Chapter 3: The Morning After the Night Before

I showered, ignoring the headache and lingering drunk. God, what did he give me? I only intended to drink enough to loosen up. Hell. I lost my virginity and didn’t even remember it. All I had was blood on my thighs and a baby in my womb. Fuck! Just like last time.

And like last time, I sought out God. I was still reeling with the effects of alcohol in my bloodstream, but after my shower, I dressed and joined Mom and Dad at the breakfast table. Dad grunted something from behind the comic pages of the Sunday newspaper.

“Out too late last night,” Mom said.

“I tried to be quiet when I came in,” I answered. I hoped I was quiet. I didn’t even remember coming home.

“You didn’t ask for permission to be out last night. Were you with that Carter boy?” Mom demanded. I was pretty sure she was on some kind of drug. The doctor said it was for menopause.

“I’m sorry, Mother. May I have permission to go to the biggest event of the school year, until graduation, that I’ve been planning for four months for? Last night?”

“Watch your mouth, girl. You’ll get it slapped.”

“Yes, Daddy.” I ate my cereal and drank a cup of black coffee, even though it turned my stomach a little. Wasn’t anything going to be different this time through my life? Was I helplessly caught in a repeat of events? What could I do?

When Daddy threw the newspaper down, we got up and followed him to the car. No one said anything else.

Church. I was the only one who had been to prom the night before who was at church this morning. Never miss church. I had a perfect attendance pin for seventeen years of Sunday School. I listened to the preacher talk about the God who had forsaken me. Who had sent me to this hell.

I wasn’t interested in seeing my friends. My memories of last night were sketchy—even the early evening. I’d never really been drunk before, but I didn’t think it would feel this way. I was disconnected from everything. First of all, I was trying to superimpose my stale memories onto my seventeen-year-old self. Shock had slowed all my mental processes. It was hard to reconcile the future I knew with the present I’d tried to forget. Knowing what I had to look forward to gave me a sense of dread that had been missing my first time through. My memories weren’t of last night. They were of twenty-five years ago. What was fresh in my mind from last night was picking up a woman and taking her to my room where I died in the midst of an orgasm. I had to remember what happened back then. Now. I would finally admit to my parents at graduation that I was pregnant. Jesse Carter and I would be married two weeks later. Mother and Daddy would do everything in their power to hide the shame, but it came out every time they looked at me.

Eventually, I would give birth while Jesse was out working on an oil rig. It was the only life we could get and I would raise my child in my parents’ basement. We found a place to move into two years after the baby was born. That was the week they died. It would be the day I found out they’d left everything to my husband. We never packed. Just moved into the master bedroom with my daughter in my former room.

“Let this cup pass from me,” I whispered as I bowed my head at the back of the church. That was what Jesus prayed. And look what it got him. I begged God for answers. I begged him to take me back to my own time. I begged him to let me die and just be dead. I was in hell. I’d suffer through birth, marriage to a bastard, the disapproval of my parents, the shame of my classmates. I’d live in the same house I was born in until the day I finally cut free and divorced him. I’d get a job selling real estate and carefully save as much as I could. I’d push Jesse until he actually made something of his life. Before I ended our marriage, we’d be considered successful, ‘in spite of everything.’ And miserable. I’d be able to recount every time we’d had sex in twenty-five years of marriage. But I’d stick it out for the sake of our daughter.

I looked up at the solemn people with bowed heads as the preacher droned on. Some were praying; others were sleeping. I listened. I listened for God’s voice. I begged him to hear me and give me guidance. All I could hear were my own thoughts. The only future I could see was the one I’d already lived. The look of horror on my boyfriend’s face when I told him I was pregnant. His futile attempt to deny that it was possible. The look of disgust on my father’s face the last time he spoke to me. No, not the day he died—the day I told him I was pregnant. The minister’s lecture during my wedding on the evils of sex before marriage and how it tainted those who couldn’t wait. The high-fives Jesse got for nailing me. Lying alone in the hospital in the agony of childbirth.

And the one glimmer of light in my life: my daughter.

NO!

I almost shouted it in the church. I wouldn’t do this again. I’d kill myself first.

And then what? Wake up to start the whole nightmare over again?

Maybe ... just maybe ... this was an opportunity to do it right.

All I needed to do was decide what would make it right.

Fuck!

I was a forty-two-year-old woman trapped in my seventeen-year-old body. My head knew all kinds of things jumbled together in a mad chaos of experience and inexperience. I’d spent twenty-five years saying, ‘If I had it to do over again... ‘ And now here I was. The problem was that my seventeen-year-old self was still subject to seventeen-year-old hormones, conditioned responses, and peer pressure.

Sometime over the past two decades, I’d come to realize that I’d been raped. That realization came slowly as I came to grips with having woken up still partially drunk and not remembering anything that happened. I’d begun by thinking my one little drink had really hit me a lot harder than I thought. Maybe I’d had more than one? How many drinks did it take to knock me out so I couldn’t remember what happened? I just knew I hadn’t had that many.

That left drugs.

When I finally came to that realization, twenty years later, Jesse had laughed at me. “What do you think?” he’d scoffed. “You could have told me you weren’t on the pill.”

‘Date rape’ was still a relatively new term in ‘91. There’d been a few articles about it in teen and women’s magazines, but I really didn’t have a concept that I could be drugged into compliance. ‘Roofies’, I learned, were comparably easy to get if you lived near a college campus. We didn’t, but I knew that Jesse and a bunch of his friends had gone to Minneapolis for a party a few weeks ago. Now I wondered how many of my girlfriends had also been drugged into performing sex acts after the prom.

What was worse, though, was that we were—or thought we were—as much to blame as our dates. The girls had taken a little break, though we only had to go to Moorhead to get what we wanted. Condoms. We had every intention of getting laid after the prom. We all had places picked out. We were as excited about sex as any guy. I would have fucked Jesse regardless. I just would have made him wear a condom. But that didn’t make it rape, did it?