Desdemona Sewall
Chapter 4: Telling Mom About Deszi
After that Saturday with her parents, Deszi and I became a couple. Not that we were glued together every minute—classes pulled us apart, the grind of studying kept us busy, and my work on the Pequod II’s diesel engines was no small task. But the moments we carved out—those late evenings after eight, the quiet stretches of Saturday night, the slow, lazy Sundays—became something I clung to.
In those pockets of time, everything else fell away. The noise of school, the hum of machinery, even the whisper of doubt lurking just beneath the surface.
It was in those stolen hours that I felt, for a while at least, like maybe we had a chance.
When Deszi wasn’t wrestling with the storms inside her, she was genuinely funny—sharp as a tack, with a wit that could slice through the nastiest insults like a hot knife through butter. Other students tried to throw shade her way, but her comebacks were swift, clean, leaving them sputtering like kids caught off guard. Their jabs—mostly about her looks—bounced off her more and more with each passing day.
Somewhere along the way, I began to fall hard for her.
One Sunday evening, during a rare phone call home, I finally admitted it—I had a girlfriend. For a moment, my mother was thrilled. She remembered how broken I’d been after my last relationship fell apart.
Then the mood shifted.
I heard her inhale sharply on the other end, a quiet pause hanging between us like a warning.
“David ... it isn’t that Desdemona girl, is it?” Her voice was low, tense, thick with worry.
“What changed? We both thought she was strange when we met her before school started.”
Her words lingered, and suddenly the room felt colder. Like something dark was just waiting for the right moment to crawl out from under the surface.
“Well, Mom, it’s like this,” I said, drawing in a slow breath, trying to steady my nerves. I told her about the storm inside Deszi—the guilt she carried like a shadow, a heavy inheritance from Samuel Sewall, the judge who’d helped condemn innocent people during the Salem Witch Trials. I explained how her family line tangled with Dorothy Good’s, that frightened child dragged through the same hellfire, and how Deszi wrestled with the ghosts of those names, caught between two legacies—one stained with judgment, the other with accusation.
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