CHAPTER ONE

Angela woke up. It was a Monday morning in February. The weather had finally warmed up a little bit, although for Florida, it was still slightly chilly. She looked at the clock – it was 9:00 in the morning, and she was right on schedule for her morning workout, and then work at 11:00. She coughed, feeling sickly, as she had been for most of the winter off and on. It seemed that her stressful life had driven her to the point of perpetual sickness, against which she fought to no avail. She squinted through the daylight, across the bed to the representation of every frustration in her life right now. Thankfully, Derrick had slept through the alarm clock. Thankfully, because she didn’t want to fight this morning.

She pulled herself out of bed, and got dressed. She said goodbye, and he barely stirred in the bed where she had just been sleeping next to him. The past thirteen months had been such a waste, she thought, as she closed the door quietly and walked down the stairs to her own apartment. She hadn’t really spoken to him in days. They never even touched hands anymore. They had exchanged words, but they didn’t listen to each other anymore, and the words were usually harsh and filled with every kind of negative emotion imaginable. She knew about the other girls, too, but he didn’t know that she did. She had seen the look in his eyes when he spoke to this particular girl at a show they had been to the night before, and the fact that he had ignored his own girlfriend’s presence in the room made her seethe with jealousy. She knew that he told her that she was gorgeous. She knew that he told her that he missed her, missed talking to her, even though they had never been together. She overheard all of this, while standing off to the side. They never even looked like a couple anymore. She had become a great lip-reader.

Angela proceeded through her morning workout routine, wishing she could be thinner and more beautiful. Not for Derrick, though, because she knew that they had never really had anything, and never would. She thought that, if only she could look like the girls that Derrick loved, someone would love her, too. She wanted to fall in love. She wanted those feelings that were described in soap operas and romance novels. She wanted to tingle from head to toe with excitement.

After her workout was complete, Angela showered and went to work. She knew the end was near for her minimum-wage-paying job, where she spent thirty-five hours a week and was still unable to make ends meet, much less have any semblance of a life outside of work. Derrick surely didn’t help in that department. He was too concerned with his musician friends, his reputation, and his nearly mediocre music itself to care about anything and anyone else. She spent most of the day thinking about this, contemplating her misery with him, with her own life, feeling like it was all hitting a brick wall.

Finally, 7:00 came, and work was over. She dreaded going home. She was being dragged by Derrick and his friend James to another friend’s show that night, against her will, being beaten into submission through guilt-trips that she had no choice but to go. So she went. She sat outside the club while Derrick and James talked about the ridiculous and juvenile things that they always did. They talked as if the world would end if a particular band didn’t play a particular song first, or what would happen if they played a certain song last…trivial things like these governed their lives. Derrick had even become unconcerned with college, and started failing his classes. He now seemed to have a complete lack of ambition for anything in life except for feeding his over-inflated ego, most of the time at her emotional expense, as she felt that he tore her apart emotionally to make himself feel powerful.

So there she sat, on the ground outside the club, not saying a word. He didn’t acknowledge her, didn’t tell her that he appreciated her giving up her evening to spend it with him and his over-rated friends. It’s not as though she had anything better to do on this particular evening. She would have rather spent it at home, alone, than at the club, seeing this friend’s band for the third time in a week, and listening to the juvenile banter that always ensued between Derrick and his friends. And inside the club, all throughout the show, she continued to not speak. He didn’t notice except to comment that the angry look on her face was embarrassing him. Who would want an angry girlfriend, after all? Certainly, the almighty Derrick couldn’t be seen with her like that, because it would hurt his reputation. Certainly, she had a right to feel angry. In addition to the verbal infidelity and the verbal abuse, she had nothing left for him, and almost nothing left for herself.

That’s when it hit her. She was with him, and miserable. She had nothing. She was at the bottom, at the lowest point she had ever been in her entire life. She had lost a lot of herself along the way. She used to be so strong willed and independent. Now, all she felt was that she was never going to amount to anything, that all her dreams were stupid and insignificant, because that’s what he told her on a daily basis…sometimes, even an hourly basis. He told her she was stupid, and she felt it. So, right then and there, that’s when she put her proverbial foot down. She looked at him and thought about how she would be better off alone. At least, alone, she had a chance to put herself back together. It would be the strongest thing she had ever done if she left him. He had made her feel like she was nothing without him…as though she was defined by being his girlfriend…as though the only thing that made her little life worth living was being his girlfriend. As though she was his property. She realized right then and there that she deserved more than this, that she owed it to herself to stand up to him finally and tell him everything, and then walk away. She knew she was risking everything in doing so and was terrified.

The show ended, and they went home. She went to her own apartment instead of up to his, as didn’t want to talk to him, not just yet. She needed some advice. She called her close friend, Matt, on the phone, to finally break down and tell him everything. Matt was biased, of course, as he was crazy about Angela. She knew this, but she trusted him and wanted his biased advice. She wanted him to push her over the edge to make that final move. And he did.

“Angela, you deserve so much better than what Derrick is giving you. I’ve watched you for the past five months, and you are a beautiful girl, inside and out, with so much potential. There will be someone out there who will be ready and waiting to give you what you deserve, but you’ll never see him if you’re blinded by Derrick’s wrath. He’s already proven himself untrustworthy. He’s already taken everything from you, including your ability to love yourself – and apparently anyone at all. You’re making the best choice possible in leaving him. Go, go do it now. Call me when it’s over.” Matt encouraged her.

After she hung the phone up, she called Derrick. Her hands shook with fear. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to say to him, she certainly didn’t rehearse it. She wanted it to sound unrehearsed, she wanted her emotion to take over and just spill everything out on the table as she let it all out of her heart and mind.

“Derrick, you have to tell me about Christie. Tell me your true feelings about her. Tell me why you’re hardly ever home when I get home, and why when you are home, you’re always talking to her or talking about her to me.” She asked him about Christie, because she was the girl that he had been speaking to the night before, and the one that she knew, secretly, that he had something going with. To make matters worse, she was their neighbor, and she worked all the time, and Derrick and Christie both did not have the need to work.

“I’ll admit it, straight out to you, Angela. I may never be able to be with Christie. I know that she and I are all wrong for each other. She’s certainly not my type, and I’m not her type either. But I have feelings for her. Maybe not love, but feelings.” Derrick told her. Not expecting this straight confession, Angela’s jaw dropped. It was the final push she needed.