Always, Abby: Freshman Year

by M. Boothe

  Is it okay to take a break for once and sink to the bottom to rest, to cry?

  Do you think I could drown in all the tears I’ve cried in my life? Or, maybe, just maybe, all the tears that I’ve cried can help push me to the top, to help me float away from all of this?

  Always,

  Abby

  April 16, 2004

  Dear Heart,

  I wrote Dawson a letter and stuck it in his locker this morning. The gist of it was that I miss him. Because I do. I told him that as of right now, there’s zero trust between us. This was more than a tiny white lie you tell to avoid hurting somebody’s feelings, and it was going to take a lot of time and work to build any of that back. If that was possible at all. But I was willing to try if he stopped keeping things from me. I was willing to talk to him about it as friends and seeing where it takes us.

  Mason thinks I'm crazy. To be honest, he probably thinks we've all lost it. He was a little shocked when I told him what I was going to do. He doesn't think I've had enough time to deal with what happened, and he's worried about me getting hurt again.

  I don't want to get hurt again either. I'd really like to avoid that at all costs if I can.

  I’m fifteen, though. There’s a lot happening in this little body of mine. I sat on my bed for hours after he left the other night, just thinking about what the best solution was. I don’t want to be stubborn and not give him a second chance just because I’m used to Mom. He’s not my mother. He’s entirely different. I feel like it would be a mistake to not let myself have even the smallest amount of happiness just because I was worried about what could happen further down the road.

  A lot of people my age were going through relationships like socks. Normally when my socks are dirty, I wash them. You could use that for a lot of different things in life. This relationship had been sullied. But maybe a quick spin in the washing machine could help get rid of some of the filth. By the time I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more, I had made the decision that it was worth a chance. I’d keep this pair of socks until there were holes that couldn’t be mended.

  I just hope as time went on, and he was able to keep his promises, I wouldn’t need to throw them away.

  Always,

  Abby

  May 1, 2004

  Dear Heart,

  I need to fill you in since it’s been a couple of weeks.

  Dawson and I had been trying to be friendly and talk through everything. Over the last couple of weeks, we didn’t really talk at school a lot, but he called me every evening.

  He wants to compromise by not using drugs himself but still selling them. He was acting weird about that, so I asked why he needed to sell them in the first place. He told me that he wanted to be able to leave as soon as I graduated.

  Me. Not him. Me. Because he said he’s planning on waiting for me. He said that I’m too important to leave behind. He knows everything I’ve been through, and that I was planning on leaving as soon as I could anyway. He’s making and saving as much money as he can so that when I graduate, he can help me get away from Mom and Dad.

  I didn’t really know what to tell him. We were on the phone when he said that, and I was trying to think if anybody had ever told me before that I was important.

  He told me that he knew we weren’t together yet, but that he loves me. He wished I would stop questioning everything.

  Do you think that’s what I’m doing? Questioning everything? I don’t really want to do that, but I’ve never had a choice. I told him that. He said he understood.

  When he talks to me like that, though, about our futures being intertwined together, I get this feeling deep in my belly. It makes me sick sometimes. At first, I thought it was because I wasn’t sure if I could trust him to mean what he says. But after what happened today, I think it’s because deep down I had been scared of how he’s going to be imbedded in my life from here on out.

  Today is Dawson’s birthday. He’s officially sixteen. He’s skipping school on Monday to get his license. But today, today he had a party at his house. It was mostly just a handful of his friends and his parents. He had been trying to invite me for the last week, but I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. He told me that if I felt better about it, he'd invite Mason, too.

  I finally caved yesterday.

  Him and his dad came and picked me up this afternoon, and I helped them decorate and set everything up. Apparently, he never told his parents we were broken up. Or at least they didn’t act weird or ask about anything.

  It started out fine. Drew showed up with a girl I had never seen. When I asked Dawson, he acted a little weird and told me her name was Tiffany. She lived next to Drew. According to Dawson they weren’t dating, but they do a lot of things together. She was in the eighth grade. I kept looking at her. She was pretty, although she wouldn’t really talk to anybody.

  Mason tried to make friends with her and she basically told him that she didn't like to talk to people she didn't know. She went outside after that.

  We were all just hanging out in the living room, sometimes migrating outside where Dawson’s parents had set up a fire pit for us to sit around. It was still kind of cool in the evenings, so it felt nice being near it.

  Dawson kept trying to find little ways to touch me as the party went on. At first, I didn’t know how to react with it. It was weird the first few times, but then when he grabbed my hand, kissing the back of it, I kind of just went with it. I missed him. I couldn’t just act like I didn’t anymore. I think it hurt me worse knowing that I could have him if I wanted to and I was just being stubborn than actually trying to stay away and mean it.

  Do you ever just feel like somebody’s staring at you and when you try to find them, they look away really fast to avoid being caught? This wasn’t like that. The hairs on my arm started to stand and when I turned, I came face to face with Drew. The anger rolling off of him was so thick I could taste it in my mouth. The muscles were working in his jaw like he was trying so hard to keep something inside that just wanted to break free.

