The blind shall lead the halt. No, wait...
I GREW UP IN half a dozen rundown trailer parks around Shiner and Sweet Home, Texas. My folks were killed by a drunk driver when I was nine; unfortunately, the drunk driver was my father. Their estate consisted of a maxed-out MasterCard and a drawerful of unpaid bills, later joined by vaguely threatening letters from collection agencies representing the ambulance company, hospital, and funeral home.
No one knew anything about my father's family, and none of my mother's scattered relatives wanted to claim me, so I became a ward of the Texas Department of Protection and Family Services. By the time I was 10 I had run away from the first three foster homes; two of the dads and one of the moms tried to convince me that, like Bill Clinton said, oral sex isn't really sex.
The fourth foster home more than made up for the first three. DPFS placed me "temporarily" with a single mother in her mid 30s named Marie Wahlberg, a pediatric nurse at Guadalupe Regional Medical Center in Seguin who lived in Luling. She was a lipstick lesbian so deep in the closet sometimes I think even she forgot. The love of her life was a San Marcos PD detective; Marie took great delight in calling Sandy O'Conner her personal private dick.
It didn't take me long to figure them out. They had avoided detection for almost 10 years, but desperately wanted a child. When I swore I'd never tell anyone, they called in some favors from a couple of mutual friends in DPFS; my "temporary" assignment dragged on for almost three years, until Marie was allowed to adopt me. Marie and Sandy really cared about me, maybe even loved me. I felt like they were the first real family I'd ever had.
My life with them didn't start out wonderful. After years of not eating well, not enough sleep, and too much drama, I was skinny and sullen, with bad acne and a worse attitude. I didn't trust anyone, I didn't make any friends and didn't want any. I'd missed so much school, what with all the busted foster homes, the school district made me repeat fourth grade.
Even though my family was caring and patient, I was slow to trust even them. I went to school, came home, studied, and played computer games. Then, the summer after fifth grade, puberty happened. It didn't sneak up on me, it came up like thunder 'crost the bay.
I wasn't surprised or scared by the blood. Marie had told me about menstruation, we'd been expecting it for almost a year, but I wasn't as blasé about breasts or hips or pubes. My menarche (still think that sounds like a town deep in bayou country) arrived a couple of months before the end of the school year, so those other things were pretty apparent by the Fourth of July.
The three of us went to the fireworks display at Rio Vista park in San Marcos, wearing shorts and tank tops like just about every other woman there. After we finished our picnic and were waiting for the fireworks to start, I offered to get us ice cream bars from a bicycle vendor a couple of hundred yards away. Before I got to him, two guys started hassling me and trying to cop a feel.
Sandy was keeping an eye on me—she's a cop, remember? When she saw what was happening, she ran over and threw the fear of God into the assholes by flashing her badge from her fanny pack (which also happened to hold her .40 Smith) and pointing out the undesirable consequences of being charged with sexual harassment.
I was pretty shaken, but my moms there-thered me and we still managed to ooh and ahh at the starbursts and closing cannonade over the Guadalupe River. They always teared up when I called them my moms, but I never took advantage of that.
Well, hardly ever.
I think the Fortha experience was what finally convinced me that I could trust them. The next day, Sandy came out to Luling—she usually only came out on Saturday or Sunday—and told me she'd signed me up for martial arts training. I'd never heard of Krav Maga, but I loved it from the beginning.
We met at the San Marcos YWCA Monday and Thursday evenings. Marie would drive me in; we'd grab a quick dinner at Burger King, then she and Sandy would watch while I learned about golden targets and eye gouging and screaming. The most important lesson, though, was to stop thinking like a victim and start thinking like a warrior. After while, I did.
Okay, a warrior princess, maybe, but still a warrior.
In August I moved up to intermediate Krav Maga, and learned another important lesson: mental preparedness is just as important as martial arts skills and physical fitness. Marie put a weight bench and elliptical trainer on our screened-in back porch, and I discovered that I really liked working out. And running.
Thanks to my non-existent social life, incessant studying, and voracious reading, I had done really well in school that past year. Just before classes started, the district tested me out of sixth grade so that fall I entered seventh grade at Alfred G. Packer Junior High School.
