Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (66 page)

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school freshman, to a stranger behind some businesses closed for the weekend. I didn’t realize I could tell him,
No
. It sounds stupid, but that’s how I felt. Young, uninformed, and in competition with my peers. It continued to get worse. I tried to kill myself a few times. This is when my mother decided I was worth no privacy. She would go through my things and invade the little bit of solitude I had. Some time passed, and we always fought. I ran away one day to make her wake up. Instead I got raped. Twice. I was a Junior in high school, I think. I came home, and my mother had called the cops and gone through everything I owned. My diaries. My journals. My scrapbooks. As a writer, it hurt most she threw away all the things I had ever written, because she found a disgusting story I printed from the internet and didn’t want to talk about it or to even understand why. I was disgusted because I had written a letter to her and hidden it away with all my papers, and she was in such a hurry to rid her house of my writing that she didn’t even notice it. This is when I started to feel the full effect of depression. Soon after, very soon after, I met a guy that saved me from myself. He taught me about the rights we are born with, who I was, how I saw the world… He asked me questions and wanted to know what I thought. How strange it was, after so long of having my mother set me aside for herself, to have someone interested in my well-being and my interests. I became myself, I turned into something new. That wasn’t enough, I suppose. After a time of going through high school and finally barely graduating, the fights with my mother got worse. I can’t say her intentions were bad. It’s the reflex of wanting to keep something and smothering it until it dies. I got fed up with her, and I left. I packed up what I could and stayed with the guy who helped me, Don, and his grandma. I lived there for a time, and she got fed up with us. I don’t exactly remember how, but we ended up living in the car off and on, and I went back to live with my mom for a while. Places I was going were making me feel worse and worse.”

Katie doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then she continues. “Around November one year, Don went on a trip out of town for three weeks. I loved him dearly, more than anything I’d ever known. I don’t know what was wrong with me, particularly beyond being bipolar. But he was honorable and had ethics, and he did not want to be intimate in his grandmother’s house. It was driving me crazy. I wanted some affection, and I wasn’t getting it. While he was gone, I was hanging out with a guy I shouldn’t have been and soaking up what attention he would give me and soon after I felt horrible. For those three weeks I didn’t eat, I barely slept, and I almost died. I was 19 years old, fresh out of high school, no job, no money, no place to live… and I was weak. I cheated on Don with a 14-year-old boy. Then I tried to slit my wrists. I didn’t succeed due to a headache I attained from crying so much. It was all my fault.
All my fucking fault
. I told him when he got here, and I cried and I cried and I cried, and I knew things would be different. Don was a wonderful man, and he wanted nothing more than for me to be happy. Whatever happened in those three weeks, it broke me wide open. I started up with this crap all over again, like when I was a kid and didn’t understand sex. I hooked up with an ex-boyfriend. Don would call, and I would be at this other guy’s house. I would tell him I was at home, and that I’d be over soon. I’d go home, take a quick shower, and go see Don, feeling sick all day long. In addition to all that awful business, this ex-boyfriend had a cousin I had met, and I was driving out-of-town to see him, too. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to die, and yet I understood that I shouldn’t, that it would be weak to not suffer the consequences of what I brought upon myself. I finally confessed to Don what was happening. I sobbed and cried and cried, and I wanted only to die for so long.”

She wipes a tear from her eye, the memories behind the story painful. “At one point I finally got a job at WAL-MART. It was the worst decision of my life. I was still really sick in the head, off and on living in the car, living with Don and his family. I started up again, writing dirty notes to a guy at work, and then we kissed. I tried to break up with Don, and he was so upset, so I packed up Anthony Barnhart

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everything in the car and went to stay with this co-worker I was flirting with. His name was Aaron…

I had sex with him, obviously… the first two times I consented. After a time of staying with him and getting drunk and high constantly, watching him smoke methamphetamines, seeing his family and how tore up the whole situation was, I came out of hiding and contacted Don. He hadn’t heard from me for several weeks. We talked, and he wanted only for me to be happy, and I was so sick then that I didn’t know what to do. A month before this WAL-MART shit started, I went to a mental health clinic to seek some kind of help. They told me I was not sick and to go home. They didn’t care about my multiple suicide attempts. And there I was, promising Don I wouldn’t have sex with Aaron anymore if he wasn’t going to be in a relationship with me, knowing as I said it that it was a lie.”

