Life Interrupted

Chapter One

Life can be such an asshole. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out and you start feeling confident in who you are and how you’ve chosen to live, something comes around the corner and slaps you in the face, not only changing your viewpoint, but leaving one hell of a mark.

We’ll start at the beginning of my life and work our way up to high school, since my guidance counselor, Ms. Flynn (who was apparently a slut in high school, so the statement in like Flynn is used appropriately in her case), is certain that my childhood is a main source of why I am the way I am. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with it, but I let her take me out of Math once a week and talk to me. The arrangement suits us both. She feels like she’s doing her job, and I get to miss forty-five minutes of polynomials and cosigns. It’s win-win, like my sister Stacy always says.

My entire life has been a rather unique one, never quite adding up the way it should. I’m the second daughter of Sam and Leigh Reynolds. My sister, Stacy, is ten years older than me, the catalyst in bringing my parents together.

My dad was an English TA at the university and a struggling poet, and my mother was a biology professor who also gave seminars on human sexuality. A few chance meetings at the local bar and one thing led to another which led to Stacy. Apparently, Ms. Flynn isn’t the only adult I know who was a bit of a slut way back when.

As the story goes, my parents were nervous, but excited, a thirty-two year-old biology professor and a twenty-six year-old English teaching assistant who moved in together and had a baby. And for the first little bit, everything worked. They lived in their two bedroom house on the outskirts of campus, working, raising their baby, all of the things young couples do. But my mother wasn’t as young as my father, and even after he’d gotten his PhD in English and become a full time professor, things got a little tight, not just financially, but emotionally. My father wanted to write beautiful poetry and spent hours on end at coffee shops talking with students, drinking coffee out of pint glasses and smoking scented tobacco, writing and reading poetry and examining life, while my mother spent time raising a baby, teaching, working up proposals for grants, and paying bills.

Somewhere into Stacy’s eighth year my parents decided what they needed was another baby, something to reinvigorate their lives and bring them back to that place they had once been. So a year and a half later I came along. Really, what they wanted was for my birth to bring them together the way Stacy’s had. And for exactly three years their plan succeeded and their life was everything they wanted—until one day my dad decided that my birth had brought him exactly the opposite of what he had wanted, which was responsibility. Soon they were back to where they had been headed before me, with my mother working and raising two babies and trying to be a woman, while her younger husband spent more and more time with his even younger students.

I was three years and two days old when my mother kicked my father out of the house, an action to which he reacted kindly and had his things packed in record time, according to my sister Stacy. This information all came to me according to my sister Stacy because she was ten when I was born and thirteen by the time this all happened and nobody thought she heard what they spoke about, especially when they used code to say it. But Stacy was smarter than they thought and she knew what was going on. Which is how she knew that I was a tactic meant to save my parents’ marriage and had instead ended up being the final straw that broke them apart. She gifted me with this information when I was five, sitting me down to tea with my power-rangers and telling me not to feel bad that I had failed at my job. A thoughtful gesture if you’re Stacy, a horrible one if you’re actually human.

After my dad left, my mom worked double time to make sure that she provided a good life for her daughters, never allowing us to go without and always showing us that we were loved, no matter what. The no matter what was more for me than Stacy.

The phrase two-peas couldn’t be more wrong when it comes to Stacy and me. Stacy is a pea, a tiny, proper pea who’s known exactly who she is from the day she was born. Smart, athletic, domineering. People bow to Stacy because she won’t accept anything less.

She brought my parents together, the surprise baby that gave them the chance to have a family—she was a 4.0 student who went on scholarship to the University of Portland and ran track. She is a simple 5’7", with a lean figure and a pixie like face. She is remembered in her high school yearbook as the it girl—the homecoming queen that everyone wanted to be, the president of every club imaginable, the state champion in the fifteen hundred meters and the high jump who received an academic scholarship for college and played a sport as well, just to ice the cake. In short, she was loved—and still is—by everyone, even the ones who wish they could hate her.

Me, well, let’s just say I’m more of an acquired taste.

I’m the girl who broke her parents up, the girl who never really knows what she’s doing until it’s done, which results in just as many negatives as it does positives. I’m not an awful student, but no one is rushing to name me the valedictorian. I have friends and people at school know who I am, though I have a sneaking suspicion that’s more because of what I look like than who I am as a person.

