Back To You (29 page)

Even Mom knew better than to push when she asked me if I wanted lettuce on my sandwich and I yelled
at her.  It took me a few days to calm down enough to be able to tell anyone what had happened.  I called Megan.  She understood the back and forth of my relationship with Jack.  I had always kept my feelings for him close to my chest for all of these years.  I could tell story after story about anything and everything.  But Jack was special to me, even in my pain.  Megan was someone who understood my pain all of those years without me having to say a word.  I had plenty of words this time.

“He did
WHAT
?”  Megan nearly broke my eardrum.

“You heard me.  He left a fucking note on my car.  He had the nerve to call me a whore, of all things!  A goddamned WHORE!  I don’t know if I want to kill him or t
ell him off or just never speak to him again.”

“I
’ll be right there.  Just sit tight and don’t do anything stupid.”  Obviously she could hear the frustration in my voice.  Even I wasn’t sure if sadness or fury was stronger.  Or even shame.  Except I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of.  All I did was try to move on, like he asked me to.

Megan spent the rest of the day with me.  And she did exac
tly what a best friend should do.  She commiserated with my pain, she got mad, and she made me laugh by making all of these elaborate plans to get him back.  I felt a little better by the time night rolled around.  We decided to go out.  I was still on the borderline of whether I should be moping around or dress to the nines.  I opted for the nines.

Augustine’s was packed.  A few drinks and a couple of games of pool later, I was
feeling much better.  Then Jack walked in.  He tried to ignore me, but he knew that I saw him walk in.  I continued playing pool, pretending that I didn’t care that he was there.  A couple shots of whiskey later, I didn’t care what anyone thought or said.  For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to go over the “tipsy” line.  If I had realized what I was going to do, I probably wouldn’t have taken that last shot.  But hell, I did.

Jack was hanging out by the dart boards, drinking a pitcher of beer all on his own.  He was sitting in a chair watching some guys we knew from high school throw a bad game.  That was when I walk
ed over to him.

*****

Jack was trying like hell to ignore the fact that Suzy was out.  He hoped that maybe the napkin had flown away and she never saw it.  She was drinking more than she usually did, and he was not prepared for what she did next.

He saw her movement out of the corner of his eye, and before he knew it she had taken the glass of beer out of his hand and down
ed the rest of it.  Then she straddled his lap and sat down facing him.  He could smell her perfume mixed with the alcohol.  Immediately, his body responded to her.  She put both of her hands on either side of his face and leaned in close.

“You are a fool, Jack.”  She barely said it loud enough for anyone to hear. 
Then she kissed him.  It was hot and sloppy and insanely sexual.  She rubbed her chest against his.  Jack wasn’t sure what to do.  Should he put his arms around her?  Shove her away for hurting his feelings?  He couldn’t stop kissing her back.  Anytime she was close to him, his brain got confused.

When she broke the kiss, she stood up, her hands still touc
hing his face.  Then she slapped him.  Hard.

“Do you see what you have given up?  Look at me!”  She was angry.  Her voice rose in pitch as she glared at him, d
emanding that he look at her.  “You are the biggest fool in this room Jack.  I hoped you liked that kiss, because that’s the last one you’ll get from these lips.”

S
he turned away and stomped off in her tight jeans and high heels.  Head held high.  She grabbed her purse and motioned to Megan that she was leaving.  Then she walked out the door.  Jack knew that she had certainly found his note.  His friends were going back and forth between shock that Suzy would do something that crazy and laughing because it was directed at him.  Jack didn’t hear any of it because his eyes were focused on the door and the sound of her voice repeating over and over that he was, indeed, a fool.

*****

“Oh my god oh my god OH MY GOD!  I can’t believe I did that!”  I was pacing in the parking lot, sobered from my actions.  Thank goodness Megan followed me out of the bar because there was NO WAY IN HELL I was going back in there.  Even if I had to sit in the parking lot until they closed.  But Megan was on my heels before I was even ten feet from the door.  Of course that didn’t stop her from being in shock that I had done something so insane.  She let me pace in the stagnant Louisiana air before she attempted to get me to calm down a little.

