by Kali K

Created on: January 25, 2009

When I was 17, I met a boy on the school bus. His blue eyes and crooked grin intrigued me, his confidence carried in worn jeans and white dirt stained t-shirts intimidated my quiet moments on the way to school. He would torment me with flirtatious words, inducing painful blushes, bluntly asking why I was so shy.

One morning surrounded by cold swirling spring mist, he sat on my seat, his blue jean knees touching mine, and asked me to the prom. Fear, adrenaline, and excitement filled my body, shaking out the desire to say no and have a prom night safe in my bed, glasses on, frizzy pony-tail hair, with a good Nancy Drew book. His asking and my yes ignited a chain of events that would change our lives forever.

So we went to Prom, danced with awkward attraction, our brains dizzy from the first few touches, his hand on my purple velvet swathed waist and my wrists resting on his prickly blonde neck. He raced me home that night, and standing on my parents gravel driveway, we taught each other how to kiss, tongues and all. And just like that, we fell in love. Being a teenage couple was fun. It involved alot of firsts, in a small window of time. He taught me to let go, to come out of my shell, and that it wasn's so scary.

After awhile I became a slave to my desire to please him and mistakenly thought "it" would never happen to me so if he likes it better without protection, what the hell. One fall morning 6 months later, in an empty house, I stood over the wooden toilet seat holding the future in my hands, presented in cryptic pink lines, realizing I wasn't alone in the room anymore. There were two of us, just like that. He wanted me to keep it, his parents wanted to adopt it, but on October 12th, 1998, there I sat, in a room full of silent guilty faces. One by one, we took two painkillers out of a little plastic cup, lay on a white paper covered bed while two women chatted maternally, and stopped a heart from beating with the suction of a miniature vacuum tube. I saw it disappear, like a magic trick, on the ultrasound video. Just like that, at the end of the day, half of the visitors to Planned Parenthood were just a memory of what could have been. The girls and I went our separate ways, some relieved, a few giddy, some sickened, and some hungry like me. My emptiness disguised as hunger, was filled temporarily with a breakfast full of hash browns and syrup. And I prayed that I'd get a second chance someday. How selfish right? What about the little soul, denied of a future as the child of a young boy with a farmer's tan and shy scholastic book-worm. I wonder if it ever got a second chance?

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