Casting Down Imaginations Read online

  “I just want to talk to you, that’s all.”

  I hung up, trying my best to figure out what I ever saw in him and returned to studying. He kept calling though, so I finally walked over to the phone and snapped it open.

  “What!?!”

  “Why you gotta answer the phone like that?” Terrance asked.

  “Why you gotta keep calling me?”

  “I been trying to call you for the last few weeks girl,” he told me. “The least you could do is return my call.”

  “Are we whining now?” I asked him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Are we trying to make small talk?”

  “Why do you keep answering me with questions?” he asked.

  He got me.

  “Please state your reason for calling,” I said very matter-of-factly.

  He chuckled. “Same old Karen.”

  I sighed. “Terrance, we’ve been through this.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry if I keep on bugging you, but—”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  He paused.

  “Karen, that was mean.”

  I felt the hurt in his voice. That was mean. When did I get to be this way?

  “Sorry,” I apologized, even though everything in me didn’t want to. Maybe if I took the time to listen to him he would finally get the clue that I didn’t want him anymore and would stop calling. Then the two of us could go on with our lives.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Do you have time to talk?” he asked.

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “Oh. You’re on your way out?”

  I rolled my eyes up at the ceiling. “No. I meant that it’s the weekend and I have unlimited minutes.”

  “Oh,” he laughed. “I was asking if you had time in your schedule to talk to me.”

  “Oh.” Now I felt like the ignorant one.

  “Well do you?”

  I was confused. “Do I what?”

  “Do you have time to talk?”

  I scrunched my face. He still made me act silly after all this time.

  “Yes, I have time,” I told him, trying to straighten up. As I walked back to the couch I got a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hung over it. Thank God he couldn’t see me. I looked a mess.

  “So what are you doing?” he asked.

  “Studying.”

  “Do you need me to let you go?”

  Everything in me said to hang up the phone. This could not be going in a good direction.

  “No, I’m good,” I told him. “I could use a break for a few minutes.”

  “Cool. So what have you been up to?”

  “Well Terrance, where do you want me to start?” I asked. “It’s been over two years.”

  “Start after high school,” he said.

  “For who, you or me?”

  He laughed. “Me. Start where we… you know, broke up.”

  He was thinking about the day I told him I was pregnant.

  “Terrance… Why don’t you just come right on out and ask me what it is you really want to ask me?”

  There was a long pause before he spoke again. “Were you really pregnant?”

  I kept my voice as monotone as I possibly could. I wanted to go off, but that would not have given him the answers to his questions, which meant that he would keep calling.

  “Terrance, I showed you the doctor’s lab results.”

  Another pause. “What happened to the baby, Karen?”

  He’d heard all the abortion rumors that floated around the school. Two years later, the lies still affected me.

  “I lost the baby, Terrance.”

  “How?”

  These questions were making me uncomfortable. It took me a long time to move on from all of that and it pained me to dig it all back up again.

  “The doctor said that it was probably from stress,” I informed, and took a sip from my hot drink.

  “Is that really what it was?”

  Oh my God… Now I understood.

  All the phone calls…

  This whole time he’s been thinking that…

  “Terrance, you didn’t make me lose the baby when you hit me.”

  He was really quiet on the other end. I think I heard him sniffle.

  “Terrance?”

  A definite sniffle.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  I waited before I spoke again. “Are you okay?”

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “I just… you know…”

  I was confused. Why after all this time? What took him so long to find out the truth about the baby?

  “Are you expecting another child?”

  “What?” he asked, his tone totally changing. “What? No. Hell no.”

  There was uneasiness and then the two of us laughed.

  “Why’d you ask me that?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I was just trying to figure out why it…”

  “Took me so long to call you and ask?” he finished for me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you know when it all happened… We were both so young. I mean, we still are really young, but we’re a little bit older now… Things change, people change… I heard you’ve changed.”

  I felt myself smile. “What are you talking about?”

  He laughed. “You know what I’m talking about. I heard you a good girl now. Don’t do no dating or anything.”

  “That’s not exactly true. I just raised my standards, and so far haven’t met anyone worthy of occupying my time.”

  “Baby, what happened to us?” he asked, becoming serious again.

  He hadn’t called me baby in a long time. I was scared to death because I liked the familiar feeling that came to my stomach when I heard it.

  “The baby is what happened to us,” I told him.

  “No, before that,” he said. “Before that. We were having problems before the baby came, remember?”

  I thought back to the end of my sophomore year. He was right. Things began to get sour between us around that April.

  “I remember what it was,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “A certain somebody, who shall remain nameless, got a basketball scholarship and got a big head. All of a sudden I had to start making appointments to call my boyfriend, who was managing to find time to walk all the skanky girls to their classes, and wasn’t giving me the time of day.”

  “Oh yeah,” he laughed.

  “Not funny, Terrance.”

  He cleared his throat and his voice became serious. “I have a confession to make.”

  “What?”

  “I cheated.”

  “What! With who? When?”

