There is nothing more dangerous than secrets at sixteen. They feel like poison, settling dangerously in the bottomless pit of one's stomach, uncoiling, slithering up and up, waiting at the mouth for even the slightest of openings. But that is exactly what's so dangerous about them; the opening. Once the mouth opens, the poison oozes out, foaming, milk-white and thick, dribbling down the chin, onto the floor. Once it's out, it's out. Keeping the mouth shut and letting the poison work its way through your insides is so much better than opening up. I learned the ways of the poisonous snake the hard way.
My secret at sixteen was not a sweet one. It didn't drip with chocolate, but rather the bitterness of sin. Mine took the shape of bodies intertwining on an abandoned family couch in an unfinished basement. Mine took shape in the dark, when sins feel less like sins and more like pleasure. Mine took shape in the movement of Jackson's body on top of mine, doing what no sixteen year old should have been doing. Except he wasn't sixteen - I was. Jackson was twenty years of predator. But in that moment, on that couch that smelled of cigarettes, with his sweaty body on top of mine, he felt like twenty years of experience. And when he finished and shoved away from me, laying on the couch watching as I put my clothes back on, he felt like twenty years of promise. And when he sent me home, telling me he was too tired to talk, he felt like twenty years of trust. The two weeks of no contact that followed still felt like twenty years of possibility to my sixteen year old self. Then the morning sickness and the almost insatiable hunger started, and when I stood in front of my cracked floor-length mirror and laid my hand on my belly, I knew what grew inside of me. But the cold fear that I felt was contradicted by my relief that it was Jackson who's child I carried.
And then I opened my mouth. The poison oozed out of my mouth into the mouthpiece of my grandma's apartment telephone and into Jackson's listening ear. Then there was silence. And silence. The sound of my heart beating and then, finally, another sound; crying - mine and his. We cried in anticipation of the future. Jackson was twenty years of love. But we must remember that the secret was in fact poison. And poison kills. Mine was no exception. In the closed-off back of Dennis' Diner parking lot, where Jackson asked me to meet, my poison spread. It came in the shape of Jackson's fists as I stood there. And when I fell, it came in the shape of Jackson's kicks. And when my breathing slowed, it came in the shape of Jackson's hands enclosing around my throat, squeezing. And when I stopped breathing, it came in the shape of darkness. Jackson was twenty years of abandonment.
