by Isobel Irons
PROMISCUOUS
Isobel Irons
Copyright Isobel Irons 2014
http://isobelirons.com
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
CONTENTS
FORWARD (Please Read First)
Part I: “Dirty”
CHAPTER ONE
Part II: “Nasty”
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Part III: “Slutty”
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Part IV: “Bitch”
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Part V: “Cautionary Tale”
APPENDIX
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Contact Isobel Irons
Sexual Abuse Resources and References
FORWARD
(Please Read First)
Some of you are likely reading this and going, “What an idiot, does this author really not know that it’s supposed to say ‘foreword’—as in, the thing that comes before the words—and not ‘forward’?”
But if I’m an idiot, it’s not for that reason. Actually, I’m pretty sure someone at some point will call me an idiot just for writing this book. Which is why I’m taking this opportunity to forewarn you in such an incredibly shocking and—wait for it—forward manner, that you’re about to embark on a dark, twisting journey which—like real life—doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending.
PROMISCUOUS is a modern day Cinderella story. But it is not a fairy tale.
In fact, in the interest of saving time, let’s just get something out of the way. In this story, the F-word is used approximately 144 times, alongside a whole slew of other “bad” words. Some people may find this crass or gratuitous, and assume it’s meant for shock value, or to make this book seem more “edgy.”
To all the people I will undoubtedly offend with this book, I would like to apologize in advance.
Honestly, I tried to tell Natasha (the hero of this story) to clean up her act. But she gave me the finger and said that there was only one way this story was going to be told: her way.
While I’m at it, I should also probably confess that I think this story deserves a better ending. Hell, I know it deserves a better author. But it gets me, and I (the author) decided to take a chance on making a few people a little bit angry.
Because, for better or for worse, this isn’t just the story of Natasha “Tash” Bohner, an 18-year-old girl from a nameless town in an undisclosed state who swears like a trucker and wears red sneakers covered in labels.
It’s also my story.
It’s also your story.
It’s your best friend’s story, your sister’s story, and your college roommate’s story.
This broke-ass, unintentionally offensive Cinderella story belongs to every one of the more than one in five women who walk around every day feeling broken, or dirty, or somehow worth less than other girls, because someone hurt them the way Tash was hurt. The way I was hurt. The way my mother was hurt. (In other words, this shit has been going on for far too many generations.)
Yes, Tash is fictional. Tash’s friends and family members are fictional, too. But there’s a piece of her in every person who will read this story and say to herself or himself, “this could be about me.”
To those of you who are brave enough to make it to the end of this story, I hope you can see through the anger to the hurt that lies beneath—not just in these words I’ve written, but in your friends and family as well.
Everyone deals with pain differently, and as Sigmund Freud once said, “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” I’m not going to lie to you. Telling the truth is scary, and it’s painful as hell. And sometimes, the people you love kind of fuck up the way they react to it. But as much as it can suck, telling the truth will never be half as painful, or half as damaging as keeping it hidden inside you.
So, please. If you don’t read another word past this point, if you throw this book down and never look at it again, please take from this story one message:
You have every right to be angry. You have every right to cry, or break things, or swear a whole lot. But once you’ve done that, please let go of your shame. Tell someone you trust, and let them help you work through the pain. And most importantly, don’t you ever shame yourself, or let anyone else shame you again, for the hellish experience you didn’t ask for, but bravely survived.
Be the hero of your story. Don’t let them make you feel like a cautionary tale. Live your life forward.
With love,
Isobel
Part I: “Dirty”
My name is Natasha, and I'm a gigantic slut.
Don't believe me? Just ask anyone. They'll tell you I juggle dicks like a six armed circus freak with nymphomania. They'll tell you I've slept with the entire football team, twice. (Including the coach, who's like 85 years old, by the way.) They’ll tell you I have no shame.
So what if none of that shit is true?
That doesn't make me any less of a slut. They'll probably tell you that, too.
But there's one thing they won't tell you, and that's my side of the story.
(By the way, if you're one of those easily offended types, I'm telling you right now, you'd better strap yourself the fuck in. Maybe buy a crash helmet while you're at it. I'm just saying. Consider yourself warned.)
CHAPTER ONE
I was born in a trailer park called Bigland Estates. How's that for irony, right?
My dad drove big rigs for a living, and since he was one of the sole men in the neighborhood who hadn't knocked up his wife and then split, or stayed and drank away the family living, I guess that sort of made my mom the honorary First Lady of the place. At least, she liked to think so.
When I was in kindergarten, mom got a job as a secretary during the day. We're talking big money here, like five, maybe even six bucks an hour.
The only catch was she didn't get off until 6:00 PM. So mom made a deal with the 15-year-old girl who lived two trailers down to watch me every day from 3:00 PM to 6:30 PM.
Her name was Gretchen Cader. You remember that name, okay? I'm not just saying that for dramatic effect, either. Fucking remember it. I'll get back to her later.
