all Mark needed was a hand up. I wasn’t about to leave him in the elements. That was my man. I was going to fight for him.
“Look, I know it’s hard out here, but we can do it together,” I insisted as I hugged him a little tighter. “I’m working,” I said, referring to the job I had waitressing on the boat. “I’m going to be making some decent money soon and we’ll be able to get us a place, and when I finish school, there’ll be even more for us. Let me help you.” At the time I was pursuing that engineering degree, and while I wasn’t on course to give Steve Jobs a run for his money, I always knew how to work, how to hustle.
I kissed his lips and neck and tickled him a little, looking to lighten the mood, but his energy was off. It was clear there would be no cartwheels to express his love like he’d done that time in the parking lot when we first met. Something had shifted. And then he got dark.
I didn’t mean to, but while I was trying to lighten the mood, I reached up to play with a gold chain he was wearing and accidentally broke it, and Mark got angry—the maddest I’d ever seen him. He raised his voice and said the meanest things. I couldn’t understand where the sudden rage was coming from.
“But I love you,” I insisted, crying. “I thought you loved me, too!”
He didn’t. That fight—simple yet decisive—was the end of us.
Who was I fooling? By the next weekend, I’d climbed into my cutest, shortest dress and my highest heels and made sure my hair and makeup were just right and grabbed my girlfriend Tracie and went down there to Chapter III, the hottest dance club in DC, tucked in the shadow of the Capitol. “I just need to get out this house,” I told her.
“Uh-huh,” Tracie said, laughing. “You know we’re going over there because Mark is going to be there.”
“Whatever,” I huffed. “You know the drill.”
She was right, I knew Mark would be there, and I wanted him to see me—to know what he’d given away. And I’m not going to front: I wanted to see him, too, to win him back. Today, I know that in marching myself to this lair, I was giving away all my power. But at nineteen, this seemed like a brilliant idea.
It wasn’t.
Mark got all in his feelings when he spotted me dancing and grinning in front of some guy who was smiling back at me and making it clear that he was interested. Mark marched right up to us, snatched my arm, and grabbed me up like he was my daddy and I was his errant five-year-old child.
“Don’t get cute,” he said, sneering.
“What are you talking about?” I yelled, pulling away. “You’re the one who wanted to break up.”
“That doesn’t mean you come to the club looking like that, throwing yourself at other random dudes!” he screamed directly in my face.
By now we were causing quite the scene. The crowd started leaning in to see what all the commotion was about, and there was some jostling and more yelling, and Tracie was trying to get between us to calm me down and Mark was waving his arms and roaring. It quickly escalated out of control. No punches were thrown, but there was enough of a commotion to draw the attention of the club’s bouncers, who made quick work of moving bodies to get to the center of the action.
Next thing I know, the bouncers put us out of the club, but Mark gets to stay! The bouncers didn’t touch him. But the girls? Side-eye. They had us hemmed in and pinned up and we were screaming and cursing and trying to pull back our arms and tug down our miniskirts, which had risen so high in all that ruckus that our asses were showing! I tried desperately to pry the bouncer’s vise grip off my wrist to stop him from making my new watch dig into my skin; that was a piece I’d just got from Cosmo, a trendy store where Tracie and I got our fly gear. We knew we were cute when we climbed into our outfits from Cosmo, destined for big things. But on that night, we were just some hood rats starting fights and getting booted out the club. Everybody was staring as that bouncer dragged us through the crowd. “Shut