Not This Time
3
The Morning After the Night Before
I SHOWERED, ignoring the headache and lingering drunk. God, what did he give me? I only intended to drink enough to loosen up. Hell. I lost my virginity and didn’t even remember it. All I had was blood on my thighs and a baby in my womb. Fuck! Just like last time.
And like last time, I sought out God. I was still reeling with the effects of alcohol in my bloodstream, but after my shower, I dressed and joined Mom and Dad at the breakfast table. Dad grunted something from behind the comic pages of the Sunday newspaper.
“Out too late last night,” Mom said.
“I tried to be quiet when I came in,” I answered. I hoped I was quiet. I didn’t even remember coming home.
“You didn’t ask for permission to be out last night. Were you with that Carter boy?” Mom demanded. I was pretty sure she was on some kind of drug. The doctor said it was for menopause.
“I’m sorry, Mother. May I have permission to go to the biggest event of the school year, until graduation, that I’ve been planning for four months for? Last night?”
“Watch your mouth, girl. You’ll get it slapped.”
“Yes, Daddy.” I ate my cereal and drank a cup of black coffee, even though it turned my stomach a little. Wasn’t anything going to be different this time through my life? Was I helplessly caught in a repeat of events? What could I do?
When Daddy threw the newspaper down, we got up and followed him to the car. No one said anything else.
Church. I was the only one who had been to prom the night before who was at church this morning. Never miss church. I had a perfect attendance pin for seventeen years of Sunday School. I listened to the preacher talk about the God who had forsaken me. Who had sent me to this hell.
I wasn’t interested in seeing my friends. My memories of last night were sketchy—even the early evening. I’d never really been drunk before, but I didn’t think it would feel this way. I was disconnected from everything. First of all, I was trying to superimpose my stale memories onto my seventeen-year-old self. Shock had slowed all my mental processes. It was hard to reconcile the future I knew with the present I’d tried to forget. Knowing what I had to look forward to gave me a sense of dread that had been missing my first time through. My memories weren’t of last night. They were of twenty-five years ago. What was fresh in my mind from last night was picking up a woman and taking her to my room where I died in the midst of an orgasm. I had to remember what happened back then. Now. I would finally admit to my parents at graduation that I was pregnant. Jesse Carter and I would be married two weeks later. Mother and Daddy would do everything in their power to hide the shame, but it came out every time they looked at me.
Eventually, I would give birth while Jesse was out working on an oil rig. It was the only life we could get and I would raise my child in my parents’ basement. We found a place to move into two years after the baby was born. That was the week they died. It would be the day I found out they’d left everything to my husband. We never packed. Just moved into the master bedroom with my daughter in my former room.
“Let this cup pass from me,” I whispered as I bowed my head at the back of the church. That was what Jesus prayed. And look what it got him. I begged God for answers. I begged him to take me back to my own time. I begged him to let me die and just be dead. I was in hell. I’d suffer through birth, marriage to a bastard, the disapproval of my parents, the shame of my classmates. I’d live in the same house I was born in until the day I finally cut free and divorced him. I’d get a job selling real estate and carefully save as much as I could. I’d push Jesse until he actually made something of his life. Before I ended our marriage, we’d be considered successful, ‘in spite of everything.’ And miserable. I’d be able to recount every time we’d had sex in twenty-five years of marriage. But I’d stick it out for the sake of our daughter.
I looked up at the solemn people with bowed heads as the preacher droned on. Some were praying; others were sleeping. I listened. I listened for God’s voice. I begged him to hear me and give me guidance. All I could hear were my own thoughts. The only future I could see was the one I’d already lived. The look of horror on my boyfriend’s face when I told him I was pregnant. His futile attempt to deny that it was possible. The look of disgust on my father’s face the last time he spoke to me. No, not the day he died—the day I told him I was pregnant. The minister’s lecture during my wedding on the evils of sex before marriage and how it tainted those who couldn’t wait. The high-fives Jesse got for nailing me. Lying alone in the hospital in the agony of childbirth.
