Free Found by Jennifer Lauck

talented.”
    Her statement caught my attention and pulled me to my own full height.
    “Can I make money as a writer?” I asked.

    “Certainly,” she said.
    “How?”
    “As a journalist,” she said, “in the short term and then a novelist perhaps. Or short stories.”
    In my head, a series of computations were being run. Be a writer. Make money. Escape. I had a plan.
     
     
    AND THEN EVERYTHING went horribly wrong.
    Richard was fired, something about the black market sale of out-of-warranty appliances. He said he was framed. The whole thing was a scam. It was politics.
    Richard was then home, all day, everyday. He watched TV and made a nuisance of himself. I knew because it was my job to fix the meals, do laundry, clean the house, and care for Kimmy. Richard followed me around, bossy and rude, saying, “You’re doing a half-assed job, you no-neck brat. Get out there and wash my truck, vacuum the living room again, blah, blah, blah.”
    He drank brandy in his coffee.
    He slept on the sofa in the afternoon.
    He was depressed.
    Peggy was the one to support the family. She became embittered by their reversal of roles.
    This was about the time they both began to push me to join the military rather than go to college. Peggy made enlistment sound like a Parisian holiday. “You can travel,” she said, “and they pay for college.”
    Graduation was one year away.

     
     
    I WAS SO damn busy with school, my job, my homework, all my domestic responsibilities, and my extracurricular activities, but still, somehow, I found time to become obsessed with the notion of sex.
    As if a time bomb had exploded inside my seventeen-year-old body, I was on fire with a desire to have intercourse.
    If one traced my secret history, the explanation was there in the annals of time. My own mother had had sex when she was sixteen, and look at the shame, the concealment, the denial, and the forgotten result (which was me). Full of wild adolescent hormones, I was burning to explode from my faux skin and enter into truth no matter the cost. A sexual encounter could be a doorway to freedom.
    I was quick to choose an object of adoration—a new boy who had moved in across the street. Dark and mysterious, this new boy played the saxophone and was painfully shy. He called himself a military brat—his father was in the air force. He was perfect for me—moody, emotionally unavailable, and withdrawn. The fact that he showed no interest in me for months, even though we lived across the street from each other, made him that much more of a catch.
    I charmed, smiled, and seduced him with relentless focus. Once he noticed me, I made it clear that I would “put out” for the right guy. What boy, at seventeen, doesn’t want to get laid?
    After school and in secret, I got myself on the pill, because I was not—under any circumstances—getting pregnant.
    And then we did it!
    Sex.
    Total disaster.

    The boy across the street was a novice, of course. Most virgins are. And I was a ticking time bomb of repressed sexual abuse. Our experimental and very painful copulation made me cry so hard that the kid was paralyzed by confusion and could not get through the process of inserting tab A into slot B. I urged him forward, all the while reassuring him that all girls cried from the ecstasy. Didn’t he know? Crying was in all the books, I said with worldly confidence, between sobs and sniffs. When we were finally done with the wretched act and he scurried away, I stopped being stoic and let the tears rain. The physical pain was bad, but worse, there was so much inside of me that was hidden and buried and yet alive in my cells. I had blundered into the dark realms and hidden corridors of myself but had no way to understand where I had landed. There were no therapists, no teachers, no guides, and no wise women in my life. I had only my books and my own mind, which was full of insane ideas including one that said, Now you’ve done it. You’ve had sex and are no