by Maggie Wells
My YouTube followers were tweeting my videos and a lot of the freshman class at Central Cath was already following me. Every day, I would get texts from girls offering to be interviewed on camera about their predicament. Because as it turned out there were a lot of pregnant girls in Catholic School.
I set up a studio stage in my bedroom with two white wicker chairs and a side table that I had purchased at Pier1. The format was basically Ellen DeGeneres meets Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns except that I wasn’t a lesbian and I didn’t have any ferns in my bedroom. I set up a tripod in the corner of my bedroom with my new camera, a high-level Canon 60D with a flattering lens, a step up from the built-in webcam on my Mac that I used for my videos in Iowa. Sometimes I used professional lights to record, but mostly I shot in the natural light that came in through my bedroom window. I also owned a high-quality microphone but it didn’t get used much either. I would shoot videos on the street and on the subway and standing in hotel elevators. Really, you know, a video can happen anywhere.
On a typically warm, sunny afternoon after school, I sat down in my bedroom “studio,” pressed record, then waved my arms around.
“Now we are in a Luci video!” I said. It had become my hallmark delivery—a lilting, cheerleader kind of voice. “Yay, videos!”`
“Hello everyone,” I said into the camera. “Today I would like to introduce Dana.”
Dana had short, straight brown hair and dark eyes. She was the kind of girl people referred to as perky. She couldn’t wait to get in front of the camera and start talking about how much she still loved her boyfriend.
“Some of you have heard this all before,” she started. She sounded kind of apologetic but she didn’t stop talking. “But Jimmy and I have been together forever. I mean, we have been going together since the seventh grade, and we have always loved each other. I have thought about it a lot, and I really don’t think the baby could make him stop loving me.”
Dana held a tissue in her hands and she kept twisting it around while she talked. The longer she talked the more she twisted it. “Jimmy still loves me,” she said. “I know he still loves me. And he is going to love our baby, too. It’s just taking him time to realize that. I know it must seem strange to everybody that we are apart right now. But it’s just a temporary thing. We are going to be back together soon.”
I felt sick all of a sudden and paused the camera. Dana, why don’t you just rip your heart out right here in front of everyone as long as you are at it? Was she going to have a nervous breakdown? My mother had two nervous breakdowns and I did not like being around her while that was going on.
Dana looked at me. “Is it on?” I nodded and resumed shooting.
“I haven’t heard from Jimmy in several weeks. But that does not mean that he doesn’t love me. It just means that he is going through a hard time right now.” Dana bowed her head and stared at her tissue. “Though, I did hear he was dating someone else.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Someone told me that.”
Dana looked back up at the camera and spoke louder. “But I don’t believe it. I know he still loves me and we will get married and we will keep our baby.”
Dana stifled a sob. “I can hope, can’t I? It’s better to hope, isn’t it?”
She looked directly at me but I didn’t know what to say so she answered her own question. “Yes, it’s much better to hope. I know that. It’s always better to hope.”
I kept the camera trained on her face as she started to cry and kept trying to smile at the same time. I zoomed in as a tear slid down her cheek and onto her dress.
Yeah, Dana’s parents, you are so lucky! You have a daughter that documents her whole life and puts it up on YouTube for you guys to view!
That video got seven million views.
The doorbell rang.
“Thanks, Dana,” I said. “That was awesome! But I think my next guest is here.”
I walked Dana to the door.
“I hope Jimmy comes back,” I whispered as I hugged her goodbye. “I really do.”
In the doorway stood Eve, a tall, thin girl with her hair in a long ponytail and beautiful sad eyes.
“You must be Eve?” I asked.
She smiled, exposing a gap between her two front teeth.
“Welcome to my studio!” I said.
She followed me upstairs to my room.
“I will probably post this segment tomorrow, if it’s okay with you?” I said as I fiddled with the camera. “I just posted Dana’s segment and we want your segment to get all the exposure it deserves, right?”
I looked at Eve. She nodded eagerly.
FOURTEEN
“ALRIGHTY THEN!” I SAID INTO THE CAMERA. “NOW we are in a Luci video! I would like to introduce Eve!”
I turned the camera on Eve. She waved frantically.
“Eve, tell us how you found out,” I said.
“This is so embarrassing!” Eve giggled and pressed her hand to her mouth. “I was at the beach with my friend Liz complaining as usual about being flat-chested.”
I trained the camera on Eve’s boobs for a few seconds and then back on her face.
“And my friend Liz told me about the pill. She said that if I went on the pill it could move me up a full cup size! And she said I could go to Planned Parenthood and get a prescription for the pill without even telling my parents. So of course I did that. I was having sex with Tony anyway, so it seemed like a good idea. After school I drove over, singing out the window of my car like a freaking idiot while visions of C-cups bounced in my head. When I got there, they made me take a blood test and it said I was already pregnant. The thought had not even occurred to me. That’s how much of a dumbass I was.”
I turned the camera back on me.
“See girls, it can happen to the best of us!” I said cheerfully. “Eve has a three-point-nine GPA—imagine that!”
I turned the camera back on Eve.
“Eve, does Tony know?” I asked.
