by Landis Lain
Damon watched the awards and clapped louder than anyone.
Damon hung out with Brielle’s family just long enough to congratulate her and give her a big hug. She was so thrilled she was talking in that rapid fire speak all the girls used when they got excited, so that he could only understand one word in five that she uttered. Kyzie snapped what seemed to be a thousand pictures.
“Grab her,” yelled Kyzie. Damon slung his arm around Brielle’s shoulders and Kyzie snapped the picture. She showed it to him on the little display screen of the digital camera.
“Send me a copy,” he said. “Okay?”
“I’ll e-mail it to you,” said Kyzie, turning to snap more pictures.
Damon nodded.
He pulled Brielle aside for a few seconds. She looked sleek, wet and elated.
“I’ve got to head out,” he said.
“You have to leave,” she asked, looking disappointed. He nodded.
“Yeah, David’s gotta work tonight, I gotta study for ACT testing, and you got your whole family here. I’ll call you, okay,” he said and kissed her cheek in deference to her father and grandparents. He shook hands with everyone and excused himself.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “Love you.”
“I love you, too.” said Damon. He tweaked a wet braid, then watched Brielle run back into the middle of the celebrating crowd.
Damon
“So,” said David, glancing over to Damon. They were about halfway home from Ypsilanti.
“So, what?” asked Damon. David eased around a slow moving truck and sped up.
“You love this girl, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Damon.
“That’s cool,” said David. He drummed the fingers of his free hand on the steering wheel. “You being careful?”
“What?” asked Damon.
“I said,” said David. “You throwing the raincoat on?”
Damon laughed.
“It’s not even like that,” he said.
“You aren’t having sex?” David asked baldly.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” said Damon. “But no, I am not having sex with Brielle.
“Why not?”
Damon sighed.
“Did dad put you up to this?”
“No,” said David.
“Then why so interested?”
“I remember that other girl,” said David. “Couldn’t leave her alone, but you wouldn’t cross the street to be with her, let alone burn gas money and go to Ypsi to see her swim. I figure she has to be giving up some sweet honey for you to go to all this trouble.”
Damon was furious. If his brother hadn’t been doing about eighty miles an hour he’d have punched him in the head. Instead he said through clenched teeth, “Brielle is nothing like Sasha. If you can’t be respectful, shut up.”
“You wanna jump bad?” asked David, incredulous.
“Keep talking,” said Damon, “You’ll find out.”
David looked at him with new respect.
“Little brother is growing up,” he said and then ruined it by bursting into laughter and singing in falsetto, “Damon’s got a Love Jones for Brielle,” for the next fifteen miles.
Damon made a rude hand gesture and shut his eyes to try to block out his brother’s antics. Inside he was smiling. He had a Love Jones for Brielle and he was proud of it. Brielle loved him back. Love Jones, yep.
December
Sasha
Sasha woke up badly. It had been long past midnight before she could get to sleep and now that it was morning, she was groggy and sluggish. She checked her phone in the hope that Damon had texted or called in the last months. There was nothing and the phone sat in her hand, back lighting her despair with its silence. She was supposed to be finishing up her first term of college. Instead, she gingerly rolled over onto her right side. She couldn’t lie on the left, anymore. The baby was riding someplace on the left and kicked her in the ribs something fierce if she wasn’t positioned just so.
I feel like my body is a battlefield. Fought over, coveted and pillaged, it has become the enemy. It has been invaded by an alien life force and it no longer belongs to me. Somehow, my body has never belonged to me.
She lay there, not thinking so much as taking stock. This is all there was for her. All the plans she’d made for herself were like dust, blown away in the windstorm of lust. She was stuck.
Sasha could feel the anger that had been steadily growing in her over the months since Damon had told her that he didn’t want her and didn’t want to be with her. The anger changed to a surging bitterness every time she thought about the fact that Damon was just going to be her baby daddy and nothing else.
Sasha still could not believe that Damon would be so cold. Hadn’t she been nice to that boy? Usually, men and boys came after her, drooling and panting like the dogs they were. Hadn’t she loved Damon like she had loved nobody else? She had given him everything she could and he took it. Just like that. She should get something back for that.
First Craig, the stupid liar, who made her feel like he wanted her so bad and then treated her like crap. She’d shown him. Sasha was beautiful and could be with anybody she wanted to be. All the boys said so. Liars.
Damon turned out to be another liar. Sasha was stuck with a permanent souvenir of lying boys. They just took what she offered and moved on.
Last night, she’d stayed up watching the movie “Color Purple”. The movie suited her mood down to the ground. She cried at the beginning when Ceilie gave up her baby.
When somebody, she thought it was Sophia, said that a girl child ain’t safe in a house full of men, Sasha wanted to yell at the TV and tell her that a girl child ain’t safe in nobody’s house, Sasha cried again.
Sasha rolled up to her side and looked blearily into the mirror situated on the dresser.
“You are so pretty,” she said to her bloated image. Hadn’t she heard that line drip off of lips of every shape and hue? Even Damon had told her that she was beautiful. “Being pretty should count for something.”
