It’s funny; I never used to feel sorry for the “bad” girls, the “loose” ones that all the guys mistreated. No, queen-angel Lucy felt they had it coming for their sluttish behavior. It wouldn’t happen to me because I was “special.” Ha! Talk about how the mighty have fallen. Some women just have to get affection any way they can. I wish I could find them, all of those girls I used to look down my nose at, so I could apologize to them for having felt superior. What they did, they did out of loneliness, even if they didn’t know it.

I want to escape from this thing I’ve become. I desperately want to start over—to be virginal again in some way, any way. I want to change. I wish I could afford total plastic surgery—nose, eyes, chin, boobs, the works. And a name change too. I want the old Lucy dead, gone, her shame buried. I’m no longer that girl. I’m what became of her.

Empty now. I just want to go to a strange place where no one knows me. I don’t know if I can feel anything of value now. Do I want to know? I can understand pain, fear, and rage intimately, even though I don’t want to.

Strange thing happened to me yesterday. I was going through all my old high school stuff and I came across this paper I wrote for a psychology class. The assignment was to write a letter to your unborn child, introducing yourself to them. The teacher told us to pretend that our child was never going to see us, ever, so we had to tell them everything important in this letter.

The paper I wrote it on was really pretty.

I wish I could remember where I got it.

Thank you for the card.

Yours Truly,

Lucy

* * *

She never mailed it. It was too demeaning, meandering, and empty-soul pitiful.

But she never threw it away, either.

That was after the end of the Bad Time.

This is how the ending began:

During the months following her hillside picnic with Larry and his friends, Lucy’s life became a long, dreary, gray night, chiseled from gray stone and shadowed by gray mist. More than a night of freezing rain, it was a tone—the kind that is part of the province of loneliness and cannot be vicariously conveyed to anyone who has not lived with the physical tension, stilled violence, and protracted anguish of regret. Her father never spoke to her unless it was to call her a whore, or a disgrace, or to remind her that she wasn’t anything special to look at and never would be because all whores were ugly to God and to all men; once in a while he would draw back his hand to deliver a blow to the side of her face which never came because Mom, bless her sad heart, was always nearby to intervene, to calm Dad and try her best to maintain some semblance of love and familial compassion.