“He is kind of a dumbass, too,” she said.
“Are you going to tell him?” I asked.
“I’ve . . . I need to figure everything out,” she said.
“You don’t want to tell him?” I asked. “Is Tony your boyfriend?”
“No!” she said. “He is just some guy from school that I use for sex.”
I kept the camera trained on Eve for five seconds. She grinned her gap-tooth smile.
Eve’s video got four million views.
“Who is watching this?” Eve asked.
“My audience is made up of girls generally between eleven and seventeen,” I said.
“Eleven,” she repeated. “That seems kind of young!”
“At first that surprised me too,” I said. “I thought I was making videos for my peers—girls our age. In my mind, my videos sometimes are inappropriate for an eleven-year-old. But that’s what they’re watching.”
Despite my anything-goes brashness on camera, I cared very much about my responsibility as a role model. After Eve had left, I scrolled through the comments on my videos, and regularly found notes from girls as young as nine. I sure hope my youngest fans are at least watching with an adult, I thought. But apparently most aren’t. When one parent commented on a recent video that the language was inappropriate for young girls and asked that it be taken down, my comment thread was swarmed by teenagers, defending me.
Seriously, I’m thirteen. You need to understand that we watch Luci, we swear, we think wrong, we act insane, we have Facebooks, we can’t live without Internet, we can’t live without our phones. THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT IS!! I never watch television. I would rather watch Luci’s show all day than anything else. She swears a lot, but she’s funny.
That inspired me to keep going. Next up: Holly.
Holly had brown hair and freckles. She talked in a coal-country drawl, so bad it made Roxanne sound like the Queen of England. Her eyes were already red when she arrived, like she had just finished crying.
“Yay videos!�
� I said and then turned the camera on Holly.
“Should I start?” Holly asked.
“Yep,” I said. “You are on camera. Tell us your story.”
“Well,” Holly said, drawn out and slow, like the word had three syllables. “I always knew that it was the best thing to give up my baby. I didn’t have any real doubts. My family is real poor.”
How did she get into Catholic School in Pittsburgh, I wondered?
“My momma sent me here to stay with her sister.”
Holly seemed to be reading my mind.
“She works at the school. In the kitchen,” she added. “Anywho.”
I have always hated that word—anywho!
“There’s no way we could afford another mouth to feed,” Holly said. “Those were my mama’s words. Besides, my daddy’s got problems. He beat me up bad when he found out. I could just imagine what he would do to my poor child. He beat me with a razor strap—for my own good, he says. He drinks too much and he has a terrible temper. I am scared to death of him.”
I thought about what my dad had told me about his father: When he was drunk and in one of his rages, he would drag one of the older girls upstairs and do only God knows what.
“But, now I am thinking more and more about the baby. I can feel it moving inside of me. I can’t bear the thought of giving it up and never knowing where it lives and what it’s doing. How can I do that?”
Then the waterworks burst forth and I handed her a tissue.
“Thank you,” Holly says. She looked into the camera again. “How can I give my baby up? How can I?”
Somewhere inside me, I could feel a part of me aching. I didn’t want to feel this. I don’t want to feel anything. I want to tell her that it’s better not to think about the baby. She shouldn’t be thinking about keeping it, either.
She looked directly into the camera. “My boyfriend wanted to marry me. He did.”
I find this hard to believe.
“But I knew it would be a mistake. I didn’t want to end up like my mama. She’s not even forty but she looks so old and tired and worn out from having too many children.”
She stared off into space so I paused the camera. “Are you done?” I asked.
“How was that?” Holly asked. Suddenly she was completely dry-eyed. Was this all an act? What an actress!
“Good—real good,” I said. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“When will it be posted?” she asked.
“Today,” I said. “I’ll send you the link so you can see how many views it gets.”
“Thank you,” she said. There was no trace of hillbilly in her voice. Who is this girl, I thought? Is this an audition video that we had just made?
The video got two hundred thousand views and thirty comments.
One of the comments came from Holly: “My baby died. The doctors don’t know why. Just one of those things, they said. She lived for three hours. They said she didn’t suffer. Maybe it was for the best.”
After Holly posted her comment, the views jumped to two million.
I can’t figure it out. I don’t know why I feel so terrible. I don’t even know Holly and I think she was probably playing me. Nobody wanted that baby. It was a mistake from the beginning. What difference does it make that it had died?
FIFTEEN
MY REPUTATION HAD SPREAD WAY BEYOND MY HIGH school and women from all over the greater Pittsburgh area were contacting me via my Facebook page. I chose Carol as my next victim.
“Yay videos!”
“Hi, I’m Carol.” Carol looked like a blonder version of me, with a big white grin. She had great teeth. I could tell she knew it, too. She was also an extrovert. If there was anything I hated, it was an extrovert. To hear her talk, she was the most popular coed in the history of the University of Pittsburgh.
“Some nights I even had two dates,” she said. “My sorority sisters were so jealous, they wanted to kill me.”
What stopped them? I wondered.
