Butterfly

by Sylvester Stephens

  “I mentioned all y’all, so just shut up.”

  “So where this niggah live, Butterfly?” Janae asked.

  “He lives in College Park.”

  “College Park?” Janae lit a cigarette. “Them niggahs crazy down there.”

  “So you scared?” Toya asked.

  “Y’all know I ain’t scared of no niggah, Toya.”

  “Will y’all stop talking so much, so Keisha can tell me how to get to College Park?”

  “Hey, take GA-400 all the way to I-75 and stay on I-75 until it split from I-85. When you get to I-285, go west, or north, whichever one it is.” Keisha was drinking a soda and talking at the same time.

  “Bri, you know where he lives?”

  “No, I just know he lives in College Park. Keisha gave you the right directions, though. You can get off on Old National Highway.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  We had no trouble finding David’s house. He was sitting on the porch with a girl when we pulled up.

  “Didn’t he know you were coming, Bri?” I deliberately pointed my finger at him to get his attention.

  “Yeah, he knew.”

  “And this niggah just gon’ sit there and disrespect you with that chick like you ain’t shit?”

  “Let me out!” Janae shouted. “I don’t even know you and I want to kick his ass!”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Bri opened the door and got out of the car.

  “I’m right here if you need me, Bri.”

  “No, I got this, Shante.”

  David walked off of the porch and met Bri at the sidewalk. My girls and I did not say a word to each other because we were trying to hear every word David and Bri said. Looking at the guy, I don’t know what she saw in him anyway. He was a scrawny little dude with long braids like a girl. He had tattoos all over his narrow chest and was so skinny his pants sagged more than normal. They talked for a minute and then they elevated their voices. David pointed his finger in Bri’s face and then pushed her.

  “Oh hell naw!” I screamed. “This fool done lost his damn mind! Pushing on her and he know she pregnant!”

  “Pregnant? Let’s show this niggah how we do it, y’all!” Janae pounded the back of the passenger seat as she talked.

  Keisha and I jumped out of the car and ran full speed toward David. Toya and Janae popped the trunk and pulled out two crowbars. The girl that was on the porch with David ran into the house and slammed the door behind her. I helped Bri get up and then I charged David. He caught me in midair as I was trying to jump on him and knocked me on my ass. I grabbed my lip and there was blood.

  “You hit me, niggah!” I yelled.

  “Oh you like to hit women, bitch?” Janae swung her crowbar with two hands and hit David in the back.

  “Oh shit!” David fell to the ground and grabbed his back.

  We continued to beat David until we heard the police sirens and then we ran and jumped in the car. We sped off burning rubber. At first, we were scared as hell, but once we realized there were no police cars in pursuit of us, we laughed and started bragging about kicking his ass.

  “Damn, that was fun!” Janae shouted.

  “Wow! I can’t believe what I just saw.” Bri covered her mouth and laughed. “That was wild!”

  “Damn!” I hit the steering wheel and sighed heavily.

  “What’s the matter, Shante?” Bri asked.

  “What’s going to happen to us when David tells the police what happened?”

  “We’ll say he pushed me first,” Bri said nervously.

  “And he hit you, too,” Toya added. “That’s self-defense.”

  “Yeah, they’re right, Butterfly. We kicked that niggah’s ass in self-defense.”

  “But the police might not think the same way we thinking, Janae.”

  “Man, I don’t give a damn what the police think! This was self-defense, gotdammit!” Janae shouted.

  “I’m taking y’all home and putting this car in the garage.”

  “Why you acting all scared, Butterfly?” Toya asked. “The only thing we did wrong was not kill his punk ass!”

  “What did he say to you about the baby, Bri?”

  “He told me to get an abortion, and he wasn’t going to help me pay for it because he didn’t think the baby was his.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Why do you keep asking me that?”

  “Because you have to have a solution to this problem.”

  “What can I do?” Bri stared at me, waiting for my answer, but I did not have one. “I don’t know anything about an abortion.”

  We drove for a mile a two and then Keisha said very quietly, “I do.”

  “You do what?” I looked in the rearview mirror at Keisha.

  “I know where she can go to get an abortion.”

  “Is that what you wanna do, Bri?”

  “What other choice do I have?”

  “Where is it, Keisha?” I looked at Keisha in the rearview mirror again.

  “It’s downtown near Auburn Avenue.”

  “What does she have to do?”

  “She can call on Monday and probably make an appointment for Wednesday.”

  “But won’t she have to take a couple of days out of school to recover?”

  “No, she can schedule for Friday afternoon when she gets out of school and then tell her parents that she is sick for the rest of the weekend. By Monday, she should be fine.”

  “But isn’t she too young to have an abortion without her parents’ permission?”

  “Yeah, but we can work around that.”

  “How can we work around getting her parents’ permission for an abortion, Keisha?”

  “I can take care of that if Bri wants me to.”

  “Bri?” I looked at Bri and waited for her answer. “Do you want Keisha to take care of it for you?”

  Bri looked out of the window at the highway and then back at me. “Do I have a choice?”

