My Writing Corners...


Little Secrets 

By Rochelle Campbell

Today I found out I am pregnant.  What a mindblower.  I’m 18, fat, motherless and the Dad of my baby?  I’ve got to flip a few coins to try and figure out who it is…not.  I know exactly who the father is.

I’ll back up a bit.  When I say fat, I’m 5’6” and 148 pounds.  So, I’ma little chunky, not obese.  I just graduated in the top 10% of my class.  I’m reasonably attractive.  I have 3 offers for college; one a partial scholarship.  But it’s been hard, really hard without my Mom.  She died last month.  She died of cancer.  She died and left me all alone – with him.

“What the hell is wrong with you?  Huh?  Why are you still wearing all that black?  It’s been over a month!”  My father was glaring at me while taking a swig from his Jack Daniels’ bottle.  It was just past 3 o’clock.  I had just come home from school.

I looked at him only briefly.  I knew I had to reach my room and lock the door before he got to the ½ way mark.  By the stagger on him I’d guess he was on bottle number 2, possibly number 3.  These days it was getting harder and harder to tell.

I’m still in pain from the last time when I didn’t move fast enough.

Without answering him, I made sure to move without looking like I was fleeing.  I managed to grab a bag of chips and a bottle of juice and water before I barricaded myself in for the night.  Thank God for myspace.com, I could talk to friends all night and pretend the world beyond my door was normal.  See, my family has these little secrets.  We keep them from other people.

I peeled off my clothes and stood in front of the mirror.  I didn’t look pregnant.  My stomach was still flat but I’m 2 two weeks overdue for my period.  My breasts are tender and I’m always nibbling at things I normally don’t want – fruit, cheese, milk and water – a sure sign there’s a diabolical force inhabiting my body, making me eat right.

But whose baby is it?

I put my clothes back on and look out the window absently playing with my hair.  It’s long and brown.  My Mom helped me perm it the day before she died.  She wanted me to look nice for the graduation.  She really wanted to be there.  She did, but her body couldn’t wait any longer.  She had been ill for 3 years.  She held on as long as she could.  She wanted to know her baby would be fine.  She saw the college acceptances roll in.  She saw the partial scholarship letter.  She saw the bruises on my upper arms and neck.  She saw the pain and tears in my eyes but she turned away from the latter two.  Mom only acknowledged my impending deliverance.  She knew and didn’t -- couldn’t -- stop what was happening to me.  Little secrets.

I flick on my laptop and watch it booting up.  I think of Neville and suppress a smile.  His fumbling idiotic attempts at being “experienced” were so sweet.  It made me feel that I was innocent too.  Well…almost.

Neville was so gentle that day in the park in the wooded section under the canopy of verdant trees, joyful twittering birds, and the frolicking katydids.  I felt like a normal, innocent, virginal girl…almost.  When Neville entered me, I didn’t scream like I usually do.  I didn’t tense up praying it would be over soon.  I actually relaxed and held him close luxuriating in the feel of his smooth unlined skin; inhaling his fresh boy scent that comes from too many trips to the drugstore trying to find the right cologne and botching the find up by pouring on way too much.  The kind of boy that you want to bring home to your parents because you know they’ll approve.

Neville made me feel like a complete young woman that day.  He makes me feel like a whole woman every day.  He loves me no matter what.  He doesn’t make me feel like a cheap two-bit whore where afterwards I am slapped and spit upon like yesterday’s garbage.  Neville never tells me I’d never amount to anything.  Neville doesn’t tell me to cover my filthy nakedness.  Neville tells me he loves me and holds me close and cradles me like precious fine gold.

The last time Neville told me he loved me was just last week.  Then, he pulls out this little velvet box with a beautiful diamond solitaire ring inside.  I accepted.  I’ve been hiding the ring by twisting the diamond towards my palm whenever I’m on the way home.

I look down at my hand and twisted the diamond around so I could admire it yet again.  See, I’m pregnant but Neville and I used protection that one time late last month and the condom did not break.

But the other?  The other never used protection.  He never ever did.  Not in 3 years.  Another dirty little secret.

My computer was up and running.  I went online knowing what I had to do.  I checked out a few sites in particular that I knew would be of service to me.  I visited Planned Parenthood and a few sites to look for au pair gigs.

I needed a new life.  My Mom knew that a long time ago.  Early morning on the day she died she called me on the intercom to come to her room.  Without a word, she handed me a slim green passbook from the local bank downtown.  She told me she would be leaving me soon but I would need some help and she wanted to help me in the only way she could now.  I opened the passbook.  There was over $50,000 in it! 

We heard him coming.  I shoved the book inside my shirt and hugged Mom close, her thin 98-pound frame vibrantly alive in that moment because of the knowledge that she had freed me.  This proves she had known all along.  I.  HATE.  SECRETS.

