story time

It's almost four in the morning and I can't sleep, so I thought I would tell you a story.

A lot of my friends know that when I was 19, just about to turn 20, my mom kicked me out of the house. I came to NYC on a bus and so on and so forth and stayed for five years. Since then my mom and I have patched things up and I am now back living at the same house I was once thrown out of, life really does come full circle, doesn't it?

Thing is, I grew up in a very small town in Ohio, there were about five thousand residents living there when my parents moved there in 1990, and when my mom and siblings and I left in 2005, enough people had left that the town had to be downgraded from city to village status. So you get the picture, we are talking SMALL. Everyone knows everyone, as well as everyone's business is discussed on a daily basis, everywhere. You don't have to go to a hair salon to hear about Amanda getting knocked up and what does her mother Sally think? And oh that poor girl, her future is gone now. No, you will hear about it AT THE GROCERY STORE.

As you can imagine, I didn't get much exposure to the big, bad world living in a small town like this.

Skipping ahead...

I'm new to the city, about three months in, and I've just been lucky enough to meet a man on the subway who tells me about the Covenant House, I go there and they accept me. Mind you, that to me the city is a big, scary place to me at this point and I still have my small town manners and trust about me. Going around saying things like "Good Morning" and "How are you, today?" and "Hello!" And just leaving my few personal items about, trusting that no one would abscond with them.

The Covenant House is in Midtown on 8th Avenue, and one avenue over, on 9th there was an adult shelter, I would walk by there and always see crowds of people outside. I didn't know at the time, but I later found out through gossip in the House that Pimps picked up their Working Girls in that area.

I was walking by there one day and I met a guy, he was a bit older than me, but I didn't mind that. I was just happy that someone was paying some kind of attention to me, fresh off my mother abandonment shenanigan.
I saw him a few times, and we talked on the phone, and he bought me a few things, which I was surprised by and it completely won me over.

One day he invited me to take a ride with him in his car. It was a white Range Rover. So fancy, I thought.

We end up at a hotel. And I started to get nervous. I didn't think to ask where we were going.

I was so nervous that I didn't say anything when he got the room.

We go in, and continue to talk, I turn on the TV. He sits next to me and I said something like "Isn't this show funny? I love this show."

The guy starts getting impatient and I don't exactly remember all of what happened next but I remember him yelling at me and saying "What do you think I bought you those things for?!?!"

It was at that moment that I realized that he wanted me to sleep with him.

I had no idea before that, I was that naive.

He yelled a lot and finally left the room. And then I went up to the front desk and was instantly in tears. They were so nice and they offered me another room for the night, but I just wanted to go "home" back to the Covenant House. So I did.

That's the story, dear readers. Moral of the story is. Don't kick your daughters out of the house, unless you teach them street smarts first.