me, pulled my hair back from my face, and tucked it behind my ear. “Are you going to get up to take a shower before we go to the dining hall?” she asked me.
I was sick to my stomach, so food was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to stay in bed and hide my face forever because of the shame I felt. “I’m not really hungry,” I said. “I’m gonna skip dinner tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m just gonna lie here for about an hour and then I’ll get up to take a shower.”
Denise sighed. “OK. But if you decide to change your mind, you know where I’ll be,” she told me, and then she leaned in closer to me and kissed me on the forehead.
At that very moment I wanted to crawl underneath a fucking rock. How dare she remind me about our sexual escapade? I was not her fucking woman, so what was up with the kissing thing? A part of me wanted to scream at her and tell her to get away from me, but then the other part of me decided against it because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Denise had been nice to me from day one. When I started withdrawing from that heroin, she was there. She stayed up half the night with me for the first two nights. Not only that, she even had her family send me a box of clothes so I could have something to wear every day. She had been good to me, so I guess the only way she felt like I could have repaid her was by fucking her. Maybe for her it was a fair exchange.
After she kissed me, she grabbed her iPod from her locker and headed out of the room. Knowing she had left my presence felt like a weight had lifted from my shoulders. And at that moment, a light inside of my head clicked on and told me this was my chance to escape.
I hopped out of my bed and slipped on a pair of blue jean shorts, a white and blue Swarovski crystal beaded T-shirt, and the Adidas flip-flops Denise’s parents had bought for me. Once I was fully dressed, I grabbed Denise’s duffel bag from her locker and stuffed all my things inside. My heart raced the entire time I packed up my things. The last thing I wanted to do was let Denise catch me while I was trying to pack my things to leave, so I found myself looking over my shoulder every chance I got. When I realized that I had packed all my things into the duffel bag, I let out a sigh of relief.
As I made my way toward the door, I remembered that I was dead broke. I didn’t have a dime to my name. But I knew that Denise had a few dollars she kept stashed in her locker. I honestly didn’t want to steal anything from her, but I was destitute. And I couldn’t leave this facility broke. That wouldn’t be a good look at all.
“Screw that!” I mumbled underneath my breath as I turned around and headed toward her locker. “I don’t let niggas fuck me for free, so I am not about to let a bitch fuck me for free either.”
In ninety seconds flat, I had gotten back into Denise’s locker, taken the one hundred seventy dollars she had tucked away in her sock bag, and was out of our room, closing the door behind me. As I made my exit toward the front of the facility, Mr. Macer met me at the end of the hall. He looked very puzzled, but quickly caught on to why I was carrying a duffel bag in my hand.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
“Mr. Macer, I’ve got to go. I just found out that my daughter was rushed to King’s Daughters Hospital, so I got to be by her side,” I lied.
Mr. Macer stepped to the side, and as soon as he cleared the way for me to walk, I put one foot in front of the other and started making my way toward the front door.
“Did you tell anyone on the staff about this?” he asked as he walked alongside me. He acted as if he was going to stop me from leaving at any given second. But I wasn’t going to have that.
“No, I haven’t spoken to anyone about this. I just found out my ex-husband was on his way to the hospital like ten minutes ago.” I continued to lie as I headed toward the exit. Mr. Macer kept walking
Weston Ochse, David Whitman