Stacy was a gazelle in high school—long and lean and narrow. Me? I’m an Amazon.

Seriously, I’m six feet tall, one hundred and thirty-five pounds of muscle. I’ve been built like this since I can remember, steadily getting taller, not in an awkward way that made me skinny and knobby kneed—no, that would have had its own set of repercussions I am sure. I’ve never been too skinny—my height and weight have always been proportionate which, in high school, means death. I’m not a string bean or a Giselle Bundchen look-a-like, however much my mother tries to make the comparison.

I love her for even trying.

What I am is solid, and no one in my family knows where I came from. My mother is 5’8 and my father is barely 5’11. The football coach envies me, the male and female basketball coaches eye me daily and offer me under the table incentives to join the team. The track coach recruited me, not to be a runner like my sister, but to be a thrower with the rest of the big girls. Stacy was—and still is—a swan or even an ostrich, strong and lean and fast. I’m a Clydesdale. Or a caribou. There is no bird equivalent to what I am.

My size is only the beginning, though. Part two of this story that I discuss with Ms. Flynn every week is my personality and how it’s been shaped, why I am the way I am, blah blah blah. From one slut to another, I love the woman, but man can she ramble. Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m known as the resident slut in my town? It’s ironic, really, but we’ll get to that in just a minute. Let’s go back to Stacy (Ms. Flynn loves to say this).

Stacy was known in high school, she was even known in college. Not the way a lot of us end up being known, where some teacher remembers you and some of your friends, maybe your coach if you got them a state championship or at least won enough games to ensure some job security for them. Stacy, she just has it—that elusive quality, trait, characteristic, whatever it was—and is—that makes people love her. They want to be her, and if they can’t accomplish that, they at least want to be around her. She’s demanding and opinionated and yet, she has a way of making you see her side of things. Never in her life has she spoken out of turn or made a rude or inappropriate comment. She’s a lady, through and through. The absolute antithesis of me.

I haven’t exactly perfected my personality, and people are more stunned by me than enamored. (Actually, the other day I was running and I had my head down and I sent Mr. Salmon flying just outside of the cafeteria. I really stunned him. But again, not quite what I was going for.)

My personality is what I consider that of the survivor. My size, combined with my ability to always make a scene no matter how hard I try to stay in the background and never say a thing, has made life all but impossible for me at times. For instance, I got my period in front of the entire student body in middle school during my championship volleyball match. The sideline ref spotted blood and blew his whistle, putting us at a standstill while everyone checked their hands and arms for cuts, even their noses. It took me almost five minutes to realize that the pain in my stomach was most definitely not because of nerves and by then the little red droplets had turned into a stream, much like Moses’ red sea I imagine.

You don’t live a day like that down, and so I have been dubbed Flow. Even my hopes of leaving the nickname behind once I got to high school were crushed as a girl who had been on the opposing team that day showed up in my Freshman English class and had a good laugh about it as she announced it to everyone. I had a good laugh that day when we played dodgeball in PE and her own nose started flowing. Coach K our P.E. teacher—who also happened to be my volleyball coach—ruled it an accident and gave me a fist bump on the way to the locker room. That was the first time I had to talk to Ms. Flynn. She assured me that day that once I understood my behavior was a cry for attention and help, I’d live a much happier life.

Who needed help? I wondered aloud that day. I wanted that bitch to bleed and she did--straight from her fake nose.

This was not the answer Ms. Flynn wanted and so we began our weekly sessions, me always providing her with enough fodder to have reason to call me in, despite how much I tried not to at first. Now I was resigned to seeing her and made the best out of it, even on days when she was trying a new counseling technique and would take long pauses or continue nodding her head as I spoke, like some out of control bobble head.

So, currently my yearbook is sure to be laden down with memories such as When Flow got her period in front of the whole school or When Flow pinned Tommy Knowles (state champion wrestler) in just under two minutes during the homecoming boys vs. girls Fun-in-the- Sun. I know, to most people who attend a school of twenty-five hundred students and counting, that’s really not a big deal because they’re just pleased to be remembered at all.

