by Rod Kackley
Steven never helped. He only hurt.
Her relationship with Steven, if that is what she could call it, was just one more mistake in the life of Debbie.
Truth be told, Debbie had no more idea than Brianna whose sperm wiggled its way into her egg. It could have been any one of a hundred guys, or at least a dozen.
There were some moments when she was a child that Debbie dreamt of being a mother. Not just any mother, the mother she never had. The perfect mother.
But, not one day of being “mom” was anything like the fantasies that rolled through her brain day and night.
“Be happy for what the Lord has blessed you with,” Debbie’s grandmother would say. She was the only family Debbie had ever known. Her grandmother passed on when Debbie was only twelve. The old woman’s place was taken by a nameless, shapeless, overworked social worker who recommended to an equally tired judge that Debbie should go to foster care. What choice did they have? Even a twelve-year old could understand that.
Debbie’s new home was a warm suburban ranch on the outside that hid a family of foster children inside who were nothing more than a third-world, no-wage workforce for the woman who wanted them to call her “Momma.”
The small-business staff of five children, ages ten through fourteen, would clean office buildings at night, then eat out of garbage bins and dumpsters as the sun came up. They would spend a couple of hours napping in “Momma’s” mini-van on the way to the new shopping mall on the other side of the city where they would lift wallets, purses and beg for spare change.
The children were dirty, grungy, bruised and heartbreaking. None of that was an act. It was hard to turn them down when they stood with their sticky, grimy little hands out.
When the children got tired or cranky as kids do, “Momma” knew that correction was a simple as a leather strap.
Debbie couldn’t take it. Only a couple of days after what she believed to be her thirteenth birthday — she was never really sure — and the wonderful birthday party she had given herself in her mind, Debbie hit back. She hit back hard. “Momma” went down. Debbie punched her in the stomach, kicked her in the knee, and when she hit the ground, Debbie jumped on her letting gravity give her feet and fists extra power. Debbie was never sure if “Momma” got up. She never looked back. She never slowed down. What else could Debbie do but run?
And run she did, right into the arms of Reginald Sheets, one notorious wannabe drug dealing, cradle robbing, gangster.
Debbie had seen men like him. Debbie had slept with men like him. Clean, pressed and successful. They had always given the most and had always been the nicest. Sometimes “Momma” had let the girls spend a night with them. Debbie always came back with money.
Reginald Sheets was that kind of smooth. At first he was as elegant as the other suits.
Debbie imagined a life with Reginald inside a nice, warm house with children, a dog, and a picket fence. Debbie dreamed of a life nicer than anything she had seen on TV.
After a couple of weeks, Reginald explained it was time for her to go to work.
The fantasy was over for Debbie.
Reginald’s approach was still soft and soothing. He made it seem the most natural thing. Because he cared, Reginald said. Because he knew that Debbie cared about him and about them.
Reginald made Debbie feel like a person even though he treated her like a commodity.
He sold Debbie the same way any other business man sold what he had to sell. They had theirs. He had Debbie. It was as simple as that. Reginald was a business man. He knew what men, and sometimes women, wanted and Debbie was it.
She was young, slim, blond, not a muscle sagging, not a wrinkle anywhere. She was porcelain. She knew how to play the role of a virgin. So much of her life was pretend.
Debbie was Reginald’s business. She was his property. Reginald owned her like the mechanic owns his tools, like the driver owns his truck, and like a barista owns his coffee shop.
Business is all about a means to an end. The end was money for Reginald. There was nothing more, and never anything less.
Reginald’s means were any orifice in Debbie’s body.
Ten men a night on average, twenty minutes a man, seven nights a week, twelve hours a night.
Debbie got pregnant six months later, sure to be a mother within nine.
“You stupid, fucking, bitch,” Reginald shrieked as he hit her with a doubled-over leather belt. “I give you pills. I give you rubbers. Still you get fucking pregnant. How the fuck did you manage that?” punctuating the last eight syllables with slaps from the belt.
CHAPTER FIVE
She was no good to Reginald anymore. At least not at the price he wanted. Nobody was going to believe Debbie was a virgin, not after giving birth. She was damaged goods. She would be thrown away just like any other piece of property that was no longer useful. Debbie knew how Reginald threw girls away. He didn’t just beat them as they ran out the door.
They wound up dead. He never thought twice about it. She hadn’t seen it happen, but she didn’t have to. Debbie knew.
So, again Debbie ran. She ran as fast and far as she could, landing in St. Isidore. It was a little city where there were no Reginald Sheets, where the men in town drove to the big city to get what they wanted, so that no one at home would ever know what they needed.
As far as she was concerned it was like walking into a Norman Rockwell painting, if he had painted the inside of a $120 a week motel room on a good week, a bus station when money ran tight.
Still Debbie felt like she had a new chance to make the fairy tales in her dreams come true.
Almost.
At least Debbie felt safe for the first eleven years. She found a couple of part-time jobs. One was working in a deli inside a department store, the other was for a cleaning company.
