Johnny Read online

  He gave a frustrated sigh and then fired his lips onto my cheek!

  They became wet, just as they’d been four years before. And I felt the light breeze from the window making that side of my face a little cool.

  This time, I didn’t wipe it off.

  -2-

  Our “relationship” didn’t last long.

  Johnny was kind, gentle, patient. But I simply wasn’t ready. For three months we fought. He’d wanted to kiss me and touch me in places I didn’t want to be touched in...yet. I liked kissing him on the lips, liked being held by him, but it seemed he wanted so much more!

  I was a prude. Because he’d wanted to touch my breasts mainly. Nothing else. But I wasn’t ready for that.

  As I’ve mentioned, girls like the redhead Nicole had “mushroomed” into their sexual prime, my progress was more like a slithering snail.

  My hormones just weren’t ready for it.

  As much as I hated to admit it (and I did hate to admit it!), Johnny and Nicole were more suited to each other back then, if only from a developmental perspective.

  It was the age of experimentation, of getting to know our bodies.

  I wasn’t there yet, and the whole subject repulsed me.

  It didn’t mean I didn’t love Johnny. I did. I loved him endlessly already then.

  Which only made things worse and more confusing.

  At the apex of our “relationship,” three months later, Johnny came over and said to my mom that he needed “to talk to Cat urgently. And in private.” He spoke firmly, and I could hear him at the door all the way from my room upstairs (Johnny rarely came in through the window during the day—too risky). Even long before we’d “officialized” the “Boyfriend and Girlfriend” thing, my dad had made it clear that we weren’t to be alone in my room under any circumstances! (Actually, I think that rule came into play on that day when I was eleven and I cried because Johnny had kissed me.)

  That Johnny visited me at night was not something my parents knew about.

  Today, however, my mom made an exception. I’m sure she knew damn well what was going to happen. She let Johnny talk to me “in private” in my room. “For a few minutes only, Johnny,” she said. “Mr. Ramsey will be home soon and you know how he doesn’t like that.”

  In my room, in reference to my discomfort with the physical side of our relationship, he said, “We’re Boyfriend and Girlfriend. That’s what Boyfriends and Girlfriends do!”

  “I know, I know, I just... I don’t know why I don’t want to do it! It seems...weird and... Can’t we just, you know, hold hands and hug or, I don’t know, Johnny!”

  “Cat, you know I love you, I’ve always loved you.” (I wasn’t ignorant of the way he was using “love” in this sense. We’d loved each for years...as friends.) “But...this isn’t working. And I’m scared to lose you. I don’t want to ever lose you, Cat. I don’t. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I want you to be my best friend forever. I want us to tell each other everything. And this is tearing us apart. It’s destroying us, don’t you see?”

  My eyes filled with water. He’d hit it on the nail. And I did see, and I was so happy that he’d said it, because I didn’t want to lose him either! I strode over to him and wrapped my arms around his neck and held him! “I love you, Johnny.” Tears poured down like a fountain. I pulled my head back, gave him a peck on the cheek, and even stuck my tongue in his mouth rapidly like a lizard! “Now that’s all you’re ever getting from me!”

  Little did I know...

  He laughed.

  When he left, my stomach clenched up tight and there was a...tingle...of some sort...

  I’d never felt it before, not like this.

  I ignored it. And even though there would be a nagging feeling of sadness in my mind later on, I knew this was for the best.

  Johnny and I returned to my state of awkwardness around him, my state of both wanting and not wanting him, and the sheer uncertainty of it all; and Johnny returned to being the cool and ever smooth Casanova that he was evidently destined to be.

  I saw the girls gravitate to him at school over the months, saw how Nicole Ferman in particular fluttered her eyes and made sure to graze her hand over his chest in the hallways. Even my “best” friend Vivian started having eyes for him. And, geeky though she was, she did try and flirt with him once or twice. I simply rolled my eyes.

  Johnny took it all in his stride. He glowed from the attention, but never forgot me. He’d come by and stand by my locker, making sure I was OK and I’d tell him he should go over and talk to his girlfriends before they fell over their tongues. He’d say shit like, “You’re the only real girl for me,” mocking me, and then I’d punch him, and he really would go over to his “girlfriends” for a bit.

  And then disaster struck.

  It was four months after I’d turned sixteen, two weeks before Christmas, and almost exactly five years since I’d first met that little boy across the street who would grow up to become the dark and tall man that I would forever regret letting slip through my fingers. And it was also six months since Johnny and I had officially decreed our state of “Boyfriend and Girlfriend” as both unlawful and foolish.

  The disaster was this: I “mushroomed.”

  One day to the next, as if it had been sitting latently in me all these years, just waiting for the worst possible moment to come out—my boobs popped out, my hips widened...

  ...and volcanic, lustful desire erupted inside me.

  It was unbearable.

  The thoughts, the images, the ideas, the sudden wants—all this was simply unbearable. I felt like an alien had taken over my body!

  And then all doubt was gone from my mind.

  I wanted him.

  I more than wanted him.

  The desire for him made my tongue dry.

