DISCLAIMER: This is the second part of a longer story. For the best reading experience, start this story at the beginning. The story contains plenty of sex, but this chapter does not. If you appreciate stories that build, you may like this. If you want a quick read, this may not be for you.
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The days after the scandal broke were a blur, but the key events were my Dad resigning his professorship at the university and my Mom filing for divorce. Almost immediately, she announced that we were moving out of our family home despite my angry, tearful protests.
"Mom, you can't do this! I have a job, and school is going to start in a month. We can't move now!"
"Lola, we are not staying here. Not in this home and not in this town," she replied without looking at me as packed up a rented van with some meager possessions. "This is not a negotiation. Now help me with these boxes."
"This isn't fair! You can't take me away from St. Simon's, I'm about to be a senior. Don't do this to me!"
"Stop being a brat and help me pack."
I crossed my arms over my chest. "I want to see Dad."
"Don't you dare mention him to me." She turned towards me. Her eyes had narrow into hard, dark little crescents. "And don't you ever ask to see him. That is not going to happen."
I felt hot, angry tears slipping down my cheeks. "You can't do this to me," I whimpered.
My Mom turned to look at me. "Lola, let's get one thing perfectly clear. I am doing this for you."
"How the fuck is this for me?" I shot back.
My Mom sighed. She looked tired. "Do you know how old those girls were? Not much older than you are now, Lola." She walked towards me. "Even after all this, you still act like Daddy's little girl. But you're 18, aren't you, Lola? And we both know what your father thinks about 18-year-old girls."
My mouth dropped open, but at first, nothing came out.
"Dad never-he would never-"
"Don't tell me what he would never do, Lola." My Mom was standing just inches away from me now and I could see the veins in her neck pulsing as she spoke. Although I am 5 inches taller than my Mom, she seemed to tower over me in that moment. "I knew him better than you did-better than you ever will. I thought I knew what he was capable of, too." Her voice dropped to a low hiss. "But I was wrong. He betrayed us, Lola. You, your brother, and me. Not just once, but for years."
My mother's voice quavered as she turned away from me.
"I don't know anything anymore, Lo. I just know that I don't trust a man like that around my daughter."
She turned back to me. Her eyes were wet and the hardness in her voice was gone.
"Please, Lola." Her voice was pleading, exhausted. "You're 18, and I can't stop you, but please, don't go to see him. Don't pick up if he calls. For me, Lo." She took my hands in hers. "Don't let him hurt us anymore."
I felt frozen, unsure how to respond.
"Promise me." She was crying now, too. "Promise me you won't try to see him."
I swallowed hard. My face was streaked with dark, wet lines from the eyeliner running down my cheeks.
"Okay." I choked the words out from somewhere deep in my throat. "I won't, Mom. I promise."
...
That is how, just weeks before the start of my senior year of high school, I found myself saying goodbye to my friends, my teachers, and the only home I had ever known. True to the promise my mother had extracted from me, I did not say goodbye to my father, whose sudden removal from my life haunted me like a phantom limb.
My mother, my brother, and I moved a few hours away to a small home in the suburbs outside Las Vegas, Nevada. We had no special connections to the city, but my Mom had managed to land a job there on short notice as an adjunct faculty member teaching Korean at the local community college.
Like my hometown, we moved into a neighborhood made up mostly of upper-middle class families. Compared to where I had grown up, however, our new community was extremely white. Our family-a Korean mother with two mixed race children-was definitely a novelty, made all the more unusual by my father's absence.
I had grown accustom to male attention throughout my teens. I developed early and realized at a young age that boys found me attractive. However, it became clear very quickly that in the context of my new community, I wasn't just another hot girl. For better or worse, I was "exotic," and that was a draw in and of itself.
Although I had always enjoyed male attention growing up, the onslaught I endured after the move was beyond anything I had experienced before. As soon as school started, I began fielding advances from random guys at least a dozen times per week. My looks got me noticed right away, and the fact that I was new and didn't really know anyone yet made me an easy target.
"Hey honey, what's your name?"
"Settle a bet for us: are you a tan white girl or a light-skinned Asian?"
"Was your Dad a GI or something?"
Ordinarily, I would have ignored these types of cheap come-ons, but I didn't want to get a reputation as an ice queen, so I tried my best to laugh them off without acting insulted. This just encouraged more guys to approach me.
The one thing that saved me from descending into depression was tennis. The tennis coach at my new school was a sweetheart of a woman and she took me in right away. She never asked me to explain the circumstances of my arrival at the school, but she could tell I was broken and needed a friend. And it didn't hurt that, as soon as I stepped on the court, I instantly became the best tennis player the school had ever seen.
My former school was a private prep school with a standout tennis program that drew national attention. Since middle school, I'd had access to incredible facilities and world class coaching. In the rush to relocate, my Mom hadn't had the time to evaluate school options, so I ended up at the local public school, which had a tennis program that was middling at best. My new coach saw my talent and pedigree immediately. She recognized that I didn't need to be coached on the finer points of strategy or mechanics, but that the mental aspects of my game were suffering. She provided the emotional support that I desperately needed to maintain my focus.
It didn't take too long for me to make friends with most of the other girls on the team. Most of them had never played against anyone at my skill level and were happy to learn from me. Plus, after my arrival, the tennis matches at our school started drawing bigger crowds than they ever had. At the time, I was naive enough to think that people were excited to support a winning tennis team. In retrospect, however, it seems far more likely that our mostly-male fan-base was there to see a busty 18-year-old mixed race girl sweat through her tennis skirt.
But not all of the girls on the team appreciated the extra attention we were getting. The captain of the team, a pretty, petite blonde named Jenna, had entered her senior year expecting to be the best player on the team. My arrival robbed her of that distinction, and although she was technically still the captain, most of the younger girls came to me for pointers on improving their game instead of her. I tried to deflect the attention and defer to her during pep talks, but I wasn't about to lower my standard of play just to soothe her ego. I still had a scholarship to win, and frankly, tennis was the only thing in my life that seemed unaffected by the scandal and the move.
Jenna's resentment of me boiled over one day in mid-October. We had a match that afternoon, and as was customary, we wore our tennis skirts to school to promote school spirit. In the halls between periods, I bent down to get a drink from the water fountain. As soon as I did, I felt a hand slip up and under skirt from behind and squeeze my bare ass.
I stood bolt upright and wheeled around in shock. Behind me was Jenna's boyfriend, Todd, trying not very hard to feign a look of surprise.
"Shit, sorry," he mumbled as he stepped away. "Thought you were Jenna."
I could hear his friends laughing further down the hall.