Anyway, there's a kind of community in trailer parks. More like that of a prison than like an actual neighborhood, though. I think you can probably chalk it up to a shared awareness of what happens when you make a series of really shitty life decisions.
Or proximity, I guess. Maybe both. Whatever.
At any rate, there was always kind of an unspoken rule in BE—and if you were paying attention, you'd remember that was the name of my trailer park, Bigland Estates. Hence, BE—and really all trailer parks, when you get right down to it.
This rule is very similar to the number one rule in prison: if you know what's good for you, you'll mind your own goddamn business.
Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well let's add a caveat, shall we?
I know what you're thinking. ‘How the hell does this broke ass piece of trailer trash know words like caveat,’ right? Well guess what? I've read every single book on the New York Times list of “Top 100 Literary Classics,”
not to mention every Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Bronte sisters’ book ever written. And fuck you very much for judging me, by the way.
Shit, where was I? Oh, right. Rule #1: Minding your own goddamn business.
But here's the caveat to this very simple sounding rule. (And just in case you’re even half as stupid as I think you are, a caveat is defined as a warning or proviso of specific stipulations, conditions, or limitations.) In a trailer park, whether it be the very ridiculously named Bigland Estates or any other, there is no such thing as a secret. Everybody knows everybody's motherfucking business.
That guy in 33D who's been screwing his wife's sister? Yeah, we know about that.
The lady in 21F with the plastic flamingos on her rock lawn? Piles of debt. We're talking upwards of thirty thousand owing to The Man, in credit cards alone. She's got a shopping addiction the likes of which TLC—or whatever the fuck channel you upper middle class people like to watch trashy reality shows on—has never seen. Thing is, she doesn't keep any of it. Sends it all to her daughter in New Jersey. The one she hasn't spoken to in thirty years.
How do we know all this shit, you might ask, if she never has the stuff sent to her house? If she hasn't spoken to said estranged daughter since the girl was old enough to drive her legally adult ass out of BE for good? See: above. Re: Trailer Park Fun facts.
There are no. Fucking. Secrets.
I'm not telling you this to educate you. Although, there is a small part of me that hopes you do learn an important lesson from this story. But how to survive in a trailer park isn't it. Because, really. The chances of your pampered middle class self needing to apply these rules at any point? I'm thinking slim.
Unless by some hilarious twist of fate, instead of going to heaven or hell, you die one day and wake up the next in the life of someone you judged wrongly. And you're forced to live it, the same way they had to.
Damn, that would be awesome.
Then again, I hate to think about what that would mean, if I was right. What if I ended up where I am because in some past life, I treated someone else this way? Shit, I really don't think I could live with that.
Either way, though, I'm pretty sure that you're going to get what's coming to you, one way or another. If there's one thing all this shit has taught me, it's that. Sooner or later, everyone gets what's theirs.
But don't you feel sorry for me. I mean it. Cut that bleeding heart, holier-than-thou bullshit out, right now. You're the reason the world is such a shitty place for people like me to live in. I don't want your pity. I want your awareness. I want you to steep in it, soak it in. Wallow in the knowledge of your part in this situation. And maybe, if you live with it long enough, it will change you. Maybe it will make you better.
But I seriously doubt it.
You see, you might know fuck-all about me, but I’ve got your little subset pegged. At this point in my story, I can imagine you're starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable. You're squirming in your seat, wishing you could flip through the pages to see if there's a light at the end of this tunnel. ‘Is it going to be this angry and depressing all the way through, or does she eventually reach a point of societal and literary Zen?’ And ‘My goodness, this young lady does utilize the F-word to an alarming degree!’
Well keep reading, ass-clown. ‘Cause I'm about to tell you why I'm so angry.
It all started the day Gretchen Cader became my babysitter. (You remember her, right? Of course you do. Because I told you to.)
Up until that point, I'm told I was a very lovely, unassuming child. Which seems to me like it could be bullshit, mostly because I was like, five, when Gretchen started babysitting me. And have you ever met a kid who's under the age of five? Lovely isn't the first word that springs to mind. Loud, maybe. Or sticky. Whatever, though. My mom says I was nice. Sweet, even. And I guess I have to take her word for it, because I can't really remember back that far.
All I remember is what happened after Gretchen took over.
Back then, I wasn't really old enough to understand what child abuse was. It wasn't because I was stupid, it's just, when you're that young...your brain doesn't jump to the same conclusions it would if you were an adult. For example: to a five year old, candy is simply the best fucking thing on the planet. As an adult, candy is fattening. Candy is a special occasion treat. A guilty pleasure. I explain it to you in these terms, because I want you to fully understand that to my little brain, my babysitter was someone I couldn't disobey. Not shouldn't, but couldn't. My babysitter was someone I had to listen to, no matter what. She was someone I could trust.
And that right there is why children shouldn’t be allowed to make important life decisions, folks.
