Chapter 1 - “Stupid Boy”
I’m sitting on the bed in our dingy one bedroom apartment, having survived another day of living in Dalton, Ohio, without a job, without school, and effectively without a life. I’m waiting for my boyfriend Beau to get home from work. He works as a mechanic at the local garage down the street and usually finishes around 6 p.m. I know he’ll be home soon, even if it is only to check that I’m here waiting for him. He’s always had a slight possessive streak; it used to make me feel wanted and needed, but it seems to have kicked up a notch in the past six months.
Beau and I met in high school in our senior year. He was a late transfer student who started with only a few months left before graduation. He pursued me fervently, and despite my parents being concerned about their somewhat sheltered daughter going out with the neighborhood’s new resident bad boy, we fell in love, and we fell in love hard.
He was known for his trademark black leather jacket and dark blue denim jeans, both of which were his staple wardrobe. He’d occasionally mix it up with a wife beater in the summer, but whenever we were out he’d wear that jacket and a shirt underneath. I don’t remember a day that he ever wore shorts, and the only time I’d see his legs would be in bed. His black hair was worn a bit too long, but he always managed to make it look good. His eyes were a deep aqua blue that could strip you bare with one heated look. Yes, he was THAT guy.
He promised me the world and beyond. We’d park up by the lake and talk of the future, of our lives together and all of the things we could achieve. It was one of those high school romances that you read about. Me being the naïve, somewhat innocent and impressionable eighteen year old girl that I was back then, believed that he could give me the world.
We’d been together for a year when he lost his job in Chicago and I started noticing a change in him. Gone was his ever present smile when we were together; more often than not he would be withdrawn and seemed as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Then, he got a job offer from his Uncle in Dalton, Ohio. He needed a new mechanic and wanted to help Beau out. Beau begged me to go with him; said he loved me and couldn’t bear to live without me.
My parents and my best friend, Kate, were dead against it. They had noticed the change in Beau. They’d never been happy with our relationship, so they weren’t shy at expressing their concerns about moving across a whole other state to live with my “bad boy” boyfriend, and were vehemently against me giving up nursing school to do so.
In the end, Beau used the ace up his sleeve, something I didn’t see coming until it was too late.
He blackmailed me into moving with him.
We were lying in bed one night, having just made love, and I was stuck in the post-coital haze that had my mind thinking of fluffy bunnies and rainbows. He rolled over and brushed the hair out of my face. “I can’t leave you behind, so I’ve decided you’re coming with me, Mac. It’s you and me against the world. I can’t survive without you, baby.”
And just like that, it was decided.
The thing with emotional blackmail is that it is much easier to see what’s happening when you are outside of the situation. When you are at the center of it, you can’t see the wood for the trees.
Despite my deep seated reservations and the increasingly disturbing behavior that Beau was exhibiting towards me, I went with him. I believed a change in scenery would do him good.
About a month after our arrival in Ohio, his possessive streak went into overdrive. He had made a new group of friends from the garage who were all about partying, drinking, smoking weed and having sex. Since Beau had me and was already getting the sex, he dove head first into the drinking and drugs side of that equation. Often staying out for days at a time, or skipping work because he was too hung over.
It has gotten so bad now that I’m starting to think that my sweet, loving boyfriend from high school was all an act. Whenever we are in public, he is all over me, claiming me as his, but behind the closed door of our apartment he can be distant and aloof. When he’s drunk, he berates me and puts me down constantly. He complains that I’m a burden on him and how he works his ass off to support us and I should be more thankful.
So here I am, jobless with no school to keep me occupied, and the only person I’m close to here is Beau. He seems to relish that idea; the idea that I need him and can’t get by without him. Every day he comes home from work and grills me on where I’ve been, who I’ve seen, and what I’ve done that day. I used to take it as a sign of his love for me and the naïve girl that I was still held out hope that I would get my old Beau back.
Things are so bad now that I’ve had to put a screen lock on my cell phone. He’s checking through my messages to see who I’ve been talking to, questioning who has been texting me, and calling me during the day while he’s at work to make sure I’m home. He’s also made it clear that because he’s the one who is working and paying for us to live here; that everything I have is because of him and I should be grateful.
Some nights, when he actually does come home, he’ll berate me. He’ll get right in my face, threatening to throw me out and never see me again; saying that I couldn’t survive without him, and how I shouldn’t even try to say no to him.
I’ve started thinking about ways to escape my life, and to be honest, how to escape from under Beau’s thumb. I don’t want to live here anymore; this is not the life I envisioned for myself when I left high school.
I was born and raised in Chicago. That is where my heart lies, but when you’re young and in love, you’re willing to go anywhere to be with them. That was my idealistic philosophy in the beginning anyway. Before Beau started to change; started to become a hollow shell of the man I first met in high school.
I’m struggling to keep up appearances with Beau now, and I’m finding it near impossible to hide my growing distaste for his possessive streak, his ability to tear me apart with hateful words, and his all-night benders filled with alcohol, weed, and God knows what else.
My problem is that I’m trapped. No friends, no money of my own, no hope of ever escaping. Beau has said a number of times that he’ll never give me up; that I’m his girl. I know he’ll never leave me, either. It will take something major for him to let me go.
As of 4.30 p.m., this afternoon, that something major became the worst news of my life.
As I sat in the free clinic bathroom stalls, watching the cardboard stick slowly show one pink line then another, my plans as I knew them were flushed down the toilet, just like the left over pee in the test cup.