  I dropped the other girls off and then I dropped off Bri. On the way, we went over our story to make sure we had everything together just in case the police came to question us. She was pretty calm about the beating of her ex-boyfriend, but she was extremely afraid of having that abortion.

  • • •

  We waited but the police never came to question us about David. They did, however, visit Janae for questioning later that evening. She was not there at the time, so she ran away to avoid going back to jail. The three of us, Janae, Keisha and me, met at Dugan’s on Ponce de Leon, to discuss if we should turn ourselves in or just wait it out. Toya was too afraid to show up and wanted nothing more to do with the situation.

  “I told Bri not to come because she’s pregnant, and it’s not even an option for her to go to jail. I’ll go to jail myself before I let that happen.”

  “You really love that girl; don’t you, Butterfly?” Keisha asked.

  “Yeah, she’s a good girl.”

  “A good girl, huh?” Janae asked. “Good girls don’t get pregnant at fifteen.”

  “Shut the hell up, Janae.”

  “You shut the hell up, Butterfly!”

  “Hey! Y’all stop arguing!” Keisha interrupted. “So what did the police say to your aunt, Janae?”

  “Man, Keisha, all that they said was that I’m in some serious trouble. I’m about to go up North to New York and stay with my cousin until this shit blow over.”

  “How come they’re not looking for the rest of us?”

  “I think I know that girl that was on the porch with that David dude. And I think she ratted me out, Butterfly.”

  “Why? Who is she?”

  “I’m almost one hundred percent sure she was one of those bitches I fought when I was a fight girl. I whooped her ass; that’s why she ran in ol’ boy’s house that day when she saw me. She thought I was coming after her ass.”

  “I didn’t even get a good look at her.” Keisha sipped from her drink.

  “Oh, you didn’t?” J
anae asked. “I did. I know it was that bitch from the West End.”

  “I been through so much shit in my life, man, I’m tired of this!” I slammed my hands on the table and cried. “Damn! I just want to graduate and get the hell out of Atlanta!”

  “Calm down, man!” Janae put her two fingers to her lips and gestured for me to be quiet. “Damn, you embarrassing me and shit.”

  “Sorry, Janae, but I made so many people so many promises about graduating and going to college, and after this, it ain’t no way in hell I’m getting out of this.”

  Janae held my hand. “I got you, baby.”

  “What do you mean, you got me?”

  “If I have to, I’ll turn myself in and put the heat on me.”

  “Girl, you crazy? I’m not going to let you go down for all of us.”

  “Why should everybody do time when everybody don’t have to?”

  “Because all of us were involved.”

  “Bri was involved, too, but her ass ain’t here!”

  “Look, I know where you going with this, but it’s different.”

  “It’s not different! You and Keisha have a chance to go college and really do something with your lives. You could really be good girls. My shit is over!”

  “You’re only seventeen years old, Janae. You got the rest of your life, just like me and Butterfly. If you go down, we going down with you.”

  “Listen to me, Keisha. If I go down, I might do three months tops and then I’m out of there. I can do three months in the juvey in my sleep. Who knows, maybe when I get out the next time, I’ll go straight.”

  “Nope! If you go down, we all go down. That’s all it is to it.”

  “Damn straight!” Keisha added.

  “Okay, then. Y’all better get ready to do some time, ’cause we going down.”

  I had all but conceded to the fact that I was about to go to juvey for a while. It was just my luck that every time my life seemed to be getting in order, something would come along and screw it all up; more times than not, that something was me.

  Chapter Eight

  Keisha was true to her word and figured out a way to get Bri’s abortion scheduled for the following Friday. We paid this girl, Janet Cooper, two-hundred fifty dollars in cash, and she let Bri use her medical cards. We were able to get fake identification with Bri’s picture and Janet’s information. Yeah, we were committing insurance fraud on the state, but we had to do what we had to do.

  Keisha, Toya, and I took Bri to the clinic for her abortion. We tried to reach Janae, but she was on the run, from us, and the cops. We told Bri to pretend to be sick so that Keisha could do most of the talking. She knew Janet’s information by heart because she was always using it.

  I could not go into the surgery room to get a firsthand account of what went on, but I distinctly remember our conversation on the way home.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Tired.”

  “I was tired when I had my abortion, too. You’re probably going to feel sore for like, the next couple of days, but after that, you should be fine.” Keisha held Bri’s hand.

  “What was it like, Bri?”

  “Weird, but it didn’t really hurt. I was kind of numb through all of it...”

  BRI’S STORY:

  As I sat in stirrups and the doctor was between my legs, she explained the surgical procedure to me.

  “Hi, Ms. Cooper, I’m Dr. Henson and I’ll be performing your procedure today. Dr. Henson was a white, tall and skinny woman. She had short brown hair and wore glasses. She reminded me a lot of an old tennis player named Martina Navratilova. She was very nice, though.

  “During this process, we will end your pregnancy by removing the fetus and placenta from your womb, which is also called a uterus. There are different types of abortions. There is the therapeutic abortion, whereas a woman needs to end the pregnancy for health reasons. And then there is the elective abortion, whereas, like yourself, a woman simply chooses to end the pregnancy. We will be performing what is called an elective-surgical abortion. We will administer a sedative that will help you relax and make you feel slightly drowsy, but you will remain awake throughout the entire process. Because you are further along than fifteen weeks, we’re going to have to dilate your cervical canal. Small sticks called laminaria will be placed into your cervix to help it open and then we will insert a hollow tube into your womb before using the vacuum to remove all of the pregnancy-related tissues from your uterus.

