I’d lost my virginity to him and started feeling myself. Every lie and dream he sold me, I was eating that shit up. In my eyes, he could do no wrong. This caused friction between me and my aunt. Missing curfew and acting out had became a daily argument. She had speculations that I had been messing with the boy, but I constantly denied it.
When that summer was close to the end, he came to me with a plan. Said he wanted us to run off together, get a fresh start somewhere nobody knew either one of us. I asked him about money and what we’d do about a place to live. Even as a kid, I knew that I was accustomed to living a certain way, and I didn’t want to give that up. Yeah, I came from money, but I didn’t have access to large sums. In high school, my parents gave me only a $500 a month allowance and I always had to make that stretch.
He told me not to worry about that part, that he had it handled. Days later he came back and told me he needed five hundred dollars from me to cover gas and food for the trip. His ass knew that was typically how much I’d get monthly, but I’d spent it already buying him gifts, lunch, and paying for haircuts and shit. I knew that I needed to come up with that money. He was my man, and we were about to build a life together.Although I knew me leaving would hurt my family, all I cared about was being able to be with him.
He promised me we’d end up in California, promised me a whole luxury life once we got settled. He was my first love. The first man I ever gave myself to completely. So I believed every wordthat came out his mouth. I was sheltered and green to the real world. The only time I ever had a normal life was when I was visiting my aunt, so naturally, I didn’t know better.
I told Kaseem how I stole that money from my aunt without her knowing and handed it over to the nigga, how he promised we’d be gone in two days. At that point, I didn’t care about my family, my friends back home or who’d miss me. I just was so caught up in this guy that I would have followed him off a bridge.
The night I was supposed to run away. I wrote a long letter to my parents and my aunt, trying to explain myself the best a seventeen year old girl could explain a decision like that. Then I grabbed my things, snuck out of my aunts house, and I waited for him at the spot we planned to meet. Hours passed, he never showed.
I went to his house after that, worried something happened to him, only to find his foster mother laying there dead in a pool of her own blood. The house torn apart around her like somebody had gone through it looking for something. I went to check for a pulse on her neck and stood up with blood all over my hands, all up my arms. The shit was so scary and traumatic that I was frozen for a while. I literally had to make my feet catch up with my mind. I ran out that house and back to my aunt’s place in a panic that I still couldn’t fully put into words even now.
When I finally made it back, my aunt was sitting on that sofa holding my runaway letter, furious, ready to tear into me the second I walked through the door, but the second she saw all that blood on me, all that fury turned straight into fear, and she rushed over to check my body for wounds and making sure that it wasn’t my blood that I was covered in. Even though I was ready to run off and disappoint my family, my aunt was still concerned when she saw me in that state. Or so I thought.
I told Kaseem abut how that night, once I explained to my aunt everything that happened, my aunt made me call his cell phone right then and there. How I tried to sound as calm as I could manage, asking him where he was, and pretending that I was still waiting on him so that we could leave. I never mentioned going to that house, or what I saw. He told me he was already gone, and how he wasn’t never coming back, he asked me if I’d gone to the house looking for him and he was sounding like that was a part of his plans for me. He wanted me to be caught up in that mess while he was already miles away.
He told me he’d enjoyed his time with me but things had gone left and he had to leave without waiting on me. He told me that he didn’t mean to do what he’d done, but he’d made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed, he said that he didn’t want to, but she wouldn’t listen. He was talking in circles and wouldn’t tell me what it meant. He told me not to ever call that phone again because he was already getting rid of it.
That’s when I knew, without him ever saying it straight out, that he was the one responsible for what happened to that woman.
I told Kaseem how my aunt made me strip out my clothes right there and bagged them up in plastic. She made me shower and she pretended to comfort me while giving me words of encouragement and telling me things would be okay. Then, days later I saw the murder on the news and got physically sick. The kind of sick that lasted for weeks straight, sick that turned out to be something else entirely. After being suspicious for over two weeks, my aunt made me take a pregnancy test.
It was indeed positive. My whole word crumbled when I found out. I was a baby myself. I didn’t want or need a baby right then. But, I also didn’t have the heart to think about getting rid of it either.
I told him how my aunt called my mother, made her drive into town so they could sit down together, how my aunt broke the news while my mother sat there and immediately started talking about how this couldn’t happen, how it would ruin our whole family’s image, how my father would leave her and me over the shame of it. How hysterical she got, how disappointed she was, calling me reckless and a lot of other names you should never call your child. She acted like I’d done all this to spite her instead of being a scared seventeen year old girl who’s been manipulated and who’s life was about to change completely.
I told him how my aunt kept the biggest parts quiet the whole time. Never told my mother about the running away, never told her about the body I found. She kept all of that locked up between me and her. I didn’t know then that it was all a part of her plan.
