Patricia had been a shy girl. She was a good student and loved her family as much as they loved her, but she was not a social person. She had felt awkward and gangly and tended to avoid her peers. But she had been an excellent student and had finished grade 8 with honors and was hoping High School would be better. It turned out that High School was just more of the same. She was taller than any of her classmates - including the boys - and flat chested to boot when the trend for the perfect female was just over 5 foot with lots of curves.
Her Mom had stuck fast to the rule about not dating till she was 16 and then nobody asked her. Finally, just before her 17th birthday, one of the school jocks had asked her out for a date. She had immediately accepted - and lived to regret it. Instead of a romantic time at the movies, he had taken her straight to lover's lane and put the moves on her. She was amazed and excited that he wanted to get physical with her and despite early protests, he soon won her over and they had ended up in the back seat of his dad's Impala.
He hadn't worn a rubber, and of course she wasn't on the pill, He had promised to pull out, but she was still a virgin and so tight that he came within a few minutes, injecting his fertile sperm deep into her as she trembled and bled beneath him.
He had told her not to worry since it was her first time and you couldn't get pregnant the first time. Needless to say, she'd gotten pregnant. He denied it was his, but her father had gone to his father and because pregnant girls in the 70's couldn't go to school, she had dropped out. There was a shotgun wedding, them apprehensive; their parents grim but determined that their children would do the 'right thing'. He had to leave school as well and ended up apprenticing as a welder.
She had the baby, a beautiful daughter they named Catherine, after Patti's one remaining friend. Then came the blow. Catherine was deaf. Their relationship, always shaky, nearly foundered but they made it through. Times were hard and they were barely making ends meet, Paul working long hours while she nursed their daughter and attempted to make them a home. They were estranged from their families, both bitterly resenting their parents for forcing them into this loveless marriage. The only thing holding them together was that both idolized young Cathy.
A couple of years later, Paul got to the legal drinking age, and things really started to go to pieces. He never came home after work any more, spending his time and their money in bars and strip clubs, becoming abusive and violent, slapping her around more than once. However, his love for his daughter never wavered, and she hid his abuse, thinking that Children's Services would take her daughter if she reported it. She had already seen it happen to others in the trailer park where they lived.
Then the nightmare of the beginning of the rest of her life. A moment's inattention on her part, and...
The scene was indelibly etched into her memory - her daughter, her most precious Cathy, her blonde hair glowing in the random beams of sunlight shining through overhead trees, looking up smiling at her from where she hunkered down to examine the flat toad on the road. Then her expression slowly changing as she took in the look of horror on her mother's face as Patti ran toward her, her head turning toward the motion she caught from the corner of her eye...
Then the eighteen wheeler, its wheels locked, went over her like a thresher, turning her into a shattered thing of pink denim and red, red blood.
He blamed her, she cried, he left, and she fell into a depression, never to recover. By the time she hit her forties; she was living on borrowed money, and borrowed time. She didn't know it and usually was too drunk to care, but she was growing cysts on her ovaries. When the pain got too bad, she finally had to see a doctor and was immediately scheduled for a total hysterectomy.
Pat started to cry. "I wasted my life in a single night, and I haven't really lived since."
Her story shook me. I felt her pain, and awkwardly put my arm over her shoulders. "Pat, you have to stop crying. You're a guy now, and guys don't cry. The sensitive male won't make an appearance for another 20 years."
"But I don't want to be a boy!"
"Yeah, well I didn't want to be a girl either, but it looks like we're getting a second chance and I don't intend to blow it!"