The Cafe Across the Street

Part 4

Day one (morning before school)

The pink-haired girl lay on the couch, although feeling miserable, she thought about James. He was the only one who knew her secret.

She was a drug addict. It started as weed, and, as we know, it progressed into more. When her parents divorced her world was already falling apart it only collapsed until her mother's boyfriend, Gabe, showed up. She was thirteen, her mother had left to visit her brother and his wife in Idaho, Jenna didn't come with her, still angry about the divorce. She shut herself in her bedroom, back to the door surfing the internet on her laptop as girls do. She didn't notice the sly creek of the door through her earbuds. Everything went black. She awoke unclothed, bruises up her thighs, and with a pounding headache. She wept uncontrollably and hardly managed to find her cell phone and call her mother due to her blurring tears.

"Mom," said Jenna shakily

"Jenna are you okay? Why are you crying?" her mother interrogated.

"Mom, Gabe... he raped me, mom! He raped me!" she blubbered.

"Jenna, her mother answered angrily, Gabe is a good man do you expect me to believe that?"

"I'm your daughter, he's a guy you met 9 months ago! Of course, I'd expect my own mother to believe me!" she cried over the phone.

"Your father and I are not getting back together, Jenna. How many times do I have to explain this to-," before she heard the end of her mother's sentence, Gabe held her in a strangle and hung up. The cops showed up, her neighbors had called when they heard her screams. She went to court and was granted her plea for emancipation, no longer trusting her mother to be her caregiver. Her father, as always, was nowhere to be found.

She turned to drugs from then on, having nothing else to fall back on. She stole money to pay for them, but a lot of the time that wasn't enough. She'd had her fair share of being sexually assaulted. She didn't care anymore, they'd called her the one's table and ridicule her for how easy she was on the street, but she didn't care about standards she didn't care about values and beliefs, she only cared about the drugs and Andy. That's why she needed to protect him from the monster she'd become. That she'd been.

She couldn't remember what James looked like, but she recalled that she thought him to be quite attractive. She'd set up a coffee date with him. She needed to clear things up and beg for his silence. It's not like she had any dignity to protect. He helped her escape a man who'd been trying to kill her. She'd have to tell Andy, but she wasn't sure how to tell him. She'd hidden everything about her life, as far as he knew, Jenna was this perfect goddess with parents who didn't deserve her. Top-of-the-class student, and musical prodigy, mastering Beethoven at the age of six. She cherished him very much but if she revealed this side of her it'd be as if he didn't know her at all. He didn't, but she didn't want to hurt him. He didn't need that.

Off to school.