Casting Down Imaginations (8 page)

We rode
all the way back to Daytown in total silence.

eight

KAREN

I took
my fresh cup of hot chocolate and made my way back to the living room sofa. My
whole place was decorated with index cards with definitions of long words that
I was sure to forget by next semester. I had three midterm exams to take this
week and two essays to turn in by next week. It was ten o’clock in the morning
and I was already on my third cup when my cell phone started to ring.

“Uh!” I
exclaimed, frustrated. I walked over to the counter and checked the phone. It
wasn’t Terrance’s number, thank God. I finally blocked it when he wouldn’t stop
calling.

I picked
it up on the third ring. “Hello?”

There
was a pause. “Karen, don’t hang up.”

I
grunted. “Terrance? Why do you keep calling me?”

“I just
want to talk to you, that’s all.”

I hung
up, trying my best to figure out what I ever saw in him and returned to
studying. He kept calling though, so I finally walked over to the phone and
snapped it open.

“What!?!”

“Why you
gotta answer the phone like that?” Terrance asked.

“Why you
gotta keep calling me?”

“I been
trying to call you for the last few weeks girl,” he told me. “The least you
could do is return my call.”

“Are we
whining now?” I asked him.

“What
are you doing?”

“Are we
trying to make small talk?”

“Why do
you keep answering me with questions?” he asked.

He got
me.

“Please
state your reason for calling,” I said very matter-of-factly.

He
chuckled. “Same old Karen.”

I
sighed. “Terrance, we’ve been through this.”

“I know.
And I’m sorry if I keep on bugging you, but—”

“You’re
forgiven.”

He
paused.

“Karen,
that was mean.”

I felt
the hurt in his voice. That was mean. When did I get to be this way?

“Sorry,”
I apologized, even though everything in me didn’t want to. Maybe if I took the
time to listen to him he would finally get the clue that I didn’t want him
anymore and would stop calling. Then the two of us could go on with our lives.

“It’s
okay,” he said. “Do you have time to talk?” he asked.

“It’s
Saturday.”

“Oh.
You’re on your way out?”

I rolled
my eyes up at the ceiling. “No. I meant that it’s the weekend and I have
unlimited minutes.”

“Oh,” he
laughed. “I was asking if you had time in your schedule to talk to me.”

“Oh.”
Now I felt like the ignorant one.

“Well do
you?”

I was
confused. “Do I what?”

“Do you
have time to talk?”

I
scrunched my face. He still made me act silly after all this time.

“Yes, I
have time,” I told him, trying to straighten up. As I walked back to the couch
I got a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hung over it. Thank God he
couldn’t see me. I looked a mess.

“So what
are you doing?” he asked.

“Studying.”

“Do you
need me to let you go?”

Everything
in me said to hang up the phone. This could not be going in a good direction.

“No, I’m
good,” I told him. “I could use a break for a few minutes.”

“Cool.
So what have you been up to?”

“Well
Terrance, where do you want me to start?” I asked. “It’s been over two years.”

“Start
after high school,” he said.

“For
who, you or me?”

He
laughed. “Me. Start where we… you know, broke up.”

He was
thinking about the day I told him I was pregnant.

“Terrance…
Why don’t you just come right on out and ask me what it is you really want to
ask me?”

There
was a long pause before he spoke again. “Were you really pregnant?”

I kept
my voice as monotone as I possibly could. I wanted to go off, but that would
not have given him the answers to his questions, which meant that he would keep
calling.

“Terrance,
I showed you the doctor’s lab results.”

Another
pause. “What happened to the baby, Karen?”

He’d
heard all the abortion rumors that floated around the school. Two years later,
the lies still affected me.

“I lost
the baby, Terrance.”

“How?”

These
questions were making me uncomfortable. It took me a long time to move on from
all of that and it pained me to dig it all back up again.

“The
doctor said that it was probably from stress,” I informed, and took a sip from
my hot drink.

“Is that
really what it was?”

Oh my
God… Now I understood.

All the
phone calls…

This
whole time he’s been thinking that…

“Terrance,
you didn’t make me lose the baby when you hit me.”

He was
really quiet on the other end. I think I heard him sniffle.

“Terrance?”

A
definite sniffle.

“Yeah,
I’m here.”

I waited
before I spoke again. “Are you okay?”

He
cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “I just… you know…”

I was
confused. Why after all this time? What took him so long to find out the truth
about the baby?

“Are you
expecting another child?”

