Haley looked into her rear-view mirror and wit’s like a punch to the gut. Like it is every time she sees her son, now. The little crow was sitting there, looking out the window. Something impossible sat next to him. It was almost shadow, something that was only noticeable in absence, through sheer lack of real presence. She’d never seen all of it at once, only fragments. A hand would caress his thigh one second, spreading his legs wide the next, toying with him while he sat there adjusting how he sat. Little sounds of pain, only slightly smaller than when they’d called her to the hospital after a morning spent desperately hunting for her him in the neighborhood, would escape his lips when it went to nibble at his neck. She could only watch as ghastly hands sank far too low on a little body she’d preened so many times.

	A blaring honk pulls her from her consternation. Green meant go. They speed along, distracted, watching every sign, every stranger on the side of the road. The sight of a large canine, any large canine, would have her looking him over just a bit longer. Did he have the spots her son had told the cops about, half-whispered about when they’d asked him. A couple did. If she ran up and pulled the mace she’d bought just after the incident on them, would one of them confess. The thought is almost pleasant.

	She’d struggled to look back directly. Prescott didn’t like that anymore. He’d said it was the face she made. He didn’t like how she’d hugged him, tried to pull him close at the hospital. 

	Haley couldn’t say that she had either, in the days following her own assault back in high school. Sometimes the hands on him would shift, become some crocodile’s for just a second rather than some ugly bald rodentine pair. But she’d gotten her justice for that, sent him to jail. He’d called her a birdbrain on stand and even today it makes her squeeze the wheel tighter. Fuck him. Fuck them all. Before Prescott could come home, she’d made a trip to the bar near where he was found. He’d said how they’d smelled like booze when they did what they did. She’d pounded on the door, nearly knocked it off the hinges to see if they had any footage of people leaving the bar in groups of threes. The assholes had refused to even let her see the tapes. That’s what had saved her, a video of the attack.

	And in the mirror, the thing kept up it’s assault on his clothed body. It was pressed up against him, crushing him up against the back of the car. She’d been the one who had to explain to him exactly what those men were doing, why they were doing it. How they were wrong to do it. When Haley had told him about what an orgasm was, how it had made them feel good, he’d told her about his own. It had nearly broken her. She didn’t fucking prepare for that. The doctor had to explain how it was normal for that to happen. It was a weight in her chest.

	Haley had checked in on him the other night, like she was now doing five times a night. There was a mirror in the corner of his room and she’d sit with her back to the wall, peeking around the corner just like those perverts had probably done. He’d been masturbating, some ghostly goat on top of him. It was like a hallucination, except there was nothing visual. But she could still see it when the goat had kissed along his little neck all the way down to where he was touching himself, quite openly, on top of the covers. Those kisses had gone on every part of his body. There wasn’t any place on him they hadn’t taken from her.

	She’d watched as his feathered body twitched in pleasure, strangely unable to take her eyes from the sight for fear that it might make that ghost real. It had felt so wrong, but so did leaving him for even a second, and so did not being there to tell him it was okay afterwards. What she’d wanted to tell him was what the doctor had. That it was okay to feel that way. If she’d caught him just a week earlier, she would have stopped him but now Haley just wanted him to have that for himself. Something that she’d always hoped would be pure and that she’d wanted to tell him to use right, taken too.

	And then he’d just gone berserk. Prescott had yelled at the top of his lungs, punched walls and broken the framed pictures that hung over his bed. She’d rushed in to pull him from that and they’d both gotten cuts on their arms. He’d fidgeted and fought even while she dragged him to the bathroom desperate to clean his wounds. He’d left bruises on himself, layered them on top of the ones still healing from his attack. She still felt the ones he gave her on her ribs. All the while, in those broken shard that had somehow gotten stuck in her own arm, the reflection of those sneering bastards had laughed as they continued to grab him and hold him so that she never again could, not like she’d used to. So that she couldn’t even look at him. 

	Haley hated that she couldn’t look at him without him turning from her. That in the rare moments she would catch him smiling, it was never at her. Then he’d twitch in some way and it would be gone.

	They pull up to the pharmacy and she can’t bring herself to look the son she’d failed, was failing, in the eyes. All Haley could do was hope the doctors were right. The little slips of paper in her hand had a few short words on them and a name written in typical doctor’s handwriting. The same for both, oddly enough. The pills were the same, the dosages were different.

	An antidepressant. They’d been sure to let her know that it wasn’t a cure, that it was a temporary thing for them both while their therapist helped them get close enough to better that they wouldn’t need them anymore. Haley couldn’t even see the possibility with those hands still holding down the boy’s arms while he nervously drummed on his window. 

	And for just a second, a face is reflected behind his own. The same goat that she’d seen on top of him in his room. Prescott stares at it and it stares back. And only when it disappears does he turn to look at his mom.