Which brings me to what will surely be the third thing remembered about me: When Flow went to that party her sophomore year and got knocked up by the resident pothead.

Yep, I had a baby last year. This is where the slut thing comes in, I’m guessing.

Chapter Two

Not that it matters, but I feel I should be allowed to clarify and say that I had a baby yes—well, have, as I wasn’t Juno and there was no glamorous woman with a huge home waiting to take my offspring. I mean, my sister Stacy would have taken her in a heartbeat (it’s a girl, go figure, as I am about as adept at being a girl as a dinosaur is at being a human) but I thought it was a little stunting for the kid to grow up knowing her biological mother while being raised by her adoptive mother/aunt. I’m not in jail, there is no court order stating that I can’t see her or be with her, so it just didn’t feel right.

Back to my point. I got pregnant in March of my sophomore year, had my baby last year in December, and have a baby this year, my senior year. I also only slept with one person, and though I would love to now tell you it was more than once, I digress, I am the cliché, the one that every sex education teacher loves to use as an example (including my mother. She teaches Biology at the University for Christ’s sake. Talk about embarrassing). I had sex once, and I have a baby. I know what you’re thinking—poor baby daddy, he slept with a naïve girl and now he’s got a kid. You would be right, sort of.

He is a poor daddy—and I mean that in several ways. Number one: he is the worst person a girl could think of to get pregnant with (hooray for me for not only getting knocked up the first time I did the big it, but also making sure the guy was a complete and total tool just to add some icing to my already crumbling cake). Number two: he would be poor, if you didn’t count the money he gets from his enabling parents and his job—local pot dealer. Number three: he was a poor lay—go figure.

We never spent much time together before the night of conception and we haven’t spent much since. Everyone knows she’s his because on the night we met (and conceived, yeah, that’s again where the slut part comes in) we weren’t overly concerned with who saw us do what, apparently. So, even Marcus knows she’s his but we don’t talk about it and I never ask him for anything because I figure although Gracie (the little one) will be messed up enough from having no dad, if I were to add in stoner dad who impregnated mom on a night neither of them remembers too well, the issues become more complicated. Ms. Flynn’s always telling me to simplify my life and I figure this is one place I can really take that to heart.

Especially since right now my life is complicated enough. For the past twenty minutes I’ve been sitting in Stacy’s living room while she stomps around, ranting about irresponsible teenagers (me) who get lucky and have babies (me again) without even wanting them (and a third time). While responsible people (her) get shafted by God for doing things in the proper order (I bite my tongue but I really want to ask her what the proper order of getting banged is).

Translation: Stacy just got her period. Again.

I mean, it’s not like I’m asking for a miracle here, I just want to have a baby.

Some people consider a baby a miracle, I say and watch her eyes narrow to slits. I know I shouldn’t open my mouth, but I can’t help it, even after three years of talking to Ms. Flynn every week and having her tell me that my lack of impulse control is what gets me into trouble. Something about Stacy’s logical way of assuming she’s a good person and, therefore, should get a baby makes me want to play devil’s advocate. Or just get a rise out of her, if I’m being honest.

Is that what you were thinking when you found out you were pregnant, Rae? Her tone is sharp, the same one she uses with her tough patients, I’m sure, but rather than have me quivering in my boots and reflecting on my actions, it just makes me smile.

Yes, Stacy, I want to say. While sitting on the toilet in the girl’s locker room at barely sixteen, holding a stick I had just peed on, praying for it to say NOT PREGNANT while knowing I was about to throw up for the third time in two hours, I was thinking what a miracle it would be if my one-time sexcapade with a stoner had gotten me pregnant.

But rather than say what I am thinking—put one in the victory column for me—I say, Point taken, and let her go back to ranting. This, really, is all she wants. She doesn’t expect me to listen or even have an answer, she just wants an audience for her tantrum so when she’s done and breaks down into a fit of tears, someone is there to coddle and sooth and tell her how unfair it is, all the while affirming how amazing and deserving she is. I’m hoping Nick, her husband, gets home before this responsibility falls to me.

I mean, what am I doing wrong? I bought an ovulation test, I’ve changed my diet, regulated our sex life. What else do I have to change before I get a baby?

