Assariyah by La'Toya Makanjuola

with your baby.”
    He paused for a while then replied, “You don’t seriously expect me to believe that it is mine?”
    “Look, I understand why you have your doubts but you are the only person I have been with within the past six weeks.”
    “Well forgive me, forgive me for not taking the word of the town whore as gospel. Even if it is mine, and that is a very big IF, I want nothing to do with it.”
    “You bloody bastard, how dare you? That ‘it’ you are referring to is my baby and whether you like it or not, I’m going to have this baby.”
    “This will ruin everything, you cannot have it,” he yelled.
    I slammed the phone down and paced back and forth on my balcony in an attempt to calm myself down. Stress was the last thing I needed, especially at such an early stage into my pregnancy. I was going to do this shit and nobody was going to stop me from having my little miracle.
    The conversation with him had taken me back to a place I did not ever want to remember. You see when I was fourteen I had fallen pregnant by Eric, my sister Nayla’s boyfriend. He was twenty-two at the time and she was twenty. They had been dating for about three years so he was a regular fixture in our household. One day I had bumped into him after leaving school early. He’d asked what I was doing bunking off, so I told him I usually skipped Miss Preston’s History class on Wednesday afternoons because Judy and her big mouth friends always hated on me. They would call me names and throw things at me but dumb ass Miss Preston was blind to all the shit they did. However the moment I retaliated and tried to stick up for myself, she all of a sudden got X-ray vision.
    “Assariyah Jones why must you always find the need to disrupt my class? I’ll tell you what, since you think you are so clever, come here and teach the class.”
    “But Miss they…”
    “That is it get out of my class, you are on detention for a whole week.”
    The whole class erupted with laughter as I got up to leave the classroom. I hated them all and couldn’t be bothered to keep getting in trouble just for defending myself, so I stopped going to her class altogether.
    “I’ll tell you what, come back to my place and you can chill out and play with my Nintendo, that way you don’t have to worry about bumping into anyone else.”
    “For real? Thanks Eric,” I said, giving him a big hug.
    “No sweat baby girl but you’ve got to promise not to tell your sister or I’ll be the one who is in big trouble.”
    “I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, promise.”
    He winked at me and I followed him to his place.
    When we arrived at his house, Eric and I played computer games and he gave me loads of candy and chocolates. I was having so much fun until Eric started stroking my thighs.
    I moved his hands away, “Eric what are you doing?”
    “Lighten up Assariyah, I just wanna play a little game with you.”
    “I should really start going home now.”
    “We both know that if you go home now, you’ll get in trouble for bunking off school.”
    I shrugged my shoulders even though he was right. It was way too early to go home, Mama would flip out.
    “Just chill out,” Eric said and then started kissing me. I knew what we were doing was totally wrong but it started to feel kind of good after a while and I did not have the strength or the will power to fight him so I laid still and let him have his way with me.
    Fast forward three months and I found out that I was pregnant. When I told Eric, he told me that I had to get rid of it.
    “I love your sister, if you have this baby it will ruin everything. She will hate you and your whole family will think you are a whore, do you see why you can’t have it?”
    I was scared and ashamed of what I had done and I did not want anyone to find out. I decided that Eric was right and getting rid of it was the best thing for everyone’s sake.
    Eric booked the appointment and dropped me off on the day but he did not stay.