Heather Fields sat in front of me in home room; for some reason she decided that the social princess and the warrior princess should be friends. Heather and I didn't have a whole lot in common: her folks were landed gentry, I was a single mom's foster child. She was Luling's version of a debutante, I was recycled trailer trash. Her daddy was in the oil bidness, my father had been an alcoholic who couldn't hold a job.
Her folks also owned an exotic game farm that sold giraffe and zebra hunting permits for really big bucks to pencil-dicked lawyers from Austin and San Antonio. I never could figure out why anyone would want to shoot such peaceful, beautiful critters, and thought it was pretty shitty of her Daddy and Mama to enable it, but they were always pretty nice to me so I didn't say anything.
I was dubious about Heather for weeks, but she was funny and honest and persistent. She had plenty of money and stylish clothes, but never commented about my fashion choices—I always wore tatty jeans and T-shirts and a thick bra, adding a hoodie if it cooled down in winter. She never tried to impress me by flashing her money, appreciated my sarcastic humor, stood up for me when some of her stuck-up friends tried to put me down, and didn't give a shit what people thought about her hanging out with me.
Her persistence finally wore down my defenses. We declared ourselves BFF before the end of that school year.
—————
A COUPLE OF YEARS LATER the self-defense lessons paid off. We were close enough to Austin that soccer was an acceptable high school sport, and thanks to Title IX we girls had a team. My running and working out paid off: I'd played some soccer in junior high PE, and because there wasn't a huge turnout of aspiring
niñas futbolistas
, the coach couldn't be too picky. My ball control left a lot to be desired, but I was quick, had great reflexes, and could throw the ball farther than most of the others could kick it. In short order, I was the starting goalie.
One late August afternoon just after I started my sophomore year, soccer practice was cut short because 103 was too damn hot even for conditioning drills. The football team was in two-a-days, but that afternoon they didn't suit up, just ran half-speed through plays in T-shirts and shorts.
I showered and was walking out to where Marie would pick me up, my backpack slung over my left shoulder. As I approached the gate to the football practice field (we practiced on the grass overflow parking lot), John Thompson jogged up to me. He was a senior, the starting quarterback, and knew for a fact that he was really hot shit.
"Well, look who's grown a nice set of little titties." He grinned at two of his buds and thumbed my left breast. "How about a quick blow job? It'll make all your little friends jealous as fuck." While he and his leering friends cracked up at his incredible
savoir faire
, I pasted what I hoped was a sweet smile on my face and reached down to his crotch.
"Y'all mean this big boy here?" He had on a jock, but it wasn't going to do him much good. Part of my workout included grip strengthening; I grabbed his nuts and squeezed hard.
His shit-eating grin turned into an O. He yelped and started to grab my arm, but I squeezed harder and ground his cojones against each other. His yelp went up at least an octave and he dropped his threatening arm. "What the fuck are you doing?" His two minions started toward me. I squeezed even harder.
"If your goons don't back off, I'll turn these into
pico de gallo
." He groaned and his eyes bugged out; they backed off.
"I'm trying to teach you a lesson, dickhead. You might be tall, dark, and handsome, you might be a football star, you might even be hung like a donkey, but that doesn't give you the right to sexually assault me or anyone else. Understand? Nod if you do." I gave him another couple of degrees of squeeze. He nodded.
"Here's what's gonna happen: I'll let go of your family jewels, then you and Tweedledum and Tweedledumber will walk back to the locker room, probably slower than usual. You might want to skip taking a shower so you won't have to explain how come your nuts are so swollen and such pretty colors, but that's up to you.
"I'm gonna keep walking and won't file a complaint—hell, I won't say anything to anybody—unless you try this shit again. You wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting an athletic scholarship with sexual harassment on your record." I upped the squeeze another notch. God I love a strong grip! "Nod if you understand." He nodded.
I gave them one last really hard squeeze and ground them together again. When I let go he dropped to his knees and I continued down the sidewalk. I never looked back, but the adrenaline was fading fast. As soon as I was out of sight I ran into the landscape bushes and started shaking so bad I thought I would pass out. I threw up breakfast and lunch, then considered checking the offal for toenails.
I never told Marie or Sandy about it because I didn't want them to worry. Apparently one or both of dickhead's minions talked, though, because I didn't have any problems for the rest of high school. I focused on studies and soccer and Krav Maga. And WoW.
