Finding Me (6 page)

In exchange for our services, Sniper gave Roderick and me a place to live and a portion of his profits. The two of us usually ended up with about $300 in cash every week. We dipped into our stash to pay Sniper when he got groceries or bought us a couple of six-packs. (Sniper never let us have drugs because he insisted that you couldn’t run a great drug business if you became a druggie. But we did have our share of liquor!)

I knew the drugs we sold and delivered were making people’s lives a big mess. But as much as I hated handing out weed and going to scary places, I didn’t hate that as much as I did the terrible fear and loneliness. And depression. And hours spent drawing wolves and blue skies while shivering inside a plastic garbage can. For the first time in my life I actually felt important. Even loved.

A few weeks later Sniper got busted by the cops not too far from his house. Roderick, who had been with him, managed to get away without the cops seeing him.

“We’ve gotta clear out of here fast!” Roderick told me once he raced back home. In less than fifteen minutes I stuffed everything I could find into my purple backpack. I pulled on my shoes and coat, grabbed a teddy bear that Sniper had bought me, and dashed out the front door without even locking it.

We had nowhere else to go—so I took Roderick back under the bridge with me. Believe it or not, my trash can was still there. “Nice bedroom, Chapo,” he said, kicking the side of the bin. “But you know I can’t sleep in there with you—you’re a girl.” In his culture sharing a bed with a girl you weren’t married to would be considered disrespectful and even scandalous. Never mind that he’d been wielding guns and selling marijuana for months.

That same day Roderick swiped his own garbage bin. His can had no lid. He placed his bin right next to mine, spread out his own blanket, and climbed inside. Roderick was at least five foot six, so his legs hung out farther over the edge than mine did.

Although we had enough cash between us to split the first month’s rent on a small apartment, we wanted to hold on to our money for the time being. “Let’s just stay here for awhile until we can figure out what to do,” Roderick said. I quickly agreed.

One evening not even two weeks later, I crawled out of my trash can and made my way up the grassy hill. Roderick followed behind me. I wanted to return to the Baptist church and see if they were still serving meals. I also wanted Arsenio to meet Roderick. Just as I was coming out of our hiding place, on the street above I spotted a woman I recognized. She was a friend of my parents, and I was sure she’d gotten a look at my face.
Damn
.

I tried to back up, but Roderick was right behind me, and I didn’t want to sock him square in the face with my foot. “Hey, Michelle!” the woman yelled out. “Hey, come back here, girl!”

I panicked. “Go back!” I said softly to Roderick.

But it was too late. After we got our things from the bins so we could get away from the bridge (so stupid … we should have just left everything there!), we ran up the hill and onto one of the nearby streets. Just as we were rounding a corner, my father drove up beside us.

“Get in the car!” he shouted. That woman had called my father on his cell and told him where she saw me—and he’d sped right over.

My father jumped out and dragged me toward the car. He shoved me into the backseat and hit me upside the head. “That’ll teach you not to run away again!” he yelled. You can imagine what kind of trouble I was in once we got home.

When Roderick had seen my father drive up, he freaked out and ran down a side street. My father didn’t go after him; he was only interested in getting me back home. I never saw Roderick again.

5
______________

Expecting

I
N LATE FEBRUARY
, after my father dragged me home from under the bridge, my mother re-enrolled me in school. At sixteen, I was still supposed to be in seventh grade—but I took some kind of test, which I miraculously passed, and the teachers moved me up to the ninth. My return to school felt like stepping back into the same nightmare I’d escaped—only this time things were even worse. Why? Because I actually knew what freedom felt like, and I’d been forced back into prison. My classmates were still mean. My grades were still horrible. So I started ditching class. No one wants to sit at the back of a room and feel stupid and humiliated—and that’s how I felt.

At home the family member who’d first raped me was still living with us. So were a bunch of other relatives—the number had grown to about fifteen. The night after I got home the abuse started up again. “You thought you could get away from me, you little pussy,” the man hissed into my ear that evening. He swirled his slimy tongue around in my ear. I pulled away in disgust, but he held me close.

