The Good Girl

by Mary Kubica

I was enraptured with my own existence, as is to be expected when one is eighteen: the way men would look at me, the way I felt in a miniskirt, much shorter than my mother would have ever approved. I was dreadfully inexperienced, desperate to be a woman and no longer a child.

James was different then, not the man he’s become over time. His faults were much more endearing, his bravado charming instead of the unpleasant way it’s grown to be. He was a master at flattery long before his choice words became insulting and ugly. There was a time in our lives when we were happy, completely bewitched by the other, when we couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves. But that man, the one I married, has completely disappeared.

The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage.

But with every dollar I earned was also the knowledge that I belonged to someone other than me.