Annie's Baby: The Diary of Anonymous, a Pregnant Teenager

by Beatrice Sparks

  9:00 p.m.

  It was Horrible! Miserable! Totally deflating!

  I’m used to being in honor’s classes and this is like kindergarten. I thought I’d tell Mom and Jenny how funny it was—but it isn’t funny! It’s sad, sad, SAD, and BAD! Any attempt at trying to put on the positive front that I’d thought I’d put on would be nothing but a big bald-faced lie.

  One girl there is so fat, she looks like she’s going to plop her baby out on the floor any minute, or maybe she’s going to have a litter like animals do. Nothing would surprise me.

  April 25, Thursday

  5:23 p.m.

  Third day at UWM School. It takes me forever to get to my new school on the bus. And yesterday I thought it was even more evil and ugly than the first day; then today I went in the girls’ room and heard soft crying and sobbing in the next stall. I asked what was the matter, and a little voice said, “Nothing…I’m…I’m…” I could barely hear the last two words, “…just…dying.”

  Quickly I dashed into her stall and found her with her head almost in the toilet water, which was brownish-bluish green. “I’ll get help,” I said as I turned to go, but she reached out one weak little fist and clamped onto my shirt like it was some kind of life link. Maybe it was—because she had taken all the medicine she could find in her house, plus two packages of stuff she bought at a drugstore on the way to school.

  “Don’t leave me and please don’t tell anybody,” she whispered in a way so tortured, I had to promise I wouldn’t. She assured me she’d thrown everything up.

  After I’d washed her face with wet paper towels and straightened her hair with my brush, we walked out to a burned grass area by the rusty old metal fence, which surrounded us like we were in prison. She told me about herself. It’s really a tragic story. Her parents don’t get along very well, and there are five other kids so she, being the oldest, is sort of the second mother.

  I think it was good for the little kid to unload. Actually, she’s a year older than I am, but she’s a spindly little girl who looks like she’s all belly. And she’s not very pretty; in fact, she’s not pretty at all, so it’s no wonder that she fell for the first guy who came along and gave her some attention. She was fifteen, and he was in his twenties, but she believed every word he said about them getting married as soon as he got a better job and stuff. I feel so protective of her. I’m much bigger than she, so I’m going to take her some of my clothes tomorrow. She’s got her pants pinned in the front with a big piece of cloth that holds both sides together, and she’s wearing one of her dad’s shirts. He is obviously a very grease-monkey-type man. I’m not trying to be demeaning; I just mean there are big grease stains on his shirt, which is clean.

  Tammy is one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever met. She reminds me a lot of Jenny (a sort of homely, underprivileged Jenny!) but honestly, I’ve never felt this way about anyone before: protective, championing, almost mothering. I know she was desperate when she took the pills, and she, like me, wants to be the best mother in the world. I worry a lot about her though; she looks so fragile and pale. Her baby looks like it’s half as big as she is, and sometimes I don’t know how she keeps from falling over frontward, but I guess that is because the rest of her body is basically all skin and bones.

  I wonder what happens to all that skin that’s holding that big blob of baby in, after the baby comes out? Does it just hang down to your knees forever, like a collapsed plastic grocery sack? Of course, I know better than that, but it still seems scary and morose.

  We’re supposed to have a counselor come in twice a week who will answer all our questions for us, but she has had the flu or something, so I haven’t met her yet.

  April 30, Tuesday

  5:10 p.m.

  I am sooooooooo sad. I don’t know when I’ve ever felt so sorrowful. Today our teacher, Mrs. Milton, was called to the principal’s office on the speaker, so she asked me if I’d help Tammy a little with her assignment while she was gone. When we moved closer together at the table, I was absolutely flabbergasted at Tammy’s lack of knowledge. How could she ever be expected to write a report on an article when SHE LITERALLY COULD NOT READ? She had no inkling of how to SOUND OUT WORDS! How can she ever get a job, even at a fast food place, when she can’t read the menu on the overhead board or the words on the cash register? I thought anyone, absolutely anyone could work at a fast food place.

