutenant grumbled and followed him out. Billy heard them confabbing in the corridor, probably about asking Billy more questions “when he's up to it.” And Jamison was likely intoning platitudes about Billy’s “need to rest.”
Billy let their conversation wash over him, their voices blending with the hospital echoes. He wasn't worried. He knew exactly what to mention and what to not mention in future interviews. He was never going to mention that the kidnapper smelled like chlorine.