Here’s where Ms. Flynn might be right about my personality. I know Stacy doesn’t want a joke or a wisecrack any more than she wants my advice. As far as she’s concerned, I’m one of those statistics that is simply ruining her chances of getting pregnant, like there are only so many babies allowed to be born and I stole one from her. And still, I can’t help what comes out of my mouth.

Have you tried getting drunk? It worked for me and mom.

In hindsight, or even in plain sight, I know it wasn’t the right thing to say, and it’s not that I’m mocking her or her feelings. I wish she could get pregnant; trust me, I probably wish it more than she does for the sole purpose that she can then start talking about something else and stop being such a martyr, but I also can’t help myself. She acts as though my having a baby is something that I take for granted and that I’m so lucky to have a baby in high school. Which, okay, I probably do take having Gracie for granted because at first, I wasn’t sure I wanted her. I’m eighteen for Christ’s sake, let me be selfish for a minute and consider what my life would be like if I didn’t have a one-year-old. But I do, and I am grateful because Gracie is the best baby in the world—and still, it doesn’t make having her any easier.

The one thing I’ve been good at since I was little is volleyball. I’m almost six feet tall, it was either that or basketball and though I’m a big girl, I’m not really butch and that’s where the difference comes between volleyball and basketball players. I’ve been ranked since I was a freshman, a top recruit people said, a natural division I pick papers wrote. And then I got pregnant.

Do you know how many articles said that after Gracie came around? About as many as the coaches who called me to ask to pay for me and my daughter to come visit their university. Yeah, I’m lucky, I have a baby and parents (at least a mom, since my dad has the maturity level of a nineteen-year-old and didn’t even stick around to raise me) who help out. No one kicked me out or tried to force me to have an abortion, no one exiled me from the city, and as great as everyone has been, my biggest fear is that I’m not sure I’ll ever look at her, my daughter, and not see what could have been instead of what is. And that’s harder than looking at my sister right now knowing she may never get a baby. She can regret what she doesn’t have and I’ll listen, but I know more than she thinks because every day I look at my life and regret what may never be, for me and my daughter.

Chapter Three

Absolutely not.

You’re such a whore.

False. I was a whore last year, I’m a teen-mom this year.

Stop trying to be funny and look at me.

Resigned, I look up from the calculus homework that I’m trying to concentrate on and have no notes to help with, thanks to my latest session with Ms. Flynn, to cock my head at my friend Katie. At five feet four inches tall and maybe a buck ten, she’s the cutest sprite of a girl I’ve ever seen. She’s also the most terrifying, especially on days like today where she’s all biker-babed out in a nose ring, black skinny jeans with seriously spiked black heels that make her a good four inches taller, and a black tank top with some sort of Asian writing stenciled on it in red. Her hair, normally pale blonde to go with her sky blue eyes, is scarlet. This look is all thanks to the influence of her latest boyfriend, no doubt. The term daddy issues was invented for Katie.

You know Coach is going to flip if he sees you in those stilts. Not to mention your hair color.

Katie waves her hand in the air. Like he can tell me what to do when I’m not on the court.

I ignore this because we both know he can, and does, as he’s the only one who keeps her in line. Her dad’s gone, her mom’s living with boyfriend number four since the divorce—who doesn’t happen to like teenagers—and Katie fills the gap by disobeying everyone in a position of authority and waiting to be brushed aside. Coach never does, no matter how hard she pushes.

Besides, Doug bought these boots for me. Of course he did.

How is Doug the biker boy? Her face lights up with the first week glow she has for every relationship. Next week will be the irritated eye roll for everything Doug does, and the week after that, if we stay on track, will be the constant complaining, the text arguments and the inevitable break-up. Katie is nothing if not reliable.

Amazing. We went for a ride last night and drove all the way to the coast. We got the bike up to 110. He bought me my own helmet.

It must be love, I say and try not to gag. Katie’s newest boyfriend is a twenty-year-old community college dropout whose current goal in life is to become a T Bird—John Travolta style. He has everything from the Chucks to the jacket and the comb which he keeps in his pocket and uses when he waits outside of school for Katie. But rather than Sandy, who Katie looks eerily alike, he prefers a more Girl Interrupted look, hence Katie’s overnight transformation.

