''

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

The 16 - Year - Old



               Her hair was long dark and curly. Her eyes were bluer than the sky on a hot summer day. She was intelligent, a book worm and spoke at least two languages fluently. She lived with her mother in a poor part of town. Her father had passed away while he was doing some time in jail for a crime which she did not understand when told or did not want to know. One thing she knew was that she did not want that in her life – an outlaw husband, not that she was looking for one.
               Her dreams were big. She wanted to leave this neighborhood, find a good job which she loved and also make a decent salary.  A salary which would be enough for her to have a real nice apartment furnished with all the luxury she deserved.  She still needed to finish high school, however, she also studied har to do well on the college entry exams in two years’ time.
               Relatives, mainly her cousins, thought she had loose screw because she came from a poor family and the rich and the poor never mixed, although she was very pretty. Her cousins told her that she should just get used to the fact that her life wouldn´t change and perhaps the only way for her to move up in society would be to marry into another level. But marriage for her was out of the question. Besides, where would she find a boyfriend and/or future husband where she lived and where she studied? They all came from the same kind of household as she did.
               On her 16th birthday her mother had given her a brand-new computer which would help her with her education. She really needed to absorb as much information as she could in order to make her dreams come true.
 Her mother also shared in using the same computer, so she knew all the passwords and kept a close eye on her daughter. After her husband had passed away, she feared that her daughter could fall into a trap and be taken away from her. She seemed to see her daughter ras a naïve teenager, who was gorgeous.
One day the mother noticed that her daughter had joined a dating website. Apparently, the message lit up as she was browsing through the web. Her heart sank. Her daughter hadn´t mentioned anything to her. The daughter had just mentioned a few days early that she was not into dating and that her studies came first and now this. She was going to bring it up at dinner time.
At the dinner table, the mother´s thought roamed in her head and to how she was going to approach the subject, because she knew that with teens either you could make them talk or clam up for life. She decided to come right out and tell the daughter what had happened.
At the same time, the daughter was trying to figure out a way to break the news to the mother that she was in love and had been chatting with a boy on the internet who wanted to meet her in person. Her mother had always been her best friend and she had to tell her.
They blurted out their news at the same time. Then the mother asked the daughter to repeat the story. The mother listened attentively and did not say a word until the daughter had finished telling her all the details of how they met and what he was like so on and so forth. When the daughter had finished, the mother took a deep breath and said that she agreed to the relationship as long as the daughter gave her the boy´s ID number so she could run a check at the police to see if the boy´s record was clean. You see, the mother had a friend who worked for the police would do this for her (not that he could, but he would).
Having agreed to the mother´s condition, the young girl called her boyfriend (by now she was calling him this) and asked him for his ID number, which he gave her. He then asked the reason she wanted it. She was an honest person, therefore she explained. He told her that he had done some time behind bars for robbing but that it was when he was younger (18) now he was more mature (21). He added that it had been part of a game which he and his friends were playing. No one got hurt, so it wasn´t all that bad.
Her heart broke into a million pieces. That very same night before going to bed, she told her mother that having him checked out would not be necessary because she had already broken up with him, blocked his number on her cell phone plus deleted the account for the dating website. The young girl also explained that she didn´t want a person like that in her life. She wanted a better life than her father had given her mother. She didn´t want a man who had broken the law.
The mother felt proud of her daughter and also sad that he had broken her heart. She had done a good job in raising such a strong and intelligent young lady. She went to bed and decided that to cheer up her daughter, she would wake up early and make her baby her favorite breakfast.
After a good night´s sleep, the mother got up bright and early and started preparing breakfast. Her daughter´s cell phone was on the kitchen counter and then it blinked several times and to her horror she read: Good morning my love. Did she fall for it?

Written: May 19, 2020


Google images

No comments:

Post a Comment