by Mj Fields
Their First Fall
Trucker & Keeka’s story
MJ Fields
Blue Valley Publishing LLC
Contents
Their First Fall
Warning
Disclaimer
Play List
To the reader
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part II
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
What’s next in the Firsts series?
Information for Dyslexia awareness & adult literacy
Also By MJ Fields
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Their First Fall
A Firsts Series novel
By
MJ Fields
Their First Fall
Copyright © 2018 by MJ Fields.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design and formatting by Jersey Girl & Co.
Edited by C& D Editing
Proofread by Asli Arif Fratarcangeli
Cover Models: Colin Wayne Erwin and Breanna Erwin
Cover Photographer: Golden Czermak
First Edition: June 2018
Created with Vellum
Warning
If you did not purchase this book, you are committing a crime and are in danger of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, you are likely to be cursed with an itchy rash in a place you can’t scratch, and a lifetime of almost O’s.
I repeat if you did not purchase this book, you’ve obtained an illegal copy and need to delete it immediately. And don’t think we won’t be able to tell, we too have possibly played dumb… once… when we were like 5. But you’re not dumb, you’ve read this far and if you continue, and are NOT supposed to have it, you’re just an asshole who will be itchy and never have an orgasm again for the rest of your life. AND it’s illegal, so make good choices okay? Okay.
If you purchased this copy of Their First Fall, ignore the above, enjoy Trucker and Keeka’s, story and all the O’s life has to offer, in multiples.
You deserve them!
Forever Steel
MJ
Disclaimer
This book contains mature content not suitable for those under the age of 18. It involves strong language and sexual situations. All parties portrayed in sexual situations are consenting adults over the age of 18.
For information contact: [email protected]
Play List
Camouflage by Selena Gomez
Whatever It Takes by Imagine Dragons
Boom by POD
Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey
Click Click Boom by Saliva
With or Without You by Thompson Squared
Enter Sandman by Metallica
Time of Our Lives by Pit Bull
New Rule by Dua Lipa
Finesse by Bruno Mars
Not Over You by Gavin DeGraw
To the reader
As a child, I dreamed of all my future would bring me. I would own a business, have a beautiful home, a husband who adored me, a dog, a cat, horses, and five children. I didn’t just dream of it; I created it.
My best friend and I would play Barbies, and between the two of us, we had every damn dream come true—the houses, the cars, the horses, the Skippers, the Kens, and all the little ones. We had the clothes, the shoes, and every accessory you could imagine. And sometimes, my brothers’ Star Wars figurines would come in to change things up!
We spent hours playing out our fantasies and dreaming of our happy ever afters.
As we got older, though, we stopped playing them. However, we never stopped dreaming. We moved on from dolls to cutting out pictures from the big JC Penny and Sears catalogs and pasting them to paper. Booklets of our future lives were created. Our husbands, children, homes—all of it.
How lucky were we to be able to dream, to play, to create?
In my teens, I was blessed to have been in a home where the doors were left open to kids who didn’t have homes where they could dream, play, and create. That was when everything changed.
For twenty years, my mother, an RN, fostered children.
I was drawn to them, their stories, their experiences, and driven to show them that they could, even as teens, dream of a better future for themselves.
This story is about two people who came from very hard beginnings, yet they had someone, an adult, who took an interest in them and made a change in their lives. No, they didn’t give them anything materialistic; they gave them their time and love.
They gave them an ear, a shoulder, a push, a mentor who they could look up to and could finally realize that, just because their beginnings were not ideal, their futures were theirs to determine and their pasts were their lessons.
It doesn’t matter where we came from. All that matters is where we are going.
Love yourself more and love those around you … anyway.
Forever Steel
MJ
Dedication
To those who have walked the hard road and became, you are in good company.
To those whose paths are difficult but still persevere, don’t stop now.
To those on a journey that seems too difficult to continue, you can do it.
Part I
Chapter One
One Year Ago…
Keeka
It’s five thirty in the morning as I sit on the ledge of the rooftop of our apartment building, looking at my sketchpad.
