I don’t really know what to think as I sit on the couch and pull the five notebooks out. I don’t know which is better to start with, but decide it is always best to go from the beginning. Within minutes, I was able to remember so much more. So many little things I had forgotten. Even that first hand job. I forgot she had asked to touch it, or that I asked her to lick the tip where it was glistening. Even at fifteen and fourteen we were sexual deviants.
What I don’t remember were the conversations or the non-sexual shit we did. Concerts, fairs, the boardwalk. I never knew where her trailer was, but she talks about the creepy men that live there or putting her drunk mom to bed most nights. There was little to no quality of life for Jenny Pope outside of school and friends. She talks about the girls in school and how they make fun of her for being poor and on a special permit to attend school in Harbor Heights and that they used her to get to me and the guys.
I throw the book down when I hate that I was so blind to not know the real hell she lived in. Or the fact that every time she touched me she felt clean and special and important and how I made her feel like the trailer park was miles and miles away when we hung out.
I ponder the journal on the last page and try to picture her in my memory and see her fire red hair and her sun kissed skin on the beach. She had auburn hair back then, a little darker than it is now. Her green eyes were always so big and sweet and a smile like a fairy. I recall the first time I really paid attention to her and it was seven minutes in heaven at my birthday party.
I can only recall the one time ever seeing Jenny so weak and sad when we were young and it was when her mom left her. I never knew how guarded she was. Noah's words telling me her issues go way back and will gut me... he was right. I feel for Red and all she missed out on.
I am on the Senior year journal and in it she talks of me not asking her to prom in eleventh grade and how the Senior prom would be our year. She talks about how her mom finally came back that year after Jen was left with no option other than the trailer court to avoid being caught at fifteen living on her own.
She talks about how she would die if I ever saw the old rusty blue trailer and that her roots were metal and garbage, not strong oak and bountiful leaves. I read that line again and again because it kills me to know her pain, her deepest secrets and thoughts that she hid from me.
She finishes with a quote in the twelfth-grade journals last page. 'He will be a star one day and I hope he will remember me and send me letters from time to time while I wait by the mailbox barefoot and pregnant, desperate to be in his sky once more.'
I cannot see what made her think I didn’t care for her. I did, even then I remember that. I am not a complete douchebag. I want to read more but my heart breaks for the girl who loved me more than any other woman ever has and how I never knew it. I knew she didn’t like when I dated, but I hated when she did. We were always fire and gasoline, even then. Anytime anyone else had her... drove me crazy. Where she tells of her sorrow, I never did.
I read through them all, pausing trying to pinpoint the memory and as the years pass, I am fighting to read about the things I did to her. I have always known that I had a part in Jenny falling into our lifestyle, I hand fed it to her for fucks sake. I want to say that if I knew how she felt I would have stopped and begged for forgiveness and tell her to marry me. But that is because now, I see through the door that was always closed. I see her high and crying as I pass the bathroom, one I didn’t acknowledge back then for shit. I see it now, remember it with sickening clarity as I learn it was because I brushed her off to go fuck someone else.
She writes about the call from the fuel point in Idaho where Seth Venus left her. I told her she deserved it. I meant it to, I was hurt and pissed. I was wrong. I was skewed back then, I sent the money to save her and to me it was a lesson to stop fucking my friends and learn her lesson.
In some fucked up and totally ignorant way, I was jealous. I remember even then seeing her as my first serious crush, puppy love shit and I wasn’t the guy to share. But I fucked with her every chance I got and tested her loyalties. I said to go, fuck them all and I will join if I feel like it, sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.
The times I did, made the sex more intense because I was greedy to please her and it made me go mad seeing someone else please her. It was sadistic and masochistic, to both of us.
She talks of sucking Shame off while I took her from behind and how I asked her to do it, that turning her on made me hot... Fuck me that was the night I should have stopped the whole fucking charade and changed my way of thinking. My words were clear as day after the drugs wore off and we were spent on the floor. I asked her to please not fuck my friends. She agreed and she never did again, but I didn’t tell her it was killing me. That is was making me resent her and I needed her to contain my innocence, even at the cost of hers.
I toss the book and lean back on the couch trying to shut my eyes when all too many of my mistakes rush to the surface without my consent or need.
I had just told Jen, my sweet firefly to leave because I was busy. I wasn’t fucking busy, I was just sick of the in and out we were doing these last four years. Once high school ended we both changed and I longed for my firefly. I spent the night with two chicks I don’t know doing everything they could to get my attention as I watched Jen with Noah. Laughing and flirting and the shit was making me crazy.
Shame and Cassa were off fucking at his place, Candey and Carrie weren’t here this weekend so Chad was playing with some fangirls of his own like usual because he was too chicken shit to tell Carrie he was into her. Noah like usual was doing himself and everyone could eat shit if they didn’t like it. he and Candey were only exclusive when she was home on the weekends and so he was free tonight. Watching them, I was sick at the sight.
Jen caught my glare and flinched before walking over to me. "Hey you okay Caly?"
the fucking sound of that nickname coming from her both pissed me off and got me turned on. I wasn’t Caly anymore than she was Jen Pope from back in the day.
"Working on it Red." I say coldly and motion to the cheap thrills with double D tits on each of my arms. "Go play with Noah on the beach Jenny. He looks lonely and I am clearly not."
I didn’t pause to see her reaction or listen if she said anything to my back, I lead the two chicks to the room and fucked them senseless until I was spent and told them to leave. After about forty minutes of torturing myself with my thoughts I decided to suck it up and fins Red and apologize. Come clean and tell her I wanted her.
I followed the scent of weed the closer I got until I was at the edge of the reeds and watched as Noah fucked my girl from behind. The sound, their pleas, the panting and the finish. I watched and listened to it all...
I wipe the tears from my eyes feeling like a pussy for the memory of the one time she fought back to hurt me.
I didn’t deserve her then and I don’t now. I reach for the last journal and read the two-year span of it and it hits harder than anything. This is the journal she needed me to read the most. She starts with the nauseating truth of the night I got her pregnant and I suffer through her details of how badly I hurt her that night... the condom still inside her... my brush off. She didn’t know I fucked two chicks a few hours later on the other bus before finally passing out or that I bragged like always to the guys of how good fucking Jenny Pope had been.
I humiliated her too many times to count, but I think that was my lowest point in any of it. I couldn’t read anymore, not tonight. I skimmed through the pages getting the drift. Her struggle here in Gig as a pregnant stripper turned cocktail waitress. How she used the last of her inheritance to get her and Axe her apartment and a car seat. She worked nonstop, leaving Axe with the neighbor who neglected him, but always happily took her money until it was all gone.
She recalls her rape, in complete detail and I suffer every single word and every gory detail.
I am trying to focus and find a way out of this. I don’t know why I do the stupid shit I do, but I hate myself right now more than ever. I feel the first guy slam into me again and I cry out from the pain, the unwanted intrusion. I want to fight but they slipped something in my beer and I can’t think clear. My heart and my brain are both screaming at me to beg them to stop, but my words are garbled.
I scream when I hear Axe cry beside the bed, still in his car seat. He is upset and crying and I wonder if he knows what a piece of shit his mom is to have put him in a drug infested home while four men gang raped her on the bed. The very bed he is on the side of.
“Shut that fuckin kid up bitch or I will!” The second guy said, gripping my jaw hard and spatting the words in my face.
“Shhh Axe, baby. Mommy is right here.” I tried to soothe him, but my voice was weak from crying. All I wanted in this hellish moment was to save him.