Chapter Nine
Jen
I pull down the box in my closet, the only box contains my only important things that matter to me. Axe's baby bracelet from the hospital. His first pair of booties and the little hat they gave him.
Beneath it all in a bunch of plastic bags are the journals I have kept over the years. there’s at least twenty of them and they are filled with Cal.
I pull out the one that says 2001 on it and thumb through the pages until I find what I am looking for.
Eighth grade just let out and we were smoking weed on the beach with Chad and his girlfriend and my current best friend Stacy Marsh. She was the most popular girl in Junior High and had the best clothes. I met her last summer at a Memorial Day party my mom was waitressing at. I pretended to be a guest, not the helps daughter. Chances were that mom would get drunk before her shift was over and find some guy to take home. I always made friends fast and hustled them into giving me a place to crash for the night with some lame story like my parents were wealthy business type that left for some reason or another.
We weren’t rich though. We were dry ramen noodle poor because my mom spent the water bill on liquor and bar hopping. Stacy used me too though. She knew I was friends with Cal, Chad and Shamus and used me to get to Chad. Fair is fair as long as I had friends, even fake ones like Stacy. Anything was better than alone.
Stacy started giggling and I saw Chads hand sneak under her towel over her lap and wasn’t shocked when they left me sitting alone like always. They were already doing it and she would tell me all about the sex later.
Every time they left to do it, Cal would come hang out with me and kiss me or touch me and it gave me butterflies. We started making out at his birthday party in the fall when we had seven minutes in heaven. It was too, he kissed me the whole time. It was sloppy and uncoordinated, but I loved him. I knew I would marry him one day.
We made out all the time now and he started to grope my boobs or touch me between my legs. Right now, with his tongue down my throat he took my hand and put it on his dick. It was alarming, I mean I knew they got hard, but to feel it the first time was scary but so good.
"Can I see it?" I asked as I looked at my hand gripping him through his shorts.
"Hell yea." He said and stood, trying to hide it from our other friends. "Come with me." He said and balled the towel up in front of him.
I followed him to the other side of the beach where the thick reeds were and the ground was rocky. There were a few fishermen a way down, but they couldn’t see us. Nobody could.
Cal lay back and took my wrist pulling me down with him. Once I was hidden beside him he pulled the top of his trunks down and I saw the wet tip and the hair around the base and I definitely wanted to touch him...
I am pulled from the memory and the journal because I hate how sweet and innocent we both were. It was real and true and he was so sweet after, telling me I was pretty and how good I did it. That was the first time I gave head and he coached me, telling me what he liked.
My mind is in constant battle with the guy he was and who he became... all of it created the man who wanted me now. And I knew he did. He was giving me everything and I was too scared to let him have me. He had this 'hash it out as we go' mentality, but how do you hash it out when your memories are sweet or hateful?
I feel like I want to cry as memories wash over me as I read this tattered journal and look for more. I thumb through the pages of my 2003 book knowing it was tenth grade.
I find the entry I want and fall back into the memory as I trace the hearts and Cal's name that I doodled on the page.
We just moved into our new apartment closer to harbor heights and far away from the shitty trailer we owned on the other side of the Bridge. I had my own room with a window that had glass and a screen in it instead of the old plywood momma had one of her boyfriend’s put in after a tree branch shatter it the year after daddy died. The bathtub drained like normal and we didn’t need four locks on the door.
Momma finally stopped drinking and had a good job at a dentist office as a secretary and she didn’t need my monthly payment from daddys death anymore so I could finally start saving for college now and have a lot more at eighteen when I got the full inheritance.
Daddy was hit while fixing a flat tire when I was ten. The guy driving a big Mac truck fell asleep and hit daddy and his car square on. Momma got his social security, her settlement for the accident and chose to never work. I was given a monthly stipend of eight hundred dollars a month until I was eighteen and received the remaining fifty grand.
I would rather have my dad though. Things were different back then...
I turn the pages because it kills me to remember him even now. I thumb through until I find the night momma skipped out.
Cal made the second worst day of my life better last night. I came home from school yesterday to see a note and a thousand dollars cash from my mom telling me she would be gone a few months with Steve, a guy she met at work. Like always she told me he was going to go back to Oregon and finalize his divorce and then move me up there to live in his big beautiful house, blah blah blah.
She would come back when she realized Steve was a liar and send's her packing. they always did. She told me that with my check I could afford the apartment to be good and not get kicked out. She said she still owned the trailer over the bridge if I couldn’t make the rent. She said she would meet me there if I couldn’t make the rent here. Told me not to worry, she would call soon.
I hated the tears that fell, hated the hope she was finally being a mom again. I hated how she always let me down. I called Cal and tried to hide the fact I was crying from Mrs. Dorian.
"Hold on a second sweetie. I'll get him." She said and I cried from her kindness, the tone of voice and comfort all the good moms have. I cry because it reminds me mom never sounded like that.
I tell Cal I need him to come over and ramble off our address. I had never let him come to my world, but tonight I couldn’t be alone. He knew how to make me feel special and wanted and it comforted me.
I close my eyes and tears fall at the memory. He told me he would keep my secret and didn’t care if I lived in the trailer. He told me he would always be there for me. He kissed me... he went down on me that night for the first time. He didn’t ask for a blow job or me to jack him off. He had said he wanted to take care of me.
I put the books down knowing they kill me to read them. I know what comes next anyway. He took my virginity in the fall of senior year right before he turned eighteen. Once they started hitting up the eighteen and older clubs he wasn’t around much.