  “This is a relatively routine procedure, but like all surgeries, there are certain risks involved. In this particular procedure, we run the risk of future ectopic or tubal pregnancies, which is when the child develops in the tube and not in the uterus. There’s also PID or pelvic inflammatory disease, which can lead to fever or infertility. Abruptio placentae; it is a condition in pregnancy where the sac holding the baby, or the placenta, tears away from the uterus lining. This can result in extreme and life-threatening bleeding. Women who have this procedure often run the risk of increasing their chance of breast cancer by fifty percent. Do you have any questions, Ms. Cooper?”

  “No, ma’am.” I tensed my body because I could feel pressure on my vagina.

  I was under the impression the doctor was trying to scare me out of having the abortion. I had never been a part of an abortion before, but I could not believe that she had to explain the procedure with such detail like that.

  “So how do you feel thus far?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Good, because it’s over.” Dr. Henson smiled and then slid her chair backward. She threw her latex gloves into a trash can. “You did well!”

  “Thank you. That’s it? It’s over?”

  “Yes it is.” Dr. Henson washed her hands. “The nurse will be in shortly to explain your outpatient information. Get some rest and have a good day.”

  Dr. Henson walked out and in a few minutes, a nurse walked in. She was black, light-skinned, with a round shape. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, but you could tell that she had a very cute shape in her scrubs.

  “Hi, Ms. Cooper, how are you feeling?”

  “I’m doing okay.”

  “My name is Connie and I’m going to go over what we need you to do to make sure you’re as good as new.”

  “Okay.”

  “We want you to make sure you drink lots of fluids. Stay off work for a few days if you can. Make sure you take vitamins, eat healthy foods, and try to get as much sleep as you can. Make sure you take the antibiotics immediately and for the full amount of days. No exercise for two weeks. No swimming or tub baths for two weeks. No lifting anything over fifteen pounds for two weeks. Don’t use anything vaginally for two to four weeks. That means no sex, no tampons and no douches, nothing.

  “You’re capable of ovulating two weeks after you have this procedure, which means you are capable of becoming pregnant again within two weeks of ending a pregnancy. After the two- to four-week period has expired, you should not have sex again unless you feel physically recovered, and you and your partner have made a planned parenting decision to have a child. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself in this same position.

  “Your body will probably return to its regular menstrual cycle in about two weeks, so if you decide that you want to resume sexual intercourse, make sure you are prepared by having some form of birth control or prophylactic. Please be certain that you are healed completely, both physically and emotionally, before resuming sexual activities. We want you to schedule an appointment and come back for your two-week check-up as soon as you can.” Connie smiled. “Any questions?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Okay, you have some friends out there who seemed to be very anxious to see you, so let’s get you to them to ease their concerns.”

  “Okay.”

  I looked around the small room and wondered how many other young teenaged girls had been in my position, and what did they do to deal with the aftermath?

  END BRI’S STORY
r />   • • •

  “...I don’t ever want to go through anything like that again.”

  “Me either!” Keisha said.

  “Ms. Alicia and Dr. Forrester are gone out of town, so it’s just you, me and Pa-Pa, Bri. All we have to do is just tell him you’re sick and he’ll baby you the whole weekend. He won’t have a clue.”

  “Yeah, but we’re supposed to be babysitting, Brit, too.”

  “Oh, Brit won’t be a problem. Please, I got her! That’s my baby.”

  “Oh yeah, don’t forget I have to stop by the pharmacy and get my prescription, Shante.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  We stopped by the pharmacy and picked up Bri’s prescription. When Bri came out of the store with the bag in her hand, Toya was excited.

  “What you got?”

  “What you mean, what I got?”

  “What kind of ’scripts you got?”

  “’Scripts? What is ’scripts?”

  “Your prescription. What kind do you have?”

  “I don’t know.” Bri opened up the bag and pulled out one of the bottles of pills. “I got a hundred and twenty Vicodin pills.”

  “Vicodin?” Toya shouted. “You done struck it rich, babygirl!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Bri, you won’t need all of them pills, girl. I can sell what you don’t use on the streets for two or three dollars a pill. And we split the profit fifty-fifty.”

  “What?” Bri was confused as hell.

  “Do you know what you have in your hands right now?”

  “Yeah, I got some medicine.”

  “No, you got a goldmine.”

  “Don’t pay no attention to that fool, Bri.” I chuckled for a minute and then kept talking. “She’s trying to get you to give her some of that Vicodin, so she can sell them on the street.”

  “Like a dope dealer?”

  “Naw, man, I’m not no real dope dealer. I just sell them to my friends at school and they give me a few dollars for them.”

  “Look, you got enough to worry about without getting into more trouble with drugs, Bri.”

  “See, Keisha, you always trying to talk somebody out of doing something.”

  “And you always trying to talk somebody into something, Toya.”