Free The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler

unfairness of calling them “bad girls” and of the social scorn that was inflicted almost exclusively on them, and not on the young men with whom they had conceived.
    I was a senior in college and I was getting ready to begin my student teaching, which was very exciting. I had been dating somebody for a few years and he was the person I was going to marry. We had gone through the traditional steps of that time. First it was the friendship ring—everybody got that pearl ring—and then the Christmas right before I was given a hope chest. It was a beautiful hope chest and everybody was giving me gifts and planning for this marriage.
    Once I finished school, the next step would be the engagement. Of course, I was thinking maybe that summer after graduation. He was a couple of years older than I and he was teaching at the time. So, you know, we had a relationship and we had plansfor the future. But the plan didn’t include my becoming pregnant at that point in time. But it was still going to be okay. We went out and we ordered wedding rings and we were having them engraved. I don’t believe those rings were ever picked up.
    I knew that my parents would be upset but I didn’t know how bad it would be. My mother was screaming and yelling and my father threw him out of the house and then hit me so hard that I went across the kitchen. It was horrible. I just never expected that. Then we went to tell his family and they were horrible, too. He left me sitting there in his house with his mother screaming at me and the last thing I remember her saying to me was “What have you done to my son? What about my son’s life?”
    My parents said that if I agreed never to see him again and do exactly as they told me to do, everything would be taken care of. I remember calling him and telling him that, and he said that might be the best thing because we had too much going against us.
    —Kathi
     

 
    NANCY I
    T hings began to get fairly physical between us. I had never entertained the idea of sex before, because it just wasn’t done in our family. In those days, there was just a certain decorum in puritanical families. We were never even allowed to say the word
pregnant;
we had to say
expecting.
Everything I learned about sex was off the walls in the A-wing bathroom. We would talk about it at lunchtime: “Can you believe this is what they do?” “No. You’re kidding.” I mean, we were seniors in high school—how pathetic is that?
    I could tell that he knew a little bit more than I did and, as ridiculous as it sounds, I was learning from him. He had come out to visit me one evening and we went for a walk, and he decided that that was going to be the evening he would “have his way with me,” and he did. I was scared. I just didn’t know…I mean, the whole biology of it. He kept saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s really hard to get pregnant. Don’t worry.” What did I know? I didn’t see a lot of pregnant people, so I figured, I guess it
is
really hard. Maybe you have to do this a lot to get pregnant.
    Later, I began to notice that there was something awry. I started getting sick in the morning. I knew something wasn’t right. I got clothing for Christmas and I knew that however badly those clothes fit me then, it was only going to get worse. I remember taking a particular green-and-white dress that my father had bought me up to my room. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “This is a joke. This is going right back to the store.” I took it back and later my father said, “I’m not gonna buy you kids’ clothing anymore. Soon as I do, you hightail it right back to the store and take it back.”
    I had stayed after school for a student-council meeting and I was sitting on top of a desk in a classroom, participating in this meeting, and I saw my mother’s face through the door. She was a teacher at the elementary school in town, but I don’t think she had ever set foot in the high school. I knewwhen I