I told him how my aunt told her sister, my mother that she and her husband would keep me until I gave birth. We all came up with a lie for my father as to why It’ll be good for me to spend a school year there. He was so busy and consumed with work at the time, he was barely home anyway. He would just always make up his absence with gifts and money. But at the same time, he was so overprotective of me, that it was even hard to get him to let me leave for the summer. Surprisingly, my father agreed to let me stay for a year after my mother and aunt sold him on how beneficial it would be for me.
My aunt made it clear that I would hand the baby straight over for her to raise. I fought that decision hard as I could. Yes I was young, but I wanted my baby. Rather my child had a father or not, I wanted to do what was right by my child. I told them both my mom and my aunt that I didn’t want to give my baby away, that if my father wouldn’t accept me and a child, then I’d have tofend for myself. I told them I’d go to trade school myself, get a job, and raise her on my own without a single one of them.
My mother wasn’t hearing that. She said that she’d give me time and space to think about it, but if I kept that baby, I’d never have a home with them to come back to nor would I have a mother or father.
Once my mother left, my aunt sat me down and showed me that same bag of bloody clothes she’d made me strip out of a month earlier. She told me straight to my face that if I didn’t agree to hand that baby over to her, she’d tell the police I was responsible for that murder myself. She told me that nobody would believe me over her. She told me that she’s spoken to a neighbor who saw me leaving the crime scene that day and that they would cooperate her story.
Hearing her threaten me had broken my heart. She just told me she was giving me a better life than I could give myself, and that I needed to take it and be grateful. She said a baby would only slow me down.Deep inside, I knew this was all so that she could take my baby since she couldn’t have any of her own.
The fear of going to jail, being disowned by my entire family, tarnishing my father’s name if any secret got out, especially being accused of murder and being a teenage mother. I felt I had no other choice.I didn’t want to go to jail, especially when my aunt held evidence that looked as if I was guilty. She kept that tucked in her room safe.
As the years passed, that woman held that secret over my head like a noose. And once I started making real money, that’s when the blackmail turned into something else entirely, something I’d been paying to keep buried for years. I told him how I was never allowed to raise my own daughter, how Nariyah grew up callingme cousin instead of momma, how messed up it all sounded said out loud but that had just been my whole life since I was seventeen years old.
By the time I finished talking, Kaseem sat there at a total loss for words.
Then he grabbed me, pulled me into him so tight I could barely breathe, and he held me like he was trying to hold every broken piece of me together with just his arms.
“You should have been told me, I swear I would have understood with no judgment. You were a kid,” he said, his voice rough against the top of my head. “And your whole family failed you. Every single adult in your life failed you. You didn’t do nothing to deserve that, Tatti. Your aunt is really fucked up in the head and yo moms ain’t no better. Every kid gone make mistakes and you not the first or last teenager that slipped up and got pregnant. Most teenagers get wild as hell when they get their first taste of freedom. But damn, yo family handled you bad as fuck.” He pulled back just enough to look me in my face. “But what you also not gonna do no more is let this bitch keep ruining your life. I’ma handle that. Now we gotta figure out what you want to do. What is your next move that you want made? That’s your child. And she needs to know exactly who her mother really is and raising her here will never be a problem. That’s a huge responsibility, I need you to know that whenever you ready, I’m ready. I got y’all forever. Say the word, and we’ll move accordingly.”
Hearing my husband tell me all the right things that I needed to hear, it made me feel more at ease. I love and adore my child, with my whole heart. I want to be her mother, I want to build a life together. Having my mother disown me, even after doingwhat they told me to do as a kid, that left me with a fear of rejection. What if Nariyiah doesn’t want the life I’m trying to give her? What if she won’t accept me being her mother because she loves my aunt and uncle too much? So much was going through my mind that I didn’t know what to do.
There was still one thing that I hadn’t told Kaseem. That was who my baby father is. I promised I would let Zuri handle things on her end with exposing that she had another son. Demontae was that son and if I exposed that secret of mine right now, I’d also have to expose hers. I wasn’t lying to my husband. I just didn’t technically tell him the answer to a question that he never asked.
Isat on the edge of the bed until my wife fell asleep, then I got up and took my shower. Standing under that water, my mind wouldn’t stop spinning.
I kept thinking about how much heaviness this woman had been carrying by herself this whole time, how she’d been walking around with all that weight tucked inside her while I was over here thinking she just had an attitude problem or trust issues. She’d had a more fucked up life than I had imagined and I hated that I couldn’t fix the shit.
As a teen, she’d witnessed a whole murder scene, and I knew that shit had to have been traumatic. Then she had a secret pregnancy at seventeen, while her aunt had a blackmail scheme against her own niece running for years. The fucked up part wasthat the blackmail was actually a lie that bitch cooked up just so the bitch could steal her baby.