  10:15 p.m.

  I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of how I can help Tammy. I’ve got to help her because how can she help her child if she can’t help herself? Maybe I’ll ask Mrs. Milton what I can do.

  May 1, Wednesday

  1:49 a.m.

  I woke up with this brilliant idea bouncing around in my head like a Fourth of July sparkler. And it will work! I know it will work because I talked with Mom about it! If Tammy comes to school an hour early in the morning and stays a half hour late, I can teach her with the very same sound cards Mom used when she taught me to read. They’re still in Great-Great-Grandma Goldern’s old TREASURE TRUNK, which we keep at the foot of my bed. I can hardly keep from getting up and scrounging them out right now! But maybe I should wait and have Mom help me in the morning to find stuff that can help Tammy. I wonder if I can wait till morning? I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?

  6:21 p.m.

  Mrs. Milton was sooooo nice and appreciative that I want to help Tammy. She’s really a nice lady. She doesn’t have enough time to do half the things expected of her.

  May 9, Thursday

  9:14 p.m.

  I have never done anything more exhilarating and fulfilling than teaching Tammy to make sounds and words and sentences out of squiggly lines! She’s like a caged bird learning for the first time to fly. And we’re planning her forever future, which will be entirely different than she ever expected it would be.

  At first I wanted her to go on to college, but Mom and I talked it over and decided that would be totally unrealistic with her dad just working part time in a U-Haul place, and her mom on food stamps and stuff. I asked Tammy if she thought her parents could read, and she was really embarrassed when she said, “Probably not,” then decided maybe her dad might a little but didn’t think her mom could, at least not much, because they never had any written stuff around, ever!

  Can you imagine that? Not growing up with picture books and magazines and newspapers with the funny paper section, and letter blocks and Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow, and so on. Tammy said her mom only liked soap operas, so that’s what the kids all watched.

  That seems so sad and deprived, but I guess they just don’t know any better. However, Tammy will! Mom said she could come to our house for the weekend, and she’d buy her a new outfit and have her hair cut and permed. Doesn’t that make her the neatest mom in the world? All that for a girl she doesn’t even know.

  May 12, Sunday

  Mother’s Day

  11:01 p.m.

  Tammy said her folks didn’t celebrate it, but we do, and we did! Mom and I stayed up after she’d taken Tammy home and laughed and giggled like two little teenyboppers. I told her that I’d always wanted to believe in Cinderella but had had a little reservation…BUT NO MORE…After Tammy had had her hair styled and permed and was in her new pink outfit, she looked like another person! She positively did! She looked like a model on the cover of Seventeen magazine (that is, if someone had airbrushed the belly out). I couldn’t believe my eyes. I still can’t!

  Mom said that much more than half of her transformation came from the inner beauty that she had never before known how to let out. I believe that’s true. I absolutely one hundred percent do! How could I not believe it when I saw it with my own eyes?

  May 13, Monday

  2:14 a.m.

  I just had another brilliant revelation! Tammy should go to beauty school. Having seen the miraculous transformation in herself, she should be all excited about the possibility of doing the same thing for others.

  I wonder how much it costs to g
o to beauty school, and where she will get the money? Is it a possibility?

  COME ON SELF, BE POSITIVE. WE’LL GET IT ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

  May 17, Friday

  5:14 p.m.

  I cannot believe how fast Tammy is learning. We went to the public library and took out a bunch of easy beginner books, and I’m so proud of her, I can hardly stand it because she’s not only learning how to read herself, she’s teaching her brothers and sisters and her mother!

  Isn’t that the most exciting thing you’ve ever heard? And my mom is a real jewel. Each day she gives me a package of cookies to take to school so Tammy can take them home for treats after their family reading lesson.