  I wasn’t the only person that could feel it, because Dawson stiffened beside me. He wrapped an arm around me and asked what was wrong with him. For a second he just looked at me. I felt so scrutinized. It was like he was sizing me up, preparing to fight or something. I have never once been in a fight where I’ve fought back. I knew that I was cowering beside Dawson, but I also knew that if I had to fight back against Drew, I would never make it.

  Drew didn’t even answer. He just stared at Dawson for a few seconds and turned around, walking out of the yard. His friend, Tiffany, started following behind him. Neither of them looked back.

  I was relieved when nobody said anything, but it definitely changed the entire mood of the party. Within twenty minutes or so almost everybody decided to leave. I could tell Dawson was upset about it, but I didn’t know what to do.

  I asked him if he wanted to go ahead and take me home, but he surprised me by grabbing my hand and walking back into the house. He told his parents that Drew was a dick and that we needed to talk about it. They didn’t try to stop us from going upstairs to his room.

  He shut the door as we walked in and just started word vomiting like he couldn’t hold anything in anymore. He started pacing from one side of the room to the other, stepping over his guitar and a scattering of books and music magazines. On each trip to furthest part of his room he’d accidentally hit a cymbal lying against his wall. It was almost like each sentence was punctuated with a ring.

  He told me that he’d asked Drew too many times what was going on with him, but he’d never give an answer. He said he was sorry that it was so hard to be around him. He didn’t know what to do, that he didn’t want to have to choose between me and his best friend, but Drew obviously had a problem and wasn’t making it easy on any of us.

  He just wanted his life to be easy again, he said. He wanted his best friend and his girl to get along. He wanted things to go back to the way that they were before. I didn’t think
he was talking about just me anymore, about our relationship.

  He seemed a little over the top with his ramblings. I asked him if he was okay, and he said that he’d just missed me so much. He didn’t even care that it was his birthday party. He just wanted me to have fun with him again, that he needed me to be with him again. He was tired of having the dark cloud of Drew hovering, he was tired of telling people we were just taking it slow, he was tired of feeling like he was committing a crime every time he touched me because he knew I wasn’t his, and he didnt even know if I wanted him to touch me.

  I stood against his door, a little afraid to walk near him or he might plow me over. I watched him, still pacing and grabbing huge handfuls of his hair with frustration. I knew he genuinely felt all of the things he talked about, but I was having this huge internal battle with myself over whether or not I could trust him to not turn into the monster that I’ve seen other people become.

  Monsters don’t just hide under your bed anymore. They’re everywhere. On the street, in your house. It didn’t matter that they weren’t supposed to get too close to you. They did what they wanted.

  Could I let another monster take a place in my heart? Could I believe that he had whatever this was under control? In the beginning that’s what Mom said, too. She said the pills were just to help with her constant migraines. She said she was only taking them on bad days, before bed. She said it wasn’t a big deal.

  She said a lot of things she didn’t mean.

  I was still watching him, trying to listen to what he was saying, what he was feeling right then, but my mind kept walking away from me. I couldn’t figure out what it wanted me to see, to know.

  Do you think sometimes it’s better to just stop listening to yourself? To stop rationalizing, to stop being afraid of the what ifs? Because WHAT IF while you’re what-iffing, the thing you were confused about decides it’s not worth sticking around while you confab with yourself. It’s not fair to hold somebody’s emotions in limbo, especially when they're your own.

  When he walked closer to me, I grabbed his arm before he could start pacing again. I told him that I would absolutely never ask him to pick me over anybody else. I would never want to be that person. I was honest and told him that I only wanted him to pick me over the pills in the box on his desk. I told him that if he could do that, if he was willing to build my trust back, I would try again. I was willing to stop thinking about what he was doing as long as he was honest with me about everything else. I could handle that if he could.

  He advanced on me, trapping me between himself and the door. He kissed every inch of my face before taking my lips.

  I had missed those lips, Dear Heart.

  It was crazy that it felt like years since he’d kissed me, since he had touched me. I know that barely two weeks ago he had climbed through my window, but that kiss and those simple touches were tainted with sadness, with darkness.

  These touches, these kisses, were so different. They held what I thought were promises.

  I don’t know how long we kissed, but he was stealing my breath away, so I turned my head a little to take in some air. I wasn’t thinking that it would cause him to take everything a step further, but when I broke our kiss, he took advantage of the opportunity and started trailing kisses along my jaw, along the column of my throat. I could feel my pulse hammering in my neck, under his lips, like my blood was trying to carry his kisses throughout my whole body.

  Do you think it makes me crazy to feel like an entirely different person when he touches me like that, kisses me like that? When he’s doing these things to me, even though I’m still nervous, I feel brave. I feel special. I feel important.

  It also felt like we were still trying to move too fast. But you feel what you feel. I had been trying for so long to turn a lot of my feelings into different things, to hide from them. Right then I decided I wanted that to be different with him. We weren’t going to build the foundation of trust that I wanted if it was strictly one sided on his part.