“I’ve always been well-dressed,” Carol said into my camera. “Grooming is important to me. And what is it with maternity clothes—can you believe how poorly made they are? I can’t find a thing to wear! There’s nothing out there that is remotely flattering.” Carol laughed like she was saying something hilarious. I rolled my eyes but she didn’t seem to notice.
Okay. I know what you are thinking—I never made it far enough to need maternity clothes. Who am I to judge? Maybe Carol had a point. But by then she had launched into a discussion of beauty tips.
“What’s the secret to beauty when you are pregnant?” she asked the camera. “Vaseline. The most important thing you can do is to rub Vaseline on your belly. That will help get rid of the stretch marks. In a few months, you’re going to be back out there on the dating scene and you will need to pretend that none of this ever happened. How are you going to pretend to your next boyfriend that you never had a baby?”
And then Carol said something that threw me for a loop.
“You would have to be a fool to trust a man. You might as well throw your life away. Men want sex; that is all. Once they get it, they leave you and they do not give a damn about what happens to you. They will break your heart if you let them.”
Carol looked angry. She was practically glaring at the camera.
“We need to get what we can out of men—the same way they get what they can out of us. I want a life that is better than my mother’s and you tell me how I am going to do that without a man. You can control men—or you can let them control you.”
I switched off the camera. “Thank you, Carol,” I said. “I’ll send you the link to the video once I’ve posted it.”
“But I am not done!” Carol protested.
“I’m sorry,” I lied. “That’s all we have time for today.” I escorted Carol downstairs to the door.
I felt like I needed to take a walk, or just find a quiet place to think my thoughts. Where is my hammock when I need it? I sat on the back porch and smoked a cigarette. I was not sure if I would post the video. Carol’s comments didn’t seem to fit into my meme. What is my meme? And then it dawned on me: I would splice the audio files from several of my videos together and set it to a rap beat.
You would have to be a fool to trust a man.
Jimmy still loves me.
I can feel it moving inside of me.
There’s no way we could afford
another mouth to feed.
He is just some guy from school
that I use for sex.
You might as well throw your life away.
How can I give my baby up? How can I?
I know he still loves me.
You can control men—
or you can let them control you.
I can hope, can’t I?
It’s better to hope, isn’t it?
“We’re in a Luci video, I would like to introduce Peggy. Peggy, tell us about your abortion.”
“My abortion happened last year when I was sixteen. I was dating Joey, a guy that I loved very much but just before my abortion, we had a fight and broke up—for good. I had found out that he was dealing drugs and I wanted him out of my life. Wouldn’t you know it, two weeks later, I found out that I was pregnant. When I told Joey, he said that he wanted me to have an abortion because he didn’t think I would be a good mother. He paid for my abortion with his drug money.” Peggy looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap.
“Peggy, do you need a minute?” I asked.
She shook her head and looked up. “The night before my abortion, I couldn’t sleep. I was lying alone in bed with my own thoughts, and I knew what I was about to do was very wrong. In the morning I went to the abortion clinic by myself. There were picketers in front so I drove around the block wanting to make sure that I didn’t recognize anyone. None of them looked familiar, so I pulled into the parking lot and went in. The picketers yelled stuff to me, but I felt they didn’t know my situation so they didn’t deserve my time.”
“Of course not,” I said, off-camera.
“I gave the receptionist a fake name. I felt numb. I filled out paperwork, talked to a counselor, talked to a nurse, and tried not to think about what I was doing. A nurse escorted me into the abortion room. She helped me get ready for the procedure and just asked me vague questions about the weather and if I was going to school. Then the abortionist came into the room and began my abortion. The nurse was leaning over me and staring into my eyes. After a little while, she asked the doctor ‘Is something wrong?’ I heard him say, ‘It’s trying to get away—I’ve tried three times!’”
I couldn’t help it, I gasped. Does that really happen?
“I was shocked!” Peggy said.
“Well, yeah!” I exclaimed.
“It is trying to get away!” he repeated. “I started to pray and ask God to stop all this from happening—to not let it work—to let it fail—to put His hand in the way of the doctor’s vacuum. I couldn’t believe what I was doing! And then the abortionist said, ‘It’s done.’ He put away his tools and left the room. From that moment on I have regretted my abortion! I just wanted to run, to die . . . I was so angry! After the nurse left the room, I started to cry. A part of me died in that room. I knew what I did was wrong. The it he was referring to was my baby!”
I leaned over and gave Peggy a hug on-camera.
“As I walked out of there, I just bawled. I remember looking at the sky, wondering what God thought of me. The rest of the day, I laid on the couch. I wanted to go back to that place and pull my baby out of the dumpster. If only I could live that day over again. My decision to have an abortion was final. It was over. I can’t go back.
“I named my baby Baby Christy and I wrote her a letter. I still have things that make me grieve, like when I go to the dentist and hear the suction machine. My abortion happened two days before Valentine’s Day, so every Valentine’s Day is a reminder. Baby Christy would have been born in September. By now, she would be two years old. I wonder what she would look like. I wonder what her laugh would sound like. I will never be able to hold her or kiss her goodnight. To tell her I am sorry. I can’t believe that I took the life of an innocent baby to make myself look better. I really wish I had had the courage to stand up for Baby Christy and said no.”