Twelve hours a day, six days a week, she was working. When Debbie wasn’t working, she was praying. She prayed the buses would be running on time so she could connect without standing too long in the hot sun, a pouring rain or a driving snow storm.
She prayed to be able to have enough money to buy food. She prayed not to fall asleep on the job.
She prayed for the baby she carried.
She lived for its hope.
If she punched in late, Debbie’s pay got docked. If she called in sick, no pay at all. No health care. No benefits of any kind. But there was also no Reginald. Those days were over.
Never again will I make that mistake, she told herself.
Debbie had her baby in the hospital. Free care, welfare. The doctors and nurses let her know it every time they looked down on Debbie.
Debbie was back in her motel-room home as fast as the hospital’s computer keyboard operators, working-poor themselves, could process her out. Still she survived. Debbie had to live. She had her baby. Something — no — someone to live for.
Her baby girl became Debbie’s life.
They had breakfast together, rode the bus to the free daycare center together, spent nights cleaning office buildings together. Brianna and Debbie, Debbie and Brianna, were together. They were a family, a real family.
There was always a little money for Thanksgiving dinner at the Big Boy restaurant or maybe the Ponderosa buffet. There was Christmas. Debbie would starve herself the last week of November and the first two weeks of December to make sure that Brianna had presents. A doll. A dress. A book. Never as much as Debbie wanted to give her, but more than Brianna expected.
She was just a kid. What did she know?
If there was anything more important than making sure Brianna had a decent Christmas it was making sure she was in school. Debbie was the first in line to get Brianna into kindergarten. Free breakfast. Free lunch. A warm, safe place to play for a couple of hours after school.
Brianna fit right into school. She did more than just make friends. Brianna was a magnet for the other kids. Her teachers told Debbie that Bree, as her friends were starting to call her, was a natural-born leader.
Debbie
was starting to seriously dream about what her little girl would be like when she grew up. Debbie wanted Bree to do everything she would never be able to do and have the life she always wanted. It was a new fairy tale. A fairy tale that was making her happier than any other.
She’ll be the first one in this little family to graduate high school, Debbie told herself while she cleaned the first in a long line of filthy urinals. And she will never have to clean an office or work for minimum wage. My baby is going to have a life she thought, punctuating each word with a hard scrub on the yellow urinals as the stink of cleaning solvent drove a spike from nostril to brain and a tear to her eye.
CHAPTER SIX
Brianna did well in school. She wasn’t at the top of her class, but she wasn’t at the bottom either, and she hardly ever got into any serious trouble. At least nothing bad enough that Debbie had to take the connecting buses to the school and miss time at work.
Brianna learned to take care of herself in a latchkey world. She had a key around her neck and instructions to “never, ever open that door to anyone,” Debbie said pointing at the front door of their motel room.
“You open that door to anyone and they are going to kill you,” Debbie said. “I am not talking about the boogie man. I am talking about The Man. Every man. Any man. You keep that door closed.”
Life in the motel room really wasn’t so bad. There was always a TV and always cable. That meant Bree always had friends. Oprah, Dr. Phil, Dr. Ruth, and all the TV soaps and TV gossips shows after school.
As long as there was a TV, Bree had friends, and dreams.
It worked for a couple of years. But even a child can only stay scared so long. Even a child can only spend so many afternoons and evenings with no company but the TV. Finally, Brianna started opening the door. First to boys from her middle school. Then she let boys from high school inside. Soon, men were knocking at her door.
“It was in that middle school, that things started to change,” Debbie told the counselor. “Everything was perfect until Brianna had to get on that bus and ride out before dawn to get to the school on the other side of town.”
Debbie had always been afraid that her baby would fall in with a bad crowd when she was so far away from home all day long, and was scared to death the child would let boys in the motel room when she had to work at night
If only Debbie had known how much she really didn’t know. Brianna didn’t fall into a bad crowd. Brianna led the bad crowd.
The really bad news was Debbie’s baby was tired of boys. She wanted men. And, the men wanted her.
And, just like her mom when she was young, Brianna knew how to play the part of a virgin.
Brianna knew what they really wanted. She also knew when they got it, they would stop giving her what she wanted.
So, Brianna almost always said, “No.”
Almost always, unless she got what she wanted first.
Besides, teasing was fun. Teasing was controlling. Controlling meant Bree was in charge. That’s the way she liked it.
Boys always liked Brianna. Even in grade school, a time when boys usually only notice girls when they get in their way, the boys flocked around Brianna. They couldn’t get enough of her.
Although Brianna had her fill of them early in the game, she wouldn’t turn down the attention.
Who would? Everything that came along with the attention was a bonus.
Yet it was more than simple attention. It was more than the warm glow of the spotlight. Brianna learned she could use the boys to get what she wanted.
This was an epiphany. The younger boys did her homework. The older boys bought her cigarettes. They did anything she wanted. Without question. Without fail. They always wanted a little something in return. No, that is wrong. They wanted it all.
Bree gave them a little something for a little something.
When they gave more, she gave more.
But still, the boys were nothing but a means to an end.
Just the way Brianna wanted it.