  So even though I knew that it was too much, too soon, I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to feel whatever it was that he wanted to show me, to give me. I wanted to feel what it was like to have somebody give me something other than pain and weakness.

  I put my hands under his shirt, placing my palms on his stomach. I felt muscle I didn't know was there before. I ran my hand along the grooves, and his skin rippled from my touch. I watched a smirk slide onto his mouth. He told me again that he missed me, and that he wanted to show me how much. He said that he knew how stressed I had been. He asked if he could fix it, if he could make me feel good, if he could show me how good he felt with me.

  I looked into his eyes, a little afraid about what he wanted to do. I could see that he still looked sad, and I couldn’t stop myself from nodding. I wanted him to feel happy. I wanted to show him that I cared about him.

  I almost choked when he reached for the button of my jeans. My hands flew to his wrists to stop him, but he said to trust him. He said he wasn’t going to take them off with his parents at home. It put thoughts into my head that there would be a time when we’d be here without his parents. That would be a whole new adventure.

  This time, he said he just wanted to make me feel good.

  He whispered all of this, a breath away from my ear. My entire body had lit up with goosebumps, a roadmap on my skin. I had stopped paying attention and didn’t realize he already had my jeans undone and my zipper down.

  I looked at his hand. His finger ran along the band of my panties. He told me that my skin was so soft. My stomach clenched when he told me to spread my legs further apart. I’m not even sure I had control of my body anymore because it moved all on its own.

  When his hand shifted inside of my panties, lowering to my core, my head snapped back against the door. He laughed for a second before he told me I had to be quiet. He told me he’d help me be quiet if he had to. I didn’t know what that meant until his fingers started to move over me. The gasp wasn’t even completely out of my mouth before he started swallowing the noises. His tongue started to move like his fingers, slipping in and out, caressing me.

  I knew that I was probably embarrassing myself. My breathing had gotten out of control. He stopped kissing me and moved his mouth to my ear. He told me to relax, that he’d take care of me. He told me that I was wet, that my skin was hot against him.

  His other hand moved to the column of my throat, tightening while his thumb rubbed the underside of my jaw. His ministrations quickened, and my legs started to quiver. He told me to give in to him. I had a second to wonder how he was so good at this. I was so awkward with everything. I had never been touched this way. I felt so out of my league with him. I started to question who he had practiced with before me, but there wasn’t room for anybody else in here right now. There was me and there was him, and he was still moving inside of me.

  I’m still thinking about that, Dear Heart. I’ve been home now for a couple of hours, laying on my bed. I’ve been touching my lower stomach, trying to find the nerve to touch myself the way that he had, to see if it feels the same.

  He made me come against his door, straddling his hand. He wiped me off of his fingers with the inside of his shirt. He told me that I was perfect. He thanked me for letting him touch me. He told me he loved me.

  I finally said it back.

  Do you know what it feels like to be touched with violence your whole life, and then somebody finally shows you what it’s like to be touched with sweetness, touched with their kind of love?

  I’ll have to think about why his way of making me feel happy or good is always something physical. I’ll rationalize it later because right now I can still feel his hands on me, and I’m going to carry that with me to sleep.

  Always,

  Abby

  Musings

  The goblet sits in the cabinet, catching rays of sunlight, scattering scarlet beams across the wall. Dust circles in the air, landing inside. It shimmers in the light, a remind
er of something forgotten. It’s a beacon of reckoning. It was treasured for its beauty, the way it felt smooth and cold to the touch, the way it picked up the light and sometimes made rainbows in the air. It was hidden, locked away for its flaw that you couldn’t see from afar. Something so beautiful could still be broken, could still be painful. It wouldn’t matter how many ways the sunshine touched the beauty of the glass, for the jagged edge of the chip can still slice your lips when you go for a taste, a memento of how all things have two sides.

  May 21, 2004

  Dear Heart,

  I think that at some point in their lives, every little girl dreams of owning a princess dress. Maybe not a huge, flowy gown that every princess is depicted as wearing. But THE dress that you try on and just feel like royalty. You walk around with it on and suddenly your entire life feels like it’s changed. You’re beautiful, you’re classy, you’ve got the perfect life.

  At least for one night. The prom.

  The prom is only for juniors and seniors, but I’ve been paying attention to the dresses that every girl says she’s wearing. The school even put up a bulletin board where you can put up a picture of what you’re wearing. The whole thing is full of pages ripped out of dress magazines. Even though I can’t go, they gave all of us some. I spent hours laying on my bed looking at all the dresses. Red, black, lime green. Lace, silk, satin. Mermaid, ball gown, halter-top.

  I can’t really picture myself wearing anything I’ve seen so far. Mostly because I’ve never owned anything that nice, but also because I don’t think it would look right on me anyway. For someone who has spent her whole life in jeans, I wouldn’t know how to even act in a dress. I’d look like an exhibit at the zoo or something.