I don't remember which specific event happened first, but I can tell you it progressed very quickly into worsening layers of wrongness.
Like the time when I was sick, and Gretchen came to my bedside with a bowl full of whipped up egg yolk she said was orange juice. I didn't believe her. She made me drink it anyway.
All of it.
Another time, Gretchen dared me to eat a handful of beef bouillon cubes. I was throwing up for days after that MSG overdose. Did you know that five year olds could get migraines—hypersensitivity, blurred vision, the works? Until then, I didn't know either. But they can. And I still get them, to this day, if I even catch so much as a whiff of an egg.
But it didn’t stop there. Each day, Gretchen's twisted little experiments got a little more creative. A little more damaging. It took me a long time to realize she was punishing me, in her own sick, misguided way.
Time and time again, I've asked myself what I ever did to Gretchen. What could my supposedly lovely childhood self possibly have done to deserve the hatred of a 15-year-old girl I barely knew?
Over the years, I've come up with a bunch of fucked up and improvable theories.
Maybe it was because she was just angry, or I don't know, jealous. Maybe it was because my house was always cleaner than hers, and didn't smell quite so much like cigarettes and ass. Maybe it was because I still had both my parents, even though my dad was almost never around. Or hey, maybe it was because my daddy never touched me the way Gretchen's daddy liked to touch her.
The bitch of it is, I'll never really know. That's the thing about hate. There's never really an excuse that makes sense.
After a while, the games started getting twisted. The dares became sexual, and I wasn't old enough to realize why that was so totally not fucking ok.
I won't go into much detail, because I wouldn't want to offend your delicate sensibilities.
After all, I'm sure no one ever called you a whore or told you the things you did—the things you were forced to do, by someone twice your size and thrice your maturity—made you dirty, before you'd even learned how to ride a bike. Right? So why should I bother trying to shock you into some manufactured state of moral outrage? It wouldn't help either of us one goddamn bit, would it?
Besides, by now it's too late. The damage has been done, and there's no way to fix what Gretchen broke. Or so I’m told.
And now you're probably wondering—like the sanctimonious asshole you are—whether I ever tried to tell anybody about what Gretchen was doing to me behind closed doors. You want to know whether I 'just said no' or 'yelled like hell' or cried 'stranger danger!'
Well I'm getting to that part.
However, fuck you eternally with a backwards pineapple for thinking that telling on Gretchen was somehow my responsibility. I was five fucking years old, goddamn it. Why are you asking me what a defenseless child did to defend herself? Why aren't you asking 'Why didn't any adults notice how the little kid never went outside with her babysitter during prime outdoor playtime?' Or, 'Where in the hell was her mother all those times she got mysteriously sick?'
Oh, you are asking those things?
Well then, cool your jets, Maverick. I'll tell you about that, too.
The answers to those questions won't make you feel vindicated, though. And if they do,
you're an even bigger asshole than I thought.
First of all, I must have tried to talk to my mom about Gretchen a million times. But every time I opened my little mouth to spit out the dirty, disgusting secret, my mom would say something like, “Oh, Gretchen is such a sweet girl. Aren't we lucky to have her, sweetie? It's a shame about her father losing his job. I'll bet he's really happy that Gretchen can help him with the bills. Such a sweet girl.”
With my mom, everything was either sweet or wildly age-inappropriate information. As the queen bee of BE, the only thing my mom thought about more often than other people's business was what other people thought about our business. Yeah, I know. That's some Inception shit right there.
Ah, I see you've also noticed the implied hypocrisy of my mother being the reigning bitch of BE while constantly flouting the Golden Rule of beeswax minding. (Oh, fuck. I just realized this would've been prime comedic placement for that queen bee analogy I made earlier. Oh well. It's too late now.)
Anyway, back to the point we go.
I only implied that mom liked to know about other people's business. I didn't say she liked to get involved. And when it came to our own business, well, let's say that she only wanted to hear about the good stuff. You’ll know how this applies in just a second.
The moral of the story is: I never really did manage to tell my mom what was happening, at least not in any kind of detail.
So it all just...kept happening.
Until the day I finally broke down and confessed everything to my first grade teacher, Miss McKibbon. Or, ok maybe I didn't confess everything. In fact, I barely told her anything. All I said was that my babysitter touched me in places she shouldn't have.
But it was enough.
See, back then everything wasn't all mandated confidentiality and political correctness the way it is now. Teachers didn't meddle so much in their students lives, or try to give parents any advice other than "Tell Bobby he needs to do better in math otherwise I'll have to fail him." Which, in my neighborhood, usually meant the parent in question would wait until he or she got home before beating the living shit out of Bobby for making them take part in his education. If Bobby was smart, he'd either shape up academically or conveniently 'forget' to notify his parents about the next parent-teacher powwow. If not, the cycle would be repeated every year, until Bobby either dropped out or turned 18 and got the hell out of Dodge.