Jessica

Cedar Posts is going to take a divergent path the next couple of weeks, under the title Jessica.

This is not going to be a pleasent journey. I have actually struggled with telling what I know and putting it all into perspective. The words don't come easy. 

Let me start with the end. Jessica is dead, she was only 16 when she took her own life.

I'm going to tell not of her death, the details or the reasons, as you the reader I will leave that in your hands, but rather her life and the time during which got to know her.

The words may change, I may put some down onliy to decide later that I've told too much, or that the picture the words paint is too troubling or worse too sexual. 

I'm older than her father, but that doesn't cross my mind as I watch her bound out of the passenger side of red honda that has parked too close to my Lexus SUV. 

I watch with the learing eyes of a dirty old man watching teenage girls along a South Carolina wind sweep beach during the heat of midday in August, the constant sound of the ocean and salt filling the air. 

For an instant she glances my way as she stumbles and catches herself on the right front fender of my car. I smile, she laughs an acknowledgement that there was no harm, no foul. 

The driver of the Honda emerges I instinctively suspect boyfriend until the angry look slams my lustful daydream back to reality. Short cropped hair, auto repairman work shirt and full of hate. Jessica's boyfriend is a dike. Mean angry man hating and as I quickly notice, very controlling full blown bitch dike.

The dike, who in the months to follow I will learn is called Cat is really Katherian Elizabeth but Cat fits her.

Cat's look is pure hate, she says something to Jessica and the young girl's playfulness dissolves to stoic as Cat arms up with her pulling her away like an arresting police officer.

I close my eye and I can still see her smile, her hand on the side of my car and her unbridled joy of her youth. Over the last few months I've visited denial, anger, pure over whelming grief and now thankfully acceptance over the loss of someone I only met in person a dozen times but had countless exchanges with over Facebook and Twitter.  

I'm in my car waiting on Mrs Cedar at a place called In-XS a hair salon, I have the Yorkie, who sits on my knee looking out the window for all to see.  It is the Yorkie that lures Jessica to the drivers side window a few minutes later. Cat is no where to bee seen and Jessica is a bubbling 16 year old again, 

Can I say hello? I offer that the Yorkie is very friendly. Much making over my four pounds of happy fur continues until Cat rains on our fun. She grabs Jessica's hand with such force I'm temporally thinkng of saying something, but I look away.

A minute later the Honda winds up and charges down Providence Road, never to be seen again or so I thought. 

A few weeks later I would meet Jessica again, same place same tine but a much different outcome. 

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About a week later at the Harris Teeter I hear an unfamiliar voice: "Hey you're the guy with the little dog aren't you?" I'm caught off guard then it clicks Jessica from In-XS. She's with her parents and expands on "the yorkie" and how she'd love to have one. Her parents seem kind and caring as they endure my sales pitch for rescued dogs and YorkieRescue.com Cat is nowhere is sight and Jessica seems to be all the better for that.

It would be a month maybe longer before I'd bump into Jessica again this time she's with Cat who have a grip on he arm like a cop taking a suspected shoplifter in for questioning. I'm hard to miss, but not a smile, a hello or even acknowledgment. Cat clearly is in control, the tension is thick yet the other High School kids seem at ease. Laughing and doing what High School kids do at Chipotle after school.

I'm inside with Mrs. Cedar when I see a young man approach my car and leave a brown napkin under the windshield wiper.

An hour later the napkin reads can you email me the website for the Yorkie rescue place. Pleeeeeze! Jessica with her gmail addy.

I'm not in the habit of emailing 16 year olds. It take me a week to respond. When I do it is from my company email with no so much as hi, just the web address: YorkieRescue.Com

A month later I get an email that says "Thank You soooo much I found a Yorkie to rescue and I'm going to pick her up in Raleigh on Saturday.

Included is a facebook link. And sure enough within a week there are dozens of photo of a little Yorkie called Boo.

Boo lived about five months before she found him dead in her parent back yard. During this time I have no contact with Jessica, a random facebook post would show up in my newsfeed. All seemed well, but the photo of her and Cat seemed off.

Somehow I sensed not all was well, not that they didn't look like an openly gay couple, just that they didn't seem to click. Her facebook posts stopped after her RIP Boo photo.

A month later she posted a comment on the photos of my two labs. I commented back and a day later this massive email showed up.

"I need some advice and I don't trust my friends or family"...... the rest of the email I'll just truncate to this facts, Cat had killed her dog, her relationship with Cat began as a dare, and she felt compelled to have her relationship out of peer pressure, in order to fit in with her friends. But Cat was abusive and controlling, she had once broke off the relationship only to be beaten so badly by Cat that she missed nearly two weeks of school. She didn't want the cops or her parents involved but wanted to end the relationship with Cat somehow. She feared rejection from her friends and didn't want to be alone.

The last part was a cry for help, "I've thought about killing myself to be with Boo" but can't afford to buy enough drugs lol"

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