Tears filled her eyes and then she snorted them back, because they were useless. She ruminated on the message in the movie. If a girl’s pretty, then she’s enticing, and flaunting. If she’s not then she got to take what comes to her without a fight for herself, because she ought to be grateful somebody is paying attention to her. In Sasha’s opinion, the world was bass ackwards, like her daddy used to say. Lock up all the boys, then the girls don’t need protection.
Sasha’s unpredictable bladder kicked in and she stumbled to the bathroom, just barely able to pull down her pants and squat. She almost missed the toilet, she was so unwieldy. She sighed in relief and just sat there for a few minutes, counting the peach colored tiles on the walls. Her mother wasn’t home. The house was blessedly, empty. Sasha finished, washed her hands and went back into her room. She picked up her cell phone. Time for a change.
Damon
Damon answered the house phone only because he was passing by the kitchen and it was two feet from his hand. He was thinking about Brielle and smiling a little. He was so proud of her team, winning the state champs in the freestyle relay. He had taken her out to dinner and a movie to celebrate the next day, and then gone to the celebratory pep rally with her. Damon was trying to decide what he was going to buy Brielle for Christmas. She had been awesome in the anchor position. He’d seen a dolphin charm at the mall that he thought that she might like. Even his sister thought that it would be a cool gift. Or maybe he’d get her a nautical charm bracelet with a dolphin and an anchor on it that she could add stuff to it later. Damon decided that he liked that idea even better, and resolved to go shopping as soon as he got finished with his last semester final exam.
Brielle really made him feel good. This is what love felt like and Damon decided that he really liked the feeling. It was different than with Sasha. With Sasha, he’d felt only mild liking for the girl herself and a compulsion for her body. Or maybe, if he was honest, a compulsion
for the way his body felt when he was inside her body. He wanted to be with Brielle anytime and anyplace, no matter what. And although she made him hot, he was content to take things slowly with her. Whenever he was with her she outshone every person around her with her smile and grace and kindness and soft lips. When he wasn’t with her, all he did was think about her.
David continued to tease him.
Even Jada had softened her position and wasn’t giving him the death look about Brielle anymore. His parents just smiled at him indulgently. His grades were going to be off the chain. Mr. Tally had given him the recommendation for the Bill Gates scholarship along with a congratulatory handshake. They’d done the application together online and it had been a grueling process because the application was about thirty pages long. Damon got his first acceptance letter from a college back. He had some new books to read and Brielle was his girlfriend. Damon figured that his life was just about perfect.
Damon didn’t answer the home phone often, but his mother had fussed at him just this morning for not getting the phone when he was near it, so when it rang he picked it up without thinking.
“Hello,” he said.
“Damon,” said the voice. Damon sighed. He’d had nearly six months of peace.
“Sasha,” he said, in a bored tone. “I told you not to call me again.”
“Damon,” she said, sounding desperate. “I really need to tell you something.” Damon sighed again and hung up the telephone. Holding conversation with Sasha was futile. She never got the message that he wanted her to get.
He had thought that Sasha was different. Besides being fine and well built, she’d acted smart, like she cared about what was happening in the world. When he’d first met her, she’d talked about going away to college and being something. She had even read some books that he hadn’t read. He was sixteen. Sasha had just turned eighteen. He’d thought that she knew everything. He’d walked her home from school. It was on his way home and she was hot to look at and easy to talk to. He’d drop her off at her door and she’d reach up and pull his head down for a luscious kiss, with lots of tongue. Damon had really enjoyed the kisses.
In March, she’d invited him in, saying her mother and step father weren’t ever home and she got lonely. The next thing he knew, they had their clothes off. She’d even provided the condoms. For a few weeks, he was enthralled with the sex. But Sasha seemed to think that having sex with him made him her property or something. If she saw him in the hall talking to another girl or sometimes even one of his boys, she’d come up to him and twine her arm through his and sort of rub herself against him.
He’d soon grown bored with her constant demands for attention and started avoiding her in school. Then she’d stepped up her campaign, constantly calling him on his cell phone. He stopped answering and blocked her number. Somehow, she got the house number and started calling him constantly, until his mother told her not to call anymore. Then, she’d lay in wait before and after school. He changed the route he took to get home, varying it so that she could leave him alone. And still she persisted in writing him notes and leaving messages on his voice mail, until he’d finally been brutal.
He waited until they were in front of about five of her girls and several of his boys and he’d said, “Look, don’t call me anymore.”
She had been shocked.
“What? Why?” she’d asked, all stunned and pitiful. Like he hadn’t told her that same thing four or five hundred times in the last month.
Damon had felt a little guilty, but didn’t back down.
“I want you to leave me alone,” he said. Their audience snickered. He dropped his voice so that only she could hear what he said. “You bugging me.”
“You didn’t think I was bugging you when you had your hand down my shirt,” she said, loudly, forgetting about their audience.