To put it mildly, he is a douche—a one hundred and fifty pound douche whom I’ve already assessed and know I can do some serious physical damage to if he hurts her. As I long ago recognized a pattern of idiocy in all of Katie’s boyfriends, no doubt a direct mirror image of her own sterling father who is currently a ward of the state for armed robbery, I always assess them at the beginning. Since most of her boyfriends are emo or some other shit that keeps them from growing and looking healthy, it isn’t hard to intimidate them.

All I’m asking is that you meet his cousin and consider going out with us. We don’t have a tournament this weekend and Doug told me Richie is really sweet and super good looking.

Well, if Doug says.

Don’t be a bitch, Flow.

First a whore, now a bitch. Is this Doug’s influence or do you think of these pet names on your own?

A smile twitches at her lips before she sighs and sits down.

Doug doesn’t really like you, to be honest.

Color me shocked, I say and turn back to my homework.

He says you’re scary.

I can’t help my smile. Imagine that.

I know, right? That’s why I suggested the double date with Richie—so he could see how sweet you really are. I didn’t tell him about Gracie, though, don’t worry. I dont’t want him thinking you’re easy.

A laugh escapes and I can’t help but shake my head. Thanks for that, but my answer’s still no.

Katie groans and leans forward. Come on, Flow, it’s just one night. Besides, you haven’t been on a date since…

I look up at her with a raised eyebrow. Since I got pregnant? And that wasn’t even a date. Imagine if the guy bought me dinner first. I shake my head. I think my reasons for avoiding this one are clear enough.

I was going to say since Tripp, she says, and has me pausing in the middle of my equation again. You haven’t been on a date since that night sophomore year when you went to the basketball state championship after party and hooked up with Tripp.

When I say nothing—how can I, I know she’s right—she lays her hand over mine in a quiet show of support. I know you love him. Loved him, she amends when my eyes flash to hers. But he’s with Lauren, just like he was before the night you hooked up.

A pain shoots into my stomach with her words and I have to suck in a breath. Nope, I will not go back there. Not to that night, not to the night a few weeks later that was impulse which led to Gracie. I won’t go back to all the nights before when I felt exactly like this—aching and hurting and swamped with love for someone who has never really seen me. If it takes a date with some underfed hipster for me to prove it, bring it.

Fine, but I’m driving myself in case I feel the need to flee at any moment and I refuse to go anywhere that burns incense and plays bad live music all night. I want a real restaurant with real food. Katie shrieks and launches herself at me and I laugh. I’m serious, Katie. If I’m leaving Gracie with a babysitter, I want it to be worth it.

She laughs and nods her head. It will be, Flow, you’ll see. I’m going to call Doug and tell him it’s on.

I watch her wiggle her cell phone out of her pocket as she walks toward the edge of the cafeteria near the windows to get better reception. When she passes the basketball table, the boys all hoot and holler at her good naturedly and she does a pirouette—a miracle in her icepicks—but I’m already ignoring her, my eyes automatically drifting to the buzzed blonde who’s sitting in the last seat, his broad shoulders hunched as he wolfs down what is no doubt his third sandwich in record time. He has a plain navy blue t-shirt on with jeans—nothing fancy or showy, which makes him ten times sexier. If I was sitting next to him, I might be able to smell the gentle scent of his Old Spice deodorant, the only scented thing he wears. I know that because I know him, better than I know myself at times.

Tripp Jones—athlete extraordinaire, high school heartthrob, and the only person to ever break my heart. The shit.

~

In fairness, Tripp doesn’t know he broke my heart and I would rather rip it out and stomp on it before telling him. All heartache where he’s concerned is of my own doing, although Katie can find fault in just about everything he does. I secretly think this has to do with the fact that Tripp dumped her after a three day relationship in the seventh grade because she wouldn’t let him put his tongue down her throat. I punched him for that, and again for dumping her in front of the entire cafeteria at lunch, but Katie’s not one to forgive and forget, so in a moment of weakness two years ago when I told my best friend that I slept with Tripp and things had happened, she promptly warned me that wasn’t good.

How