I curled deeper into the comforter. For that moment, I felt safe. The soft sheets smelled like sugared lilacs gently swaying in a summer breeze… my mother’s smell. I pulled my knees up to my belly. My belly, no longer just a belly. My belly, now a womb. My belly, an incubator for a life that I never wanted but could never not want.
My belly, my betrayer. In its tight roundness, finally rendering my skinny jeans useless, it said everything and nothing…
It said, “I’m pregnant.” Obviously.
It also said, “I’m a pregnant teen.” Fairly obviously.
I’m a baby having a baby. A baby.I pulled the lilac comforter up over my head so that darkness shrouded me, and warmth, and the scent of my mother. I was in a womb. A baby… having a baby.
Here’s what my round belly didn’t say. It didn’t say that I did nothing wrong. It didn’t say that misogynistic boys raised in sexist families thought they could make me not-gay by giving me a piece of their manhood. It didn’t say that I was too small, too slight, and too scared to fight back.
It didn’t say that I was pushed back into the closet, both literally and figuratively. I had the bruises to prove it… if I weren’t too afraid-ashamed-angry-confused to show them, I could prove it.
My mother always told me that there’s the story you tell yourself about who you are, and another story that each individual person tells themselves about you. Which story are you going to believe?
Well, what she didn’t tell me was what to do when those other stories start to mix up with yours, and you don’t know how to set it all straight. You don’t know how to print a retraction. All you know how to do is curl up in your mother’s bed and cry. You just stare at the blank page at the end of the chapter, too afraid to see what’s going to happen next, but somehow feeling compelled to read on.
The ringing pierced through my quiet cocoon, startling me back into a life I wanted so desperately to escape… even for just a moment. I cupped my hands around my ears. The ringing stabbed through my hands, and the vibration from my cell phone shook through the soft comforter. I could almost feel it in my bones, under my skin, crawling in like a parasite. I wanted to gestate until I could be reborn into a different life.
It rang again. Two more rings. Just two more and it would stop, go to voicemail. I clenched for the next ring, but it didn’t come. It just went quiet. Good.I breathed deep and shuddered on the exhale, the kind of shudder like when you’ve cried really hard and then stopped.
I placed my hands on my belly. The baby turned and I could feel something–I assumed it was a foot–poke against my insides. It felt weird, but also amazing, to have this life growing inside of me. I had never felt so incredibly connected to another human being. She was me, but she was her. Did my deep shudder wake her?
I opened my eyes. I could sense the light from outside the bed, an idea more than an actual light. Then I heard the shrill whistle: a text message. It whistled again, and for some reason, like a dog to its master, I crawled out of my cave to reach it.
DAVID: WTH? Did you jump ship?
I rubbed my eyes. David was my best friend. He held my hand when I was figuring out my sexuality. I was fifteen. We had been best friends since we were eight. He had known he was gay since he was six, before he even knew what it meant to be gay. We became friends over bomb-pops and Doritos at our neighborhood pool and we never stopped. What did he mean, jump ship?
ME: What?
DAVID: Or are you just trying to get it out of your system?
ME: WHAT are you talking about?
DAVID: Sleeping with boys. R U bi now? Or maybe you were never really gay.
The baby kicked me from the inside, and David kicked me from the outside. I felt pinned and beaten. I felt out of place, just when I had started feeling like I had a place.
I loved this baby and hated her.
She was mine and only mine. I didn’t even know which one of the three a-holes was her father. Father? No, just a boy who donated sperm. Which one held me down and which ones watched? Which was first and which was last? They all just melded into one giant monster. The monster in the closet.
How could I tell David I was weak, or that I was somehow at fault, that my flagrant lesbianism somehow encouraged them? I felt completely drained, empty but for the flutter in my belly… trying to keep writing the story of my life through my own eyes, but failing as the other words rolled in.
DAVID: Gonna change your relationship status on FB? Maybe even change your banner, cuz I’m not sure you can fly that rainbow flag any more. Way to be loud and proud.
My hands trembled as I texted him back.
ME: David, please don’t. I am still me. Something happened. I made a mistake. Don’t do this to me.
DAVID: U just decide UR going to homeschool and go to community college. OUR SENIOR YEAR! I don’t see you becuz U R “sick.” We text and text, but that gets old after oh a few weeks.
