Promiscuous (2 page)

Well keep reading, ass-clown. ‘Cause I'm about to tell you why I'm so angry.

It all started the day Gretchen Cader became my babysitter. (You remember her, right? Of course you do.
Because I told you to
.)

Up until that point, I'm told I was a very lovely, unassuming child. Which seems to me like it could be bullshit, mostly because I was like, five, when Gretchen started babysitting me. And have you ever met a kid who's under the age of five? Lovely isn't the first word that springs to mind. Loud, maybe. Or sticky. Whatever, though. My mom says I was nice. Sweet, even. And I guess I have to take her word for it, because I can't really remember back that far.

All I remember is what happened after Gretchen took over.

Back then, I wasn't really old enough to understand what child abuse was. It wasn't because I was stupid, it's just, when you're that young...your brain doesn't jump to the same conclusions it would if you were an adult. For example: to a five year old, candy is simply the best fucking thing on the planet. As an adult, candy is fattening. Candy is a special occasion treat. A
guilty pleasure
. I explain it to you in these terms, because I want you to fully understand that to my little brain, my babysitter was someone I couldn't disobey. Not
shouldn't
, but couldn't. My babysitter was someone I had to listen to, no matter what. She was someone I could trust.

And that right there is why children shouldn’t be allowed to make important life decisions, folks.

I don't remember which specific event happened first, but I can tell you it progressed very quickly into worsening layers of wrongness.

Like the time when I was sick, and Gretchen came to my bedside with a bowl full of whipped up egg yolk she said was orange juice. I didn't believe her. She made me drink it anyway.

All of it.

Another time, Gretchen dared me to eat a handful of beef bouillon cubes. I was throwing up for days after that MSG overdose. Did you know that five year olds could get migraines—hypersensitivity, blurred vision, the works? Until then, I didn't know either. But they can. And I still get them, to this day, if I even catch so much as a whiff of an egg.

But it didn’t stop there. Each day, Gretchen's twisted little experiments got a little more creative. A little more damaging. It took me a long time to realize she was punishing me, in her own sick, misguided way.

Time and time again, I've asked myself what I ever did to Gretchen. What could my supposedly lovely childhood self possibly have done to deserve the hatred of a 15-year-old girl I barely knew?

Over the years, I've come up with a bunch of fucked up and improvable theories.

Maybe it was because she was just angry, or I don't know, jealous. Maybe it was because my house was always cleaner than hers, and didn't smell quite so much like cigarettes and ass. Maybe it was because I still had both my parents, even though my dad was almost never around. Or hey, maybe it was because my daddy never touched me the way Gretchen's daddy liked to touch her.

The bitch of it is, I'll never really know. That's the thing about hate. There's never really an excuse that makes sense.

After a while, the games started getting twisted. The dares became sexual, and I wasn't old enough to realize why that was so totally
not fucking ok
.

I won't go into much detail, because I wouldn't want to offend your delicate sensibilities.

After all, I'm sure no one ever called you a whore or told you the things you did—the things you were forced to do, by someone twice your size and thrice your maturity—made you dirty, before you'd even learned how to ride a bike. Right? So why should I bother trying to shock you into some manufactured state of moral outrage? It wouldn't help either of us one goddamn bit, would it?

Besides, by now it's too late. The damage has been done, and there's no way to fix what Gretchen broke. Or so I’m told.

And now you're probably wondering—like the sanctimonious asshole you are—whether I ever tried to tell anybody about what Gretchen was doing to me behind closed doors. You want to know whether I 'just said no' or 'yelled like hell' or cried 'stranger danger!'

Well I'm getting to that part.

However, fuck you eternally with a backwards pineapple for thinking that telling on Gretchen was somehow my responsibility. I was five fucking years old, goddamn it. Why are you asking me what a defenseless child did to defend herself? Why aren't you asking 'Why didn't any adults notice how the little kid never went outside with her babysitter during prime outdoor playtime?' Or, 'Where in the hell was her mother all those times she got mysteriously sick?'

