Chapter 10 #2
When that summer was close to the end, he came to me with a plan.
Said he wanted us to run off together, get a fresh start somewhere nobody knew either one of us.
I asked him about money and what we’d do about a place to live.
Even as a kid, I knew that I was accustomed to living a certain way, and I didn’t want to give that up.
Yeah, I came from money, but I didn’t have access to large sums. In high school, my parents gave me only a $500 a month allowance and I always had to make that stretch.
He told me not to worry about that part, that he had it handled.
Days later he came back and told me he needed five hundred dollars from me to cover gas and food for the trip.
His ass knew that was typically how much I’d get monthly, but I’d spent it already buying him gifts, lunch, and paying for haircuts and shit.
I knew that I needed to come up with that money.
He was my man, and we were about to build a life together.
Although I knew me leaving would hurt my family, all I cared about was being able to be with him.
He promised me we’d end up in California, promised me a whole luxury life once we got settled.
He was my first love. The first man I ever gave myself to completely.
So I believed every word that came out his mouth.
I was sheltered and green to the real world.
The only time I ever had a normal life was when I was visiting my aunt, so naturally, I didn’t know better.
I told Kaseem how I stole that money from my aunt without her knowing and handed it over to the nigga, how he promised we’d be gone in two days.
At that point, I didn’t care about my family, my friends back home or who’d miss me.
I just was so caught up in this guy that I would have followed him off a bridge.
The night I was supposed to run away. I wrote a long letter to my parents and my aunt, trying to explain myself the best a seventeen year old girl could explain a decision like that.
Then I grabbed my things, snuck out of my aunts house, and I waited for him at the spot we planned to meet. Hours passed, he never showed.
I went to his house after that, worried something happened to him, only to find his foster mother laying there dead in a pool of her own blood.
The house torn apart around her like somebody had gone through it looking for something.
I went to check for a pulse on her neck and stood up with blood all over my hands, all up my arms. The shit was so scary and traumatic that I was frozen for a while.
I literally had to make my feet catch up with my mind.
I ran out that house and back to my aunt’s place in a panic that I still couldn’t fully put into words even now.
When I finally made it back, my aunt was sitting on that sofa holding my runaway letter, furious, ready to tear into me the second I walked through the door, but the second she saw all that blood on me, all that fury turned straight into fear, and she rushed over to check my body for wounds and making sure that it wasn’t my blood that I was covered in.
Even though I was ready to run off and disappoint my family, my aunt was still concerned when she saw me in that state. Or so I thought.
I told Kaseem abut how that night, once I explained to my aunt everything that happened, my aunt made me call his cell phone right then and there.
How I tried to sound as calm as I could manage, asking him where he was, and pretending that I was still waiting on him so that we could leave.
I never mentioned going to that house, or what I saw.
He told me he was already gone, and how he wasn’t never coming back, he asked me if I’d gone to the house looking for him and he was sounding like that was a part of his plans for me.
He wanted me to be caught up in that mess while he was already miles away.
He told me he’d enjoyed his time with me but things had gone left and he had to leave without waiting on me.
He told me that he didn’t mean to do what he’d done, but he’d made a mistake that couldn’t be fixed, he said that he didn’t want to, but she wouldn’t listen.
He was talking in circles and wouldn’t tell me what it meant.
He told me not to ever call that phone again because he was already getting rid of it.
That’s when I knew, without him ever saying it straight out, that he was the one responsible for what happened to that woman.
I told Kaseem how my aunt made me strip out my clothes right there and bagged them up in plastic.
She made me shower and she pretended to comfort me while giving me words of encouragement and telling me things would be okay.
Then, days later I saw the murder on the news and got physically sick.
The kind of sick that lasted for weeks straight, sick that turned out to be something else entirely.
After being suspicious for over two weeks, my aunt made me take a pregnancy test.
It was indeed positive. My whole word crumbled when I found out. I was a baby myself. I didn’t want or need a baby right then. But, I also didn’t have the heart to think about getting rid of it either.
I told him how my aunt called my mother, made her drive into town so they could sit down together, how my aunt broke the news while my mother sat there and immediately started talking about how this couldn’t happen, how it would ruin our whole family’s image, how my father would leave her and me over the shame of it.
How hysterical she got, how disappointed she was, calling me reckless and a lot of other names you should never call your child.
She acted like I’d done all this to spite her instead of being a scared seventeen year old girl who’s been manipulated and who’s life was about to change completely.
I told him how my aunt kept the biggest parts quiet the whole time. Never told my mother about the running away, never told her about the body I found. She kept all of that locked up between me and her. I didn’t know then that it was all a part of her plan.