DAVID: U hide the fact that U R PREGNANT! I find out on Facebook. Then it makes sense. U R ashamed. U lied. U aren’t gay. What, did U just need a cause to stand behind? Think U can just mess with the rest of us like that?
DAVID: People like you make other people think it’s a choice.
I suddenly felt dizzy. I struggled out of bed and into my mom’s big bathroom. I thought I might vomit… something I had been doing often now anyway. I gripped the cold porcelain bowl, stooping over so that my reflection in the toilet water looked back at me. A watery shadow of myself.
After a few deep breaths, the urge to throw up faded. I poured a glass of water and left the sanctuary of my mother’s room. My mother, whom I didn’t have to tell a word, who knew by looking in my eyes. My mother, who waited patiently for me outside the doctor’s offices, the therapist’s office, the college administration office, the bathroom while I cried.
My mother, who knew I would open up on my own time. My mother, my sanctuary.
I walked down the hall to my bedroom, opened the window shade and turned on my laptop. I hadn’t been on Facebook in a few days. Or twitter, or Instagram. I told you, I just wanted to hide. I wanted to stay on the blank page.
I opened to the familiar blue and white of my Facebook home page. Clicked on my news feed. My jaw slowly and involuntarily began to drop lower and lower. I read my news feed like a tabloid, like it wasn’t mine. It was an after-school special about cyber-bullying.
Hey, ho-bag.
Whazzup, preggers?
I missed you at the LGBT Teen Alliance meeting. Where are you? What is going on? I’ve heard some things.
I heard you had a boyfriend. Didn’t think dykes liked boys.
So are you up for a threesome now? Me, you, Lilah. 😉
So, Kara, what does your girlfriend think of your baby-daddy?
It just went on and on. A few smatterings of concern, like Rebecca asking why she hadn’t been to the meeting. But mostly it was disgusting, and hurtful, and inexplicable how people she called friends could turn on her in a second. I mean, people Icalled friends. That shewas me. ME! This was my Facebook page, the digital peek into the real me.
I stood up so hard and fast that my desk chair flew back against the bed and crashed down onto the shag-carpet floor. I could feel the energy rush into my body like a Monster drink, like fire, like an angry sugar rush. How could they say these things? How could people be so mean?
How could I bring a child into such a hateful world?
But I had to. To me, it didn’t feel like a choice. I mean, I knew it was ultimately a choice and I am grateful for that. It just… for me… I already felt love for this tiny body that never asked to be created.
Can love come of hate?
I paced my room, over to the window, touching the course fabric of the curtains with the tips of my fingers still shaking with emotion. Back to the bed, I pulled up the blankets and tucked them under the pillows. I arranged my stuffed animals–a lady bug, a dinosaur, a unicorn, and a tattered teddy with a button nose–as if they were cuddled up asleep together. Somehow the tidiness helped me calm myself. Across to the mirror, I inspected my reflection.
My face was a bit rounder, my breasts fuller under my thin pajama shirt. Of course, there was the belly, stretching the pink and purple stars etched on the fabric until they were ridiculously large and misshapen in places. I spread my fingers across those stars, one hand on either side of my belly button, the place where I had been connected to my mother almost eighteen years ago.
I stared at those stars until my thoughts wandered to the Dr. Seuss story about the things with stars on their bellies, and how they added them and removed them to be like one another until everything was all mixed up. I guess their stories were so jumbled they couldn’t remember what story of themselves they were supposed to listen to. They had to rewrite the story.
As I began to turn away, one of those stars moved beneath my palm. It was the life inside of me. Not mine, but hers–mine for just a short time.
Can love come of hate? It’s my story.
I went back to my computer, and with a few clicks, shut down my Facebook account. I picked up my phone, but not to text. I dialed David. It rang twice and went to voicemail. I hung up and dialed again. I counted the rings… One. Two. Three. Four… My stomach fluttered.
“Yeah,” he answered.
He answered! My voice caught in my throat.
“David?” I whispered. “It’s me.”
“I know.”
“David?”
I said his name again and tears rushed up from the hollow of my chest. They poured down my face in an uncontrollable flood of fear and relief and comfort and confusion. It was time for me to turn the page.
“David,” I whispered again. I paused and cleared my throat. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “I was raped.”