Take Me With You

“Okay, I believe you now,” I told Born Here on the phone after she'd left the gym. “All I know is I've been dating him since the summer. I know his mama. I've been in her house and she told me I'm the only girl he has.”

“I'm bout to go to his house and get my shit and tell him I'm done.”

“Take me with you,” I said.

I told her where I lived and gathered the condom wrappers off my floor. Twenty minutes later I hopped the fence and walked up to where her car was parked with her friend, a girl I'd never met, in the passenger seat. I slid in the back.

The friend asked me if I used to stay at an apartment complex a few blocks away, and when I told her yes, she started describing the posters I'd had on the walls in my first apartment. Ken had brought her and Born Here inside my house while I was at work.

“He said you were just his best friend, but you gave him money.”

Then Born Here told me she gave him money, too. “I wonder why I'm broke all the time. It's 'cause I have this car note and I have Ken.”

“How many weeks pregnant are you?”

“Like twelve. Look.” She pulled the collar of her shirt down, revealing his name in ink so fresh it was still raised.

“Damn.”

We took the city streets at nearly freeway speeds, which wasn't uncommon in Vegas. Her phone rang. It was Ken. I kept quiet while she told him she was on her way home. After she hung up, she said, “He gave me his iPhone.”

It was the same iPhone he'd bought with my money.

“He told me that got stolen at school.”

“Ken doesn't go to school.”

It all began to make sense. The end of August was when he'd started messing with Born Here heavy. He'd told me he was busy studying just so I wouldn't wonder why he suddenly didn't have time for me. But how could he have known, when he impressed me with lies about college the first time we ever spoke, that his story would be so useful later? It would take me a while to understand that guys like Ken didn't tailor their lies to fit their girls, they picked their girls to fit their lies.

I told Born Here I thought there was one more girl, beginning to wonder if it was NY's money he'd used to buy me that Obama shirt and lunch at that Chinese spot, back when everything was new.

“Do you snort coke?” Born Here asked me.

“No,” I said. “I don't even smoke weed.”

I was confused by her question but didn't have time to think about it much because we were pulling into his apartment complex. Born Here called Ken and told him she was outside. I ducked down in the backseat. He met her a few feet away from the car like everything was cool. Then she smacked him in the face. I popped out and ran up, screaming, “You weren't with me two hours ago? Then what's this then?” throwing the condom wrappers on him. He pushed me back by my shoulders.

Born Here said she wanted her stuff out of his house. Ken went inside while we waited right by the door. He opened it to hand out a few plastic bags and that's when I forced my way in. Bay was sitting in the living room with his mouth open. I demanded the most recent five hundred dollars I'd given Ken and his dazed mother picked it up off the coffee table and handed it to me.

Ken appeared in my face. He tried to say something.

“She got your name tatted!” I screamed.

“I didn't tell her to do that.”

“She's pregnant!”

“I didn't know.” He put his hand on his chest like the fucking Pledge of Allegiance.

“You're lying,” I said.

The next thing I remember, I was walking up Chandra's front steps. I was shaking, but I wasn't crying. I'm not gonna let myself even think about being sad, I vowed. The person I'm gonna miss never even existed.

Chandra and Cornrows were in the living room, smoking. I took a deep breath, tired of hearing myself talk before I'd even said a word, and told them the whole thing.

Cornrows's voice seemed to condense from the smoke he breathed out. “You just gotta learn from this, go write about it in your journal...”

Chandra laughed. “She does write in a journal!”

“...so you don't go through it again. And move on. It's 'bout to be 2010.” He set the blunt in my fingers. “Now hit this.”

“Just one time,” Chandra said.

Every friend who knew I didn't smoke wanted to be the one who got me to try it. It was like a race to deflower (or, technically, en-flower) my lungs.

“Fuck it.”

I put my mouth on it and had no clue what to do. Smoking weed for the first time was nothing like sucking dick for the first time, I can say that. They attempted to explain how it was done. I took a few pulls, started coughing like a coal miner, and that seemed to be good enough.

With a calmness that I think came more from adopting a sense of duty than the weed itself, I went upstairs. I wrote a few simple paragraphs about Ken and my night, made a quick call to a friend in Cleveland, and fell asleep.

I woke up to a blocked number call from Ken. He tried to apologize for things without admitting to them, tried to suggest it had been someone else on the phone saying he hadn't been with me. But that had been his voice, the same one that was now enticing me like a drug to believe his lies just one more time. But I couldn't, I wouldn't. I was beginning to formulate this theory, that if I put the same effort into myself that I'd put into him, into turning this aint-shit dude into a king, then who knew what I could accomplish?

When I got off the phone with him, I found NY's number and called her, told her I was sorry for not believing her sooner. Shockingly, this girl who'd had me circling parking lots with Vaseline on my face, was actually cool as hell. She'd never turned a trick in her life, but that had been her money he was spending on me in the beginning. She said it had been the same cycle with her. As soon as she turned eighteen, he treated her to a couple dates then started needing her to help pay for “college” and light bills and such. NY and I are friends to this day and she's the one who gave our ex-boyfriend the nickname Ken, because she said he was fake like plastic.

That night of the condom wrappers was the last time I ever saw Ken in person. Over the following years, he went to jail a few times, once for robbing the home of another dude from his clique, though he either beat that case or managed to plead down after sitting in the county for about five months. I believe he has two kids now (neither of them the baby he conceived with Born Here), both daughters. I don't wish anything bad on him. I just wish he never does to another girl what he did to me, to us. I stalked his MySpace those first weeks after our split and identified a whole new batch of girls he was trying to game. I made it my mission to warn each one.

I wish I could say that after him, I managed to turn my whole life around. I wish I could say that what I went through with him was the worst thing that would ever happen to me, or even the worst thing ever done to me by a man. Unfortunately, my struggle was still young.