The impulse to run from danger or stand our ground and fight is a primal force in all of us. When we feel threatened or afraid, our bodies are flooded with stress hormones, our hearts pump faster and our pulses race. The part of our brain responsible for reasoning shuts down and our thinking narrows to three basic impulses: fight, freeze, or flee. Those are useful responses to fear if, say, we find ourselves in the woods face-to-face with a wild animal, but the problem is that those same impulses are triggered any time we’re afraid in life. We all have a fear that triggers our fight-or-flight response, and for me, it was (and still is) the fear of being alone and unloved.
It’s not a coincidence that my happiest time in high school was before Robbie and I started going to school together at Hoover. When our social lives were separate, I could focus on what mattered most: doing well in school and growing as a person. But once our worlds collided, I couldn’t help losing myself in our relationship. The unresolved issues and insecurities that had been eating away at me my whole life began to resurface, and I fell into a pattern of behavior that would come to define all my relationships. That hunger inside me for love was so intense, and the fear of losing it loomed so large, that over and over again I gave in to impulses that made me behave in ways I still regret to this day.
I had earned a spot on the varsity cheer team during my freshman year because I had some natural athletic ability, but then I struggled to keep up because my skill level wasn’t advancing at the same pace as other girls. When I got moved down to the JV team, it created yet another crack in my fragile self-confidence. Going into my sophomore year, I was so insecure that I felt jealous of any girl who even looked at my boyfriend. But there was one girl in particular who really got under my skin. She would flirt with Robbie every day at school and then post nasty “away” messages about me on AIM and Myspace. She had a reputation for sleeping with other people’s boyfriends, so every time someone came up to me and told me they had seen her all over Robbie in the hallway—it made my blood boil. This went on for probably a month or two and I even tried to confront her in the hallway, but she ran away. She didn’t come back to school for a couple of days, but when she did it just started all over again.
When word got around that I had tried to fight this girl, we both got called into the guidance counselor’s office. We got a long lecture about the consequences of fighting in school, but it didn’t exactly spark a healthy dialogue between us about conflict resolution. She kept right on flirting with Robbie and talking shit about me, and I kept right on letting it get under my skin. When I finally told my mom and my grandma what had been going on, their response was that I needed to fight this girl. My grandma even came down to the school one day and pulled me out of class to tell me that I needed to kick her ass right then and there, or I’d be in trouble with her. I had already gotten a warning about fighting in school, and the last thing I needed was to get suspended. I got my grandma to calm down so I could go back to class, but her attitude was basically, “You need to stand up to this girl and if you can’t do it in school, then you better do it when you don’t have school.”
My grandmother had a rougher childhood than anyone I have ever known. She was the middle child of twenty kids and was repeatedly beaten and molested by several family members. She survived because she learned to fight for what was hers with her fists. That’s how she had raised my mom to see the world. I think in their minds they were teaching me to be strong and stand up for myself. But I wish someone had helped me understand that I didn’t have to fight to hold onto anything. The truth is, Robbie wasn’t interested in some silly girl flirting with him at school any more than it mattered what she said about me online. I should have trusted in what I had and held my head high, but my mindset at the time was that this girl was trying to take what was mine and (like a dumbass) I was ready to throw down.
It was maybe a week or two after my grandma came down to the school. I don’t even remember exactly what triggered me that day. It could have been that someone told me they saw her sitting on Robbie’s lap or it could have been that I overheard her talking shit about me in the hallway between classes. Things like that had been happening almost daily since the beginning of the school year. What I do remember is walking out of my Spanish class and seeing her standing in front of the door to another classroom. Something inside me just snapped and the impulse to fight completely took over. This time, I didn’t give her a warning or time to run away. I just walked up to her and punched her in the face. She was definitely shocked, but it only took her a second to fight back. And then it was just an all-out brawl. At some point, we must have fought our way back into the classroom because I remember having her leaned over the top of one of the computers and hitting her over and over again. It was like all this rage that had been simmering under the surface had finally boiled over and I couldn’t stop. That primal instinct to protect what I had, took over and nothing else mattered.
