Casting Down Imaginations

by LaShanda Michelle

  I opened the door and sat inside. “Deacon!” I exclaimed. “How did you?”

  He walked to the car. “Well, yesterday I went down to the car dealership and bought it, but I had them drive it over this morning while the two of us were at church to surprise you. Do you like it?”

  “Do I like it? Deacon, I love it! This car is so me.”

  I checked out the car’s sporty interior and admired its features. I was going to look good driving around campus in this thing!

  “Can I take it for a spin?” I asked him.

  “Sure, Baby Girl. Have fun, but don’t go too fast in it. I don’t want you getting any tickets.”

  I retrieved the keys from the glove box and cranked the engine, then turned the radio on. A song about cheating boyfriends from a popular girl group came out of the speakers, a song I should have been singing to David throughout our relationship.

  I looked up at Deacon, who was watching me with joy and pride in his eyes. I realized that today was probably going to be the last day that we would spend together for a while.

  “You wanna ride with me?” I asked him. “I can take you to get something to eat.”

  “You sure I’m not gonna cramp your style?”

  I shook my head. “No, Deac. Come on. I’ll even turn the radio down for you. I know how much you hate hip hop. Better yet, I’ll put it on a gospel station for you. How about that?”

  He grinned and got inside. We pulled out of the driveway and drove off together, enjoying each other’s company for the first time in a very long time. I knew then that I’d let too many of these moments slip away.

  two

  Karen

  I pulled my suitcases from beneath the bed and examined the space in each one. I didn’t know why I always waited until the last minute to pack, but I did.

  “Lord, I’m sorry for procrastinating,” I repented. I should have learned this lesson long ago, but here I was again, struggling to get things done in a hurry. At least I hadn’t waited until tomorrow. Then I would have really been pushing it.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Come in,” I yelled.

  Kevin, my little brother, walked in. “Here are those boxes you wanted,” he said, dragging the folded pieces of cardboard behind his five year old frame.

  I took the boxes from him. “Thanks, babe.”

  “Karen… Can I stay in here with you while you pack?”

  I smiled. Kevin didn’t want me to leave, so he was spending as much time with me as he could.

  “Sure,” I told him. “But if you stay in here, you’re gonna help me out. Is that cool with you?”

  He nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “You can start by taping the bottom of those boxes together and taking all the pictures off the walls.”

  Kevin looked up at the pictures, realizing how big the task was going to be. Pictures decorated every wall. There had to be at least thirty frames of all different shapes and sizes. But he began to fold the boxes anyway, finding peace with having a reason to hang around me.

  I opened the sliding door of my walk in closet, exposing my collection of designer clothes, shoes, and purses. There was no way everything was going to fit in my suitcases. I would leave some here, but Mama said she wanted everything out. She was turning my room into her “Special Room” and she wanted it left bare when I left for school in the morning. Everything had to go.

  I rummaged through the clothes and picked out my favorite jeans, T-shirts, blouses, sweaters, and slacks, and brought them all over to the bed. There was still a lot left over once I finished, but I didn’t want to box them up and put them in the basement with the rest of the things I wasn’t taking to school with me. By the time I came back for them they would be out of style and a waste of perfectly good clothes. I was just gonna have to bag them up and donate them to the Salvation Army.

  “Kevin,” I called, getting his attention.

  He looked up, finished with taping the bottoms of the boxes together.

  “Can you go get me some big garbage bags out of the kitchen?”

  “Okay,” he said, and left to go retrieve the bags.

  As soon as he was gone I locked the door behind him. I had to change into some more comfortable clothes and I didn’t want him bursting in on me as he’d done in the past. I grabbed a pair of oversized sweatpants from my bottom dresser drawer and an old T-shirt and sat down on my bed. Once undressed, I looked in the mirror and caught a reflection of the tattoo on my upper thigh. TERRANCE. I rubbed at it, wishing it would come off, but the permanent ink remained there as it had for the last two years.

  “Ugh,” I pouted as I got dressed. The tattoo was a souvenir of my past life that I had to look at everyday. As much as I tried to view it as simply a reminder of how far the Lord has brought me, it still annoyed me.

  “Karen,” Kevin called from behind the bedroom door. He twisted and jiggled the knob, trying to get in. “I got the bags you asked for. Hurry up and open the door.”

  I quickly got dressed and let him in.

  “It’s about time,” he mouthed off, handing me the bags. He was getting so big. I bet by the time I came back for Christmas he’ll be even bigger. I’ll hardly be able to recognize him.

  Kevin took a picture of me and Anaya off the wall and placed it in a box. It was a picture Mama took of us at a church picnic when we were seven.

  “Let me see that picture,” I instructed Kevin, pointing so that he’d know which one I was talking about.

  He got it and brought it over to me. I stared at the little girls in the picture. We both were missing teeth at the time, but that didn’t keep us from smiling at the camera. The remaining teeth were slightly stained from the red fruit punch drinks we were holding in our hands. We stood there, arm in arm in unity, loving each other the way that we were supposed to.

