We were somewhere outside Berryville, Virginia. I knew that because I’d seen the exit sign before Mega pulled into this motel parking lot and dragged me inside. A roadside spot with no cameras, no front desk staff that cared, and rooms that rented by the night in cash. He picked it because nobody would look for him here and he was right. Nobody was looking for him here… yet.
The tears hadn’t stopped since Dante’s house. My face was raw from crying and my nose was still burning from the line he’d forced into me and my body felt like it was vibrating from the inside out, the coke still working through my system even though I could feel it fading, leaving behind something hollow and shaky that I recognized from the first week of rehab. My body was already craving the next one. Thirty days of sobriety, gone in one snort.
My three children were haunting me.
That’s what I kept coming back to. I’d been pregnant three times in my life. The first one was taken from me at sixteen and given to strangers. The second one I lost to a miscarriage after my brothers cut off Julius’s finger and the stress tore my body apart from the inside. And now this one, eight weeks along, with cocaine in my bloodstream that I didn’t put there. The father was outside the door on the phone and he didn’t even know that I was pregnant.
I’d already lost two children. One to adoption and one to my own body failing me. Losing a third would kill me. Not figuratively. I mean it would actually end my life because there was a limit to how much a woman could lose before her heart just stopped trying and I was standing on the edge of that limit with my toes hanging over.
My brothers had to be looking for me by now. Rita would’ve called Quest when I didn’t come home. Quest would’ve traced my phone and found it in the bushes at Dante’s house. He’d be tearing through the entire DMV right now with Prime and Justice and whoever else he could mobilize. Quest Banks didn’t lose people he loved. He collected them back by force. He’d put me in a trunk to save me from myself. He would burn this state to the ground to save me from Mega.
I just prayed he’d find me before Mega shoved another line up my nose. Every hit was a threat to the baby. Every hit was thirty days of rehab being erased. Every hit was me being pulled back into the version of myself I’d fought so hard to leave behind.
I didn’t know what would happen if I told Mega I was pregnant. Would he believe me? Would he care? Or would it make things worse, give him another reason to keep me, another leash, another tool of control? He’d used the coke to own me.He’d used the trips and the jewelry. A baby would be the ultimate chain and Mega loved chains.
I closed my eyes and the hotel room disappeared and I was somewhere else. Somewhere older. Somewhere that smelled like coffee and old books and chalk dust.
Mr. Jamison’s office at Ashford Academy. Third floor of the humanities building, last door on the left, the one with the James Baldwin quote taped to the window: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I used to read that quote every time I walked in and think it was meant for me personally. Like the universe had put it there so I would know that this man, this teacher, was the one who was going to help me face everything I couldn’t face alone.
He was the only Black instructor at the school. Taught AP English Literature and African American Studies, which was an elective that only four students signed up for and three of them were me, a girl from Atlanta named Brianna, and a girl from Philly who dropped out after the first semester. Mr. Jamison was tall, with glasses and a beard that was always neatly trimmed, and he wore blazers with patches on the elbows like a professor in a movie. He was in his early thirties and he had a voice that made everything he read sound important.
He noticed me before I noticed him noticing me. I was fourteen and homesick and angry at my mother for sending me to a school full of rich white kids who were hostile toothers. I sat in the back of his class with my arms crossed and my walls up and he let me sit there for two weeks before he asked me to stay after class one day.
“You’re not participating,” he said. “But you’re listening harder than anyone in the room. I can see it in your eyes. You’re absorbing everything and processing it privately. That’s a sign of intelligence, Serenity. But it’s also a sign of isolation. And I don’t want you to feel isolated in my classroom.”
Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. Nobody at that school had even tried to see past the crossed arms and the attitude. He did. And that’s how it started.
He gave me books. Langston Hughes first because he said Hughes understood what it meant to be Black in spaces that weren’t built for you. Then Nikki Giovanni because he said her fire reminded him of mine. Then Toni Morrison because he said she wrote about Black women with a complexity that most writers were too lazy or too scared to attempt. He’d leave them on my desk with sticky notes inside, little comments in the margins, questions he wanted to discuss with me after class.
The after-class conversations became weekly meetings. The weekly meetings became daily visits to his office during my free period. He’d read poetry out loud to me while I sat in the chair across from his desk with my knees pulled up to my chest and a cup of tea he’d made me or a glass of wine, and his voice would wrap around the words with such care that I felt like he was reading directly to my soul. I used to feel so grown sipping that wine. Nobody had ever given me that kind of attention. My mother shipped me off. My brothers were doing their own thing. My father was a stranger. And here was this man who saw me, who understood me, who told me I was brilliant and special and unlike anyone he’d ever taught.
I was on the brink of fifteen when he first touched my hair. Tucked a curl behind my ear while we were reading Gwendolyn Brooks and let his fingers linger on my cheek for a second too long. I didn’t pull away because it felt like tenderness and I was so hungry for tenderness that I would have eaten it out of anyone’s hand.
He told me he was in love with me three months later. I was fifteen. He said it quietly, in his office, with the door closed and the Baldwin quote watching from the window. He said he knew it was wrong and he knew the world wouldn’t understandbut what we had was different, it was real, it was two souls recognizing each other across an unfair divide. He made it sound like poetry because that’s what he was good at. Making ugly things sound beautiful.
I lost my virginity to him on the floor of his office on a Tuesday afternoon in November while the rest of the school was at a pep rally. I was fifteen years old. He was thirty-two. And I thought I was in love because I didn’t know that what I was feeling wasn’t love. It was a child responding to the only warmth available in a building full of cold.
I got pregnant two months later. And the warmth disappeared overnight. He panicked. Told me I couldn’t tell anyone. Told me it would ruin both of our lives. Told me he loved me but this had to stay between us. The man who quoted Nikki Giovanni about courage and fire suddenly couldn’t find either one when it mattered.
My mother flew up, pulled me out, and arranged the adoption. As for Mr. Jamison, he stopped teaching at Ashford Academy and nobody ever mentioned his name again. There are things I’ve never told anyone about what happened before I left that school. Things my mother helped me bury so deep that even my brothers don’t know. And I plan to keep it that way.
I opened my eyes and I was back in the hotel room in Berryville with brown carpet and a water stain shaped like a fist and my wrists tied to a headboard by a man who didn’t read poetry or pretend to love me. Mega didn’t pretend. He just took.
I could hear him outside the door on the phone. His voice was muffled but agitated. Arguing with someone about money or a location or whatever crisis was chasing him this hour. The call ended and the door opened and he walked in smelling like cigarette smoke and looking at me with eyes that had stopped seeing a woman a long time ago. He just saw a thing he owned.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Untie me.”
“When I know you won’t run.” He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on my thigh. “You look good, Ren. I missed you.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“You used to love when I touched you.”
“I used to love a lot of things that were bad for me.”
He laughed. Then he stopped laughing and his hand moved higher and I closed my eyes and went somewhere else. I went to the cafe in Silver Spring. I sat at my table by the window and ordered a chai latte and watched the school doors open. The kids poured out, loud and chaotic, backpacks bouncing. And there she was. Pink hoodie, white Air Forces, French braids, laughing with her friend, her whole face wide open with joy.