And the one glimmer of light in my life: my daughter.
NO!
I almost shouted it in the church. I wouldn’t do this again. I’d kill myself first.
And then what? Wake up to start the whole nightmare over again?
Maybe… just maybe… this was an opportunity to do it right.
All I needed to do was decide what would make it right.
Fuck!
I was a forty-two-year-old woman trapped in my seventeen-year-old body. My head knew all kinds of things jumbled together in a mad chaos of experience and inexperience. I’d spent twenty-five years saying, ‘If I had it to do over again…’ And now here I was. The problem was that my seventeen-year-old self was still subject to seventeen-year-old hormones, conditioned responses, and peer pressure.
Sometime over the past two decades, I’d come to realize that I’d been raped. That realization came slowly as I came to grips with having woken up still partially drunk and not remembering anything that happened. I’d begun by thinking my one little drink had really hit me a lot harder than I thought. Maybe I’d had more than one? How many drinks did it take to knock me out so I couldn’t remember what happened? I just knew I hadn’t had that many.
That left drugs.
When I finally came to that realization, twenty years later, Jesse had laughed at me. “What do you think?” he’d scoffed. “You could have told me you weren’t on the pill.”
‘Date rape’ was still a relatively new term in ’91. There’d been a few articles about it in teen and women’s magazines, but I really didn’t have a concept that I could be drugged into compliance. ‘Roofies’, I learned, were comparably easy to get if you lived near a college campus. We didn’t, but I knew that Jesse and a bunch of his friends had gone to Minneapolis for a party a few weeks ago. Now I wondered how many of my girlfriends had also been drugged into performing sex acts after the prom.
What was worse, though, was that we were—or thought we were—as much to blame as our dates. The girls had taken a little break, though we only had to go to Moorhead to get what we wanted. Condoms. We had every intention of getting laid after the prom. We all had places picked out. We were as excited about sex as any guy. I would have fucked Jesse regardless. I just would have made him wear a condom. But that didn’t make it rape, did it?
Well, it certainly wouldn’t in Fargo, North Dakota. I could just imagine pressing charges against my boyfriend and having all my friends testify that I intended to get laid that night. Like that would improve anything over the last time around.
I wasn’t going to press charges, but I sure wasn’t going to marry the asshole. Not since I knew this time what he did to me. I could crucify him without pressing charges. And while I was at it, I was already pregnant, my reputation would be trashed, so I was going to enjoy life. There were eighty-seven boys in my graduating class. Jesse had told me that he fucked most of my girlfriends before school was out as I was hiding my shame and remaining faithful to him.
Not this time, buster.
So, did you get nailed by Jesse?” Abby asked as soon as I stepped off the school bus Monday morning. “Spill, girl. How was it?” The last time through I’d denied everything right up until the day I told my parents. I planned to have as many of the high school hunks as I could cram in my pussy this time.
“It was more like getting tacked,” I whispered, holding my thumb and forefinger about three inches apart. Abby gasped and giggled. Now that I’d made the decision, I was going to make the most of it. “And so quick! It’s a wonder he even got it in me before he came. I laid there with my legs spread masturbating so I could get myself off and even that didn’t get him hard again. I sucked, I tugged… I even offered to let him do my ass. Huh-uh. One-time Charlie. He suggested we try again next weekend.”
“Oh my god! And I was going to borrow him!”
“Honey, if you’ve got really low expectations, you can have him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“He served his purpose. My cherry’s gone. Now I’m going shopping for a lover. Auditions are now open,” I said making a lewd gesture. “I want somebody who can fill me.”