“I don’t know if you can see this, Mom.” I look down at my picture, hoping she can.
Hope may not be a strong enough word. Need is stronger. I need her to see it.
“Remember when we moved here? Remember how I lost you in a crowd of people and I couldn’t see the sun? I needed to see the sun because you taught me to tell time and direction from its position, and I couldn’t find you because New York City wasn’t like New Jersey or Florida, not the places we lived, anyway. Not places where the sun met the water. I didn’t know where to stay away from or where to go so you’d find me.”
I sigh as I feel the first tear fall, and then I wipe it away, knowing she hated when I cried. It wasn’t that I did it
often; it was when I did she always felt like she had done something wrong. I didn’t want her to feel that way, because when she did, she overdid the mom thing. And when she was exhausted from it all, she crashed, and she crashed hard. Even though everyone tells me that she’s been resting peacefully for almost a year, knowing her, I find it hard to believe.
I push back those memories and look up at our bridge, my bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, and smile, remembering our first morning here, the day after the incident.
She had woken me up to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise. I was terrified, so scared, but because she was doing the over-the-top momming, I tried to hide my fear and soak in the next two or three days before the inevitable crash.
Despite my best efforts, she somehow knew.
I remember her kneeling before me at the beginning of the bridge, tugging on the blue ribbon holding my braid and smiling as she told me, “The Brooklyn Bridge never falls down.”
I nodded and told her, “So, not like the bridge in the storybook?”
She closed her eyes and smiled. “No, sweetie. Brooklyn Bridge is much stronger than the London Bridge.”
As she held my hand and we walked, she told me how many people had come to this very bridge to watch the sunrise. She told me the same water beneath us connects to every place we have ever lived through the Atlantic Ocean, and that I should find the beauty and comfort in it.
Halfway across, I felt a little braver and switched sides with her. She stopped and took a picture of me. I smiled from ear to ear for her, for my mom, for her ability to tell me a story that made me feel like everything would be all right.
When I turned around to peer over the side, to show her how brave she made me feel, I saw the sun was in fact perfectly positioned in the middle of the next bridge over, the Manhattan Bridge.
I didn’t tell her that, though.
Several months before that day, something had happened that made her crash harder than ever before, for longer than ever before. Something I didn’t know about, which was odd, because she had always told me why she was sad.
I woke up one morning in our little two-room New Jersey shore bungalow to boxes stacked next to the door and my mom smiling.
“You ready to go on an adventure?”
I smiled the brightest smile I could manage, one that I hoped matched hers as I nodded enthusiastically.
That was when we moved here, next to my bridge. The bridge she thought had the most beautiful sunrise, when it fact, the sunset was far more unforgettable.
Looking down at it, I can’t help feeling angry, so angry that tears spill onto my drawing, the one I did last night of the sunset, trying to make it beautiful … again.
I hear her footsteps before she clears her throat, letting me know she’s behind me, probably afraid I will fall the seven stories to my death.
“Mocha angel, what are you thinking?”
I look up at my mom’s best friend, the woman who has truly raised me since we moved here years ago. She’s beautiful, strong, and truth be told, she’s the real angel.
In Mom’s darkest hours, she supported her by taking care of me. The time between crash and becoming super mom wasn’t quite as jarring. Shakeeka, my angel, explained to me that three of her six kids suffered from depression. She explained it worsened when they began having children.
The crash, as I call it—the darkness, as she does—seems to worsen with the guilt of those they know who suffer along with them. Their loved ones.
I look back at her as she leans over the edge. Then she quickly shuts her eyes and giggles.
“Child, I have no idea how you don’t get as dizzy as a goose.” She steps back, her hand over her belly.
“You said the same thing the first night you found me up here.”
“Child …” She laughs. She always laughs, regardless of how hard life is. “You were nine years old.”
