My Romantic Teen Evening Didn’t Go as Planned

Instead, it became the ugliest night of my life.

The next day at school, I thought about Will and me on the cot in my building. I couldn’t wait to be with him.

The hands on the clock moved too slowly. I wanted to jump out of my seat and push them forward.

All I wanted was Will’s kisses and his hands on my body.

He planned to be at my house at seven, after a family outing with his grandparents.

I gobbled down a bowl of white rice for supper while my eyes kept checking the dining-room clock.

Waiting, waiting… was the entire world filled with clocks that prevented me from having what I wanted?

The September evening was warm. Calm. The tide was high. Everything so perfect. When Will arrived we went swimming with the other kids.

We treaded water next to each other, our hands working their magic beneath the waves.

As the sun set, the sky turned a magical pink; the end to a perfect evening. I wanted to stay locked in that moment forever.

At dusk, we made our way out of the water. Climbed up onto the scrap-wood deck my father had built. We kept our towels and shoes there while swimming, instead of on the rocks by the shore, where they got wet from the waves.

Kathleen, Troy, Margaret, and Jamie surrounded me and Will. They all wanted his attention.

I wrapped a towel around my shoulders and let my eyes take in Will’s body, liking him almost naked, in only his swim trunks.

Darkness would soon surround us and we’d need to go inside and get ready for bed and school the next day.

Will and I tried for a few more moments alone together. But it was impossible to escape the rest of the kids. They kept asking Will to tell more of his dead baby jokes.

“Okay,” he said, “one more. How do you make a dead baby float?”

Troy started laughing before Will even finished.

“How?” Margaret and Kathleen squealed, almost in unison.

“Two scoops of ice cream and one scoop of dead baby.”

The kids roared with laughter. I smirked at Will, shook my head, and grinned.

“More. More…” they said.

“Okay, but this is the last one,” Will said. “Why did the baby fall out of the tree?”

“Why?” they asked, “Why?”

“Because he was dead,” Will said.

I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing while the other kids roared. Out of the corner of my eye, in the shadowy, dimming light, I caught sight of my father coming over the lawn, headed in our direction.

A chill, like icy fingers, gripped me.

Dad seldom came out after supper. He stayed in front of the TV, smoking cigarettes, or went to bed early. This wasn’t like him. This wasn’t normal. Something was wrong. My stomach knotted.

My father stepped on to the deck and stood in front of Will. He shook his finger close enough to Will that it almost touched his face. He said, “You get your goddamn ass off my property right now.”

Will had been in the middle of another dead baby joke. He blinked, and appeared as stunned as the rest of us. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “What did you say?”

“Don’t sorry sir, me, you little bastard. You hear me loud and clear,” my father roared. “You.” He pointed toward the road. “Fly your fucking ass off my property, NOW.”

Shocked, speechless, embarrassed. I wished to slide off the deck with the water dripping from my body.

“Did I do something wrong, sir? I don’t understand.”

“Stop your sir shit. You don’t fool me. I know what you did with my daughter.”

“Sir, I don’t know what — ”

“Get the FUCK off my property NOW.” And I feared my father would grab Will and throw him to the ground.

“Yes sir,” Will said, and grabbed his towel and sneakers. He turned toward me and whispered, “See you later.”

My father roared even louder, “And don’t you ever come back here again. You stay away from my daughter. Hear me, boy?”

“Yes sir.”

Will hurried up the path and headed toward home.

I turned to my father. “Why? Why’d you do that?”

Confused, I tried to understand.

This was the same man who’d helped me gain the freedom to swim. The same man who’d built me a playhouse. The man who’d allowed me to go to school dances. How could he be the same person?

“Don’t play stupid with me,” he said.

I stood glaring at him, shaking my head.

“You know damn well what he did. The two of you will not be together. You think I’m allowing him to mess around with you, well,” he huffed, “you’ve got another thing coming, young lady. That’s not happening ‘round here! You’ll have nothing more to do with that boy.”

Tears streamed down my face. I ran toward the house, up over the lawn.

I rushed inside, opening and slamming doors behind me, storming through the kitchen, past my mother and Dorothy in the dining room.

All the while on the way to my bedroom, I screamed, “I hate you! I hate you all!” Then I slammed my bedroom door, the last door left to slam.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.

Troy had told. He told Mom about Will and me in my building. About Will giving him quarters to keep his back turned, and not look at what we were doing. Mom told Dad these intimate details and worked him into a rage.

I imagined how my mother told my father that he must put his foot down. Like she did whenever she wanted him to do something she wouldn’t do herself. I was certain she had made the whole situation sound a thousand times worse.

After an hour of crying, feeling as wrung-out as a used dishrag, I was calm enough to go downstairs. I needed to convince my parents to let me see Will again.

“You’ll get pregnant,” were the first words out of her mouth. “That’s what you’ll be, pregnant.”

Her words were all I needed to confirm she had been the one responsible for my father’s rage.

“How can I get pregnant?” I asked. “I did nothing to get me pregnant.”

“Huh, many a girl’s been a fool like you.”

“I’m not stupid,” I spat the words. “I know what not to do.”

“That’s what every girl thinks until it’s too late. They think they know everything. Then they come home with a baby. You think you’d be the first, Barbara Ann?”

No matter how hard or how many times I tried to explain I wouldn’t do anything to get pregnant, neither one of my parents would listen.

My father was still up, sitting by the wood stove. He leaned forward with his head between his hands as if this was too much for him to bear.

Mom kept raving on while I tried and tried and tried to reason with her.

I promised them that Will and I would never be alone.

I promised we’d never touch each other again. Never even kiss!

I was willing to promise the moon, the stars, anything in the universe.

My parents would not bend.

All I got from my mother was, “You should be ashamed of yourself for upsetting your poor father so. He has to come home from work to this. It’s not right, Barbara Ann, not right at all how you treat him. And here he is now, losing sleep over something like this.”

Defeated, I turned and walked away.

Back in my bedroom, I crawled under the blankets until it felt like they buried me.

My parents were strict, that I knew. But this was beyond anything they’d done before.

I felt broken.

I dragged myself out of bed in the morning, tired from crying and worrying all night, suffering from lack of sleep; my eyes red.

I dressed and headed for the bus stop, not looking at my mother, not speaking a word, not caring about my growling stomach or anything else, because without Will, my life meant nothing.

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BARBARA CARTER is a visual artist and writer with a focus on healing from childhood trauma, alcohol addiction, and living her best authentic life.