“And we both know how easy that was, right?” he said, with a smirk that he wasn’t really feeling. “Been there, done that.”
Sasha’s eyes filled with tears.
“I don’t know why you’re being this way,” she said.
Damon was feeling hunted. He looked around and his boys looked back at him and shrugged.
“Look, Sasha,” he said. “I need some space. You crowd a brother.” And she’d burst into tears and run away. He had felt terrible the entire day but when he’d seen her after school, she approached him like they hadn’t had a conversation and he hadn’t treated her like trash in front of his friends.
“Walk me home,” she said. So he did, because he was still feeling guilty.
“One last time,” she said, when they got to her house. “For old times’ sake.” Damon thought the comment was stupid since he wasn’t old enough to have any old times, but he went ahead, anyway, because it felt good.
“See,” she said, after they’d finished their heated coupling. “You can’t get enough of me. I told you we’d always be together.”
Damon was getting dressed, hardly able to look Sasha in the face. She had tried to kiss him when he was leaving her house, but he’d turned his head away, sick of himself for being so weak and sick of Sasha for being so easy to mistreat. She tried to pick things back up by acting sweet and friendly whenever she came near him in school, but after that he wouldn’t walk her home anymore, and then he got a car and a job at the local university working maintenance after school. After D. Dog attacked him, Damon hadn’t set foot back into Lansing Southern and had been allowed to finish the semester from home. He’d been relieved that Sasha had graduated and finally moved on to college. Until today.
The phone rang again and Damon, snapped out of the past to the present with a jolt, looked at it like it was a snake. He felt dread creep up his spine. He checked the caller ID. Sasha, again. He snatched up the receiver.
“What?” he snarled into the phone.
“Damon,” said Sasha, “I need to tell you something. Don’t you hang up on me again.”
“Look,” he said, “I am not trying to be rude, but you-,”
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “And it’s your baby.”
Damon slammed the receiver down, and stood staring at it like it was going to explode. He put his hands over his ears to block out the obscene words. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get his breath to go in and out. His chest had an elephant sitting on it and at the same time there was screaming going on in his head so loud that it blocked out the lack of air. It wasn’t until his sister walked up to him and smacked him on the back that he wheezed out his first tiny breath in what felt like a century.
“Inhaler, stupid,” Jada said, picking it up off the counter and tossing it to him. Damon hadn’t heard her come into the kitchen behind him. He caught the inhaler on the fly and took two puffs, which eased the heavy burden in his chest. He breathed out in relief and blinked back tears. He stumbled to a chair and slumped down into it with his hands covering the sides of his face.
“Hey,” said Jada, voice tinged with concern. He felt her hand on his right shoulder. “Are you all right? Is it a bad attack?” He still couldn’t speak, so he nodded. He felt his chest tighten again, and he felt Jada jerk away and run from the room.
“Mom,” she called. “Damon’s having a bad asthma attack!” Damon’s eyes dimmed. He could feel his heart pounding and hear his own labored breathing from someplace very far away. He heard running footsteps and suddenly his mother was standing in front of him.
“Breathe, boy,” she said. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were very concerned behind her glasses. She turned to Jada. “Get my cars keys.” The next hour was a blur to Damon. He didn’t remember the frantic ride to the hospital or his mother jumping out of the still running car to get a doctor or a nurse. He didn’t remember the emergency room paramedics lifting him out of the front seat of his mother’s van. The hospital got his breathing back under control with the Nebulizer machine and a breathing treatment, but Damon still felt like he was drowning. He lay in the emergency room with his eyes closed. His mom thought
that he was just resting from his asthma attack. But Damon’s mind was spinning and jumping and skipping breaths just like his lungs.
‘I’m only sixteen. How can I take care of a baby?’ What was he going to tell his parents? They were going to kill him. They were going to be so disappointed.
He took another deep breath and exhaled through the plastic mask on his face, sounding like Darth Vader. He was suddenly so tired that he just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. Then his eyes snapped open in panic.
‘Oh, God,’ he thought, breath hitching again. His mother looked at him sharply, but he got his breathing back under control quickly and squeezed his eyes back shut, lest he betray his agitation and she ask him what was wrong. God help him, he might just tell her. No, he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t even breathe, let alone think of something that made sense. He bit his lower lip. ‘What am I going to tell my baby? What am I going to tell Brielle?’
Brielle
“Hey Damon,” said Brielle, voice bright and cheery through the phone. He’d been avoiding her calls, but she’d texted him that if he didn’t pick up, she would think that he was dying and make her father drive over to see him. Damon did not doubt that she would.
“Hey, Brielle,” he said.
“Are you better?” Brielle asked. She had been very worried about Damon for a full week. She had called the house to talk to him and been told by Jada that he was on the way to the hospital. He’d missed two days of school.
“I’m doing okay,” he said in a choked voice.
“You don’t sound so good,” said Brielle.
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “But I gotta go, okay?”
“Okay,” said Brielle. “Feel better.”
She could hear Damon take a deep breath and let it out.