Casting Down Imaginations Read online

  Casting Down Imaginations

  A Novel

  by LASHANDA MICHELLE

  L.M.Ink

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013, 2011, 2009 by LaShanda Michelle

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)

  Casting down imaginations,

  and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ…”

  ~2 Corinthians 10:4-5 (KJV)

  one

  Anaya

  I hurried through the crowded parking lot of First Bethany Christian Church as fast as I could and climbed into the passenger side of Deacon Patterson’s truck. Once inside, I slid the seat back as far as it could go, lying flat on my back and out of sight to anyone who may have looked in my direction.

  “I hate this place,” I muttered under my breath, and smoothed my ruffled dress over my knees. I’d spent my entire life here, and now that I was moving away to college, the only part of this church I wanted to see was it getting smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror as Deacon and I drove away— if I gave it that much attention.

  I reached down, careful not to let my head rise above the door window, and retrieved my purse. Earlier, Pastor Fields had given all of the college bound students scholarships to see us on our journey to higher education. I didn’t want to be rude at the time, so I politely placed the envelope in my purse without opening it. Now that I was alone, I couldn’t wait to see how much it was for. I hoped they made it out to me instead of the school. That way I could deposit it into my checking account and do what I really wanted with it: Shopping.

  I tore open the letter size envelope addressed to me and pulled out the check. A big smile came across my face as I read the first line: Pay to The Order of: Anaya Patterson. YES! …

  A twinge of guilt came over me. Maybe I shouldn’t play the church like that. The money was supposed to go toward my education… Oh well, what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. Besides, after all the things they put me through, they were lucky I didn’t go up to them and demand more. I missed out on a lot of important things in my life because of them. I wasn’t allowed to date, go to any dances, or be a cheerleader. They had Deacon Patterson so brainwashed, he thought the best way to raise me was to make me go to church twenty four hours a day, seven days a week! He kept me locked in the house all of the time. Thank God I had sense enough to take matters into my own hands; otherwise I would be a social misfit like some girls from the church. I knew Deacon meant well, but he sheltered me too much. That revelation became painfully obvious my freshman year when I met David.

  David and I met at a carnival that fall. As usual, I was with a group of people from the church, but somehow I had managed to sneak away. I was in line for the roller coaster when I spotted a group of guys standing against the concession stand wall. One of them walked over and struck up a conversation with me. We talked for a while and I realized that he was David Jones, the most popular guy in town who’d graduated the year before. I was so excited that he wanted to talk to me! I thought I surely had to be all that to get the attention of a guy like him. He was in college, and I was only fifteen!

  We started things off rather slow at first. I didn’t know a lot about guys at the time because Deacon Patterson would never let one near me. We went from late night phone calls to me stuffing pillows under my sheets and sneaking out of my bedroom window because he “just had to see me.” I was infatuated with him and would have done anything for him. Well, almost anything.

  Because David was a grown man and I was still only in high school, he was used to things that I wasn’t. One of those things was sex. From day one he tried to get it from me, but I let him know I wasn’t ready to take our relationship that far. Even though I’d been taught to only have sex after I got married, I told David I had to make sure that I was in love with the person I gave my virginity to. He tried to talk me out of it, but I wouldn’t budge until I knew for sure that I was in love with him. When that finally happened, he kept pressuring me until I finally gave in and let him touch me. He enjoyed the experience way more than I did, but I was happy to please him.

  Our relationship continued throughout my sophomore year as well, but by the beginning of my junior year, David wanted the real thing. Petting and kissing didn’t satisfy him anymore. He began to tell me all the classic excuses of why I should give it up, saying he was a real man with real needs and he was used to getting what he wanted before he was with me. One day he had the audacity to tell me that if I wanted to stay with him I had to give him what he wanted. I was outraged when he made that comment and broke up with him. My heart was broken, and I was depressed. We were separated for about six months before he started calling again, apologizing. He said I was the only girl that he ever loved and that he couldn’t be without me. I forgave him and we got back together.

  That same week I started hearing rumors that David was cheating on me with a girl that I went to school with. I asked him about it, but he said it wasn’t true. I kept hearing the rumors though, so I finally asked the girl about it. That turned into a fight in the cafeteria and I got expelled from school for three days. Deacon grounded me for two weeks with no phone, no radio, and no TV. David and I continued our relationship through that episode, but it wasn’t the last. In fact, it was the first of many. All in all, I had four fist fights over David, and a lot of other altercations as well. But I learned from my past mistake and had the girls that wanted to fight meet me at the park down the street from the school. Jayla, one of David’s college friends, would meet me there and together we would beat down any girl who tried to come between me and David’s relationship.