Word spreads fast in a small school. Whispers. First the girls. They’d spread the word to their boyfriends. The boyfriends would start laughing at Jesse. Jesse would be lucky if he ever got another date in this town. I, on the other hand, was suddenly a woman of interest. Guys started sniffing around Tuesday morning. I had three offers for ‘dates’ over the weekend. One was even from a freshman. A good-looking one and I took him up on it, even though I was going to have to drive. My parents still insisted I had a ten o’clock curfew anyway, so the fact that I was going out with a fifteen-year-old wasn’t a bad thing.
He wasn’t bad, either. We celebrated the last minute of his virginity together.
“What did you tell people?” Jesse hissed at me in the hallway.
“Tell people? About what?” I said innocently.
“About making love to me.”
“Did we make love? I don’t remember it. Or did you drug and rape me? I probably have told people that you are the least memorable of the five guys I’ve had sex with. Yeah. Count ’em. Five. You’re a stupid oaf, Jesse. I was going to fuck you anyway. You didn’t have to drug me.”
“I’ll deny it. You wanted it. Everyone knows that.”
“What are you going to deny? That you ever had sex with me? That will look good, won’t it? Four other guys have nailed me since prom and they all know I was no virgin. Or are you going to tell people you didn’t drug me? Why don’t you try that one on? See if anyone believes you.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do. What’s the big deal, anyway? Like you said, you were going to give it up anyway.”
“Yes. But I intended to give it to a man. You don’t qualify.”
I turned on my heel and went to my Senior Lit class. Mr. Jenkins smiled at me when I entered the room and I winked at him. Maybe it was because I was wearing my skirts a little shorter and unbuttoning an extra button on my blouses, but more guys were noticing me. Even teachers.
I turned 18 on a Friday and was pretty pleased with myself. There were only two weeks left of school and I had already started packing my things. I’d scraped and saved every penny I could and I’d made some phone calls. From payphones. I didn’t want any record on my parents’ phone bill. The day after I got my diploma, I would be gone without a trace.
Mr. Jenkins handed tests back to us at the end of class and told us all to have a good weekend. I glanced at the paper and saw I’d scored an A+. Beneath the letter grade were the words SAT 800? I started to say no, I’d only scored 745. But he knew that. We’d talked about it.
Oh, my.
I caught my lower lip between my teeth and looked up at him through my eyelashes. The bell rang and everyone started to move I winked at him and nodded. He smiled.
“Varsity and Grand,” he said. I knew the corner. It was close enough to the main drag that I could be walking to the theater but was still far enough away that there wouldn’t be many people who would see me. I nodded again and stood. He didn’t move so I stood right up against him. “Pack a bag.” I brushed past him and headed for the door.
Allen Jenkins was a hunk. He was only two years out of college and coached the football team. I hoped the important parts were built as well as the rest of him.
“I’m spending the night at Marcie’s,” I said as I prepared to leave on Saturday. I slung a backpack over my shoulder. I’d dressed fairly conservatively so I wouldn’t raise any questions. I was sure they couldn’t tell I was braless. And how would they know there were no panties under my knee-length skirt?
“I don’t like her,” Mother said. “She’s a loose girl.”
“We’re just going to hang out and watch movies. Abby’s coming, too. You like her. It’s two weeks before graduation. They want to celebrate my birthday with me. We just want to be together where there’s no boys,” I said. “They’re so annoying.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since you became a teenager,” my father chimed in. “You be back here in time for church.”
“I packed my church clothes. I’ll meet you there,” I said as I walked out the door. He didn’t have time to give me any more grief. They were so self-absorbed that they didn’t notice no one was there to pick me up. I walked down the block and turned toward town.
I’d decided to walk rather than try to catch a ride with someone. It was a big night. I was going to stay out all night, fuck a teacher, and enlist an ally. I didn’t need anyone else knowing what I was doing. I knew Mother wouldn’t call Marcie’s house. It wasn’t really Marcie she didn’t like. It was Marcie’s mom. Marcie’s mom had her eye on Dad. It was a wonder that Dad didn’t volunteer to drive me over there.
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