  I’ve decided that after my baby is born I’m going to donate one night a week to the library illiteracy reading program. Mom’s going to go with me, and I truly think it’s about the most honorable thing in the world we could do for humanity. Imagine not being able to read a stop sign or a job application or a danger sign or a menu or…that to me would be the most suffocating, imprisoning feeling there could possibly be…whoa! If I’m so damn proud of my own smarts, how come they didn’t save me from getting into this huge mess of trouble? Also, though I did take the chastity vow, how important to me was it if the first boy who came along could talk me out of it? What a lost loser I am! Poor Mom…poor, poor…lost…me.

  Hey, snap out of it. You’ve got the greatest, most supportive, loving, forever-there mom in the world, and she and you are going to the market to stock up on cookies and then to a movie. It’s funny how I never really appreciated being with her till I got…you know. She still bugs the heck out of me sometimes, but I’m sure I do the same to her, a million times worse.

  The counselor came in today and we had an hour long therapy session. It was interesting, but I didn’t participate much because I have my mom to talk to, and most of the girls don’t have a very good communication set-up with anybody except their friends, who it seems are as dumb and unenlightened as they are.

  We had all learned the mechanics of sex in our old school, but either we weren’t listening, or it didn’t register, or we weren’t taught the PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY PART! Such dumb, naive little jerks! Every single one of us believing that “OUR GUY” loved us and would always be there for us. That is, everyone but Lolanita. She’d had lots of boys and didn’t believe that “one in the bunch was worth the dynamite to blow him to hell.” Everybody clapped and shouted when she said that, and it might have seemed fun and funny to them, but it seemed like the worst possible tragedy in the whole world to me. Aren’t FATHERS supposed to have as much responsibility for raising a child as mothers? It’s going to become a more and more scary world if they don’t start making some changes. Every mother in creation can’t be like mine, who is both a good mother and father figure. But what do I know about that? Maybe again it’s about the old thing that “if you don’t know what you’re missing, you may not miss it that much.”

  Anyway, back to Lolanita. Her questions were only about how she could get on welfare and have her own apartment. Dr. Milshaw explained that route was becoming less and less easy. Afterwards Lolanita told us that lots of her friends and relatives were on “the system and had been back as far as she could remember.”

  It made my blood curdle. How could anyone not want to be independent? Responsible? A big lump formed in my throat. What about me? Mom had been saving for over a year so she could buy a new Datsun to replace ours, which has almost 90,000 miles on it. She’d have to spend the extra money on the baby. She didn’t complain, but I know she hates putting around in the old thing.

  Crap, sometimes life is crappy!

  May 22, Wednesday

  10:56 p.m.

  I hate my shitty new school! Seven pregnant girls and two who have had their babies sprawling around moaning and groaning about how tough their lives are. All of them except Tammy and Marie and Marinda and me fantasizing about how someday they’re going to be successful, wealthy doctors, scientists, lawyers, marine biologists, etc., yet I’ve never seen a single one of them take a book home on any subject, or for that matter even do any schoolwork they didn’t absolutely have to do. They don’t have a clue how much work and money those professions demand.

  I’m so grateful for Tammy and Marie and Marinda. We’re all scholastically working our rear ends off to get out of the horrible messes we’ve got ourselves into. AND WE WILL!

  Marie wants to go to secretarial school, and her parents and grandparents are going to loan her the money, which she’ll pay back when she gets a job, and Dr. Milshaw says there is a chance she can swing some kind of loan or scholarship for Tammy’s beauty school. Isn’t that amazing when just a few weeks ago she couldn’t even read! A scholarship, wow! I do hope she gets it.

  May 23, Thursday

  5:20 p.m.

  This afternoon I’m feeling top-heavy and depressed!

  I’m working hard at trying to be positive, but I’m failing miserably, and I feel miserable! I’m getting so fat and repulsive, I’m unstable, and I don’t feel or even look like myself anymore.

  May 24, Friday

  5:43 a.m.

  The alarm clock just went off. I hated it because I’d been dreaming I was with Danny again, and it was sooooooo wonderful, I didn’t want to ever wake up! He was being just the GOOD THINGS he really is. Oh! If that were truly so! Anyway, now I’m awake…and life, as it is, goes on, yuck!

  9:19 p.m.