He pulled me off my mother and pushed me to the ground.  “Get your mangy paws off her!  Get your ass off to school.  NOW!”  I knew better than to argue.  So did she.  I fled the room before he changed his mind, my hand to my breast, mind aflutter with tentative plans already beginning to form.

I met up with Neville at lunch and told him about what my mother had given me and told him I wanted to see her now.  I wanted to thank her.  He and I cut school and took all the back streets to get to my house to avoid the truant officers.

He wasn’t home, thank God.  I introduced Mom to Neville.  She liked him.  I knew she would.  She told us she wanted me to be happy and she told him to make sure to keep me happy.  I knew she really liked him because just before we left the room she gave him a backhanded blessing by asking him to visit her gravesite with me in a year’s time.  At that moment, I knew she knew she was going to die that day.  I screamed and held her close begging her to take back the words.  But I knew she wouldn’t because she couldn’t.

“You promised me you’d come to my graduation!  You promised me!  You promised…”  Over and over I said it.  Yelled it.  Crooned it.   Shrieked it.  When I couldn’t scream anymore, Neville pulled me off of her and held me until the shuddering subsided.  Sometime during my emotional tirade she had left the building permanently.  That was 5 weeks ago, at the beginning of May.

My laptop was still on the last au pair site I had visited.  It was now 2:30am.  Today is my last day of high school.  My last night as a prisoner of little secrets.  My last day of being a little secret whore.  I was going to go straight to Planned Parenthood after 4th period since Gym and Sex Ed were not things I would need to make my new life successful.  I flicked off my laptop and crawled into bed.  I couldn’t wait for the day to dawn.

At 5am, the world crashed down around me.  The splintering of the door jolted me, but I was still struggling to rise through the mists of sleep when he grasped my leg and jerked me out of bed.  He was on me before I could utter a word or even open my eyes.

He was tearing off my Lovers R Us PJ’s Neville bought me last month.  The insane man was groping my sore areolas and tried to put them in his mouth but he was still so drunk he couldn’t aim right.

I’d had it though.  My life was my own!  Not his to piss in!!  From somewhere deep inside of me, a roar erupted from my soul.  It spoke in a tone befitting a king of legions.  It told him to leave his daughter alone.  It told him to get down on his knees and pray that God and the saints would forgive his blasphemous actions for the past 3 years.  It told him to pray the child within the child would die or leave on its own without ever coming forth into the world of the living to shame him and the family with its dark little secret.  It told him to never ever touch the girl again or else he would perish in agony.  The voice told him to pray, and pray hard that no harm ever befell the girl, or else he would be found and castrated like the dog he was.  The voice then hit a shrill pitched note that seemed to go on for eons cracking and splintering glass all over the house including the windows.  The sound even shattered Mom’s favorite Mikasa vase out in the living room.  The voice decimated him and at the same time, saved me.

I finally opened my eyes and realized I was standing on the bed with my arms outstretched with my head thrown back like some sort of whacked-out siren.  But I felt good.  No, I felt…great.  I jumped down off the bed and grabbed some jeans and a shirt and pulled them on quickly.  I was moving the plan up – I’d leave now, not after school.  Why wait?

I threw some things in my duffel bag including the passbook, the framed picture of mom and me and my laptop which had somehow escaped being effected by the shrill tone.  I took one last look as I grabbed my jean jacket from behind the door.  I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything of value behind.  I hadn’t.

He was still whimpering on the floor like the damn grub he was.

I looked up into the mirror above my dresser and saw someone in there I didn’t recognize.  She was a beautiful woman with dark flashing violet eyes with flecks of green in them.  Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was layered to perfection, even if it was a bit tousled.  Her skin was flawless and had a glow to it that showed vibrancy that I wished I possessed.  But it wasn’t her beauty that drew the eye the most, it was her confidence.  Her self assuredness.  She looked like she knew what she was about, what she was going to do today and every day after that.

God, I wanted to be her!

I blinked hard trying to hold back the tears.  I looked into the mirror again and she was still standing there!  That woman…was me!

In that instant, I realized that I had become a woman in that one defining moment.  That voice was meI protected myself.  I saved myself! 

I looked down at my father who had curled himself up into a fetal position and felt nothing.  No-thing.  It was done.  I was done.  He would never harm me again.  I wouldn’t let him.  I had freed myself.  I didn’t even have to leave if I didn’t want to.  I could stay right here and make him do my bidding.  I knew I could.

I looked at the shell of the man I knew as my father and just turned away and left the room feeling a growing sense of peace.  With each breath I took, I felt the peace swell and expand filling all of the empty spaces that had grown inside of me for so long.  I felt the peace softening all of the hard bitter edges that I formed to protect myself.  As I stepped through the front door for the last time the last of the bitter hatred shingles fell from my soul and were burned away by the rising sun.

I walked into the oncoming day a woman free from any and all little secrets.  I loved myself and that’s all I would ever need to get along well in life.

 


Last changed: 02/13/07
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Last updated: 02/13/07.