  “No, you can’t get mad. We ain’t together no more and this happened a long time ago.”

  I kicked my foot. He was right, I couldn’t get mad. Dang it.

  “With who, Terrance? And I wanna know right now.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he joked. “You remember that girl, Nicole?”

  I was disgusted. “Nicole Greensboro! Ugh!”

  “You said you wasn’t going to get mad!”

  “I ain’t mad!”

  “Then stop yelling at me then!”

  I swallowed the other yell that lodged itself in my throat and exhaled through my nose.

  “Boy, you nasty.”

  “What? Why I gotta be all that?”

  “I don’t know why you had to act like that, but you did,” I said to him.

  “What you call me nasty for?”

  “Nicole Greensboro? You cheated on me with her? That girl was the biggest ho. Ugh. If you were going to cheat, you could have at least cheated on me with somebody decent. Not that dizzy chick. Ugh.”

  He chuckled.

  “When?” I wanted to know.

  “What do you mean, when?”

  “When?” I repeated.

  Terrance remembered me well enough to know when I was mad. And right now I was.

  “After the
celebration party my brother threw for me when I got the scholarship. You had to go home early because your dad wouldn’t let you stay past midnight, remember? She ended up staying and we…”

  I was still mad at Daddy for that one.

  “I could kick you,” I said.

  “Too bad you can’t, because we’re having this conversation over the phone.”

  “I should go get tested,” I retorted, jokingly implying that he may have given me a STD that he could have gotten from her. “But I guess I can’t be mad at you,” I said. “What’s done is done.”

  “That’s right. Now don’t you have something to confess to me?”

  “What?”

  “You never cheated?”

  I was insulted. “No!”

  “Karen.”

  “I’m for real, no I haven’t. Just because you can’t keep your thing in your pants, messing around with that ol’ nasty skank don’t mean I had to be nasty, too.”

  “You never cheated on me with Darius?”

  Darius? That was a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. He was a guy that was on the same basketball team with Terrance. He tried to get with me but I was smart enough to tell that it was only to get under Terrance’s skin, especially after he got his scholarship, so I never gave him any attention.

  “No, Terrance. I never messed with Darius, and I told you that. I had no reason to lie to you then, and I have no reason to lie to you now.”

  He sighed. “I guess I believe you,” he said.

  “Well you should, because I ain’t lying.”

  We sat there in silence for a minute. I was still thinking about Nicole Greensboro when he spoke again.

  “What do you think it was?” he asked.

  “Think what was?”

  “You know… it.”

  “The baby?”

  “Our baby,” he corrected me.

  I felt myself blushing. “He was a boy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I just do?”

  He pondered over everything I just said. “So it was a boy, huh?” he finally asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Awh, man, I had a little boy,” he beamed.

  I felt myself smiling. It was more like cheesing. “Yes you did.”

  “But wait a minute. I thought it takes months before the sex of a baby is known? How do you know it was a boy if you were only pregnant for a few weeks?”

  “It takes the doctors months before they know what the sex of a baby is. God knows us before we are even conceived. It says so in the bible. So I guess God told me what it was, because I woke up one morning and I just knew that my baby boy was in heaven with God.”

  “That’s deep,” he finally said after a few moments of thought. “Sounds like you’re pretty close to God now.”

  “Maybe. But ain’t nobody perfect. I could always come up a step or two.”

  “I heard that,” he said. “I wonder what we would have named him? Would you have named him Junior?”

  “After you? H to the hell nawh,” I said.

  He laughed. “Oh, that’s cold girl. Why not?”

  “Because, you didn’t even want him, remember?”

  “Oh yeah… about that. Karen, I’m sorry I did that to you. I was tripping on that scholarship and everything, and I—”

  “It’s cool, don’t worry about it.” I fought the memories of the humiliation that were trying to come to me. No use in going all the way back to that day. It was done and over with.

  “No, no, I need to get this right,” he insisted. “I’m a man and I should have never ever put my hands on you.”

  I listened to his apology. I felt that he was genuinely sincere.

  “All is forgiven, Terrance. I forgave and released you a long time ago.”

  He exhaled. That must have been hard for him to say.

  “I call him Jeremiah,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you give him that name?”

  I took another swig from my hot cocoa. “Do you have a bible with you?”

  “No,” he said. “No actually, I don’t.”

  “Well, when you get time, find one and look up Jeremiah 1:5.”

  “Okay. I definitely will do that.”

  “You will?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “I want to see where the mother of my child got the inspiration for my son’s name.”

  A warm feeling came over me. I never would have imagined him saying our son’s name, or him referring to me as the mother of his child. Shoot, I never thought I would speak to him again. But I guess I really was the mother of his child. It almost made me feel like he and I were… family. And for some reason that meant a lot to me.

  “I’m going to go on ahead and go now Terrance, okay?” I said to him.

  “Yeah, that’s cool. I really need to get some stuff done anyway. When I called I really didn’t think you were going to talk to me.”