  I wanted Johnny in all the ways a girl could ever want a boy. All the terrible, sinful ways.

  And I knew I would never want anyone else.

  He and Nicole had been dating for a month.

  -3-

  I’ve kept a diary since I was twelve. I have several of them, each with a tiny little lock that can’t be opened unless you have the code (or unless you tug a little harder than on a shoelace—but people get the point when they see it).

  It’s a typical diary with things written in different colors and hieroglyphics based off what I was thinking at the time, random thoughts, ideas.

  And poems. Lots of poems. Poems until the cows come home. Poems filling pages, odyssey poems, epic poems, poems of grief, poems of love, poems of hate.

  And poems of Johnny. So many poems of Johnny.

  How could I not see this coming?

  I wrote.

  I saw you, and yet I didn’t.

  I heard you, but didn’t listen.

  I felt you, but never touched.

  And now you’re gone. I miss you so much.

  I loved you, but didn’t see it.

  You called me, I didn’t hear it.

  You kissed me, I wiped you away.

  Won’t you kiss me again on a blustery day?

  You were there, across the street.

  I went to you so often, on my little patter feet.

  We smiled, we played, we laughed, we laid

  our heads under the sun, hoping for dreams, looking for fun.

  But I was blind to what was in front of me,

  couldn’t believe such goodness would come to me.

  And so you ran.

  You found her.

  You kissed her and wound her

  around your olive finger

  where she’ll probably forever linger,

  because your curse

  is the verse

  of poetry...

  ...in any girl’s mind and dreams.

  But especially in this one’s.

  Your magic,

  so tragic.

  Gone.

  -4-

  Poetry helped me think. Poetry helped me breathe. Poetry sto
pped me from moping around because I knew I could lose myself in a rhyme and then take a deep sigh and forget what had just happened.

  It got me through.

  I didn’t cry when I wrote the “Ode to Johnny” (or whatever you could call it!)

  If I hadn’t written it, I would have cried.

  I would have cried for days.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ~ Problems ~

  -1-

  It was no secret that my parents were having problems, but it was only after my “mushroom” that I really started seeing them. What is it with puberty that it rips apart every shred of belief you’ve ever had in anything magical?

  My parents had fought mildly over the years, no more than any other suburban middle-class family, I guess. But it was only now, now that I’d started feeling the tensions and tightnesses of adulthood, that I became acutely aware of certain details about the two of them, details which made me deeply uncomfortable.

  My dad was drinking a lot. I’d never noticed it before because he’d never taken it to boiling point, had never taken it to the stage of fumbling and stumbling around the house and making a fool of himself. But the haze of beer from his breath, the glazed smile and the “elsewhere” taint to his eyes as we sat at the dinner table had reached the stage where it was impossible not to notice anymore. When had it begun? When I was fifteen? Fourteen? Younger? Sitting there at the dinner table, at sixteen, the only thought I came up with was that it had “always been this way.” Indeed, it really had been. I’d often seen him with a beer in his hand growing up. And? All the dads in the movies also had beers in their hands, that didn’t make them alcoholics, did it?

  I noticed the faint look of despair in my mom’s blue eyes as she sat at dinner, sometimes dressed up, and yet the dinner was over and done with within a matter of minutes, mostly us sitting in silence. And then we’d clean up. The only sounds to comfort us during and after this reverential “family meal” was the clatter and scraping of cutlery and plates.

  I felt the sorrow on my mother like a thick blanket of nettled fleece.

  I asked her once in the kitchen, “Mom, is everything OK?”

  “Of course,” she assured me.

  But it wasn’t. My folks were unhappy, I could feel it, I could sense it.

  Mom started staying out late some nights “with her friends” and when she’d get home my parents would fight and I’d go to my room and text Johnny and we’d talk as soon as he was free.

  Johnny had become my natural go-to person whenever things got heated. Vivian had a nice suburban life a few miles from where we lived. Our home-lives looked the same from the outside, but mine was starting to eat itself up from the inside. She was cool when it came to talking about dresses and guys and movies and books... But that’s where it ended. Once I’d hinted vaguely at my sadness at not being with Johnny anymore and she’d said, “Oh, honey, you’ll find someone else!” and then she pulled out the latest issue of Us Weekly and asked my opinion of the dresses.

  Viv was a good chick. She just wasn’t BFF material.

  Johnny, on the other hand, had found me red-eyed at school one day after a particularly heated parental argument in the morning. Whereas I’d gotten away with telling everyone I was coming down with a cold, Johnny didn’t buy it. He pulled me aside at recess, ignoring the catcalls from girls vying for his attention, ignoring even Nicole Ferman’s comment of, “Oh, baby, come on! I thought we were gonna have some fun now!”

  He took me behind the gym and said, “Now! Tell me now what’s happening!”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “I just have—”

  He put his hands on either side of my head and pinned me to the brick wall. His eyes narrowed. I couldn’t face those eyes. They were the only eyes that could see right through me. “Bullshit,” he growled. “I’ve known you all my life. And I know what you look like when you’ve been crying. Now tell me what’s happening. Did some guy feel you up? Did Nicole start shit again.” Nicole had not hidden her jealousy of my and Johnny’s friendship since they’d started dating, pushing for him to spend less time with me. Johnny never paid any heed to it. “Tell me.”