“What?”
he asked, his tone totally changing. “What? No. Hell no.”

There
was uneasiness and then the two of us laughed.

“Why’d
you ask me that?”

“I don’t
know,” I answered. “I was just trying to figure out why it…”

“Took me
so long to call you and ask?” he finished for me.

“Yeah.”

“Well,
you know when it all happened… We were both so young. I mean, we still are
really young, but we’re a little bit older now… Things change, people change… I
heard you’ve changed.”

I felt
myself smile. “What are you talking about?”

He
laughed. “You know what I’m talking about. I heard you a good girl now. Don’t
do no dating or anything.”

“That’s
not exactly true. I just raised my standards, and so far haven’t met anyone
worthy of occupying my time.”

“Baby,
what happened to us?” he asked, becoming serious again.

He
hadn’t called me baby in a long time. I was scared to death because I liked the
familiar feeling that came to my stomach when I heard it.

“The
baby is what happened to us,” I told him.

“No,
before that,” he said. “Before that. We were having problems before the baby
came, remember?”

I
thought back to the end of my sophomore year. He was right. Things began to get
sour between us around that April.

“I
remember what it was,” I told him.

“What?”

“A
certain somebody, who shall remain nameless, got a basketball scholarship and
got a big head. All of a sudden I had to start making appointments to call my
boyfriend, who was managing to find time to walk all the skanky girls to their
classes, and wasn’t giving me the time of day.”

“Oh
yeah,” he laughed.

“Not
funny, Terrance.”

He
cleared his throat and his voice became serious. “I have a confession to make.”

“What?”

“I
cheated.”

“What!
With who? When?”

“No, you
can’t get mad. We ain’t together no more and this happened a long time ago.”

I kicked
my foot. He was right, I couldn’t get mad. Dang it.

“With
who, Terrance? And I wanna know right now.”

“Yes ma’am,”
he joked. “You remember that girl, Nicole?”

I was
disgusted. “Nicole Greensboro! Ugh!”

“You
said you wasn’t going to get mad!”

“I ain’t
mad!”

“Then
stop yelling at me then!”

I
swallowed the other yell that lodged itself in my throat and exhaled through my
nose.

“Boy,
you nasty.”

“What?
Why I gotta be all that?”

“I don’t
know why you had to act like that, but you did,” I said to him.

“What
you call me nasty for?”

“Nicole
Greensboro? You cheated on me with her? That girl was the biggest ho. Ugh. If
you were going to cheat, you could have at least cheated on me with somebody
decent. Not that dizzy chick. Ugh.”

He
chuckled.

“When?”
I wanted to know.

“What do
you mean, when?”

“When?”
I repeated.

Terrance
remembered me well enough to know when I was mad. And right now I was.

“After
the celebration party my brother threw for me when I got the scholarship. You
had to go home early because your dad wouldn’t let you stay past midnight,
remember? She ended up staying and we…”

I was
still mad at Daddy for that one.

“I could
kick you,” I said.

“Too bad
you can’t, because we’re having this conversation over the phone.”

“I
should go get tested,” I retorted, jokingly implying that he may have given me
a STD that he could have gotten from her. “But I guess I can’t be mad at you,”
I said. “What’s done is done.”

“That’s
right. Now don’t you have something to confess to me?”

“What?”

“You
never cheated?”

I was
insulted. “No!”

“Karen.”

“I’m for
real, no I haven’t. Just because you can’t keep your thing in your pants,
messing around with that ol’ nasty skank don’t mean I had to be nasty, too.”

“You
never cheated on me with Darius?”

Darius?
That was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. He was a guy that was on the
same basketball team with Terrance. He tried to get with me but I was smart
enough to tell that it was only to get under Terrance’s skin, especially after
he got his scholarship, so I never gave him any attention.

“No,
Terrance. I never messed with Darius, and I told you that. I had no reason to
lie to you then, and I have no reason to lie to you now.”

He
sighed. “I guess I believe you,” he said.

“Well
you should, because I ain’t lying.”

We sat
there in silence for a minute. I was still thinking about Nicole Greensboro
when he spoke again.

“What do
you think it was?” he asked.

“Think
what was?”

“You
know… it.”

“The
baby?”

“Our
baby,” he corrected me.

I felt
myself blushing. “He was a boy.”

“How do
you know?”

“I just
do.”

“How?”

“I don’t
know. I just do?”

He
pondered over everything I just said. “So it was a boy, huh?” he finally asked.