I Said No

Chapter nineteen

Jessica and I are driving up to Vancouver to hang out with Anthony and some of his friends. They're throwing a little party. Anthony and I have continued to talk since my birthday party. It seems to be going well. He says sweet things to me. He makes me feel good again. He makes me feel beautiful and wanted. My days seem easier when they are filled with his voice.

I've known Jessica for a long time, since middle school. At the time, she was my best friend. We lived in an extremely small town, if you can even call it that. More like a long road with house and a couple stores. My family had a little farm. I went to a Kindergarten through eighth grade school with a couple of my siblings. Then we moved and we lost touch. I've moved a lot in my lifetime. I'm not sure why we moved. It may have had to do with money.

I remember one time, the police came to repossess my parents' Suburban. My parents weren't home, I was only 13 and two police officers came to my house telling me they had already found the car in our barn and they were going to take it. If I wanted to clean it out now and turn it over easily, they there wouldn't be any problems.

They followed my sister and I back to the barn and began looking over the car while I started cleaning it out. One officer found leftover marijuana remnants on top of the center console. He started screaming at me, asking me if we were dealing drugs. He then yelled, 'to get the car cleaned out now and he would forget about that part.' My stepmom has smoked marijuana for as long as I can remember. Even before I knew what marijuana was, I remember smelling that same smell. I remember that smell as far back as third grade while I was visiting my dad.

I started bawling, yelling at my sister to clean the car out faster, the police would not stop antagonizing me about going to jail. We threw the entire contents of the car into a gigantic pile.

We moved into town not too long after that and Jessica and I lost touch. It didn't really matter. We simply lost touch. We were young, I made new friends. But for some reason, four years later, she wrote me over Facebook asking advice on whether she should lose her virginity to her fiancé or not. I gave her a lengthy answer on waiting until the moment was right and not to rush. After she reached out to me, we kept in contact. This was all extremely soon to when I was going to move back to Oregon for school so it would be nice to have a friend.

We moved in together. She was my first roommate. Jessica is definitely classified as one of my drinking friends. She is fun, but not someone I can entirely trust. Every other month, she has a new boyfriend, each overlapping with the last. She finds a new guy, tries it out while still with the last guy and then eventually breaks up with one for the other. It is an odd thing when one of my friends hurts another friend because of her dating methods.

Jessica has always looked younger than everyone else, not in a bad way, she will probably still look younger than everyone once we are all old and wrinkly. She's about five feet tall and blonde. She has pale clear porcelain skin. When we were younger, she was sick a lot. I'm not quite sure what she had, but she always had stomach issues. Always had last minute visits to the doctor, always had to stress about her medicine.

We got a hotel room for Saturday night, but we are staying the night at Anthony's friend's tonight. We are thinking we might throw a hotel party tomorrow. For tonight though, a party with his friends sounds perfect. I'm excited. I'm excited he invited me to hang out with his friends and be public. I couldn't say the same for Kyle. Anything we did for the last year has been in secret, behind closed doors. Anthony wasn't ashamed of me. He was different. He was my best friend and he had changed for me. A player no more.

I told him I was raped. He listened. He was quiet. And then he told me he was there for me. I believe him. Just like he was there for me through Kyle, he would be there with me each step of the way for this. This time, hopefully, as my boyfriend instead of as my friend.