In the romance novels Kelli liked to read, the men were always handsome. They might be hard to reach at first—they might be in denial about how much they wanted to fall in love—but after they’d met and finally made love to the heroine, they always crumbled and admitted how they felt.
For two weeks after Kelli had lain down in the front seat of Jason’s truck, she kept waiting for him to crumble. She saw him in the hallways; she smiled at him in algebra. But he barely spoke a word to her. When she tried to talk with him, he looked at his friends and snickered. He moved his seat away from hers when she passed him a note. My parents grounded me for a month, it said. But it was worth it. Hot tears flooded her eyes when she saw him toss the note around to his buddies. She didn’t understand how he could do that when he loved her.
“He doesn’t love you, Kel,” Nancy told her as they stood next to each other in the bathroom, fixing their hair before heading to their next class. “He used you to get laid.”
Kelli blushed. “He did not. He told me he loved me.”
Nancy turned and frowned at her. “Please. Boys will say anything to get in your pants.”
Kelli blamed herself. Maybe she didn’t play hard-to-get long enough. She should have made him wait. She should have made him take her on a real date. The only place her parents would let her go was the library, so for the next few weeks, she went there after school and scoured back issues of Cosmo for articles about what to do to win Jason over. Want to make him jealous? one article said. Flirt with his friends and he’ll realize how much he cares.
Perfect, Kelli thought. The following day, she approached Jason and his friends Rory and Mike at their table in the lunchroom. “Hi, Mike,” Kelli said, purposely not looking at Jason. She knew she looked pretty—she’d borrowed a tight blue sweater from Nancy and a pair of Levi’s that had been pegged at the ankles. Every curve on her body showed.
Mike, another tall boy who wasn’t quite as handsome as Jason, smiled at her. “Hey, Kelli. What’s up?”
“Not much,” she said, lifting her shoulder and pushing out her chest. “I was thinking . . . do you maybe want to study together later? I could use some help with algebra.”
Mike glanced over to Jason with a strange smirk on his face. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve heard you are lots of fun to, uh, ‘study’ with.” Mike made invisible quote marks in the air, and seeing this, all three boys burst into laughter.
Kelli felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She didn’t know what to do. Her eyes burned with tears, and she looked over to Jason. “You told them?” she whispered. Her voice fractured as she spoke.
Jason lifted his jaw and shrugged. “Yeah, well, you’re a church girl, right? You should have known better.” They all laughed again and Kelli raced out of the lunchroom. She hid in the bathroom for the rest of the afternoon, crying.
When she got home, her father was standing in the living room, waiting for her. She stopped short, unused to seeing him before the bank closed at six o’clock. She knew her eyes were red, so she dropped her gaze to the floor, hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Where’s Mama?” she asked.
She felt his eyes on her. “She’s in our bedroom. She got a call this afternoon from the school secretary. You weren’t in any of your classes after lunch.”
Kelli’s stomach clenched and she looked up at him. She’d never skipped class before—she didn’t even think about the fact that her parents would get a phone call. “Daddy—” she began, but he held up his palm to stop her.
“I don’t want to hear it. You are a disappointment to me, young lady. You are a liar.” He paused and pushed his black-rimmed glasses against the bridge of his nose. “Your behavior is unacceptable and you will be punished for it.”
Kelli nodded, feeling the tears well up behind her eyes again. She longed to be able to ask him for help—to find comfort in her father’s arms—but she knew it was pointless to hope for this. “How much longer am I grounded?” she asked quietly.
“Grounding you didn’t work.” He took a breath. “Go get the wooden spoon.”
Kelli’s breath caught in her throat. He’d only spanked Kelli a couple of times—once when she was four years old, after she had grabbed her mother’s favorite crystal vase to admire it and accidentally dropped it to the floor, and then again when she was six and, in a fit of anger, cut off all the blossoms on her mother’s roses. “Daddy,” she said again. “Please. I promise it won’t happen again.”
He nodded, pressing his lips together into a white line before speaking. “You’re right. It won’t. And this time, you’ll remember why. Get the spoon.”
She was fourteen; he couldn’t do this to her now . . . could he? “Mama?” she called out, and her father took a step toward her. Kelli took a step back.
“She agrees this is the proper punishment.” He stared at his daughter. “Don’t make me ask you again.”
Kelli felt a wave of anger rise up inside her. She clenched her hands into fists at her sides and straightened her spine. “No,” she said. “I made a mistake. I was upset and crying in the bathroom and I lost track of time. I didn’t do it on purpose.” She knew he wouldn’t ask why she was so upset. He didn’t care about that. He only cared that she had broken a rule. He only cared how he felt, not her.
Her father’s dark eyebrows raised. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.” Kelli saw her mother appear behind him. “Mama, it was an accident. I didn’t mean to skip class. Tell him to stop this. Please.” She was so scared, her voice shook. She’d never stood up to him this way.
Her mother looked over to her father, then back to Kelli. “Thomas,” she said. “Maybe it’s too much.”
Kelli’s father turned toward her mother. “You called me at work. You asked me to come home and do this.”
“Not to hit her,” Kelli’s mother said quietly. “Just to talk some sense into her.” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I should have just dealt with it myself.”
Kelli’s father’s body visibly relaxed and she seized the opportunity. “I’m so sorry, Daddy. It will never, ever happen again. I promise.” She began to cry, but neither of them moved to soothe her. After a moment, her parents left the room—her father out the front door to head back to work and her mother to the kitchen to start dinner. Kelli stood weeping in the living room long after they were gone, wondering if anyone in this world loved her at all.
* * *
Over the next couple of months, Kelli stayed quiet. She was quiet at school, quiet at home. She felt nauseous much of the time, tired in a way she’d never been before. All she wanted to do was sleep. She made polite conversation with her parents, accompanying them to church and attending youth group without a fight. She stayed as far away as possible from Jason—she even distanced herself from Nancy. Everyone in the school was talking about her—whispering about what she’d done. One boy cornered her at her locker and asked if she gave blow jobs in the front of trucks, too, and she wished she could simply close her eyes and disappear. She shut herself off from anything that might hurt her, and yet she cried every night in the dark, her face buried deep into her pillow. She wasn’t sure what she wept for, but the tears came whether she understood them or not.
“You’re losing weight,” her mother remarked one morning as they sat at the table for breakfast. Her father had already left for work. Since the day she stood up to him, he’d barely spoken to her at all. It was like he’d have preferred that she didn’t exist.
“I’m not hungry,” Kelli said, swirling her spoon around in her cereal. “I feel a little sick.”
Her mother reached over and placed the back of her hand against Kelli’s forehead. “No fever,” she said. “Have you been throwing up?”
Kelli shrugged. She had, in fact, just thrown up that morning. She’d been throwing up for weeks. Grief over all that had happened, she decided. Like one of the heroines in her novels—she was lovesick, devastated by how Jason had used her. How easily she had given herself away.
“Do you have your period?” her mother asked, her voice so soft Kelli could barely make out the words.
“No,” Kelli answered, and then her breath froze. She looked at her mother, wide-eyed. “It hasn’t come.” Oh no. Oh please. It couldn’t be true. It was only once. It happened so fast.
Her mother’s face went gray and her shoulders slumped forward. She dropped her fork with a clatter. “For how long.” A statement, not a question.
Kelli tried to remember the last time she’d needed the supplies in the blue box under the bathroom sink. It was before Jason. Before her world as she knew it began to fall apart.