Swinging my legs over the side, one at a time so she doesn’t worry even more, I nod and remind her, “Just turned nine.” I stand on the rooftop, take a deep breath, and then start to tell her, not ask, this time, “I’m going to be seventeen in two days …”
“One more year, honey, till you’re of legal age.”
Inhaling a deep breath, I continue, “I quit school today.”
Her lips turn up, intent on forming a smile, but even she can’t make it happen.
I don’t wait for her response, because I don’t want her to waste her time trying to convince me to stay. I know she will, and that will only worsen the hurt we are both sure to feel.
“I can’t look at it anymore.”
She nods once, waiting for me to continue. Then she reaches over and squeezes my hand, encouraging me to continue. The burn of tears threatens far too early in this conversation.
Right now, I’m struggling to voice the truth in why I need to leave, even though I am aware she knows it. And, right now, I wish she would say the words so I don’t have to.
Before Shakeeka, I never expressed my emotions out loud. I was afraid it would make my mom crash. And as I found out later, I really didn’t understand them. Shakeeka is the reason I can now, yet it’s not without difficulty.
“I have a train ticket. I have a plan.”
“I want you to stay,” she interrupts.
I shake my head. “I need you to be okay with this. I need you to understand.”
“Can’t be okay with you leaving. You’re a sixteen-year-old girl,” she protests.
“I’ve never been sixteen,” I remind her.
To that, she does smile as a tear slides down her cheek.
“I can’t make you stay.”
I shake my head no as she steps up to me and throws her arms around me.
March twentieth, at five fifty in the morning, I am walking down 42nd Street with a backpack strapped to my back and a duffel bag slung across my body. I’m no longer looking for where the sea and the sun meet. No longer looking for her to appear and save me from a place where I’m alone and afraid. A place she told me to wait for her because she was my person, and I was hers, no matter who else she had in her life.
She always made me feel special that way. Always. But now, a year after she took that step off the edge and left me where the water never really meets the sun, I know that she was never healthy enough to be someone’s everything. And I know I’m not going to grow and become my own person until I let go.
I can let go, finally, because she did.
I chose this time of day and mode of transportation out of the city that haunts me for a reason. Neither the sun rising or the view of the waters will pull me to look for something … or someone who isn’t there. Something or someone who will always be beautiful in the most confusing way. Something or someone who isn’t here and isn’t real anymore, who is holding me back from growing, and God, how I wish to grow.
Stopping at the corner of Park Avenue and 42nd Street, I reach up and untie the pale blue ribbon from my hair. Then I close my eyes and rub it between my fingers, soothing myself, feeling the silky softness that I have felt since she gave it to me. She told me that this scrap of ribbon had once run around the edge of the blanket that a man, who she assured me I had met before; a man she said wasn’t strong enough to be what he truly was supposed to be—my father, gave to me.
She insisted I always keep a part of him, symbolizing that I was the best part of him, the part he didn’t even know he held. To me, that part of him, that scrap of nothing, has been a hindrance to me and her.
I remember a day playing in the sand when, by chance, I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw it had somehow come untied and was flying in the breeze.
Panicked, I looked around as I jumped to chase it. Mom was talking to a man, smiling from ear to ear for him, engrossed in the attention he gave her, and he was smiling back at her the same way.
That day, I chased a blue ribbon, knowing it meant something to her and, in theory, meant something to me, as it wisped through the air. I panicked, t
hinking that, after she was done with her crash, after that man had broken her smile, she would notice it was gone when I lay next to her, when she would rub the ribbon between her fingers like she always did, soothing herself with its silky softness, just like I did.
Looking up at it, I ran right into a boy who was running along the beach, holding a kite string.
We both jumped up, and then he ran toward the kite string as the wind blew it away like my ribbon.
“Oh shit.” The little boy with black hair laughed as he jumped high in the air, grabbing both the ribbon and the string in different hands at the same time. Then he fell onto his bottom in the sand.
When he looked at me, he smiled and reached out his hand, the one holding the string, not the ribbon. When I didn’t take it from him, he looked at me like I was odd, yet he was still smiling.