  I felt so bad. This whole time I was avoiding his phone calls, thinking everything was about me, when the boy was just trying to get some peace about the death of his baby. Our baby. How could I have been so stupid?

  “I’m sorry for the way I been acting,” I apologized to him. “You know, it’s just that I haven’t talked to you in so long, and the last time we spoke it wasn’t good.”

  “It’s all good Karen. Don’t even sweat it. If I were you I wouldn’t want to have nothing to do with me either. And I’m sorry about…. Everything I put you through. You didn’t deserve any of it. You were a good girl to me, and I can tell you have grown up to become a very strong woman.”

  I began to blush all over again. “Thank you.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll say goodbye for now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “For now.”

  “Can I call you sometime?”

  I hesitated. “Yeah, I guess you can,” I told him, flirting a little bit.

  “Cool. Well I’ll talk to you later then.”

  “Alright.”

  “Bye, Karen.”

  “Bye.”

  I hung up the phone and stared at it, hugging myself. After all this time, all those feelings about Terrance were still there. I just hadn’t realized that it could actually turn out to be a good thing.

  nine

  ANAYA

  I walked out of class feeling pretty good about myself. Even though I was dressed in the same grungy oversized T-shirt and pajama pants I slept in the night before, no one could pull me away from the cloud I was on. The only way I was coming down was if I wanted to, and that wasn’t going to be any time soon.

  I studied hard for all of my classes this semester and was averaging two As and two Bs. I had to drop one of my classes because I couldn’t keep up with the material, but I was doing just fine. Deacon was proud of me, which was enough to keep spare change in my bank account, which was enough to keep me happy.

  My mind drifted back to Deacon as I made my way back to my room. It had been a while since I talked to my father. Every time I did he always asked if I was going to church. I was in no rush to sit in front of anybody’s pulpit, so I made it a point only to call when I needed something. But since I’d been cracking down on the books, I really didn’t need anything else. Even still, I decided to give the old man a call. He was really disappointed that I didn’t come home for Thanksgiving, but oh well. I would be there for Christmas soon enough.

  I stopped walking, realizing that in all of my contemplating I’d missed the shortcut to my dorm. I didn’t mind though. I was feeling good, and the extra exercise wouldn’t hurt. That was my whole point for walking to class anyway instead of driving my car. The only problem was that I would have to cross in front of Reese’s dorm and run the risk of seeing him.

  Or worse… Adam. The thought of the two of them sent chills down my spine.

  It’d been weeks since the night of the concert. I hadn’t spoken to either one of them and hadn’t tried
to. Reese called me a week after it all happened, but when I didn’t return his phone call he didn’t bother calling again. The sad thing was that through all of it, I found myself missing him like crazy. The way he used to make me laugh and the way he used do little sweet things, like meet me outside of my classes so that we could spend a little time together. I missed all of the “semi-sexual” times we had, too. He sure did know how to make my body feel good. But most of all I missed having a man by my side. There was something about being alone that just wasn’t appealing to me.

  I never thought he would put his hands on me, though. Not my Reese. But then again, he probably never thought that I would jump on him the way I did. What was wrong with me that night? I was so angry, but I didn’t remember why. Adam pissed me off, that was for damn sure, but what did Reese do? I mean, yeah, he was all up on some girl at the concert, but that was probably just a part of his act. I shouldn’t have acted that way. And when he found out about Adam he did go handle him. That was love, wasn’t it? He probably saw me as a little girl now, though, acting childish like that. Who knew? I probably would be wearing his chain around my neck right now if I hadn’t acted so stupid. I could kick myself.

  But even though I hit him first, he still wasn’t supposed to hit me back. Deacon always told me that a man had the right to restrain, but never hit. As big as Reese was, he could have held me down without knocking me into the window. But then again, every man ain’t Deacon. Maybe if I had one more chance with him, I would know what buttons not to push. That would probably be the last time he hit me, if he even still wanted me.

  I was about five minutes walking distance away from Reese’s dorm. Maybe I could go inside and see what he was up to. Maybe he was there and had time to talk. It wouldn’t hurt just to say hi.

  I looked down at my pajamas, wishing I would have fixed myself up before going to class this morning. But he and Adam were the reasons why I didn’t dress up anymore. I didn’t want to draw more attention to myself by wearing makeup and attractive clothes. That was what got Adam looking at me and trying to take what didn’t belong to him. And every since that night my hair has been slicked straight back into a tight bun. My scalp was sore for two days from the two of them pulling my hair. I took every avenue to make sure that it didn’t happen again.

  I stood there and thought, suddenly wanting to go see him. What was the worse that could happen if I did? It wasn’t like he’d beat me in the middle of the day. Besides, I was sure he wasn’t mad at me anymore. Maybe things could be cool between us again. I needed to go see him. I had to. I needed to know if things were really over between us, or if we were just experiencing a little time off. There were probably plenty of reasons why he hadn’t called. Maybe he was still waiting on me to call him back.