I have to confess: When I saw her for the first time I was impressed. And if you can put 'impressed' and 'scared' together in a sentence, I was a little bit scared too.
She was special, the complete opposite of all girls at this school. When I saw her for the first in my math class, almost laying on the chair and chewing gum, I could see the top of her bra sticking out of her skin-tight shirt that ended shortly over her belly button. With that she wore baggy pants that were too long.
She had three piercings in every ear and a little hole in her lip. Her mother probably forced her to take out her lip piercing for her first school day, I thought. Our math teacher introduced her as 'Destiny', but she didn't seem to be the 'social type', she just nodded, bored. When he told her chewing gum was forbidden in class she spit it out on the desk. That got her dentention on the first day already.
During lunch she hung out with those weird guys from bio class and the sakter, over their heads, like little clouds, cigarette smoke, and smoke from some other stuff, I didn't want to know what it was at all.
A few months later she was the girl with the most entries in her student record file and she didn't even care. That was around time we started dating. Sometimes I was asking myself what she was seeing in me, and my friends were asking what I was actually seeing in her. I still don't know. She was prickly, made fun of me in front of her friends and was in a bad mood most of the time. But when you get to know her you would realize that she could be funny, understanding and sometimes even loving. She didn't show that side of her to everyone though. But I didn't care, as long as we were together my world was alright.
I was happy and she was too, I could see it in her in her green eyes, a sparkle. Of course my parents wanted to get to know my girlfriend sometime and so I brought her home with me for dinner. When I had brought her home later that evening and kissed her goodbye she told me my parents would hate her.
"No way!", I said. "They love you!"
When I came home my mom was close to bursting into tears and yelled at me, "How the hell could you fall for someone like that? She is a nightmare!" My parents forbid me to see
L her. Of course I didn't listen.
One week before the summer holidays we had a date at the mall. Destiny hadn't arrived yet and when I called her she didn't answer her cell-phone. I was worried. Although I was used to her not showing up at school or gym, I knew that I meant a lot to her, I was 100 percent sure that I was the only person in this world who had never been dumped by her.
After a half an hour of waiting in front of the mall I walked to her house and waited until a neighbor opened the door and ran upstairs to her door. It was open.
"Destiny?", I whispered and walked carefully into the living room. I didn't feel like meeting her mom or her boyfriend and having to explain who I was and what I wanted in their flat.
The living room was empty, but a weird, sweet smell was in the air. I found her in her room. She was lying on her bed and starring at the ceiling, her face was pale and totally frightened. When she realized I was there she winced and told me she smoked something with her friends and that then everything went black. Later she woke up in her room, her whole body hurting. She had no idea what had happened to her. I hold her in my arms and comforted her, she was totally disturbed. I stayed the whole day and night and when I wanted to leave at 6 in the morning she begged me to stay. So I stayed.
You would propably think that after this experience she would stay away from drugs, but the opposite happened. It got worse.
Soon I couldn't reach her at all. When we were together she either laughed about every word I said or she was so depressed that she didn't listen to me in the first place.
A few weeks later I discovered the cuts on her wrist and when I questioned her about it she yelled at me and said, it was none of my fucking business. She would always appear later for dates and soon I had to wait in front of the school if I wanted to talk to her.
My friends told me I should finally break up with her.
"No. She needs me now!", that's what I said.
When I talked with her about the drugs, the cutting she said that she needed it, and, of course, she could stop any day. She just didn't want to because it helps her deal with her mom's mood swings, the yelling and screaming at home and everything else her mom would put her through. Destiny told me again, that it wasn't of my business.
"All she needs is a good undertaker. Like, really soon." That's what the rest of the world said.
Destiny broke up with me 2 months before graduation. At that time she was hanging around with that guy from college, six years older than her, too many tattoos for one body and always drunk. I was worried, I was really worried. I tried and tried to break through to her, but she just didn't let me. Sometimes I couldn't sleep because I just couldn't stop thinking about her. I often had to think about that day she told me, that later, when she had children, she wanted to be a good mom and make everything better than the mess her own mom brought her into. Instead of this, being better she failed at the final exams and didn't attend the seconde ones. So we all graduated. Except Destiny.
In the next year I went to college in Portland, so I didn't heard much about her anymore. Sometimes my little sister told me a few things about Destinys so-called 'friends'. For example that they had all been sued because of owning drugs and that all of them got sent into jail. She wasn't sure about Destiny because she had been under 21 when that happened, under the age of constant.
I had a girlfriend in college, her name was Amber. I really liked her, we met at a dorm party and after a few months she moved in with me. I was slowly forgetting Destiny.
In our last college year Amber told me that she was pregnant and after our graduation we moved to Chicago and Amber gave birth to our son. I had a pretty good job and after two years I got offered a job in Florida, vice-president of our company and so we moved. There we got our second child, a baby girl. A few months later when we were visiting my family in California my mom told me that Destiny got married two years ago, but I had never asked for her. My mom just told me because she and her husband just got divorced. You kow, the newest gossip in the neighbourhood. Rumors had it that he had hit her and maybe even something worse, but of course no one knew what had really happened. My friend Kathy told me that Destiny was pregnant with her husband's baby, but he didn't want it. After she had had the abortion nobody heard anything of her, she ran away in the middle of the night. When her husband would mention her now he would just call her 'the slut' and, according to Kathy, he also did it before she got away.
When my son turned 7 I was searching my old baseball stuff for him on the loft. I found a box full of photos, a box full of memories. The high school year books, some college pictures and a bunch of old year books. On the last page of one of the high school year books I recognized her handwriting. Small and crooked, but still written clear.
"Stay the same. I love you. Destiny J"
I remember the day she wrote it like it was yesterday. We had been sitting in my room and I was trying to learn physics. I bought the year book that day and she wanted to be the first one to write a little message in it. Then she drew a heart on my arm and kissed me.
"You know what?", she said. Later, after college, we two will move to Florida together, we'll have a adorable, cute baby and we'll call it Nick Junior. Or Destiny Junior. Depends. And then we'll live happily ever after, away from my mom and all that shit here in L.A."
"Is your mom's boyfriend still that bad", I asked and hugged her.
"When I'm older, I'm not going to be that stupid and let such a jerk in my flat. If a guy hits me I'll hit back."
I swallowed when I remembered these words. She didn't hit back. She ran away. She killed her baby.
It was stupid, but I blamed myself for what happened to her, not being with her. I wondered where she was and what she was doing right now. She always wanted to make better decisions than her mom did. I remembered how often she screamed in her pillow, hoping for a better tomorrow.
A year later me and my wife had our third child, a little girl.
We called her Destiny.