  Jayla was cool. She and I met at a house party that I snuck out to with David. The two of them met in class. She liked me and we became friends right away. She said I was a sweet girl, but she mostly liked me because David was so in love with me. We were like sisters. She taught me a lot of things that I didn’t know, like how to have sex when I finally decided to do it, how to get a man in the mood, how to fight, how to dress, and how to steal. She even got me a fake ID so that I could get into the clubs with her and David and the rest of their friends. Some would say that she was a bad influence, but at the time I didn’t care. I was having too much fun spending time with my man and being away from Deacon Patterson.

  David didn’t let up on the sex issue though. He kept bugging me about it until I finally agreed to do it with him. One weekend Deacon Patterson went out of town with the church and left me at home alone. David came over about ten o’clock that night and the two of us got into a heavy kissing and touching session. We both ended up fully undressed under the sheets of my bed. But, right when he was about to finally get what he wanted, I got scared and jumped up. David became so angry. I could tell that he wanted to hit me. He went off on me and told me I was acting like a baby and that I sho
uldn’t have told him I would if I really didn’t want to. He left angrily, and I cried myself to sleep. By the next day he’d calmed himself down and we tried again, but this time it was even worse. I just couldn’t get the thoughts of how wrong it was out of my head. I tried hard to ignore them, but at the last minute I jumped up again. He held me down and pinned himself on top of me. I thought he was going to rape me, but instead he shook me really hard and left again.

  After that we just decided to wait until I was totally ready and committed to the idea before we did anything else. I thought it was a good idea, and I loved him even more for his willingness to stand beside me and put my wants above his. I thought he really loved me. It was the height of our four year relationship. He even told me that he’d been thinking about moving to Daytown after he graduated so that we could be together. I was very excited about all of it, until I got a phone call from Jayla two weeks ago.

  She called me late in the evening and told me that she had some very important information to tell me. David had gotten a girl pregnant and didn’t even tell me about it. He’d been cheating on me the whole time since we had gotten back together. I was outraged and couldn’t believe it. I asked her why she didn’t say anything if she knew about it the whole time. She said that she didn’t want to see me hurt, but she couldn’t let me leave for college thinking that David was going to stay faithful to me. I got the strange feeling that maybe she and David had messed around, but I didn’t want to accuse her of anything that I didn’t know. I haven’t talked to her since and don’t plan to ever again. If she was really my friend, she would have let me know from the beginning that David was cheating on me, so I had to let her go.

  After I got off the phone with her, I called David and cussed him out. He kept asking me how I found out, but I wouldn’t tell him. The more I questioned him, the more information came out, some of which Jayla hadn’t told me. He confessed to actually cheating on me the entire time of our relationship with many different women, some of them I knew, some of them I didn’t. The entire four year relationship had been a joke. All of the drama was for nothing. I didn’t have a man. I didn’t have anything.

  After I cursed and screamed at him, I wanted to know why he did it to me. Why didn’t he just tell me that he wanted to be with other women? Why did he have to make a fool out of me for four years? He gave me some tired lines about how he really did love me, but he was a man and men couldn’t live without sex. If we had been face to face I would have smacked him. I told him that I never wanted to see him again, and if he accidentally laid eyes on me as we were passing through to look the other way and pretend he never saw me. As far as I was concerned, he could erase me out of his memory because he was already out of mine. That night I burned every love letter, picture, diary entry, and anything else that reminded me of him.

  Even though David played me like a fool, he had a point. Men needed sex. They even talked about it in church when they told the married women not to withhold it from their spouses. Guys just weren’t waiting for it anymore. They wanted it when they wanted it, and they wanted it now. No woman was going to be able to keep a man without giving it up. And no one wanted a virgin. That was cute in middle school, but nowadays, a man wanted a woman that knew what she was doing. That’s why as soon as I got on campus, I was going to get a fine college man and get as much experience that I could. The next time that I fell in love, I was going to be able to keep him. If I hadn’t been so stuck on the stupid stuff they taught in church, I would still be with David now and would not have gone through the heartache and pain of losing someone I really loved.

  Coming back to reality, I peeked over the window and peered through the tinted glass in search of Deacon Patterson. He was nowhere in sight. What was taking him so long? I was ready to go. Knowing him, somebody probably told him they needed prayer and he was in a corner speaking in tongues and putting his hands on their forehead. The whole scene was tired and played out and I couldn’t wait to get away from it all.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God or anything like that. I actually did. I just didn’t believe that it took everything that church folks did to be pleasing to God. All that jumping and shouting and staying in church all day and hollering and screaming was ridiculous. Then everybody stayed so long afterwards, hugging and kissing, pretending they loved you and cared for you, but in reality they knew they didn’t. It was so stupid. I could praise God from the house by watching one of the many preachers on TV, and God could hear my prayers wherever I was at. I didn’t need to go to Saturday morning prayer or anything like that. And I could live my life anyway that I chose, as long as I repented for all the things that I did wrong. God understood my issues, so I didn’t need some man hollering at me week after week, telling me to get my life together before I went to hell.

