Never Too Late (6 page)

That lasted for another, oh, ten minutes.

T
hings got more intense pretty fast. By the time I was fifteen, I was going to the kind of parties I always describe as “the kind of parties you really wouldn’t expect a high school girl to go to.” That’s a nice way of saying they were completely messed up places to be. I mean that in the sense that if any parent found out their daughter was spending time there unsupervised, they’d probably faint and then cry. They just were not your typical teen house parties.

Again, I didn’t have one friend who was dating somebody that was our age. I can’t stress that enough, because it’s a fact that really jumps out at me when I look back and try to understand how everything was so intense for my friends and me in high school. Every girl’s boyfriend was in his twenties, and most of them were drug dealers.

I could have kept saying no to those pills for as long as I wanted, but unfortunately I was already setting myself up for situations I shouldn’t have really been in. When you’re buying drugs, or hanging out with people who do drugs or deal drugs, you eventually get connected to the kind of people you never plan to get connected to. I probably should have tried harder to make friends in history class, or whatever. But what I ended up doing was following the friend-ofa-friend chain to some really dark places.

We were hanging out at houses full of drug dealers and gang bangers. These guys were ten years older than us—one was thirty years old, dating my friend who was in high school with me, a girl who was half his age. He’d come over to the house with a bunch of cocaine and lay it out on the table. That was the kind of ridiculous shit that started popping up. As time went on, we came into contact with more people and more drugs, and it all started to warp our idea of what was okay and what wasn’t, assuming we ever had a clear idea to begin with. After that period, I can’t even tell you how many drug deals, fights, and guns I’ve seen. I’ve seen people get guns pulled on them, people threatening each other and beating each other up over all this awful shit. There was one night when I was out at one of these places with my friends, and they wanted to give us tattoos. I’m glad somebody talked them out of it, but it probably wasn’t me. All I remember is lying in a Walmart parking lot that night with my head turned to the side, puking my guts out.

I think of a teenage girl in that kind of situation now and see how shocking it is, that a fifteen or sixteen year old girl would be running around with these twenty-year-old drug-gies and gang dudes, getting wasted and throwing up in parking lots. Those were dangerous situations. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain. But we were so reckless at the time, we didn’t even think about it. Maybe it’s just how adaptable we were because of our age, but this insane stuff started feeling normal to us really fast.

Mind you, nobody knew about any of this. My mom was always working or hanging out with her boyfriend. My brother was off doing his thing. And I definitely wasn’t on good terms with my dad.

Even after the divorce, I still hated him for the way he was in that house. I wouldn’t have even been able to call it mad. I really felt like I despised him, and talking to him or having a relationship with him was pretty much the last thing I expected to do at any point in my life. I was putting a lot of blame on him for my unhappiness as a kid, feeling like it could have been different if he hadn’t been drunk and screaming all the time, being mean, calling me names. There was no way to get over the hurt I felt over losing him to his addiction. I had all these memories of being a daddy’s girl, and no matter how much pain my family had been through, there was no way to understand how he went from that to being the monster he was when he was drinking and fighting with my mom every night for the rest of my childhood.

So there was no mom and no dad telling me what to do. I was all on my own. And I went all out on the partying. That was all I really wanted to do. It wasn’t to the level I’d go to a few years later, not even close. I was just a crazy teenager, basically—nothing too abnormal from what I could tell at the time.

But I was about to get a new influence in my life, somebody who’d wind up having a bigger impact on me than I could possibly imagine at the time. I was about to meet my future fiancé.

He was my brother’s friend to start with, but the first time I laid eyes on him was in the school library. My math teacher had sent me there during lunch. I was so behind in my homework, and he strongly suggested I go there and try to get something done. There was a class in there at the time, a senior class, and all of a sudden I saw this guy sitting with his back facing me. He had a football team jersey on, and he was freaking huge. I didn’t even see his face, but I remember clearly thinking to myself, “Oh my god, this guy is huge. He’s gotta be the biggest guy in the school.” He looked like the damn gym teacher.

About a week later, I was sick at home—had a reason to skip, for once—and my brother walked into the house with the guy from the library. He introduced us, and I was thinking, “I just saw that guy a week ago.” He was really nice. Really proper and polite. They had just gone and bought this CD, some screamo kind of hardcore metal or something. My brother and me were into that kind of music, but when my brother’s friend put it in and listened to it, it was obvious that he wasn’t into it at all. He looked at both of us like, “No.” Back then he was just this Christian boy straight out of Cicero. He went to church every Sunday—literally, every freaking Sunday. So he left that CD for us. It wasn’t his thing.

Some time after that I called the apartment from wherever I was hanging out, and this man picked up the phone. I said, “Hello?” And this guy goes, “I’m layin’ in your bed right now.”

“Excuse me?” I was freaked. “Who the hell is this?”

“I went through your underwear drawer.”

Then I could pretty much hear him grinning. It was totally the Christian guy out of Cicero! He’d gotten into a fight with somebody in his family, and he went and stayed at my mom’s house while my brother was at work. He was just playing with me. Never gave me any reason to think he actually went through my underwear drawer. But about a week later, he called the house when I was home and asked if my brother was around. I told him no, he was at work. But then we stayed on the phone. He and I ended up talking for about eight hours that night. What I didn’t know was that he had taken my brother to work that night, so he knew he wasn’t there. It was a set-up to get me on the phone and ask me on a little date, which he did.

