No One Could Know

Chapter 1
Sweet Sixteen and Never Been Kissed
I’d been kissed.
I’d kissed back.
So any boyfriend who came after him … it seemed like kissing was expected, because … that’s what boyfriends and girlfriends “do.”
Don’t they? Didn’t everyone?
Too bad peer pressure doesn’t end the moment you move the tassel to the other side of the mortarboard, or when the smoke dissipates from the last candle on your 18th birthday cake.
Another shady encounter I had with sixth grade peer pressure was when “all the other kids” were crossing the street to sneak to the candy store during recess. We weren’t supposed to leave the school. Other than my third grade stint of rolling my own paper towel cigarette, I was an upstanding citizen. But that street seemed all too easy. There were no crosswalk guards to distract, no fences to climb, no alarms to disable and no laser beams to limbo under that would otherwise keep us inside our little boundary.
Well…there was Miss “Candice E. Ahmbizzy.” The librarian served as the perfect playground monitor from whom to escape; she was always distracted. She relished in pointing out nature to the group of kindergarteners still interested in that sort of thing.
My two pals had enough of mundane break-time customs. They were certain Judd’s was the place to be—and they knew I had 15 cents in my pocket left over from lunch. That was just enough money to buy each of us a five cent sour-sucker.
The more they talked, the more those suckers with orange on top and yellow on the bottom danced around my head like Sugar Plum Fairies—taunting, luring me to jump that asphalt and take just one little taste of sour on a hot desert day. The gauntlet was lying right there in the middle of West Tabernacle Street and I picked it up. We ran hard and fast, right into that cool candy store with the breeze blowing in the open door behind us.
We never got caught. That’s the thing about peer pressure, sometimes you and Miss Vice Grip are the only ones to know what was done, and a secret is lugged around in the sugar-coated corners of your mind the rest of your life.
But, what if you’re a recovering alcoholic—or even a recovering Facebook addict, how do you “just say no?” Here are a few tips I learned from my lurid 11-year-old sour sucker rebellion:
• Decline with a smile and change the conversation to the last TV show you watched. “Did you see Marcia get hit in the nose with the football?”
• Consider joining those who actually like the librarian’s locust migration lessons.
• There’s always, “You’ll have to excuse me please. My mom just texted me; I have to pick up some milk and Gummy Worms. Now.”
• You could boldly use an indisputable reason like your health, “I’m allergic to red Solo cups; I break out in hand-cuffs.”

CHAPTER 7
Terminated

The doctor finished almost as soon as he’d begun. I thought it would’ve taken a lot longer, but that was it. In—I don’t know—thirty minutes or less, I’m guessing, it was done. Now my life would be mine again and Brock’s life would be his.
The nurse led me around a corner and told me to lie down in a reclining chair next to a host of other women who were there for the same reason. It looked like a row of lounge chairs at a resort where we should all be sipping tropical drinks with little umbrellas poking out the top while passing sunscreen to each other. And I thought this event was supposed to be discreet so that “no one could know.”
How had so many gotten pregnant unexpectedly? How many of us were there, anyway? How many were there in the U.S. — or other countries? A wow, almost fell out of my mouth as I realized the enormity of what was happening, but I wasn’t about to break the silence in our “beach club.”
Every layer of skin and muscle tissue felt heavy and like it was slipping off of my skeleton. My female parts particularly hurt with searing pains—and my heart felt even worse.
The nurse handed me a pill. “Here. It’s Valium to help you relax.”
Hmm … Valium … for anxiety. What about my heart that felt like it had been terminated as well? I’d just done the most dramatic thing in my life and I was supposed to be calm? Where was the hard stuff? “Here’s a pill—it’s all ‘over’ now”? How long was long enough to gain a full recovery anyway?
Tick, tock.

CHAPTER 12
The Hardest Thing

Understanding that God could love me no matter what I’d done started to make sense the more time I spent getting to know Him. I finally allowed myself to receive His unfathomable pardon for my crime. My debt had been paid through the work Christ did on the cross. How could I not forgive those who’d hurt me, when God was forgiving me?
John 3:17 made perfect sense now—“For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (KJV).
God was not condemning me! The only condemnation was from perceived judgment that may have or may not have come from those in the church! We never even asked Brock’s parents how they’d have responded to the news if we’d decided to keep the baby! Would I have been locked away in the bell tower of the church with the bats? Would I have been excommunicated? Would anyone have tried to send me away to another country?
Why do we torture our own souls with endless questions and perceptions as if they were facts? Thankfully, God’s love surpasses all our foolishness; and at the end of the day, He is still waiting right in front of us with outstretched arms and open hands.