Raw Deal (Beauty for Ashes: Book One) (47 page)

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Shawna said with a toss of her head.

“Well, I really appreciate it,” I told Sam. “I so owe you.”

“You can pay me back by listening to Shawna.”

We moved off to the den, and I took a seat. “Do I really have time to sit and listen to your story of conversion when I have so much work to do?” I had a whole semester of work to catch up on.

Shawna raised an eyebrow. “How come you’ve had to photocopy all that? Exactly how many classes did you skip?”

“Is it any of your business?”

“Hey, hey, ladies,” Sam said. “No catfights in this apartment. Take it out into lobby.”

Shawna sprawled out on the couch. She smiled up at Sam. “Go make us something to eat?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sam left for the kitchen.

“You know what? You Christian girls are all the same,” I told Shawna.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re all happy and bubbly and all ‘life is great’.”

“Maybe that’s because it is.”

“Well, good for you then. Not everyone is that lucky.”

“Being happy doesn’t mean you have no problems. Life is mixed, Lexi. There are good times and hard times, but you can still be happy regardless.”

What could she possibly know about hard times? “You have a great boyfriend, or fiancé, or whatever he is.” I wished I hadn’t married Carl. My life would be less complicated right now if I hadn’t.

Shawna smiled and sat up. “I’m not happy because of Sam. He definitely makes me happy, but he’s not my reason. I’m only happy because I have Jesus. Apart from Him, I really have nothing to be happy about.” She paused, looking at the ring on my finger. “But you have a fiancé too. Or a husband?”

“Husband,” I sighed. “The worst mistake of my life.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to know. You’ll be so scandalized, and I don’t want to ruin your innocence.”

Shawna laughed, “Yeah, right, I’m no angel. Anyway, I’m supposed to be telling you about how I got saved, so zip it and listen.”

I looked deliberately bored.

“When I was fourteen I ran away from home for the first time. My mom was on drugs, and she was crazy. So, I just upped and left.” Shawna looked at me for a reaction, but I plastered a passive Dr. Paula style expression onto my face. “Anyway, I went back home after sleeping on a park bench for two days, and my mom hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone. Two weeks later, I asked my mom for some money so that I could buy new clothes. I was sick of getting teased at school because of my clothes and everything. But, of course, my mom needed every penny she had to feed her drug habit. That made me so angry, but I bottled it up for about two years. Every time I got home and saw my mom in one of her drug-induced comas, I hated her guts. Anyway, so by the time I was sixteen, I was like an outcast at school and nobody wanted to know me. One day, I got home and told my mom what I thought of her. I cursed her to her face, and she slapped me. So, I said I was leaving and never coming back, and I didn’t.”

“You haven’t mentioned your dad.”

“He died when I was twelve. It’s partly the reason my mom turned to drugs. She was really depressed.”

I was shocked. I thought about my own mom, and I was glad she hadn’t done that. As much as I resented her for ignoring me, she was a million times better than Shawna’s mom.

“Sometimes, I feel I was unfair toward my mom, as she obviously couldn’t cope with the loss. But at the end of the day, I was the child, and she was the adult. Lots of people lose their husbands, but they’re still able to bring up their kids.”

“How did your dad die?” I asked, suddenly more interested in Shawna’s story.

“He was a cop, and he got shot on duty by a drug dealer that he was trying to bust. Ironic, isn’t it, that my mom would turn to drugs when it was a drug dealer that killed my dad?”

Now I was confused. How could Shawna possibly be happy when all this had happened to her? “Doesn’t all that make you feel angry sometimes?”

Shawna shook her head. “I used to be, but what is there to be angry about? Dad’s dead. Hunting down the man who killed him and making him pay isn’t going to bring him back. I gave up all hopes of murdering my dad’s murderer long ago. You just can’t be happy if you carry so much hate around with you.”

