NOVEL THIRTY-SEVEN

Warren and Sophia were at Sophia’s house. They had been babysitting, so they weren’t fooling around—just sitting on the sofa, watching TV, chatting.

"Pookie, I think there’s something we should start thinking about," Warren started.

"What?"

"College."

"I’ve already started, a little. Just trying to find out schools with a good meteorology program that I think I could get into."

"Yeah, I’ve done that for pre-med. But that’s not the big question."

"What is?"

"Are we going to try to go together?"

Sophia thought for a minute. "Well, I always assumed we’d go close, if not to the same school. To tell you the truth, I figured we’d both go in Boston someplace. But now, I’m not so sure I want to do that."

"I’ve been thinking about maybe going out of state myself. I guess the question is, do we want to do this together? Decide where we’re going to go and if we’re going to stay local or not together, as a unit? Or do we want to keep it completely separate, and if we end up a thousand miles away from each other, so be it?"

Sophia smiled at him. "I’ll be honest, Warren—when I hear about a school with a good meteorology program, I make sure I check out their pre-med, too." Warren just laughed. "I would like to stay together, yes. I think our relationship would survive a separation, but I’m not sure my mental health would."

Warren laughed again. "Neither would mine. And our ice dance career would surely be toast. I’d much rather go together, myself."

"Well, now I’m glad you brought this up, because you need to think about this, Dear Heart. If you decide you want to go to the same school, you are restricting your choices for my sake. A lot more schools have good pre-med than meteorology. Plus, there are schools that you can get into that I won’t. I know you’ve talked about Princeton—I could never get into Princeton, and I’m not even sure if they have a meteorology department."

"You might not be able to get in Ivy League, Sophia, but with your grades you’ll be able to get into a very good school. I don’t need to go to Princeton"

"But if that’s your first choice…….."

"Not if you’re not going to be there, it’s not. Look. Let’s do it this way. Let’s try to look together. Let’s investigate it with the idea that we’re looking for a school for both of us. If we don’t find one, then we readjust our plans. "

"OK. That sounds fair."

"You have three things going for you. First, you have a drastic grade improvement. Second, you have a very attractive extra cirricular activity. Third, you have a boyfriend that’s being actively recruited."

"You are?"

"Oh, yeah. With my grades, and where I go to school? You betcha. Letters, promises of scholarships, the whole deal."

"How does that help me?"

"I tell them we’re a package deal. You can’t get me unless you take my ice dance partner."

Sophia giggled, but then got sober. "I appreciate the thought, but I’d hate to get into a school on your back, if you know what I mean."

"I can see your point, but admissions to College are so arbitrary anyhow. I know a kid who’s planning on going to Harvard. And he will get in. And, he’s nowhere near the student that I am, and I’m not sure I could get into Harvard. He will, however, because his father’s an alumnus who gives boatloads of money to the place. So, if he can use the ‘son of rich Almunus’ loophole, you can use the ‘girlfriend/skating partner of favored recruit’ loophole."

Sophia cracked up. "OK, I see your point. However, we use that as a last resort. I try to get in on my own, first."

"Deal."

"Quite honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to go to an Ivy League school. I’d rather deal with a more diverse student body, actually."

"That’s a good point."

Sophia was walking into the Peer Counseling office. She stopped in to say hi to Mr. Doherty, and then to Mrs. Kincaid, the Biology teacher who was the other faculty advisor for the group. Mrs. Kincaid was talking to Doctor Gwen Sorensen, the psychiatrist who helped them out with some of the thornier problems.

"Hiya, Mrs. Kincaid, Gwen. How you all doin’ today?"

"Hello, Sophia," Mrs. Kincaid smiled. "Gwen was just telling me of a problem she had."

"Shrinks have problems?" Sophia teased. Gwen laughed. Gwen and Sophia were very fond of one another, but that didn’t mean that Sophia would ever stop teasing her about her profession.

"This, actually, is a shrink problem." Gwen smiled at her. "One of the things that I like to do with my abuse groups—like the one you run, Soph—is to have a guy talk to them. A guy who has had to, shall we say, pick up the pieces that an abuser has left. Someone who’s helped an abused girl get better. Brother, boyfriend, good friend, anyone who has been close to a girl who has been abused."

"I have had a couple guys that have helped me the past couple of years, but they are both away at college, neither is close by, and they won’t be able to help us out. That group that you work with, Sophia, the one with Meggan and Caroline and them—they could really use this. They need to hear from a guy like this. And I haven’t been able to find one."

Sophia smiled at the doctor. "Gwen, that is a problem easily solved. This sounds like a job for SuperWarren."

"Huh?" Gwen asked.

"Warren. My boyfriend."

"He has this kind of experience?"

Sophia looked down. "OK. Gwen, I’ve never told you this, because I haven’t wanted you to pull the whole shrink thing on me." Sophia took a deep breath. "Gwen, you’ve always said that I was one of the best boyfriend abuse peer counselors you’ve ever seen. Why do you think that is?"

Gwen looked at Sophia—and then her eyes widened. "You are kidding. How long ago?"

