Page 7 of Dirty Little Secret
“So I’ve been told.” She laughed menacingly, making me smile. I loved living dangerously. Why not live that way? What did I have to live for anyway? “So, no miscarriage. Did you lose the baby after it was born?” I could hear the sympathy in her voice, mixed with caution. Taylor knew me well enough to know that revealing so much about myself wasn’t easy for me.
“Kind of.” I grabbed the dash as she made an abrupt stop at a stop sign that seemed to have crept up on her.
“Kind of?” She narrowed her pale blue eyes at me. Her tiny nose was pointy and turned up at the end. Taylor really did remind me of Tinkerbell. Only, her short blonde locks were pulled into spikes, and each one was dyed a different color on the ends. “How is that an appropriate answer, Zandy?”
“I had a baby. And my parents made me give him up for adoption,” I clarified my answer.
“Made you?” she asked, then hit the gas hard enough to make a jackrabbit take off.
Clutching the bar above my head, the one I called an “oh-shit bar,” I went on, “At barely sixteen I lost my V-card to the boy I’d had a crush on since I was about twelve. He had dirty blond hair, all-American good looks, and eventually, a killer body. The first hint of attention he gave me made me putty in his hands.”
Zipping up to the parking space in front of the apartment we shared, she stopped right next to my red Mustang. Her head swiveled to look at me. “So, you gave it up to this guy who you weren’t dating but you’d been crushing on for years, and you ended up preggo? On the first go?”
“Precisely.” Getting out of the car, we made our way to the front door.
The whole complex was made up of ground-floor apartments, another thing that made me like this place better than the place I’d been living for the last eight years. No stairs to climb and no one living overhead, making noise all the time. The apartment was perfect.
Taking a seat on the expensive leather sofa and loveseat, Taylor asked, “Your crush didn’t want to do the right thing by you, Zandy?”
Shaking my head, I said, “I never told him about it. I never told anyone about it. My mother was totally up in my personal business. She kept track of her periods on this calendar that she called the “menstruation keeper.” When I got my period when I was around thirteen, she began adding mine to it. She said she did it so I would know right when I was about to start so I’d never be unprepared.”
“So you’d put some tamps in your purse then, stock up on Midol,” she said with a knowing grin.
“Most of the time, yeah.” Chewing on my lip, I thought back to that time when my period hadn’t come. “Well, anyways, suddenly, one month, my period didn’t start.”
“And when it didn’t show up, what did you do?” Taylor asked with wide eyes. “I mean, I’ve never had a pregnancy scare at all. My mother trotted my ass down to the clinic right after my first period when I was fifteen. She made me start getting the shot as soon as I could, and I’ve been on it ever since.”
“I tried to hide the fact that it hadn’t started.” I remembered how hysterical I felt when I was late. “I lied to my mother about having it, telling her it was right on schedule. Only I didn’t think about one important thing.”
Nodding, she said, “You forgot to plant evidence, didn’t you?”
“Yep.” My chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh.
She shook her head sadly. “Rookie mistake, Zandy.”
Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “I was a rookie. And I wasn’t ready to handle anything, never mind what would happen when my parents found out. I figured I’d have at least a few months to figure something out and eventually talk to the guy about it. I had no idea if he wanted anything to do with me after we’d slept together. We didn’t do a hell of a lot of talking before we got naked together.”
“He must’ve been so hot,” she mused. “’Cause you’re a really gorgeous girl, Zandy. You could have your pick of anyone.”
“I was plain back then, and my parents were really strict. I wasn’t allowed to wear any makeup at all. Everyone else was, but not me. And my mom cut my hair.” I cringed, remembering the horror that was my hair. “I had these straight, very short bags. The rest of my hair was one length that went down to the middle of my back. My clothes were all purchased by my mother, too. Needless to say, they would have looked very appropriate on a teenager in, say, 1950.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any pictures,” she said with a wry smile.
I threw a little pillow at her, smacking her in the face. “No, you jackass.”
“Thought as much.” She tossed the pillow back at me, and I caught it. “So, what happened next?”
“Mom took me to see our doctor. He told her I was pregnant. I was only a couple weeks along and already my parents were making decisions about the little baby I carried.” The tears sprang up on cue as his tiny face made a brief appearance in my head. No matter how many years passed, I knew without a doubt that I’d never forget the sight of his perfect little face.
Taylor got up and came to sit next to me. Her arm around my shoulders was meant to comfort, but it didn’t help at all. There was just no way to comfort someone who’d had their child taken away. “They made you give it up?”
Nodding my head, I let the tears flow freely. “We left that night to go stay with relatives in Chicago. Mom and Dad took me out of school. I had to finish high school online. Dad had a cell phone, but other than that we had no other phone because they didn’t want me to be able to talk to any of my friends—the few that I even had. When I was on the computer doing schoolwork, my parents would watch me, making sure I didn’t get a chance to contact anyone. They never wanted anyone to know the shame of what I’d done.”
“And the father of the baby never knew?” she asked as she patted my shoulder, trying to reassure me that everything would be okay. It wouldn’t ever be okay. I’d already accepted that fact.
“He doesn’t know a thing.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, seeing black smudges from my makeup. “He never will. The adoption agency arranged a closed adoption. My parents and I were never given the names of the people who adopted him. And the guy’s name wasn’t on anything—I never even told my parents his name. That was the one thing I refused to do. I didn’t want them saying anything to him or his family about it. It was all my fault, anyway. I was the stupid girl who, when he asked, told him he didn’t have to use a condom.”
“Wow.” Taylor sat back, looking stunned. “That was dumb.”