  Went to my stupid doctor this afternoon. He says I’m losing weight and it isn’t good for me or the baby. How can I be losing weight when I’m blowing up like a balloon?

  May 27, Monday

  10:46 p.m.

  The counselor came in again today, but we didn’t talk about anything I wanted to talk about. Now Beta has started harping about getting started on welfare and child support and an apartment of her own, so then she wouldn’t have anyone telling her what to do including her mother. Daranela is still considering abortion, even though she is well past the point where the counselor says no reliable doctor would perform it. Birdie says she’s had three abortions, and it’s no big deal.

  Geraldina says the guy who “fixed her up” is nineteen and already has five kids floating around that he knows of. She says he brags about it, actually seems proud of it, even though he doesn’t support any of them. She says it’s sort of like a macho thing for the guys in her area to have lots of kids by different girls. I think that’s so disgusting and sad that it almost makes me ashamed to be a human being. And I thought I was dumb!

  I don’t think most of the girls even listen to the counselor’s advice. They just turn her off. I’M LISTENING! And I wish I had heard all this stuff before I met Danny. I had no idea how many guys do the old broken “I love you” thing and the “If you loved me you would do it” bit. Then they feel absolutely no remorse at dumping the girl. Life sometimes isn’t very pretty.

  May 28, Tuesday

  7:26 p.m.

  It’s amazing how we’ve segregated at school. All the kind of worldly girls in one group, and us naive dumbheads in another. They treat us like we’re retards, and we treat them like they’re…I don’t know…maybe scary? I don’t understand most of them and their attitudes. OR MINE! I’m really ashamed of myself because Tammy asked me to go to the mall with her after school, and I said I had to help my mom. That was a big fat lie. I just told her that because…because I’m ashamed of her and she’s my best friend! I’m soooooo mortified, and yet that’s the YUCK! way it is. Who so high and mighty do I think I am? I won’t think about it. I can’t!

  I am sooo mixed up! I don’t belong or fit in anywhere! Maybe going to the school for unwed mothers was a mistake. But how could it have been any better in my old school? I couldn’t have stood that either!

  May 29, Wednesday

  8:42 p.m.

  Today I walked through the park and became even lonelier and depressed than ever when I saw a couple of kids about my age ripping by on their rollerblades. I almost started
crying. It was really a weird feeling because I wanted with all my heart to run on home and crawl into bed and cover my head up with a pillow, but I couldn’t; something beyond my control forced me to stay there and watch all the kids my age doing all the things I should be doing. I could feel my heart being wrung out inside me as I daydreamed of myself playing soccer, riding my bike, rollerblading, and just “hanging” with my gang of goofy, prank-playing, nutso, no cares, no pressures, no regrets, no pain, normal fourteen-year-old kids.

  May 30, Thursday

  4:43 a.m.

  I think I’ve cried all night, but it hasn’t solved any of my problems or reduced any of the contempt I feel for myself! What a loser I am. Hey, buck up. All this negativity might be hard on the baby. She doesn’t deserve to be raked around in my dark, yucky mudhole.

  Okay, all my old friends, well most of them, at least individually, try to be nice and polite when we meet, but it would be obvious to even a fence pole that they aren’t quite comfortable around me.

  Come on, miserable, pessimistic, negative boob tube, that’s probably because of your attitude, right?

  Maybe, but the guys from the old days do seem to be embarrassed to admit that I even exist. And I’ll never ever, ever be able to forget a couple of days ago when I was coming out of the market and a bunch of grade school boys started making remarks about my being pregnant and how I got that way. It made me so mad that if I’d been Jean-Claude Van Damme or Walker, I’d have splattered each of them all over the parking lot.

  May 31, Friday

  5:29 p.m.

  Jenny called and asked me to come to her fifteenth birthday party. She said her mom would like to take Deanna and Molly and Kathy and me to see a funny play at the Civic Center, then out for ice cream and cake because her dad had just gotten home from the hospital. I hadn’t even heard about his accident, but I was really sorry because he’s a really nice father kind of man, and she’s a really nice mother kind of mother.