The Bounty

3. But It's Not Even My Birthday

[ 3. But It's Not Even My Birthday ]

At twenty-six years old, I was pretty confident in the idea that nothing could surprise me. I was terribly wrong.

When I was two, I was put into foster care. I learned a lot between the ages of five and ten about how to get what you want from people. It was about learning what makes someone tick, what appeals to each individual. I could never use the same tactics twice. For example, women over the age of forty naturally loved me. It was something about my eyes, I think, so all I had to do was sweeten them up and I'd have them in my pocket. Meanwhile, older men liked their egos stroked. Yes, sir, getting drafted when you were eighteen is very admirable.

That being said, there wasn't much an eight-year-old orphan wants besides a chance.

I found someone who was willing to foster me when I was fifteen until I was an adult. Her name was Bethany and, though she was sixty-eight and overdue her social security, she didn't have much money. She taught me everything I knew about the streets of the Bronx and how to survive. All of the knowledge about reading people and judging a good apple from a rotten one was from the School of Bethany and I truly couldn't have had a better teacher.

Bethany died when I was seventeen from some complicated heart disease that they didn't bother trying to explain to her punk foster child. I was sent back to the group home for the remaining three months of my adolescence.

The worst thing that Bethany taught me was how to love somebody. Even if it wasn't an intentional lesson, it was one that I would never, ever forget.

After the system decided that my eighteenth birthday was means enough to kick me out, I was out on the street until I was nineteen. It wasn't so bad. I was hungry most of the time and slept from motel room to motel room, paid for by a dead-end, minimum wage job. But I had people looking out for me, so in turn I looked out for them. In life, it wasn't always about what you know. It's about who.

Then I met my first boyfriend.

Refer back to when I said I knew how to love and I knew it well. I loved that man so hard that he couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle me, just like the everybody else. A year into us dating, I'd lost the boyfriend role, instead adopting the honor of being his very own personal punching bag. I didn't stick around long enough to see if he'd change because I knew he wouldn't.

I knew how to look beneath the exterior that people liked to display. The dirty, bloody innards deep within a person was where the truth was. I could see it all.

The only good thing that came from my ex-boyfriend was meeting Georgette at a house party. And getting off the streets, of course.

Georgette and I may have had a rough start, but we were two souls interlocked, in a way. I couldn't explain it. We had very little in common, from our music taste, down to our political agenda. Maybe that's why we clicked so well. The honesty that came with admitting our differences left little for Georgie to hide. I could see deep within her, too, and nothing was unexpected.

Nothing grand lead up to my meeting Ron. We both landed a shitty landscaping job and connected over our mutual hatred for it. I had only known him for a year now, but I'd trust him with my life. That was, if he knew what to do with it.

Needless to say, I'd been through the ringer. I found stability uncomfortable and continuity exhausting. My occupation was quite literally elaborate miniature heists, for Christ's sake. So nothing surprised me.

Until I woke up to a crushing weight on my body and a hand over my mouth.

My eyes shot open, hardly adjusting to the pitch blackness of my bedroom. In the corner, I could see the moon shining through the break in my taupe, rayon curtains. I used it as a light source to readjust my eyes on while I focused on not suffocating under the rough hand over my breathing orifices. I tried to remove it, but my arms were trapped under the assailant's legs.