My name is Samantha Kramer, but everyone just calls me Sam. My life hasn't been what you'd call 'normal', but then, whose is? Stuff happens. You deal with it. Nothing worth writing about. But it was spring, just five months after my 18th birthday when my life got seriously weird. Weird enough to write about, so I'm starting this journal or diary or whatever, OK?
I'm not sure where to start. I guess I'll start when Dad left last year. That's as good a place as any. He and Mom had been arguing for months, so I wasn't really surprised when he took off. When they argued, it wasn't the shout and get over and make up kind of argument that kids have. They just kept getting angrier and angrier until they started screaming at each other. Then Dad would storm out of the house and slam the door and not come back until the next day. One day he didn't come back at all.
I won't get into the arguments and the screaming because I don't like to think about that. I don't want to relive that part. Well... maybe I should try to say something about it. So I'll just say that most of the arguing was about sex. They would be in the bedroom with the door shut and just when I thought they were having some fun together, I would Mom start to yell, "No" and Dad would yell something about "Oh for God's sake Yvette, why the hell not?" and Mom would say, "It's perverted" or "It's nasty" or something and they would be off on another argument.
I tried to talk to Mom about what was happening, but all she would say was, "You stay away from men. They are all worse than animals." I wanted to talk to Dad, but Mom never left me alone with him long enough for us to have a private conversation. She always acted like she was scared he would try to make me do the bad things she said he tried to do to her. I think that's what finally made him leave — he couldn't stand being treated like a sex criminal in his own home.
I don't know what kind of things Dad wanted Mom to do, so I can't say if they were really bad or not. I tried to imagine the worst things I could, but I could not think of anything bad enough to make her act the way she did, so I just couldn't understand what the problem was.
After Dad left, I wanted to go find him and try to get him to come back. I tried to get Mom to tell me where he went and that was a mistake. She told me she didn't know and didn't care. After that, she started treating me like she thought I would run away and go live with Dad if she let me out of her sight for a second. I had to account for every minute that I was out of the house and I could only go to school stuff where there were lots of chaperones to make sure I didn't sneak off. It was a real pain. I mean, a convict on parole has more freedom. After a few weeks with Warden Mom, I started thinking like a prisoner, trying to find ways to get around the bars, to slip out of the chains whenever I could. I had always been into sports, tumbling and gymnastics and stuff when I was younger, then Field Hockey when I got older. I even tried out for the Varsity Cheerleading Squad and I got in. Although I'm sure that was because of my 34D-18-28 measurements. Cheerleading practice got me an extra hour after school before I had to be home, but I could still never be late or stop by the library or hang with my friends or anything. My social life was a complete zero. Even after the games, Mom hustled me off as soon as it's over. I never got to go to the after-game parties or anything, even if we won.
At first, Dad would mail us a check every few weeks. I made a point of looking at the envelope each time, but there was never a return address on them. After a few months, that stopped, so Mom got a job at the big electronics plant out west of the city. She was lucky enough to get on a day-shift, but she still doesn't get off until 6:00pm and she doesn't get home until almost 7 most nights. Supper became whatever the take-out special was at the meat-and-three restaurant she passed at on the way.
I guess Mom must have caught onto how happy I was that I was going to have a few hours each day without her breathing down my neck. She spent a couple of hours alone in her bedroom one night. "Thinking things over," she said. When she came out; her eyes were red and puffy and she sat me down for one of those 'serious' talks. She said she didn't trust me to stay at home alone after school. 'Unsupervised' was how she put it. She said she had made an arrangement for me to stay with this friend of hers until she got home. She told she would call Mrs. Reynolds to make sure I'm there like I'm supposed to be and then time me while I walk home so she could be sure I didn't take any detours.
I'd never met Mrs. Reynolds before. I couldn't even remember Mom ever mentioning her. I figured she was someone with the same rigid moral agenda as Mom; another last-ditch holdout against the sexual revolution that I learned in Social Studies had been over for decades, but which Mom seemed to think could still be defeated by keeping me from enlisting with the revolutionaries.
I knew something about the Reynolds family, of course. I knew they were Upper-Crust kind of people with lots of money. I had been going to school with their two boys for the last couple of years. I even heard through friends that one of them might be interested in me, but Mom never gave me enough slack to find out.