I nodded, my eyes stinging. Maybe that was my problem. I was carrying the burden of my dad’s death around with me all the time. No wonder I couldn’t get over it. “My dad died two years ago in a car crash. My mom was in the car with him, and it still haunts her. The guy that crashed into them was drunk, and he got out without a scratch. ”

We were both quiet for a moment. The pain of my dad’s death was still so fresh. It welled up within me like a bitter poison, stinging every cell in my body. Shawna came and perched on the armrest of the sofa chair I was sitting on. She placed a hand on my shoulder. I closed my eyes willing the tears away even as they escaped from under my squeezed shut eyelids. I heard Sam enter the room, and I opened my eyes.

“So what part are we up to?” Sam asked.

“Still the beginning.” Shawna left the room for a moment and returned with a roll of tissue. She handed it to me. “That smells delicious,” she told Sam. “Curry?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like curry?” Shawna asked me.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be leaving soon.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind making a bit more,” Sam offered.

“No, it’s okay.”

Sam returned to the kitchen.

“I’m sorry to hear about your dad,” Shawna said. “It’s so hard, isn’t it? I was really close to my dad, so I just couldn’t get used to the fact that he was gone forever.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to my dad being gone.”

“I know. It’s hard.” Shawna settled on the armrest again. “Well, as I was saying, I said I was never coming back, and I didn’t for nearly three years. When I left, I started thinking about how I could make money so that I could get my own place. That same night I met a guy who wanted to use me to sell drugs, but the way I saw it, drugs had killed my dad and ruined my mom. I wanted nothing to do with them.

“I asked him if there was anything else I could do to make money, and he took me to a club and introduced me to this guy who owned an escort agency. To cut a long story short, I became an escort, and I got really popular with clients because of what I was willing to do, and I made lots of money. But I hardly saw any of it because my boss kept most of it.

Shawna ran her hand through her hair a couple times and a pained expression crossed her features momentarily. “I wasn’t happy. I felt like trash. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to go back to my mom, and I had nowhere else to go. While I was an escort, I had a really nice apartment and my boss was paying for it. Anyway, I left when my boss, who by the way was a married man, started getting a little too familiar with me. Something horrible happened, and I packed my things and left.”

“Something horrible? Like what?” I asked.

“That’s personal.” Shawna frowned.

“How long were you an escort?” I asked.

“About two years. When I left, I checked into this horrible cheap hotel, because I wanted to save as much money as I could. I started looking for somewhere else to live and I found a three-bedroom apartment that was being shared by two girls. I moved into the third bedroom and started wondering what to do with my life. I had no qualifications because I had dropped out of high school at sixteen, and even if I did have the qualifications to get into college, I wasn’t interested in studying. I wanted quick money. Plus, I had no money to go to college anyway, so it wasn’t even an option anyway.”

“Was all this here in LA?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’ve lived in LA all my life. Anyway, so I considered joining another escort agency, but every time I thought of it, I felt sick. That just wasn’t the kind of life I wanted to live anymore. I was sick of rich men. Actually, I was just sick of men in general.” Shawna shuddered slightly. “One of my roomies was into modeling, just casual, nothing serious; so I thought I’d try it too. I gathered up the last of my money and shot my portfolio. But of course, I’m too short, and modeling was just too much hard work.”

Sam popped his head around the door. “Dinner is ready.”

“Give us five minutes,” Shawna said. The door closed again, and Shawna continued, “I got into doing beauty pageants. I don’t know how I got accepted, but I did. All was going quite well for about a year, until I met Sam.” She smiled. “I was at the mall, just shopping on a Saturday, and he came over and handed me a leaflet. I took it, but I didn’t read it. I went around a few shops. Then I went to the food court just to sit down and rest my feet because I was wearing some killer heels. I realized I was still holding the leaflet, so I decided to read it. It was about God.