Oh, you
are
asking those things?

Well then, cool your jets, Maverick. I'll tell you about that, too.

The answers to those questions won't make you feel vindicated, though. And if they do, you're an even bigger asshole than I thought.

First of all, I must have tried to talk to my mom about Gretchen a million times. But every time I opened my little mouth to spit out the dirty, disgusting secret, my mom would say something like, “Oh, Gretchen is such a sweet girl. Aren't we lucky to have her, sweetie? It's a shame about her father losing his job. I'll bet he's really happy that Gretchen can help him with the bills. Such a sweet girl.”

With my mom, everything was either sweet or wildly age-inappropriate information. As the queen bee of BE, the only thing my mom thought about more often than other people's business was what other people thought about our business. Yeah, I know. That's some
Inception
shit right there.

Ah, I see you've also noticed the implied hypocrisy of my mother being the reigning bitch of BE while constantly flouting the Golden Rule of beeswax minding. (Oh, fuck. I just realized this would've been prime comedic placement for that queen bee analogy I made earlier. Oh well. It's too late now.)

Anyway, back to the point we go.

I only implied that mom liked to know about other people's business. I didn't say she liked to get involved. And when it came to our own business, well, let's say that she only wanted to hear about the good stuff. You’ll know how this applies in just a second.

The moral of the story is: I never really did manage to tell my mom what was happening, at least not in any kind of detail.

So it all just...kept happening.

Until the day I finally broke down and confessed everything to my first grade teacher, Miss McKibbon. Or, ok maybe I didn't confess everything. In fact, I barely told her anything. All I said was that my babysitter touched me in places she shouldn't have.

But it was enough.

See, back then everything wasn't all mandated confidentiality and political correctness the way it is now. Teachers didn't meddle so much in their students lives, or try to give parents any advice other than "Tell Bobby he needs to do better in math otherwise I'll have to fail him." Which, in my neighborhood, usually meant the parent in question would wait until he or she got home before beating the living shit out of Bobby for making them take part in his education. If Bobby was smart, he'd either shape up academically or conveniently 'forget' to notify his parents about the next parent-teacher powwow. If not, the cycle would be repeated every year, until Bobby either dropped out or turned 18 and got the hell out of Dodge.

But Miss McKibbon, god love her, she was pretty fucking progressive.

Instead of doing the professional and detached thing, she marched right over to our house and told my mom what was happening to her precious little daughter, right under her own nose.

That was when Mom and Miss McKibbon hit a little snag. Because telling someone how to raise their kids, while standing on their trailer park turf?

Bingo
. Clear violation of Rule # 1.

Even if it turns out that you're in the right, even if the other person is wrong or blind or just plain stupid, you should've minded your own god damn business.

They say bad news travels fast? Well, scandalous news travels even faster, and at BE, it sure as shit didn't have far to go. Miss McKibbon had knocked on our door at 6:47 PM. By 7:15 PM, Mom had showed her to the door, using her 'outside' voice. By 7:20 PM, our phone was ringing off the hook from concerned neighbors, wanting to know why their trailer park Jackie O's perfect little angel had done to earn a home visit from a teacher.

By 8:00 PM, everyone knew the truth. Including the fact that I'd accused Gretchen Cader of basically being a child molester. (And yes, I've often wondered where those nosy bitches were when I really needed them. Probably tying up the phone lines ordering limited edition American Girl dolls off of QVC.)

After the phone stopped ringing—or in other words, after my mom jerked the cord out of the wall—she took a sleeping pill and sent herself to bed.

Taking my cue from mom, I decided the whole Gretchen thing wasn't as bad as Miss McKibbon seemed to think it was. So the next morning, I woke up and fixed myself a bowl of cereal, and took myself off to school. As per usual.

This brings me to Trailer Park Rule #2: snitches get stitches. I know, right? Again with the delightful prison analogy. I amuse the shit out of myself, sometimes.

Long story short, Gretchen's dad had heard about the things I said, and he’d beaten the living hell out of her the night before. So of course, she passed the message on to me.