She leans back in the pew. “Finally I was down to the end of my rope. Aaron was raping me repeatedly, and I had lost any urge to fight back or to live to see another day. It was one night when we went to the casino, no amount of weed or beer could give me the attachment I desired, so I snorted methamphetamines. It was horrible. I gave a blowjob to another co-worker in the elevator at the casino. After that night I was sitting at Aaron’s house, and I asked him, ‘Do you want me to stay?’

He said he didn’t care. This tore me up. I just… wanted the abyss forever. So I called Don, and we cried on the phone, and he said to come home with him and get some help. I did. I left that horrible place and went back to Don. I realized then that I wasn’t just mentally ill anymore, that the repeated violent sex that was forced on me caused me to contract some disease. I was in so much pain. We went to WAL-MART and told them what happened, and they fired the people I worked with and myself. I was horrified that they didn’t care that I was raped. That night I was so angry, and I decided that I was going to see Aaron one last time. He had weapons, and he was violent, and I made him lose his job. I was going to convince him to kill me by making him angry. But before I could, Don got a hold of me. I was screaming and clawing at him, trying to get out the window or however I could escape. I did this to myself, I fucked around, I stayed with Aaron… and I was even more sick because of it. What could I possibly want to live for, what could there possibly be in my future besides more pain? Eventually Don calmed me down, and we agreed that I would get better.”

Adrian is quiet, listening.

Katie stops speaking for a moment.

“You can go on,” Adrian says in a whisper.

“Okay,” she replies. “Anyways, I was forced to go to the emergency room soon after. I could barely walk anymore, and at first I refused to be examined. But after a while, I didn’t have a choice. I was crying my eyes out, it hurt so much. It was my fault. The cops came and asked me questions about Aaron, and I talked as long as I could, but it wasn’t long before I curled into a ball and screamed and screamed and screamed, screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘It’s my fault!’ The E.R. doctor came in and examined me, and his words haunted me for the next year: ‘Oh, yeah, this is definitely herpes. Is this from all the sex you’ve been having?’ It was all my fault! I prayed that if God cared for me, that He would just take me, and I convinced myself not to commit suicide, because I deserved to suffer the consequences of my actions. These things I had done to myself. I wish this is the end of my story, but it’s not. I worked on recovering for the next few months, and it was excruciatingly painful—physically, emotionally, mentally. Don was with me every step of the way. All of the events of that time period are blurry and out-of-order in my head, but soon we were living in the car again. He wouldn’t let me stay alone, he took care of me and made sure I always had something to eat. I refused to go back to the mental health clinic, but eventually I started going to addiction classes. I wasn’t addicted. I would smoke weed, because it gave me the chance to calm down and recognize what I feel instead of panicking. But before I left a man told me about Partners for Youth Vision, a drop-in center for homeless and disenfranchised youth. That was me. So I went, Anthony Barnhart

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and to this very day, I’m glad that Don made me go. I told him I didn’t want to; on the brochure was a picture of the guy that I was first soaking up attention from. How could I possibly go there and just get involved with another guy? But I went, and I think God for it, too. A woman there, named Yvonne, became my strength and guidance. I had been struggling a lot in my homelessness, and it was hard to even get $20 from my mom for food. I had told Don I couldn’t be with him, because I was tainted now. Diseased. Herpes. It was all my fault. We would go to the Holiday Inn a lot for their computer access… and at one point I ended up in bed with a drunken older man, and I went back to Don and sobbed my eyes out. He took me to the E.R., and I can’t remember what all happened. But eventually Yvonne convinced me to go back to the mental health clinic, and I knew it was a step in the right direction—even though the workers there caused me so many heartaches, headaches, and problems. They placed me in special housing, and despite my desire to get better, I still struggled with my horrible bouts of mania. At one time I had sex with the pizza delivery guy, at another with a guy in his car that I met from the internet. It just kept happening. I got involved with drinking and took sleeping pills to help me fall asleep. One night I drank an entire bottle of vodka and took two sleeping pills while hanging out with a guy I shouldn’t have been with. I don’t remember what happened, but I woke up at 5 in the morning, naked, alone, confused, and hurt.”