After about
thirty minutes, we got in her car and headed out.  Neither of us knew where we would go, but home was not an option.  So we went to the only club that stayed open until four in the morning.

I
danced with every single guy we could.  Jack called me a whore.  I most certainly WASN’T one, but I needed some fun.  And I was dressed to kill.

C
hapter 25

I did not see Jack the rest of the summer, but I could feel him.  It was always so weird that I could feel what he was thinking when it was about me.  I did my best to put him out of my mind and move on.  I still turned beet red when I remembered what I had done that night I slapped him.  It didn’t take long for it to fade into a smirk as I remembered the look on Jack’s face.

I looked forward to another year at Wesleyan.  As I packed my car for the trip back to my home away from home, I was dete
rmined to put the Jack issue behind me.  I was the junior class president so I arrived early like last year.  We had plenty of training to get us ready to be big sisters to the incoming freshmen.  I was in my element.  I was a leader.   

I resumed my job at the Mexican restaurant, working as a hostess and hoping t
o train to be a server.  My classes had gone from being mildly challenging to full on difficult.  I was reading constantly.  When I wasn’t reading I was working.  And if by chance I had time between those things, I was doing things as class president, attending rehearsals for Washboard Band, writing for the magazine, going to club meetings, or perhaps passing out on my bed by the end of the day.

Carrie listened as I told her about my summer.  She hadn’t done much other than work on the farm with her dad.  She had gotten herself involved in a lot of activities too so we didn’t get to hang out as much.  It was all I could do to just keep up. 
By the middle of October, I was exhausted.  And then the dreams began.

I was so tired each night that I would fall asleep sitting up.  Carrie had to fuss at me to go to bed most nights.  Often she would save her homework until the late hours, so I would fall asleep listening to her typing furiously on the computer ke
yboard.  I talk in my sleep sometimes, and one night Carrie had to shake me awake in the middle of the night.

“You were mumbling.  Sounded like you were in pain.  Are you OK?”  She looked worried.  Actually she had looked worried for a couple of months now when she saw how hard I was pushing m
yself.

“I
’m fine.  Just a bad dream.”  I tried to remember the dream.  “Really it was more weird than anything.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“MMMM, no.  I can’t really remember it.  Just that I was talking to someone.”  I lied.  I had been dreaming about Jack.  It was fuzzy, but I could have sworn he was begging me to forgive him.

After the fifth or sixth time I had dreamed that Jack was tal
king to me, I realized that he probably was.  He had a hard time saying what he was truly thinking unless he was drunk.  It was the dream I had right around Halloween that clued me in.  I had drifted off, listening to Carrie do her homework.  The next thing I knew, I could hear his voice calling my name.  He sat on my bed with his head hanging low.  I begged him to look at me but he refused.  He regretted that any of it ever happened.  In that dream, I could feel how sorry he was.  When I woke up, I was haunted by the dream, feeling his regret and even his love around me.  I tried to talk to Carrie about it, but it was hard enough for me to understand.  So I kept a lot of it to myself.

I stayed at Carrie’s for Thanksgiving.  It was the first Thanksgiving I had not spent around my family.  It was strange. 
They welcomed me as one of their own.  It felt great to feel like I was a part of a “normal” family.  Surrounded by chaos and tons of food.  Yet, I still felt alone. 

For Christmas I went home, but not for the whole break.  I needed the money, so I planned to work at the restaurant in Macon some during the break.  It came and went before I even knew it.  Life moved on. 

I was training to work as a server, but mostly I just had hostess shifts.  I had a crush on one of the cooks.  It was mutual.  Chaz was a nice guy, but he was a bad boy too.  He drank and smoked pot, had hair to his waist and was a part of the new “Grunge” trend.  He was a high school graduate but had no vision of what he wanted to do with his life.  He wasn’t stupid, but he wasn’t very intelligent either.  It wasn’t like I could talk to him about seventeenth century literature.

Gradually we started hanging out together.  He was ev
erything I hated about a guy.  He was lazy, unmotivated, a pot head and a slob.  He did have a certain charm about him though.  It was like he was rebelling and trying to be a bad boy.  Soon we began dating.  The best part about him was the worst part about him.  He wasn’t Jack.  He didn’t know how to touch me or kiss me the way Jack did.  I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to let Jack go.  Certainly not while I was comparing every other guy to him.