“I wasn’t interested, but I just read it anyway because I had nothing better to do. Then lo and behold, the guy who had given me the leaflet was sitting at the next table to me, and he came over to ask if I understood what I was reading. I decided he was pretty cute, so I let him sit down.”

Shawna chuckled when I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t believe they’d met at the mall, and now they were engaged. Shawna’s ring finger flaunted a pretty impressive rock.

“When Sam finished explaining about God, He invited me to his church and then left. I was shocked because he hadn’t asked me for my number or anything,” Shawna recalled. “I know it sounds silly, but I was really surprised because I was used to sleazebags.

“So the next Sunday, I went down to his church, thinking it would be a good joke, and I dragged my roommates with me. We started going regularly, and one of them got saved. I was pretty annoyed at her for getting saved. Well, I kept going to church, so people thought I was saved too. Still, though, I only really wanted to get with Sam. But Sam for some reason wouldn’t talk to me. He kept pushing me to the girls in the church and telling me to talk to them. Anyway, one day I was wondering what else to do to make Sam like me, and I was lying on my bed thinking about it and also thinking about what a terrible person I really was. Nobody knew that I used to be a hooker, and everyone thought I was saved. I decided to stop living a lie. I went back to my crazy boss who I’d run away from, and I stopped going to church too.

“One night, a client dropped me off at home, and Sam was outside my apartment waiting for me. He asked me why I hadn’t been at church, and I just started crying. He asked me about the guy who’d dropped me off. I lied that he was just a friend, and then I ran into my apartment. That night I got so depressed I don’t even know how much I drank. I thought I wanted to die, but when I came through it, I was just so grateful to still be alive.

“The next morning Sam came to see me again. I had a beauty pageant, so I got him to give me a ride as I was in a really bad state and couldn’t drive. I don’t know how I did the pageant, but I did. Afterwards, Sam started asking me all these questions. I broke down crying and just told him everything.”

“So he knows you used to be an escort?”

“Yeah.”

“How old are you?” I asked

“Twenty-one.”

“How old is Sam?”

“Twenty-three. He took three years out to go to Peru for missions and he’s been working with Faith Television for the past few years. They’re funding his marketing and comms degree.”

I looked at my watch. I hoped Carl wasn’t home. “So what happened after you told him?”

“He asked if I wanted to be saved, and I said yes. I’d hit rock bottom, and I was sick of my hopelessness and depression. It wasn’t easy. I had to go through a long process of allowing God to cleanse me and really work on me. It was hard, but it was worth it.” Shawna paused and looked me directly in the eyes. “Listen, Lexi, I’m twenty-one, and I’ve already been through so much. I’ve got terrible debt. I have a terrible past that sometimes haunts me. My relationship with my mom leaves a lot to be desired. Everything is just a mess. Emotionally, I’m getting better, but I’m still not there yet. But God is helping me. He’s fixing me up.” Shawna pushed her hair back from her face and looked down at her feet. “I really don’t know where I would be now if not for Jesus. I don’t know what mental state I’d be in by now. I’ve been a Christian for two years, and God has really made a difference in my life.” Shawna took my hand. “Think about it, Lexi. Jesus loves you. Your father is dead, but God is a Father who will always be alive. He will always be by your side.” Shawna’s nose twitched. She sniffed. “The curry is burning.”

I followed her to the kitchen where Sam was serving rice and chicken curry into two dishes. Shawna opened a window.

“I’ll see myself out,” I told them.

Shawna insisted on walking me out. It was hard to believe all what she’d just told me. I couldn’t believe that she’d been a high class hooker just a couple years ago.

Chapter 56

“Where’ve you been?” Carl asked looking pointedly at the wall clock when I got home.

I looked at the time, it was only getting on six p.m. “I’ve been at college.” I replied distractedly. Shawna’s story was still fresh on my mind. I had to give it some serious thought, and I had to make a decision about whether to become a Christian. If God could help Shawna, He could help me too. Maybe He could even help me out concerning my pathetic marriage.