She looks over at Adrian. “I haven’t always lived in Cincinnati. All of this happened when I lived in Phoenix. I continued searching for love… Don was killed in a freak motorcycle accident, and that tore me up. I slipped back into depression, and that’s when I went to a party and realized that I was a lesbian.” She laughs. “How does one realize she’s a lesbian at a party? I had been raped and ravaged by so many guys, and I found that I was sexually attracted to Yvonne. No, I never did anything about it. But eventually I turned my attention to girls. Guys crave sex. Girls crave romance. And it was at a party that the tables turned, that I realized that what I had been looking for the entire time—
love
—was simply behind another anatomical frame.”

She is quiet for a moment. “I was working a SUBWAY on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. I befriended a girl at the work. Sierra. It was a Friday night, when it happened, and everyone was meeting for drinks a high-class bar downtown. CELEBRITY THEATER, it was called. Sierra and I rode together, parked in a covered garage, and made our way into the bar. There was a line stretching out of the entrance, with a bouncer letting only the elite inside. Sierra was friends with him, and he let us pass. We both had a few drinks as we sat at the bar, listening to a jazz band playing on stage. Maybe it was because I was vulnerable, maybe it was because I just didn’t care… But she began flirting with me, and I didn’t resist. We moved our legs closer to one another until they were touching. She invited me to come over to her place, and I agreed. I was honestly nervous about what might take place, but I was excited at the same time. Before we got to her place, both our panties were off under our dresses and we were rubbing each other. By the time we got to the bed in her studio, we were both naked. That was my first… time… with a girl. I wore Sierra out,” Katie tells Adrian. “She was totally spent. I loved eating a woman, and I wanted to be eaten like that. I became involved in several incidents of group sex with other women. It was a few years later that I met a girl from Cincinnati. Her name was Elizabeth. She was a lawyer, had graduated from some college in Boston. We became really good friends, and we became closer and closer to one another. She wanted to hold off sex for a while, because she had seen too many relationships destroyed by sex. She stayed in Phoenix for two months, working on a case. When it was time for her to return to Cincinnati, she invited me on a three-day trip to a beach along the Texas coast. She invited me… and
only
me.”

∑Ω∑

Anthony Barnhart

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Elizabeth had reserved a room at an expensive resort hotel right on the Gulf Coast. They had been there for one night, and though they had slept together, nothing had happened. Morning came, and Elizabeth opened the balcony door to let the breeze from the ocean sweep into the room. With her pajamas on, Katie ducked into the bathroom and shut the door. She began to shower, and a knock came at the door.

“Katie?” Elizabeth cooed. “Can I come in to do my hair and makeup?”

“Sure,” Katie said. She leaned out of the shower and unlocked the door. Elizabeth entered, still dressed in her pajamas, and began getting ready for the day. Katie continued showering behind the fogged-glass door. After shampooing her hair, she turned off the water, felt it dripping from her body. She grabbed the towel hanging over the shower door and dried her hair, her body, wrapped it around her waist. She pulled back the door and stepped into the bathroom. It was small and cramped. Elizabeth smiled at her from the sink. Katie smiled back, reached for the door to the bedroom… and “accidentally” dropped the towel from around her waist. She leaned down to get it, and her bare cheeks touched against Elizabeth’s leg. Katie glanced over her shoulder to see if her roommate would turn around and finish her makeup, but she saw that Elizabeth’s eyes were glued to her freshly-shaved flower-garden. A strange look came over Elizabeth’s façade, and Katie knew that she was turned on. She knew it would be only a matter of time before they explored one another sensually for the first time. Katie went ahead into the room to get dressed. She rifled through her things, wondering what to wear. She called Elizabeth out of the bathroom for advice. Elizabeth came into the room, saw Katie standing stark-naked, holding two pairs of panties in one hand and two pairs of bras in the other. Elizabeth’s eyes danced over Katie’s slim figure: the shapely legs, the petite stomach, the pear-sized breaths, her slender arms and stately neck. She didn’t turn her eyes away, but even commented on how nice Katie’s breasts looked. She recommended a certain outfit, so Katie said thanks and turned back around, continuing to rifle through the dresser drawer. She was turned away from the older woman, and in a moment she felt the warm touch of Elizabeth’s hands against her waist. Katie’s knees went weak. She could feel Elizabeth’s hot breath on her neck, and her insides began to tingle. Elizabeth, coming from behind, wrapped her arms around Katie’s side and began caressing her breasts with both hands, and Katie pushed her cheeks against Elizabeth’s abdomen. Elizabeth leaned close against her, whispered, “Want to go to the bed?”