Afterwards, I picked myself up, wiped the blood off my nose and walked to school, as usual.

I'll bet you're now wondering what the fuck a 5-year-old kid was doing walking to school, aren't you? Seriously? Again, you're focusing on all the wrong details, genius.

When I got to school, Miss McKibbon took one look at me and called the cops. Child services came and took me into custody. They put me in a room with some hard-ass cop with a full on uniform and a gigantic mustache. He scared the shit out of me at the time, but in retrospect he was probably a nice guy. He just had the world's shittiest job.

So we'll cut him some slack for being one grim ass motherfucker. But we won’t cut him slack for what happened next. What happened next was, he pointed to the stuffed horse I was holding and said, “Show me on the horse where Gretchen touched you.”

I looked at him, then at the adorable, fluffy stuffed horse. Then back at him again.

I was five, but even then I understood when someone was being a dumb ass. At that point, even though this was well before the show
Punk'd
—and even if it has existed, I wouldn't have been allowed to watch it, because MTV was ‘too mature’ for me at my age (go ahead and laugh it up, you lovers of irony)—I was pretty sure I was being Punk’d by Officer Moustachio at that moment. So I looked around and, sure enough, there was a video camera mounted to the wall.

"Is that on?" I pointed to it, asking him—quite politely, I might add—if I was being videotaped against my knowledge. I don't know why, but for some reason that struck me as creepy, even after everything that had happened.

"No," he told me, with a straight face. In spite of the fact that there was a motherfucking blinking red light on the thing, which even a scared, idiot child would know means that the camera is fucking
on
.

In that moment, Officer Moustachio lost what little trust he'd gained from me with his official looking uniform and totally badass nose ferret.

After lying point blank to my face, he repeated the question about the horse.

"Show me where the babysitter touched you."

But even if I hadn't just been betrayed by yet
another
grown up in my life, even if I'd trusted him enough to talk, I think deep down what my little mind was really rebelling at was the thought of violating that innocent, fuzzy little stuffed horse in the exact same way Gretchen had violated me.

And no matter how much I wanted to be free of her, I couldn't be like her. Not ever.

A couple of days later, child services gave me back to my mom. Just like that.

"Sorry we took your kid, lady. We tried to make her sing like a canary, but she stonewalled us, so...I'm sure everything's fine here. Enjoy the rest of her shattered childhood. Don't forget to tip your babysitter."
Waka waka
.

Oh, I'm sorry. Does my glib tone offend you? Do you think I'm being disrespectful, joking about my fucked-up life? Well that's just too goddamned bad. I've earned the right to laugh about this, if I feel like it. I fucking
lived
it. Just because I usually don't feel like laughing doesn't mean I don't have the right to.

And God, I wish so hard that I could laugh about this next part. And I wish even harder that it wasn't true. That I'd made it up, just like people will probably say I made up the rest of this story.

But it is true, and I'll never be able to forget what my mom said to me that day, about an hour after I got home from child services:

"I hope you're happy, Natasha. Now we have to move."

So we did. Across town. To another school district, another trailer park.

This one was called Lazy Acres. (I'm telling you, you
cannot
make this shit up.)

Luckily for me, no one in LA—the abbreviated trailer park, not the city, obviously—had a relative or anything in BE.

Not so luckily for me, I was now so
fantastically broken
that it didn't matter.

Everywhere I went, it seemed like people knew. Everyone I met seemed like they were blaming me for something I didn't even know I'd done. Worst of all, I'd become like a homing beacon for other people who were broken. People like Gretchen.

By the time I graduated middle school, it had happened three more times. Once with a boy named Christopher down the street, a few weeks after I moved in. Once with the father of a little girl I babysat for—again, irony is a son of a bitch—when I was twelve. His name was Doug.

It even happened with a stranger; a guy who was literally just driving by my house one day. I was playing in the sprinklers in front of our little blue double-wide, and he stopped to ask for directions. He never even got out of the car, just made me watch through the rolled down window while he touched himself. I ran back into the house, but by then it was too late.