That year my favorite English professor
planned to take a group of students to London in the summer after graduation.  The trip of a lifetime.  A chance to take a slice of history and really touch it, taste it, smell it, feel it.  I wanted to go, but money was an obstacle.  My grandmother was eager for me to go so she paid for my trip.  We were set to leave a couple of weeks after finals. 

I had already decided that I was not going to Hammond that summer.  I needed to give myself some time before going back.  Chaz and I looked at apartments so I had a place to stay.  Wesleyan didn’t have summer classes so I wasn’t able to stay there.  Until the semester was over, Ch
az and I found places to meet.  It was interesting having sex with him.  I felt like I was being the bad girl for once.  But I was never totally engaged with him.  It was like I was watching myself in an out of body experience.  Most of the time Chaz was sober when we were together.  By this time I was twenty-one and we were legal to drink.  Sometimes we got together with others from the restaurant and drank.  He liked to smoke pot, but I wouldn’t even try it.  I didn’t even want to be around him when he smoked it.

Chaz moved his stuff into our apartment before I was done with my classes.
  There was another guy from the restaurant who would be living there too.  We didn’t have much in the way of furniture.  Basically a bed and a couch we got for twenty bucks that was uglier than any couch I had ever seen.  I went over there after work one Saturday night and a couple of people from work were there.  I was tired, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I stayed up and drank a little bit with them.  When I could barely keep my eyes open, I excused myself and went to bed.  I could smell them light up a joint.  That pissed me off, but I was too tired to argue.  A couple of hours later Chaz came to the bedroom.  He must have been pretty trashed, because he took his clothes off and jumped on the bed, waking me up.  Then he did the unimaginable.

He turned me so I was on my back looking at him.  Even though it was dark, I could see his eyes.  They were different.  I knew that he had indulged a bit too much.  I said no, but he b
egan taking my clothes off of me.  I started to resist him, pushing him away, saying I didn’t want to.  It didn’t matter, he sat on me, holding my hands with one of his own.  I struggled but he was too big and too heavy. 

And then he raped me.  We had always been careful, u
sing protection.  I had not even considered being on the pill since both Andrea and Kim had such problems with them.  I was careful to watch the timing and to always have at least two different methods of birth control.  But that night I had nothing.  It didn’t even phase me because I was so upset that he would do something like that.  It just wasn’t like him to treat me that way.  Chaz was a lot of things, but cruel was not one of them.  Once he was done, he just sort of passed out.  I cried myself to sleep.  Confused.  Angry.  Hurt.  Lost.

In the morning, I had to get up early to go to work.  Then I had to get back to school to study and work on some papers.  I felt
violated.  But there was something more.  I just didn’t know what was bothering me until later.

Chaz didn’t have to work that day, so I didn’t see him until later that night.  He showed up outside my dorm room window, as
king me to let him in.  He looked terrible.

“Let me in please Suzy.”  He spoke quietly.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  I wanted to scream and cry, but I also wanted to
find out why he would do something like that to me.  I let him in. 

His
story was that he didn’t remember anything that happened after they started smoking.  He said he remembered feeling funny but then everything else was a blur.  He was serious when he asked me what happened.  So I told him.  Everything.  I cried a lot.  He was horrified at what he had done to me.  He begged for my forgiveness.  He begged me not to leave him.  He swore he wouldn’t smoke it anymore.  I sent him home that night, hoping that it was behind us.  But the damage was done and left me with a blazing scar inside.  I crawled deeper inside myself and left a somewhat colder exterior.

The next few weeks I was busy with schoolwork.  I saw Chaz when I worked, but we didn’t spend a lot of time together.  He was humbled.  I was preoccupied.  I still went to the apar
tment on the weekends, but something was different.  Me.  I had a few moments of peace and quiet one Saturday.  I had been scheduled for a double that day, but I had enough time to go home for a couple of hours.  I decided in my spare time to take a long hot bath.  It was at some point during my bath that I realized something WAS missing.  My period.  I couldn’t rely on dates, but I knew when I had gone beyond the regular irregularity.

