Finding Me by Michelle Knight, Michelle Burford

me on one of the rare occasions when I could come to the phone.
    “Hello?”
    “This is Cassie,” said a high-pitched voice. “I found your number in Erik’s phone.”
    “Who’s this?” I asked.
    “I don’t know if you know this,” she began, “but Erik and I have been going out for a few months.” I went mute, and she hung up.
    For an hour afterward I sobbed. Suddenly I understood what the word heartache meant. I felt like someone had pierced my heart with a thousand stickpins.
    I began avoiding Erik at school. When our eyes met across a classroom or in the lunchroom, the expression on his face said it all: he knew his girlfriend had told me his secret. A couple of classmates told me that after Cassie had busted him, he began downplaying our relationship. One girl even told me that Erik said, “Michelle was never my girlfriend. She’s just someone I fooled around with a couple of times.” I never asked Erik about it, but I could tell by the way he was treating me that it might be true. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for his sweet talk, but that was how badly I’d wanted to be loved.
    A couple of weeks after Cassie’s revelation, I finally ended things with Erik. It wasn’t a long conversation, but instead a quick, “I think we both know this is finished.” I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, like the sudden rip of a Band-Aid from skin that’s already sore. I didn’t tell Erik I was expecting a baby; I didn’t think he deserved to know because of the way he was acting toward me. But I did have to break the news to my mother. A few weeks later I worked up the nerve to tell her. I knew she wasn’t happy and that she probably didn’t want me to have this baby. But I told her it was my choice, not hers.
    As scared as I was, I never even thought about having an abortion. I hoped that at least the baby would love me. At the time I felt like no one else in the world did.

6
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    Huggy Bear
     
     
     
    A S I BECAME MORE EXHAUSTED from my pregnancy, I could barely get myself out of bed. And it was embarrassing to attend classes when my stomach started showing. So toward the end of tenth grade I dropped out of school. I’m sure my classmates hardly noticed I was gone.
    About five months into my pregnancy my parents split up and my father moved out of the house. I don’t know why they parted, but they’d been arguing nonstop for at least a year. After he left, things were a little more peaceful.
    Once I dropped out of school, I sat around the house all day and watched TV or read Stephen King books. Thankfully, because I was about as sick as I was huge, my mother cut me a little bit of slack in terms of household responsibilities. By that time the relative who’d been abusing me had backed off some. After so many years, I got pissed off enough that I was determined to defend myself.
    “Stop it!” I’d spit when he tried to force himself on me. As petite as I was, I could kick and shove pretty hard—and now when I fought him off, sometimes it worked.
    I was excited about the baby coming, and I got even more excited when a nurse told me, “You’re having a son.” But I was also very scared. As a whole bunch of soap operas, followed by Judge Judy , blared on the television during my afternoons at home, my thoughts raced. What will I do to get money? How will I provide for him? Will I be able to get my own place? Who will hire me without a high school diploma? And if I get a job, will anyone watch the baby for me ? I didn’t have any of the answers, but I did know I was supposed to have this child. The way I saw it, the baby growing in my stomach was God’s gift to me.
    After being abused for so many years, I was still on the fence about God. Did he exist? Did he not? I wasn’t 100 percent sure. But if he did exist and was good enough to give me a child to adore, then I decided that might be enough to make up for the hard stuff I went through during my first eighteen