Every time he climbed on top of me, I just tried to disconnect. From the abuse. From my life. From myself. I got to the point where I could make myself not even notice that he was on me. I would make my brain go someplace far away, like to a lush island or to a peach-colored sunset. This scene went down at least three times a week for the next two years. I’m surprised I never turned up pregnant.

One afternoon in my sophomore year I was sitting in the lunchroom. Alone. I was about to eat my cheeseburger, which I’d slathered with my favorite hot sauce.

“How you doin’?” I looked up to see a boy I’d sometimes said hello to around the school. For me to speak to anyone was a rarity, but I thought he was kind of handsome.

The boy, who I’ll call Erik, was part white and part black, about six feet tall, and he had the cutest button nose. His arms were very muscular. That day he had on jeans and an army-green T-shirt. “You seem a little sad,” he said to me. “Is everything okay with you?”

I shot him a look that said, “Seriously?” He pulled up a chair and sat across from me. I had on a dingy button-up shirt from the 1960s, one of the three homely outfits I owned and wore to death. I also had on a pair of Beetlejuice shoes. I
hated
those shoes!

“Whatever happens in your life,” he said with a straight face, “God loves you. He’ll always be there for you.” This guy was weirding me out. I grabbed a fry from my tray and began chewing it.
Maybe he’s some kind of religious freak
, I thought. I kept eating my fries until he eventually got up and left.

A few days later I was sitting in the library—alone again. I was rereading one of my favorite Stephen King novels when Erik walked over to me. I pretended not to notice him and buried my head farther into the paperback.

“So those are the type of books you like to read—slasher books?” he said.

I smiled and barely looked up. Only because I thought he was handsome, I’d asked a couple of classmates about him. I found out he was on the football team and that he was a senior.

“Do you like poems?” He’d noticed the stack of poetry sitting on the table in front of me. I nodded. “Can you read me something you wrote?” I could feel the blood rushing to my face.

“Well,” I said, “I guess so.” I looked through the stack and pulled out the poem I considered to be the best. The final line said something about wanting to be loved.

“Why do you feel like that?” Erik asked. I shrugged and put the paper back down on top of the stack.

Over the next few weeks Erik and I began cutting classes together. Often. As strange as I thought he was at first, he was the only person at school who was paying any attention to me. When I was around him, I felt pretty. Even though my clothes were horrible, he always told me that I looked nice. Classmates stared at us as we walked through the hallways together. You could see what they were thinking: “What is he doing with
her
?”

One afternoon when Erik and I were out of class together, he pulled me aside toward a set of lockers. Right then he made things official. “I love you, Michelle,” he told me.

I stared at him, not believing what I was hearing. Before I could say anything back, he kissed me long and hard. I was seventeen. It was the first time anyone had ever kissed me in a loving way or said those words to me. It was the best feeling in the world.

I gave Erik the phone number at my house because I didn’t have a cell phone. But when he called in the evenings, I usually couldn’t answer. I was either chasing around the little kids I had to take care of or I was trying to avoid the relative who abused me.

“Why didn’t you call me back?” he’d ask the next day. I never had a good answer. One time, when he really started pressing me about it, I finally told him the truth—or at least part of it.

“Erik, there’s something you need to know about me,” I said. “I come with a lot of baggage.”

“What do you mean by ‘a lot of baggage’?” he asked.

I cleared my throat. “Well,” I said, “my situation at home is horrible.”

“You deserve to be loved,” he told me. “I wish I could take you home to live with me.”

I wished that too. From what Erik had told me, his parents loved him unconditionally. They treated him well. They bought him stylish clothes and made sure he had dinner every night after school. And not once had anyone ever punched him in the face or sexually abused him. On the nights when I was being violated, I sometimes dreamed of what it would feel like to instead have Erik inside of me—to feel adored rather than despised. About a month into our relationship, I found out.