In the end, it took two male teachers to pull me off of her. Weeks later, one of those teachers came up to me and joked, “Leah, I was trying to pull you off of her and you punched me in the damn chin. My jaw was sore for days. You’re a lot stronger than you look!” I laughed because I was embarrassed, but I knew it wasn’t funny. I had beaten the girl so badly that she ended up in the hospital and her family pressed charges against me for juvenile assault. I was suspended from school for three days, I had to see a parole officer once a month for six months, and my grandma had to pay the girl’s hospital bill.
After that, Robbie and I broke up and got back together so many times I lost track. He was becoming more confident and establishing his identity as an athlete in high school, and I was struggling to hold on to my own sense of self. He was serious about our relationship, but he was also a normal teenager having fun in high school; the way it should be. His personality was flirty and he liked the attention he got from other girls, but it drove me crazy. So we’d get into fights because I couldn’t control my jealousy. My flight impulse would kick in and we’d break up for a little while, but then I’d always end up going back to the relationship. It became this cycle where I didn’t feel like I was getting the validation I needed from my boyfriend, so I went looking for it somewhere else. If we were on a break and my friends told me some guy thought I was cute and was interested in me, I was easily swayed because I was afraid to be alone and being wanted made me feel good about myself. That instinct to run at the first sign of conflict in a relationship stayed with me for a very long time, and it always got me into trouble.
The first time I got drunk was during one of my breakups with Robbie. He wasn’t into drinking because he was so focused on being an athlete (and I was focused on our relationship), so I had never really partied in high school. One weekend I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and her dad was having a party. As the night wore on the adults were doing Jell-O shots, so they didn’t really notice when we took a few Smirnoff Ices out of the cooler. I’d never had so much as a sip of alcohol before, but Robbie and I were on a break, so I figured, why not? It made me feel warm and relaxed. I had just gotten a brand-new Motorola Sidekick with my grocery store money, and I remember sending a bunch of (embarrassing) texts to Robbie. Then we snuck some Jell-O shots out of the freezer and the rest of the night is a blur. I remember barely being able to walk, or even stand. While the world was spinning around me, I heard my friend arguing with her dad. I wasn’t sure what they were fighting about, but I heard her say, “Fine, I’m calling Mom.” Her parents were divorced and I think she called her mother to try and play her parents off of each other, but it must have backfired because a little while later she showed up at the house. When her mom saw the state we were in, she was furious. The last thing I remember hearing before I passed out was her mom saying to me, “Just wait until I tell your mother, Leah.”
My mom came to pick me up first thing the next morning. I was so hungover my head felt like it was going to split open and I was puking my guts out most of the day. Instead of letting me sleep it off, my mom made me go out and do yard work in the blazing heat as part of my punishment. I was so sick and miserable I thought I was going to die. She also grounded me for a couple of weeks and took away my new Sidekick. I spent the next few weeks hibernating in my room and feeling sorry for myself. The worst part was my friend twisting the story to make it seem like it was my mom who had flipped out about us drinking. A rumor went around that if I got caught drinking again at anyone’s house, my mom would call the cops on the parents—and people believed it because she already had a reputation for being over the top. After that night, whenever the girls on the cheer team were planning to party, they intentionally left me out.
The irony was that my mom had actually gotten a lot more lenient since Victoria and I had become teenagers. Around the time we moved to Big Chimney, Lee had started working the graveyard shift at the hospital. So, on nights he wasn’t home, she would let us have friends over and she’d hang out with all of us. I think because she never went to high school, or even got to be a normal teenager, there was a part of her that felt like she had missed out on something. She wasn’t even allowed to talk to boys before she met my dad and got pregnant with me, so she liked hanging out with our friends and being around that energy. Around that time, she and Lee were going through a rough patch. She had started seeing a therapist who diagnosed her as bipolar (with depression and anxiety), but she wouldn’t take her meds so she was totally unpredictable. One second she’d be flying high and the next she’d spiral into a dark place. I think she also just didn’t know how to handle having teenage daughters, so she’d either be so strict it was embarrassing or she’d want to hang out and act like she was the young cool mom—which was also embarrassing. There was no middle ground; it was always one extreme or the other.