  I laughed aloud, thinking of all those times. Things were simple then. That was before the boyfriends, before the sex, and before the fights. Things certainly have changed.

  For one, Nya and I were nowhere near as close as we used to be. The whole time we were growing up we were partners in crime. But now I could hardly get her to say two words to me without rolling her eyes. She thought I was stuck up, but the truth was that I decided to dedicate my life to the Lord. That meant that there were some things I just didn’t do anymore. If I had to lose a friend because of my relationship with God, then so be it. God came first in my life and I could never live my life to please people. Real friends wanted the best for you anyway, not the worst. I hated that our friendship had to end that way, but she made it very clear that she didn’t want me in her life anymore. I couldn’t force anyone to like me, or love me for that matter.

  The drama between us really started in the eighth grade when I became sexually active. I had sex with my next door neighbor Eric, who was two years older than me. Nya and I argued because she said that I knew better and I shouldn’t have been messing around with him because he had a bad reputation. We stopped talking for a while, but she was right. I did know better and he did have a bad reputation. But I didn’t care. I liked the attention and I continued to have sex with him until I finally realized he was playing me for the young fool that I was at the time and broke it off. After that, Anaya and I became friends again.

  By the time we were in high school, both of us were moving at paces way faster than two girls who grew up in church should have been. We were lying to our parents, sneaking out of the house, going to wild parties, and in relationships that were leading us down wayward paths. In the beginning of our freshman year Anaya met David, a college guy who was a major playboy, and through him I met Toney.

  Toney and I met one night when Anaya and I had a sleepover at her house. Once Deacon Patterson had gone to bed, Anaya and I snuck out to join David at a house party. At this party David introduced me to Toney, who was also in college. We had fun together and after that night we continued to see each other secretly. We started having sex after about three weeks.
Toney had me drinking alcohol and smoking weed, but at the time I didn’t care. I thought I was in love and that was all that mattered to me. Our relationship was going good in my eyes, until he started tripping, talking about how he wanted to have a baby. I laughed at him at first, because I thought he was joking. He was serious though, and I told him that I was too young to go there with him. He left me the minute he found a girl dumb enough to get pregnant by him, so that was the end of our relationship.

  Then I got involved with Terrance. Terrance and I had actually known each other since we were little. Both of us played basketball at the YMCA, but he was two years older than me. We were in the same Spanish class the spring semester of my freshman year, and by that summer everyone knew we were a couple. The beginning of our relationship was good. We took things really slow and he even came to church with me from time to time. Daddy approved of him, and we usually spent every weekend together.

  But the end of my sophomore year was when the problems started. Terrance was doing very well in basketball, and receiving media attention from people all over Texas. He ended up getting drafted into the NBA, something that we all were very excited about. It was around that time that I realized I hadn’t gotten my period. I didn’t know what to do. I was only fifteen and I didn’t even have a job. When I told Terrance, his response to me was, “If you are pregnant, it’s not mine.” He went on to say that he didn’t want to be with a girl who was trying to trap him and he broke up with me.

  I went to the doctor a week later and he confirmed that I really was pregnant. To prove to him that I wasn’t a liar, I brought the results to school to show Terrance. Instead of embracing me as the mother of his child like I thought he would, he slapped me in the face and pushed me down on the ground in front of everybody. It took two of his friends to get him off of me. The guy who I thought loved me so much and would have given his life for me turned around and attacked me. I called Mama and told her what happened. When she picked me up from school, she took one look at my face she had me stay at my aunt’s house until the swelling went down. She knew Daddy would have attacked Terrance and would have ended up in jail for assaulting a minor. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I was pregnant though, so I kept it to myself. I knew it would have broken her heart to know that the daughter she was trying so hard to raise in the ways of the Lord was having premarital sex.

  But the situation with Terrance proved to be harder than I assumed it would be. The break up left me very depressed and stressed out. I had no clue how I was going to take care of a baby all on my own.

  Then one morning I woke up feeling sick. It wasn’t a cold or the flu, but I knew something was wrong with the baby. It took all the courage I had to confess to Mama that I was pregnant and thought the baby needed help. After screaming and crying over what I’d done, she took me to the doctor who informed me that I’d had a miscarriage. I cried for days over my lost child, but God gave me peace about it and let me know that my baby was with Him.

  But every since that day, Mama never treated me the same. She said that she didn’t look down on me, but I knew that she really did. I don’t think she has forgiven me. We lived in the same house and hardly said anything to each other. I often went out of my way to ask her how she was doing, and she always pretended that I wasn’t even there. It was like we were two strangers just passing by, even though we were family. She didn’t rejoice with me when I got accepted to Daytown University, either. She just asked me when I was leaving. Her telling me she wanted my room completely empty when I left let me know she’d been looking forward to me getting out of the house for a long time. There was no “I’m so proud of you.” No “I’m praying for you.” No “Good luck.” All I got was “When are you leaving?” and “Have that room bare when you walk out of that door.” Even still, I was determined not to let her ways get to me.