  I squinted and scanned over the many people leaving the church until I finally saw Deacon standing in the doorway. He was talking to Karen. Ugh!

  I flopped my head down on the headrest in disgust. I couldn’t stand that girl. As usual, she was doing something that bothered me.

  Karen and I grew up together, right here in this church. When we were little we always had to play together every Saturday when the deacons met. We were the best of friends. We snuck out to wild college parties all the time and always got crazy drunk. Karen couldn’t hold her liquor though. There were plenty of times I had to fight dudes off of her to keep her from getting raped. We smoked weed together and everything. We even got tattoos together one night. Deacon Patterson still didn’t know about that one. We were always together, until about two years ago when she started being fake and judgmental.

  Karen tried to act perfect now, pretending to be as holy as Jesus’ mama, but I knew the real deal. She lost her virginity when she was in the eighth grade to a boy that everybody knew wasn’t any good. She had an older man right along with me when we were in the ninth grade, with whom she also had sex with, and when we were in the tenth grade she got pregnant by another guy. Yeah, he was her boyfriend, but still. That’s three different guys by the time she turned sixteen. Ho-ish. Now she was trying to tell everybody not to date and to wait on God to bless them with their husbands. Puh-leeze. These people at this church could believe that goody-goody attitude if they wanted to, but I wasn’t falling for it. She claimed that she lost the baby due to a miscarriage, but she didn’t fool me. I know she got an abortion. She was just scared to admit it because she didn’t want all these church people to look down on her and her family. Well, forget them and forget her!

  As much as I wanted to forget all about her and put her on the same “Forget You Ever Met Them” list that David was on, I couldn’t. As if I hadn’t made it clear that I wanted nothing to do with her, she decided to follow me to Daytown University. She said she made the decision to go long before she knew I was going there, but I didn’t believe her. She was just trying to follow me around so she could keep a watch on me and try to tell me how to live my life. Little did she know, as soon as we got on campus, I was going to act like she didn’t even exist. It was my turn now, and nobody was going to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. I couldn’t wait to get away. I loved Deacon Patterson, but I was ready to get from under his strict rules and finally be free. I’d broken pretty much all of them already, but tomorrow I would be able to really do whatever I wanted. I could almost taste the independence!

  The only thing I needed was a car. If I had that, then I would really be grown. But Deacon said he couldn’t afford it right now, and that maybe by Christmas I’d be able to get one. So my first semester of college I would be catching the bus with the rest of the broke students. Oh well, maybe I’ll meet a fine guy on the bus and he can be my man… Maybe not. I had to have a man with a ride.

  I looked up again for Deacon Patterson. He was walking toward the truck now. Thank God!

  “You couldn’t wait?” he asked once he opened the door and looked inside.

  I put on my sweet daughter voice, the one that always
got me whatever I wanted from of him, as long as it wasn’t too drastic.

  “I’m sorry, Deacon,” I apologized. “I tried to wait for you, but my head was hurting and I just had to come lay down.”

  He smiled at me and climbed inside the truck. “That’s okay, Baby Girl,” he said. “You had a big day today, telling everybody good-bye before you go off to college.”

  Deacon started the truck and pulled out of the church parking lot.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked me.

  I didn’t want to seem too eager to leave the nest. “Yeah, I think so,” I hesitated.

  “That’s good,” he smiled. “I’m proud of you Nya. I know if your mama was here, she’d be proud of you, too.”

  That last comment surprised me. He hardly ever brought up his only wife that died after three years of marriage when I was four months old. He must have been feeling really emotional about me leaving.

  “Thanks, Deacon,” I said.

  “Are you upset about not having a car for school?” he asked me.

  “No,” I lied again. “I understand you don’t have the money right now. It’s okay, I’ll be alright.”

  “Thanks for being so understanding. Are you all packed?”

  Am I packed? I finished packing last week. The only thing I had to add was clean underwear and toiletries, and I’d be set.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered.

  We continued to drive in silence. Finally we turned on our street, and Deacon spoke again.

  “I have a surprise for you at the house,” he said.

  I looked at him and smiled. “Really? What is it?”

  He pointed down the street. “Look.”

  I looked down the street and saw a car parked in our driveway with a big red bow on it. I shrieked. “You got me a car!”

  He laughed as we pulled up next to the house. I unbuckled the seatbelt and hopped out of the truck before it had completely stopped and ran to the car. It was a brand new black Mitsubishi Eclipse, the exact car that I told Deacon I wanted as a graduation and going away present.