Our first date was amazing. We picked up a couple of friends and went to see
Final Destination.
On the way there I found out there was a lot more to him than meets the eye. He showed up in a nice polo shirt and khaki shorts. Of course I had my lip pierced and my long black hair. I wasn’t really sure what to make of him. I was sort of thinking he was some kind of straight-edge football player. But on the way to the movie, his friend Jordan kept saying this weird stuff, going, “Show her your nipples, Dude! Show her your nipples!” The next thing I knew, my movie date lifted up his shirt and showed me that he had his nipples pierced! Not only that, but there was a huge tattoo of a sun in the middle of his chest. I stared at him with my mouth open, like, “What in the hell?” And I remember being relieved, because I had thought he was this goody-goody dude and he definitely was not.

After the movie we all went out and got something to eat, and then we dropped them off and it was just me and my date. We were sitting in the car outside his house and I said, “Oh my god, dude, I can’t go home now. I’ll get in so much trouble. It’s too late.” I didn’t want to risk going home after my mom had gotten there and having to explain what I was doing. I wanted to act like I’d stayed the night with a friend.

So he said, “Listen, you can just sleep here. I’ll stay in the car with you.” It was really sweet of him. He was sitting in the driver’s seat and I kind of laid on his shoulder. Of course, after about an hour we had to face how uncomfortable it was. So he said, “Hey, maybe I can sneak you inside.” We made it into his room and he put his arm out for me to lay on. He was so nervous he was shaking a little bit, his arm was out completely straight. I laid down on it, but I could tell he was freaking out so I started kissing his hand. I kissed all the way up to his arm and all the way to his face and then I started to kiss his lips. I had to give him a little bit of a lesson, but it was really sweet. We just made out that night, nothing else. It was just a perfect night. Then I woke up to him shoving me off the bed onto the floor when his grandpa walked into the room.

Still, even the morning was good. After his grandpa left, he started playing the guitar for me. I love a man with a guitar, but he was very, very good. He’s probably the best guitar player I’ve heard out of any of the guys I’ve been around. The way he plays is just so gentle, and he has a beautiful singing voice. It’s just so pretty. He played a song for me and sang to me a little bit. It was the sweetest thing.

We just had something special. We instantly liked each other and had feelings right from the beginning. To me he was so interesting because he was so different, and he was interested in me for the same reasons. He was the football player, the good Christian boy, playing his guitar all soft; I was the wild child, listening to loud music, partying with these crazy people. But opposites just attract, and we had things in common, too. We both had come from rough childhoods, we were both virgins, we both had jobs and worked really hard, and really wanted to move up from where we’d come from in life.

Honestly, our relationship in the beginning was a fairy tale. It was what everybody wants. We’d sneak out to hang out all night, going to church parking lots and just sitting there for hours, talking and making out. It was so interesting being with him. We would have these really, really long conversations where we would just be staring into each other’s eyes, talking about nothing. It was really one of those special things.

There was one night when we were at the movies and he was holding onto my hand, kind of petting it with his thumb, and I felt his grip getting tighter and tighter. When I looked over at him, he had tears in his eyes. I was so surprised I asked him if he was okay and what was wrong. And what he said to me was, “I’m just so happy that I found you.”

That was the moment when we both just went, “Okay, this is for real.”

We had a few areas where we clashed, of course. As much as I was into him, it wasn’t like he was suddenly the only thing going on in my life. I was still blowing off school, and par-tying was still pretty much at the top of the list of things I wanted to do. He became the only person outside my friends who knew anything about that side of my life, and he did a lot to balance it out. He really tried to get me back into going to class and doing my work, because I was missing so much that I was getting kicked out and sent to alternative school.

He tried to influence me in other ways, too. One huge thing he helped me get over was my eating disorder. I can’t even tell you when I started making myself throw up. I know it was very young, and I think I was seven when I realized I was chubbier than some of my friends. I always thought I was ugly, and I always thought I was fat. So I’d been starving myself, overeating, and then making myself throw up since I was in elementary school. He found out about that, and when we got together I was finally able to cut that behavior out and learn to be a little healthier.

I used to tell him when we got together that he saved my life. Sometimes I had a pull on him, too, but we kept each other in check. For example, sometimes he’d skip school just to be around me when I was doing it, and I’d have to be like, “No, you have to go to school.” I had no desire to drag him down with any of my bad behavior. But for the most part we had this natural balance that put us both in awe. Each of us knew what the other was thinking, exactly how the other person worked. Our bond was so close and we shared so much together that I really think of my personality as molded around him. And that’s not bad, because we had an amazing relationship. When it really comes down to it, I think the most innocent times of my life were the times I spent with him.

But it couldn’t go on being perfect like that forever. He probably didn’t even know half of the shit I was doing back then, but he hated the pills and the partying. I remember him smacking a bottle of pills out of my hand one time, and another time I remember him finding a different bottle and throwing them out into the road. And that, I could handle. It pissed me off when he wasted my pills, but I wasn’t nearly so bad that I couldn’t see where he was coming from. I could handle him trying to keep me on the right track, because that was something we did for each other. Unfortunately, what was pushing me away at the same time was how controlling he got. He always wanted to know exactly what I was doing and where I was, or he wanted to be with me every minute of every day. I did, too, at first, but after a while it started to become too much.