  My relationship with Anaya changed during that timeframe, too. Even though I told her I was different, she never really understood. I think her confusion is what ultimately drove her away from me. I tried my best to explain to her what was going on with me, but she never wanted to see me as a new person. She tried so hard to keep the old Karen that was dead and gone alive and well. When I wouldn’t allow it, she couldn’t handle it. My refusal to be involved with wild parties, drugs, alcohol, and sex caused her to detest me. She knew that I had gotten pregnant, but when she didn’t see my stomach getting big she asked me what happened. I told her that I’d miscarried and she called me a liar. She had the audacity to tell me to my face that I killed my baby to save my reputation at First Bethany. That was the craziest crap I’d ever heard. After that she stopped calling me, and then wrote me a letter expressing that she thought I was phony and that she didn’t want to be friends with me anymore.

  I was very hurt by it all, but I gave her over to the Lord and let Him handle it. Even if we never become friends again, I know that I will always be there for her if she needed me, and I let her know that, too. She began to do things that were contrary to the way I wanted to live my life, including fighting. She and some girl named Jayla started having fights down the street from the school, something I never imagined she would do. Then I heard the same girl was messing with David behind her back. Some kind of friend she chose. I even heard that she started stealing, too. Anaya? I concluded that there was just too much drama associated with her for me, so I pray for her from a distance.

  I never talked to Terrance again, either. Last I heard, he messed up his knee and was out of he NBA. He was supposedly moving back to Texas, but I am not sure if that’s really true. I stopped following his career a long time ago and could care less what he was doing.

  Snapping back to the present, I put the picture back into the box that Kevin was packing. If I was going to get everything done I didn’t have time to travel down memory lane.

  “When are you going to come back home?” Kevin asked.

  “I don’t know, Kevin. Probably Christmas.”

  “Christmas? Dang, that’s a long time!”

  I laughed. He’d asked me that same question over and over again for the past two weeks. I guess he was hoping my answer would change, because I always got the same response from him.

  “There you two are.”

  Kevin and I looked up to see Daddy standing at the door.

  “Kevin, I told you to keep her from packing, not help her!” he joked through a smile.

  “Sorry, Daddy,” Kevin said.

  Daddy walked over and patted Kevin on the head, then sat down on the corner of the bed.

  “Are you going to be able to fit all of these clothes in your suitcases?” Daddy asked. “You know the most you can have on the bus is three.”

  I looked at the clothes on the bed. “No, but I’m going to fit in as many as possible. What I can’t take with me I’m giving away.”

  “Okay,” he said. “If you insist.”

  I opened one of the garbage bags and began to stuff it with the folded clothes that I decided to give away.

  Daddy smiled at me. “My baby girl is about to go to college.”

  He must have been reading my thoughts. I smiled back at him.

  “Don’t you start crying on me now, Daddy,” I warned. We had a joke going on about which one of us would cry first. Neither one of us would admit that we thought the other would win.

  “I’m not going to cry,” he insisted. “But I know after you leave I will.”

  “Karen was crying this morning,” Kevin interjected.

  Daddy’s face lit up.

  “No I wasn’t,” I argued. “Kevin, what are you talking about?”

  “At church,” he answered. “When y’all were in the front. You were crying, I saw it!”

  Daddy and I laughed, realizing that he was referring to earlier this morning when the church handed Anaya and I our scholarships and we said our good-byes to the congregation.

  “That doesn’t count, Kevin,” I told him. “We’re talking about which one of us will cry first w
hen we have to leave each other.”

  “You did,” Kevin insisted. “I saw you crying Karen. Daddy, you won.”

  I decided to let it go. Some things were left better that way, and I could see that in Kevin’s heart he knew and understood what he saw.

  “You need me to help you pack?” Daddy asked.

  He wanted to spend some extra time with me, too. Daddy never even packed his own clothes when he had somewhere to go. There was no way he really wanted to help me.

  “No, Daddy, that’s okay. I think Kevin’s doing a good enough job helping me out.”

  Kevin looked up from his work to show all of his pearly whites.

  “Are you sure?” Daddy asked.

  I thought about it. “Well, if you want you can move all of this furniture down to the basement for me. That stuff is heavy. I know I won’t be able to move it by myself.”

  A blank look came over his face. “What are you talking about? Who said anything about moving furniture?”

  “Mama did,” Kevin answered.

  Daddy’s eyes went from me to Kevin, then back to me. “Are you serious?” he mouthed in my direction, not letting his voice carry out for Kevin to hear.

  “She said she wanted the room completely bare by the time I leave in the morning. I know I’m not getting up at the crack of dawn to move all this stuff downstairs, so I was gonna get it done tonight.”

  He chuckled in disbelief. “But where are you going to sleep if you do that?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, I was just going to put some blankets down and sleep on the floor.”

  Kevin jumped up. “Oohh, can I come? We can pretend like we’re camping!”

  “No,” Daddy said sternly. “Kevin, you will be sleeping in your bed, and Karen, you will be sleeping in yours.”

  Kevin sat back down. We both knew when our parents were serious. They didn’t know it yet, but Kevin was starting to pick up on all of the fights they’d been having, even though the rest of us pretended that everything was fine in front of him.