“I really don’t think Brianna knows anything about sex,” Debbie said to Laura, one of the women on her cleaning crew who was twice as old as Debbie with three times as many miles on her soul.
Whispering the last word of the sentence, her eyes banging back and forth in her head as she looked to the right and the left to make sure no one else in Billy’s Lounge heard what she had just said about her baby.
“But, my baby knows everything about how to get what she wants,” Debbie explained, lifting her head and looking around proudly to make sure everyone had heard that, nodding her head as she reached for her cigarette.
The Bic flicked. The Marlboro glowed.
“Still, self-control is getting to be an issue,” Debbie said.
The men were able to get much more for Brianna than the boys. They happily bought the beer and wine and brought it out to the car for Bree and whomever she allowed into her aura for the evening. Boys, girls, and men, Bree was learning how to use them all.
When the men brought the booze to the car, or the weed, or whatever Bree wanted, they didn’t want much in return. They wanted everything.
Brianna never forgot that if she gave everything, she would have nothing left to give, and the men, boys and girls would never be back.
It’s not that she cared about them any more than they cared for her. Brianna cared about what they could do for her. If she gave in, they would never be any use to her again. So she teased. She took it to the limit and taught her girlfriends how to do it too.
One of them didn’t do it right and got her jaw broken for refusing to go down on a guy. Brianna never would have let him get that close.
Brianna was totally in control until the minute that plastic bag went over her head. At least that is what she thought.
Her little teenage world had been spinning off its axis for weeks. She was just the last one to find out about it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bree was walking home from the Stop ’N Go when the plastic bag went over her head.
In an instant, instead of bouncing on the balls of her feet, teasing the men and the boys, Bree was fighting for breath, feeling the plastic wrap itself around her nose and mouth as she struggled for air.
Bree could taste the plastic. It was on her tongue. It was on her teeth. There was no air. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs rebelled, demanding oxygen. Her brain was starting to shut down.
Bree gulped for air. She got only plastic. Still she tried to fight. That only made it worse. Bree was using up what little oxygen was left in her lungs and in the blood going to her brain. It didn’t take long. It all shut down. Bree blacked out.
When she came to, the plastic bag was gone, replaced by a rag duct-taped into her mouth. Her feet were off the ground. At first her oxygen-starved mind thought she was flying. Then Bree realized she was being carried across the parking lot.
At least she could breathe. At least she could think. At least Bree could fight back.
Bucking, squirming, screaming, kicking and thrashing, using her head as a weapon, Bree was in a battle for her life.
This wasn’t the first time someone had grabbed her. Guys had done that when they got so excited their male signifiers were busting out of their jeans.
It wasn’t the first time Bree had been in a fight. She could defend herself. Bree never put it into so many words, but she knew the best defense was a good offense. Once Bree absorbed the impact of the first punch she found the second and the third didn’t hurt as much.
Any other kid would waste precious seconds wondering who was hitting them, then why, and then how they could get away.
There was no “flight or fight” choice for Bree. It was all fight, except with one man.
The only one who still scared her was her father — no, not her father, her ‘whatever’ — Steven.
The rest of them, she could destroy. Bree fought with a shield of invincibility that only a sixteen-year old could possess. It didn’t hurt that Bree also had th
e fighting skills of an athletic kid who had been taking karate and judo classes since she was eight years old.
The martial arts classes were Debbie’s idea. If she had taken those classes when she was Bree’s age, life might have been different.
Debbie was taking them now, but it was too late to change what had gone before.
There were other kids Bree’s age in the karate class. None of them could hold a candle to her. Even the older kids would back off from a real fight with Bree.
It wasn’t just that Bree was a quick student. Bree not only learned how to fight. Bree learned that she liked to fight. Correction — she loved to fight. She adored the combat.
Most of the other kids didn’t fight very well for two reasons. They didn’t want to get hurt and they didn’t want to hurt. Bree could never understand either attitude.
But they are real good at flinching, Bree would think to herself with a smirk.
Sometimes, Bree just looked at them and they buckled. They broke. One boy almost turned and ran. Another did. When she did hit them, Bree loved the feeling of their soft skin giving way under her sharp knuckles.
The bigger kids never saw her coming.
She was only 5-foot 2-inches tall.
“You can smoke a cigarette while she blows you,” one boy said. “All you have to do is put an ashtray on her head.”
When Bree heard about that, he wound up in first place on her hit list.
She went down on her knees in the parking lot. He sprang to attention, unzipped his jeans, and she threw a right cross right into his nut sack.
Bree jumped out of the way when he fell, and was able to dodge the vomit that spewed from the bastard’s mouth.
One down, so many more to go, she thought.
Hitting and hurting people didn’t bother Bree much at all. Especially when they deserved it.
Bree’s reputation preceded her. The other kids would cross the street when they saw Bree coming with that look in her eye and her fists clenched.
However, there was one boy who refused to be intimidated. When the kids formed a circle around them to keep the police officers’ prying eyes away and make sure neither of the combatants would turn chicken and run away, he was smiling.