  And so I told him.

  “How long?” he asked me at the end.

  “A...few months. It’s...” My chin quivered. “It’s...scary...sometimes. They’re really...loud.”

  “Violent?”

  I shook my head. Not yet, I thought, and I didn’t know where the thought came from.

  Johnny pulled me toward him, held me firmly. I wept into his chest, grateful that I had an anchor.

  Nicole Ferman “caught” us a few minutes later. “What the fuck?” she howled.

  Johnny was quick to respond. “Oh, knock it off, Nicole! She’s my best friend!”

  “What the fuck is—”

  “I SAID KNOCK IT OFF!”

  “I better go,” I whispered.

  Nicole looked like a flaming witch with her fists clenched at her side.

  Since that day, Johnny checked in with me daily on how things were going at home.

  Things weren’t going any better.

  Things were going downright shitty.

  -2-

  A typical nighttime phone conversation:

  “Your folks fighting again?” Johnny asked me on the phone.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  “Wanna come cover?”

  “I...can’t. It’s late. Besides, I’m a little worried about my mom.”

  “Would your dad do anything?”

  “No! But...just in case.”

  This is what they officially call “Denial.”

  It wasn’t long before I couldn’t take it anymore and I was rebelling at the dinner table, refusing to sit in this facade of family unity when it was apparent that there was some great rift that sat between us like the proverbial elephant that no one dared mention!

  Dad’s own late nights became almost commonplace, and the few times we did sit down and eat at the table, World War II would start all over again.

  I became catty, true to my name. And soon, naturally, I became the scapegoat to my parents’ frustrated tensions. Instead of sitting in silence, I now sat grudgingly, until my father would pipe up, inebriated, and tell me I should “smile more” or “have more respect” or “dress less...revealingly.”

  The more painful rebukes were always accompanied by a slight slur.

  Dad was a different man.

  And when he’d downed a few beers or a few Scotches, he became a completely different man.

  I realized here that even though dad had carried a beer around a lot when I was growing up, this was different. Something had changed, and it wasn’t only me.

  Dad had changed.

  I didn’t like this other man.

  He wasn’t my father.

  One night, after a particularly late night of revelry on my father’s part, I heard an argument so loud coming from my parents’ bedroom that I went out into the hallway to listen.

  Muffled cries soon became piercingly sharp as my mother slammed open the bedroom door and completed her sentence. “...is unbelievable! And how many were there! Two, three?”

  The fight progressed down the stairs to the living room, then the kitchen. I didn’t have to move around to hear much of it, they were loud enough. I stayed at the top of the stairs, out of sight. I heard most of the words. They seemed to have forgotten that there was someone else in the house.

  I texted Johnny. What you doin?

  But I didn’t read his answer.

  My phone fell onto the carpeted steps after I heard the slap, and the howl of a woman who’d just been hit!

  My heart raced!

  I sat paralyzed for a second, sure I would hear more, sure that the house would be torn apart with violence soon! I was too afraid to budge, too afraid to even pick up the phone that was only a foot away from me!

  But all I got in return was silence.

  And then, “You fucking bastard! How dare you strike me! How dare you!”


  More silence.

  I heard a mumble.

  “...sorry, Alice...” was all I could make out. “...so sorry...I...I’ll get help.”

  The muffled sounds of weeping.

  “...so sorry ... so sorry, honey. I love you.”

  A soft wail, like that of a wounded animal.

  I picked up the phone and read Johnny’s answer. With Nicole. What’s up?

  I didn’t reply.

  -3-

  For a few days after that, we were all extra careful to not get on each other’s toes. Dad made an effort to not raise his voice. We actually even had dinner together three nights in a row.

  The dinners at the Abreus had not been happening for a long time. It seems my parents were circling the wagons, and pushing those skeletons as far back into the closet as they would go.

  But the skeletons were bulging out.

  The facade only lasted a week.

  From my parents’ bedroom, I heard a shriek, and then a crash, and then my mother wailing. I ran to just outside the door and listened, afraid, thinking I might need to rush in like some hero to protect my mom. And to protect my dad from himself as well! This was all just a big misunderstanding, surely! We’d spent sixteen years together as a happy family and now things were a little off kilter but we could get back on track.

  Those had been my thoughts at the time.

  It felt like my world was crashing, like everything in my life was falling apart like thousands of splinters of wood from timber breaking in a woodchip machine.

  My dad’s voice growled with rage as he spoke softly and deadly to my mother inside the room. And then he used language fit only for a prostitute, and he said things that made me feel bad for my mom, and angry at him for being so cruel to her.

  There was a crash, a faint moan, some stumbling. “Fuck you!” from her and “You bitch!” from him. Then more muffled cries, the sounds of fighting. He grunted angrily.

  And then I heard what was...maybe?...the unmistakable sounds of people...having sex?