"Ended about two years ago. Started about two years before that, more than one guy, but the last one was the worst."

"How bad?"

Sophia reached into her pocketbook, and withdrew that picture. She handed it to Gwen. "Oh, about that bad."

Gwen gasped. "Oh my sweet Jesus." She blinked, and handed the picture back to Sophia. "Sophia, you are one of the most put-together young ladies I have ever met. Recovery to the degree that you seem to have is very, very rare. I hate to do the shrink thing"—Sophia just giggled—"but did you have therapy?"

"A little, but a few months after it ended, and I was well on the road to recovery by then."

"What happened?"

Sophia smiled. "What happened? Warren Kelleher, champion piece-picker-upper, that’s what happened. And the pieces I was in were so jagged that he sliced his hands up more than once. And the dear heart never flinched. "

"Did he see this? Was he there?"

"He was there at the end of it. This—the really bad stuff, with this particular guy—started in October of my freshman year. I met Warren in January, at work—he’s a Junior too, but goes to St. Mike’s—and we became friends pretty quickly. Things deteriorated to the degree that you saw in the picture shortly after that. Warren lived through it all. Not only that, the asshole beat Warren up."

"Because he was your friend."

"Right. Anyhow, that’s what made me realize a lot of things. Because I knew that Warren did not deserve to be beaten up. And if he didn’t, why did I? Anyhow, I dumped Scott, we got the police involved, he’s in jail right now, and a week later I asked Warren to go out with me. And he’s been there ever since."

"Call him. ASAP."

"Right." Sophia whipped out her cell phone, and hit a speed dial. "He ain’t picking up. There’s a dead spot or two at St Mike’s." She waited for the beep. "Snugglebear, it’s Pookie. Call me when you get this. Love you."

Gwen was amused. "Snugglebear? Pookie?" Sophia just laughed.

Then her phone rang. "Hi, Snugglebear, that was quick."

"I was in the can, taking a piss. What’s up?"

"I got a proposition for you………"

Gwen Sorensen stood in front of seven young ladies—the six members of the abuse support group, and their peer counselor, Sophia.

"Ladies, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine. He’s going to talk to you today, to tell you about the other side of abuse—the side of the people who care about girls like you. He’s been through it, and he’s going to talk to you about it. Please welcome Warren Kelleher."

Warren stepped to the front of the group and took a seat. He was nervous—public speaking was not his favorite activity by any means—but he knew what he wanted to say.

"Good afternoon ladies. I want to talk to you about what I know about abuse. I know a lot about it, even though I’ve never been abused, nor have I ever been an abuser. You do not have to be abused to live through it. You have friends and loved ones who are living through it. Trust me on that one."

"Two years ago this January, I got a job. It was at the Dunkin’ Donuts downtown, you all know where that is. Since half of Oceanview High sneaks out of school to grab a coffee there, you’ve probably all been there." They all giggled at that. "I was fourteen, it was my first job, they hired me to do maintenance."

"My first day there, I met this girl. I was immediately fascinated by her. For one thing, she was gorgeous, and I was your typical hormonal teenaged male, right? But, there was more to it than that."

"Now, we came from different worlds. She was a party girl, drank a lot, did drugs, had an older boyfriend, and was flunking out of school. In short, her life was a mess—at the time, I didn’t know why. I figured she just liked to party and all. We all know kids like that. Now, myself, I am the quintessential St Michael’s Preppy, OK?" All the girls giggled. "Straight A student. Virgin with a capital V. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, got along with his parents, even. The word ‘Nerd’ has been thrown my way more than once, and I can’t disagree with it."

"Despite that, we became friends rather quickly. This girl—let’s give her a name. We’ll call her Kitten, which is short for Sex Kitten, which is one of the things she calls herself"—the room erupted in laughter, Sophia trying not to be too obvious—"anyhow, we’ll call her Kitten. Despite Kitten’s far different lifestyle from my own, we became good friends. Despite her horrible grades, she was smart, sharp as a tack. We had very similar senses of humor. We had some interests in common. She lived on my way home, so I used to walk with her to her house. We were just friends, mind you—she had a boyfriend, and I figured she was way out of the league of a Prep Nerd like myself, anyhow."

"One day, she came into work and avoided me a bit. I finally discovered why—she was sporting a shiner like you wouldn’t believe. I guessed—rightly, as it turns out—that her boyfriend had done it. She finally admitted that to me. We talked on the way home that night."

"Now, you have to understand, that I have no experience with abuse, or didn’t up until that day. It was always something kind of beyond my ken. I never understood why it happened. If someone is hitting you, you leave, right? Now, I didn’t say anything like this to Kitten, not that way, anyway. She gave me her phone number, and we started adding phone conversations to our walks home and work talks."

"What I found out—that you all probably know—is that Kitten’s self esteem was practically non-existent. Now, I found out later on why this happened—and in Kitten it was a lot of reasons piled one on top of another—so, now, I can see how it happened. But, at the time, I just didn’t get it. I don’t make friends easily. I’m fairly reticent. However, I also consider myself a good judge of character. I looked at Kitten, and did not see what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She was knocking herself, constantly. And the abuse she was taking, besides doing bodily damage, was tearing apart what little self-esteem she had left. And I felt so helpless."