By the end of that school year, Robbie and I were still fighting and I was lonely, so I had started talking to this senior that all my friends thought was really cute. Mike was a total country boy. He was into hunting and fishing. His idea of a fun time was to drive me to his house to pick up this huge, hairy hog that his family had living on their property. It was senior week and the faculty had lost a competition with the seniors, the penalty for which was that the teachers had to kiss a hog. After that experience, I definitely wasn’t interested in taking things any further, so I told Mike that I was planning to get back with Robbie. At the same time, I didn’t completely discourage him from pursuing me either, because hanging out with him was better than being alone.
In all the times that Robbie and I had broken up, neither one of us had ever actually hooked up with anyone else. Talking to other guys was just a distraction that made me feel less lonely when we weren’t together. Then, one night, things escalated so quickly I didn’t know how to make it stop. Kayla and my cousin were sleeping over at my house and, since Lee was working a night shift, my mom said we could invite some friends over. We called Mike and he came over with his younger brother, who was the same age as Victoria. We were all sitting around the living room, talking and hanging out, when my mom came into the room with an empty wine bottle and said we should play spin the bottle. At first, it was funny; we were all just laughing and not really taking the game seriously. Mike spun, and I was relieved when the bottle didn’t land on me. When I spun, it landed on his brother, so I gave him a peck on the cheek and we all laughed. When it was Mike’s turn to go again, the bottle landed on the empty space next to me. There was an awkward pause and he went to spin it again. But, before he could, my mom leaned over and pushed the bottle so that it was pointing right at me. I shook my head and said, “No way,” but she started wrestling with me and telling me I had to do it. I was laughing, because I thought she was just teasing me, but then she started pushing both of us towards the bedroom I shared with Victoria. The next thing I knew I was in the room with Mike and my mom was holding the door shut from the other side so I couldn’t get out.
I remember feeling cornered, like a trapped animal. I remember the sound of my pounding heart echoing so loudly in my head that it was difficult to think straight. Instead of choosing fight or flight, my impulse in that moment was to freeze. I didn’t want to kiss Mike, much less have sex with him, but that’s exactly what happened. He didn’t force himself on me. I think he was actually as nervous and uncomfortable as I was. At one point he even asked me, “Are you sure, Leah? Because this is weird.” I wasn’t sure (and it was definitely weird), but I still hadn’t learned how to say no. So I just shrugged and said, “I guess.” It was easier to just let it happen than to think about why my mom had pushed me into that room in the first place. We were in there for maybe ten minutes and it was the grossest sex I’ve ever had. He was all sweaty and grunting like that hog we had driven to school in the back of his pickup for senior day. When it was over, I felt totally ashamed of myself, but I knew there was no way I could take back what I had just done. Coming out of that room was the most humiliating walk of shame. I remember my mom laughing as we walked out. Then I think she just lost interest because she went to bed shortly after.
Robbie and I ended up getting back together not long after, but it was never the same between us. I didn’t want him to know what I had done. The guilt ate away at me until I couldn’t take it anymore. A couple of months later, I finally worked up the courage to tell him. I knew he would be angry, but I wasn’t prepared for how hurt he was. After I told him he just kept saying, “How could you do that to us, Leah? You don’t really love me.”
We never really broke up or had any kind of closure. Things between us just got so bad that we stopped talking to each other. He said he forgave me and we tried to make it work, but I think he just couldn’t get past it. By the beginning of my junior year, he was partying more, flirting, and hooking up with random girls to get back at me. Of course, my instinct was to run, so I left Hoover and enrolled at Clay High School where Kayla was. I was there for a couple of weeks, but I was totally miserable. So I went back to Hoover. I thought I could run away from my problems, but it was becoming painfully clear that my problems were running after me.