I sat straight up, splashing water everywhere.  No.  It
couldn’t be.  There was no way I was pregnant.  None.  Nope.  Not when I was so close to the end of the semester.  Not when I had the trip of a lifetime in just three more weeks.  Not when I had to concentrate on finals. No no no no no no no no.

I stopped to get a pregnancy test after work on Sunday.  When I got back to the room, Carrie was working on one of her papers.  Considering she knew me probably better than an
yone, she knew that I was hiding something.

“Out with it.”  She didn’t even face me as I crept through the door.  “Now.  You have been moping around here for several weeks.  What happened to you?  Are you and Chaz having problems?”

For the first time since the night after it happened, I cried.  I told Carrie everything.  About the rape.  About the pot that was probably laced with something.  And about my fear that I was pregnant.  In truth, I didn’t need a test to tell me it was true.  I just knew it.  But I peed on the stick anyway.  Yep.  I was pregnant.

I
couldn’t believe something like this could happen to me.  Wasn’t I supposed to take on the world with my new found confidence?  How could I finish school with a baby?  I had friends who had been doing it.  If they could do it, I could too.  If I had the baby on schedule, it would be pretty close to December finals senior year.  I needed a plan.  But I had no idea how to start.  So far Carrie was the only one who knew the truth.  I had to tell Chaz.   I had to face my family. 

Chaz was all over the place with his emotions
when I told him.  Scared, happy, sad, angry.  I would have felt bad for him if I wasn’t completely submerged in finals.  And if his stupidity wasn’t the reason for the whole situation. 

The professor who was taking us to London
needed to know what was going on.  She was my absolute favorite professor and I knew that if I could talk to anyone, it would be her.  She was exactly what I needed.  She was just the right combination of concern and support.  She hugged me like I was her own daughter.  She was there for me.

Over the next couple of days, I started having some cramping.  I wasn’t too concerned until the cramping turned into pain as sharp as knives stabbing through my abdomen.  I hoped it would pass.  I just had one more final to get through.  I told my other suitemate, Kate, about the pregnancy.  Fortunately for me, Carrie and Kate were both going to London too.  They would look after me, I was sure of that. 

As I sat finishing up my last final, I was uncomfortable with the pain.  Then, according to my professor, my face went white and I passed out for a few seconds.  All I remember was a white hot pain that sliced right through me.  After I came to, the pain was gone.  I went to my room and lay down on my bed.

The next day the pain was back and within another day I had another episode of the white hot pain.  Only th
at time I was driving.  I swerved when I came to.  It had only been a couple of seconds, but it was enough to scare me.  Carrie took me to the hospital.

Five hours after arriving, I had been seen three times by di
fferent doctors.  Each doctor had to do pelvic exams up to their elbows in my vagina feeling around, pushing on painful spots, making me cry and yelp in pain.  After the anal exams, I can honestly say that I felt more violated at the hospital than I had after Chaz raped me.  They sent me home with very little information except that my body was fighting against the fetus.  They believed that I had a lot of cysts on my ovaries, which caused the pain.  When a cyst would burst, the pain was enormous, but the pain would subside until another one had gotten big enough to cause discomfort.  I was to go back in the morning so they could do an internal ultrasound.  My mind was spinning.  I had begun making plans.  I had prayed like my life depended on it.  I asked for guidance and strength.  I was comfortable with my choice to keep the baby.  Now God seemed to have other plans.

The ultrasound was about as much fun as having a tooth filled without Novocain.  I was able to see the screen.  Once they explained what I was seeing, I was amazed.  There was a teeny tiny little squirmy thing surrounded by lots of masses.  The masses were cysts.  The squirmy thing was my baby.  And the news was that I needed to abort because my baby was not compatible with my body.  I was RH negative.  I had a certain window in which to have the procedure done.  If I didn’t and a
llowed the baby to either die on its own or grow, I ran the risk of never being able to have children at all.  Regardless, my baby would not survive.  It was my own life and health I had to worry about now.