CRYSTAL
CRYSTAL
Aug 27, 2017 · 6 min read

Leigh

(Read the previous story, this is a series)

Chapter 5

It started with weed like it always did for everybody. No, it actually started with alcohol and a clearly addictive personality that I might have inherited from my mom. She had alcohol everywhere in the house so I helped myself to it long before I had given it to Amanda. It helped me to sleep, it made me feel powerful and superior to everybody else. Something I always wanted to feel. I was 14 at the time when I met her. I started attending a summer class at a private school close to my house in Kingston. We didn’t do much there. We had a few lessons but most of our time was spent playing sports or hanging out by the sports field. There was a bunch of kids there and after classes were done for the day, some of the older boys hung out there and smoked weed. There she was among all the boys. The only girl but she looked like them. Her skin was white and her hair was very curly, bordering kinky. She had her hair in a big puffy afro bun. She was wearing baggy jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. She was a tomboy, she fit right in with the rest of the boys and that was cool and fascinating to me. I stared at her because I was hurting and missing my previous obsession who was overseas. This little boy-girl person was standing with older kids and smoking weed with them like it was the most normal thing in the world. I can’t put into words how that interested me. I went over to her and asked her what she was doing and she handed it to me to try it. I tried. I coughed like hell and they laughed so I tried it again and again and again. And that was the start of the spiral into drugs.


Weed never gave me the thrill alcohol gave me. Even then at 14 smoking it for the first time. I only did it because it looked cool. It made me sleepy and that was it. Over the years I’ve heard that it’s just never good weed. But I’ve had good weed and it’s been the same. St. Thomas weed, grange Hill weed all the good highgrade weed from Jamaican farmers and its the same effect. I continued smoking though because she was doing it. Her name was Leigh pronounced (Lee) . Very mature for her age. Too mature for her age and it was a little scary but different at first. I loved anything different. She was very demanding, commanding and bossy. Even more so than I was and at first we had many arguments on the field while playing. Mainly, I was mad as Leigh hardly said much. We talked (I talked mostly), smoked and hung out all summer. She was fun to play with and she was cute. I liked her but I was hurting being away from another love. How does a 14 year old bond with a 12 year old? I don’t know but there was a friendship. That summer I tried so many things to get Amanda out of my mind, some of which led me down darker paths but thats the next story.


The next summer I was going through emotional turmoil. Not only was Amanda sent to boarding school, my mother had lost the apartment. The sugar daddy that was paying for it had stopped paying for about three months and we were given an eviction notice. He had stopped because my mother had revealed herself to his wife in an attempt to destroy his marriage and he was done with her. My mom tried to scrape the rent from other men in her life but we were on our last. I turned to Leigh for solace at school and she took me to her house. She never talked much but she liked me and she felt pity for me during those times. She lived with her parents in a big house in the same community as her school. Both parents were half white, Canadian migrants and she had an older brother. They were very religious, catholic people and they were nice to me at first. I told them my story and they took pity on me. They took me in and tried to assist my mother in finding a job. She wasn’t interested in working. My mother stayed from one man’s house to the other but I was safe with Leigh and her parents for a while. We had to go to church. I learnt a lot about the catholic faith and I hated it because it felt forced. Religion and church always felt forced to me. I felt like nobody wanted to do any of this shit, they were only doing it because they’re scared of God. I wasn’t scared of God. I would rather rule hell if I went there. I wasn’t an atheist fully as I still wondered about the mystery of the universe and thought a Supreme being must have created it but I was heading there. I was forced to go to Sunday school since living in Barbados but it never felt forced at the time because I always saw church as a place for kids to gather and play. At 15 living with Leigh’s overly religious parents, I started discovering more about religion and the more I discovered the more I hated it. They tried to force Leigh to wear dresses and she did sometimes but she always looked funny in them. Dresses just weren’t what she wanted to wear. She loved her baggy jeans and baggy pants.


By this time I was beginning to understand my sexuality and I knew now what that meant. I wasn’t a lesbian but I also wasn’t straight. One day Leigh told me she liked girls. She liked me and she wanted to kiss me. We kissed and it was magical. I was beginning to heal from the Amanda pain and wanted to move on. Leigh said she wanted me to be her girlfriend and I agreed. That was what she did. She demanded things and I complied. I was tired of being dominant. After Amanda it was draining. My discovery of men and penis the previous summer when Amanda went away also changed me in that regard. Leigh controlled my every action. She told me what to do in every situation. She told me what to wear. She was 13, I was 15 and she was way too mature for her age. She continued smoking weed at the back of her parents house or down by the playground. She played games for money with some local boys. She rebelled against all of her parents rules. How had she gotten this way? Maybe the overbearing strictness of her parents made her do the opposite of what they wanted her to do all the time. That’s what teenagers with overbearing, strict parents did sometimes. She never talked to them about her sexuality. They had a clear homophobic stance that they got from their bibles and their religion. When they suspected we were too close they prayed over us. Separated us and made us pray away any sinful thoughts. Those sinful thoughts never left however and it was chaos when they walked in on us naked and rubbing ourselves on each other.


They blamed demons, they prayed for us, they tried putting us in separate bedrooms, they took Leigh to the pastor at church, therapists and then they were convinced that the demon was inside me they called my mom and told her to take me. She wasn’t able to and we continued to perform what we thought was sex at the time any chance we got. One day they had had enough, and they told me to pack my things and leave. Leigh was very upset and she cursed at her parents with more curse words that I knew she had in her vocabulary. She sounded like the grown men she hung around with. Eventually she left with me and with nowhere to go we contacted my mother who also didn’t have anywhere to put us. We finally found a couch at the house of an older male friend of Leigh’s, very sketchy. I was scared but it was better than sleeping on the streets. We stayed at this house for a few years. Until my mom had acquired an even richer sugar daddy and had swindled him out of an entire house. I had became addicted to drugs and men during those years. Leigh and I had a very tumultuous, toxic and abusive realtionship and I was in and out of her life on her friend’s couch.

Ps. I am not a writer. English isn’t my first language and I have poor vocabulary. I am basic don’t read my shit.

)
CRYSTAL

Written by

CRYSTAL

Just using this to tell a story that has to get out of me.