Prompt 3: Using the Pentoprint First Line Generator, click the pink button that reads, “generate first line”
“She knew something was wrong when she looked at her baby for the first time, she just couldn’t love it.”
How could she love a reminder of such trauma and pain? She didn’t even know who the father was, not that knowing would change her opinion. Of course she’d understood from an early age what rape is, but she had never met anyone who had experienced it.
When she realized she was pregnant, Cathy had thought she could solve her problem with an abortion, but at fourteen neither she nor her friend Greta knew where to turn. They weren’t quite sure exactly what an abortion was or how it was done, but that didn’t matter anyway because it was against the law in her state.
Her sister had kids of her own and sent her to the hospital where both her kids had been born to ask for help. The doctor she spoke to in the ER asked her what she had been wearing on the night she was raped, hinting she was at fault because her clothing was “daring.” A sweatshirt and jeans?
All Cathy knew was that she was walking home from the library when she was grabbed and dragged kicking and screaming into the bushes at the back of a vacant lot. She wasn’t sure how many of them there were, but she vaguely remembered four guys – or was it five? She didn’t recognize any of them. At some point she passed out, and the next thing she remembered was her next-door neighbor couple helping her stumble home to her sister.
Edie cleaned her up and got her into bed, and Cathy went to school the next day. But the trauma wasn’t over. Within a couple months, it was evident both to Cathy and Edie that she was pregnant. Edie told her she was sorry, but Cathy would have to leave; Edie and her meager income weren’t able to support another child.
Neither Cathy nor her sister knew who their own fathers were, and their mother had bailed years ago. Edie was thirteen years older than Cathy and barely making it on her own, trying to take care of her family while working in a dead end, low pay job.
Cathy showed up crying at Greta’s door, who convinced her mom to let her stay. But now that she had a baby to look after, Cathy had decisions to make. She hated her baby.
Fast forward fourteen years:
Cathy was bright, very bright. She had been on the honor roll until she had to drop out of school because of her pregnancy. Her teachers hadn’t known quite what to do with her because she zipped through her textbooks, aced every quiz and exam, and asked questions that they often had difficulty answering. Now, with no teachers to guide her, Cathy turned instead to her home away from home, the local library. Since the age of six, she had spent every minute she could holed up at the library: searching, finding answers that led to more searching, and searching again. She learned to use the library’s computers to speed her discoveries.
Cathy found work at a neighborhood mom-and-pop diner – the library wasn’t hiring and, besides, the pay was too low. So here she was: a minimum-wage waitress with no benefits. The work was okay, and she was good at it. She became famous – at least among the diner’s customers – for taking orders from groups without writing anything down and getting every order right, even when some folks would change seats to try to trip her up.
When Adam was born, Cathy took three days off from her job, found day care for him, and plowed on. By this time her aging employers were relying more and more on her to purchase provisions and supplies, deal with deliveries, keep tabs on the clean-up guy who came every evening, and show them new ways to handle their bookkeeping and taxes. Thank you, library! It meant long hours, but she was learning – learning all the time.
Cathy blew through her GED exams and started applying for college admission. She would be sixteen in a month.
In a year’s time, Cathy proficiencied much of her way through an associate’s degree in business and started looking for scholarships at colleges around the state. She knew she could never afford out-of-state tuition and living expenses.
At the same time, her attitude toward Adam began to change. He was becoming a cute kid who, like her, was biracial. In rare moments, she wondered who his father was and what he was like. No! She wasn’t going down that path. She’d never know and didn’t want to know. Whoever he was, he was a criminal. Adam didn’t need to be saddled with a scumbag daddy.
Adam crawled a little late but finally got the knack of it, and then there was no stopping him. He soon struggled to pull himself up and stagger from one handhold to the next. Before long, he gave up crawling entirely and was off at a run, eager to get on with whatever caught his attention. Like his mother, he seemed constantly in a hurry, looking for new places to go and new things to do.
(Cathy, later Catherine, and Adam will likely be back later when there’s more time to add more flesh to the bone. This took about a half hour, and I can’t believe how easy it’s been! I’ve never tried fiction before, and I recognize this as stereotypical drivel – soap opera stuff – but it’s really fun to get inside someone’s head and control all their thoughts and actions. Maybe I’ll add some dialogue or take a shot, storywise, that is, at one of her rapists. That should be fun. Can I call this my free writing, Matt? I swear I just plowed through – never stopped.)
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