"She thought she was nothing. Less than nothing. She hated herself. Meanwhile, I was hopelessly in love with her, by that point." The group laughed at that, and Warren smiled. But then he got serious. "I was hopelessly in love with a girl that hated herself, and I couldn’t convince her to not hate herself. And I’d want to take her by the shoulders and yell at her, 'Goddammit, I don’t fall in love with worthless people!' But I didn’t. What I did do was cry myself to sleep more nights than I care to talk about."

"I tried, as gently but persistently as I could, to let her know that she wasn’t worthless, to let her know that people did care about her. I just tried to be there, as much as I could, without being too overbearing. It eventually worked, but I’m getting ahead of myself. But, you have to know, it was tearing me up inside."

"Somehow, I got through to her. Now, I didn’t completely get through until she had taken a severe beating bad enough to put her in the hospital, and the asshole found out about her friendship with me and took it out on me twice. That’s what finally made Kitten snap, seeing the asshole beating the living shit out of me so he wouldn’t go after her again. That’s what finally made her realize this. He beat me up on the way home one day, and came into the store the next day and did it again. Between those two things, Kitten saw the damage he had done to me, got all upset, said, ‘Warren, you didn’t deserve this. This whole mess isn’t your fault.’ She was right, I told her, but I also told her that I had been telling her the same thing for two months. That, combined with seeing him tearing into me a couple hours later, finally made her believe it."

"She gives me credit for saving her life, which is bullshit. However, I did try to convince her that her life was worth saving, and I also showed her the alternatives. She has admitted now that there were other people trying to do the same things, but I was the one that got through. Which might be luck, or it might be just that I’m good"—everyone laughed at that—"or it might be other things. But it worked."

"However, the moral to this story is this—there is someone in your life that is trying to show you that your life is worth saving. There is someone that is trying to show you the alternatives. And that someone sees the bruises, he sees the cuts, he sees the lack of self esteem, he sees the dead look in your eyes that I saw on most of you when I walked in and that I saw on Kitten for two months—and it is tearing him up inside. I don’t know who it is—might be a friend, might be a family member. But there is someone, I almost guarantee it. And you need to figure out who it is, and you need to listen. How many of you have had someone close to you say something like ‘I don’t know why you keep putting yourself down?’ or ‘I can’t understand why you don’t think your smart, or beautiful, or worthy, or whatever?’ Any of you have that happen?" Every hand shot up. "Here’s my advice. Listen. And encourage that person to keep talking. And, if you have to—ask for help. Because that person who is telling you those things wants to help far, far more than you know. And he or she doesn’t know how, and it’s killing him. Trust me."

Warren let that one sink in for a while. Then Caroline, one of the girls in the group, asked him, "Warren, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"What happened to Kitten?"

"Looking for a happy ending, are we?" Warren smiled. Caroline smiled and nodded agreement, as did the rest of the girls. Warren smiled bigger. "Well, lucky for you, I’ve got one."

"After Kitten finally decided that she didn’t want to be abused anymore, and dumped the asshole—who is now in jail, may he rot there—after that, Kitten decided something else. She decided that she had had it with guys who beat her down instead of lifting her up. And she found the guy who had been lifting her up. Of course, he had been there for a while, but she finally noticed."

"She asked me out a week later." All the girls joined Warren’s big grin. "And it’s a good thing, because Preppy Nerd Boy me would have agonized about it for a year and then lost her. Luckily, she saved me from my preppiedom by making the first move. When you consider that she was beaten down and abused, it was an incredibly courageous thing to do. Although, I think by then she had figured out that she wasn’t taking any kind of risk, that there was no way I was going to turn her down. I was completely gone by that time." Everyone laughed at that.

"I still am. We celebrated our two-year anniversary a couple of weeks ago. She’s also drug free, hardly drinks, quit smoking, and is a straight-A student. We’re discussing what colleges to attend, because we plan on going together. And, sometime after that, I’m going to marry her." The girls were grinning widely at this point.

"Happy endings are possible, ladies, but you have to work at them. Kitten did this herself, I was just there for her. You need to find someone willing to be there for you, too. And you have to open your ears, and your mind, and, most importantly, your heart."

Another girl in the group, Meggan, asked, "Does Kitten go to school here?"

"Yup."

"I wonder if I know her."

Warren grinned. "Oh, you know her, all right. I called her Kitten in my little story, but more often than not, I call her Pookie. She calls me Snugglebear." Everyone laughed. Warren got out of his chair, and walked over to where Sophia was sitting. "That’s all for me, ladies. I hope it helped." Then he looked down at Sophia. "See you later, Pookie," and bent over and kissed her. The girls grinned in amazement as Warren walked out of the room.

Meggan just looked at Sophia. "Warren is your boyfriend? You’re Kitten?"

"Yeah. And that’s the moral of the story, isn’t it? I finally listened to someone who was trying to tell me he truly, truly loved me, for all the right reasons. And it worked."

"Wow," was all Meggan could say, and the other girls nodded agreement.