One Friday afternoon Erik and I ditched class together. For the first time we really made out—all the way. Things got hot and heavy pretty quickly, and we ended up actually doing it. It happened that day, plus three more times. It felt so great to be close to someone because you chose to be. I loved Erik. I also loved that I got to be with him because I wanted to—and not because I was forced.

A few weeks later I began feeling nauseous. And exhausted. I decided to take a pregnancy test. I was terrified.
What will I do if I’m pregnant? How could I support a baby?
That night I took the test. When I saw the blue line, it told me what I pretty much already knew: I was pregnant.

I put down the stick, buried my face in my hands, and cried for an hour. What was I going to do now? I wanted to tell Erik I was pregnant, but that wasn’t so simple. Not long after the fourth time we got together a girl had said to me, “You know Erik has a girlfriend, right?”

For a minute I couldn’t speak. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I finally blurted out. “That can’t be true.”

But it was. A girl I’ll call Cassie, who went to another high school, rang me up at my parents’ house—she caught me on one of the rare occasions when I could come to the phone.

“Hello?”

“This is Cassie,” said a high-pitched voice. “I found your number in Erik’s phone.”

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“I don’t know if you know this,” she began, “but Erik and I have been going out for a few months.” I went mute, and she hung up.

For an hour afterward I sobbed. Suddenly I understood what the word
heartache
meant. I felt like someone had pierced my heart with a thousand stickpins.

I began avoiding Erik at school. When our eyes met across a classroom or in the lunchroom, the expression on his face said it all: he knew his girlfriend had told me his secret. A couple of classmates told me that after Cassie had busted him, he began downplaying our relationship. One girl even told me that Erik said, “Michelle was never my girlfriend. She’s just someone I fooled around with a couple of times.” I never asked Erik about it, but I could tell by the way he was treating me that it might be true. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for his sweet talk, but that was how badly I’d wanted to be loved.

A couple of weeks after Cassie’s revelation, I finally ended things with Erik. It wasn’t a long conversation, but instead a quick, “I think we both know this is finished.” I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, like the sudden rip of a Band-Aid from skin that’s already sore. I didn’t tell Erik I was expecting a baby; I didn’t think he deserved to know because of the way he was acting toward me. But I did have to break the news to my mother. A few weeks later I worked up the nerve to tell her. I knew she wasn’t happy and that she probably didn’t want me to have this baby. But I told her it was my choice, not hers.

As scared as I was, I never even thought about having an abortion. I hoped that at least the baby would love me. At the time I felt like no one else in the world did.

6
______________

Huggy Bear

A
S I BECAME MORE EXHAUSTED
from my pregnancy, I could barely get myself out of bed. And it was embarrassing to attend classes when my stomach started showing. So toward the end of tenth grade I dropped out of school. I’m sure my classmates hardly noticed I was gone.

About five months into my pregnancy my parents split up and my father moved out of the house. I don’t know why they parted, but they’d been arguing nonstop for at least a year. After he left, things were a little more peaceful.

Once I dropped out of school, I sat around the house all day and watched TV or read Stephen King books. Thankfully, because I was about as sick as I was huge, my mother cut me a little bit of slack in terms of household responsibilities. By that time the relative who’d been abusing me had backed off some. After so many years, I got pissed off enough that I was determined to defend myself.

“Stop it!” I’d spit when he tried to force himself on me. As petite as I was, I could kick and shove pretty hard—and now when I fought him off, sometimes it worked.

I was excited about the baby coming, and I got even more excited when a nurse told me, “You’re having a son.” But I was also very scared. As a whole bunch of soap operas, followed by
Judge Judy
, blared on the television during my afternoons at home, my thoughts raced.
What will I do to get money? How will I provide for him? Will I be able to get my own place? Who will hire me without a high school diploma? And if I get a job, will anyone watch the baby for me
? I didn’t have any of the answers, but I did know I was supposed to have this child. The way I saw it, the baby growing in my stomach was God’s gift to me.