Jenny (Babysitter's Club 5)

“Listen to me, Lauren, these are your beautiful babies. You love them; you will never hurt them, no look at me.” I’d stopped here before never saw past this point, so now I watched and listened, not daring to breathe.

“It’s me you hate, not them. I’m the one who messed up. I’m the one who should’ve stayed away. It wasn’t him, and it isn’t the girls, they have nothing to do with it. Now let’s go downstairs and talk about it.”

“No, you’re trying to trick me.”

“No, I’m not, I promise you I’m not. I understand trust me, I do.”

“What, what do you understand? Why are you looking at me like that?” Jenny took a deep breath as if weighing her words.

“I know that you have some kind of illness, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Didn’t you feel better when you were on the pills the doctor gave you?”

“I don’t need them, and what do you know shut up about it. He’s going to find out, and then he’s going to leave me for you.”

“You know better than that, you know he’s not that type of man. He won’t neglect the mother of his children just because she needs to take some pills to make her feel better.”

“Not that, it’s not that miss know it all.”

I saw the quizzical look on Jenny’s face and found myself leaning forward to hear what my wife would say next. “I made a mistake; it shouldn’t have happened, now Derrick’s going to leave me for sure. I know him, he’ll never accept me after, after… he’s going to hate me.”

Lauren rocked back and forth. “What is it that you think you’ve done, Mrs. Masters, that would make your husband hate you?”

“I fucked someone else okay, are you happy now? I only did it because of you, because you were always mooning around here giving him those looks like you two had a secret that I didn’t know about.”

The look on Jenny’s face was as stupefied as the one I was wearing now. I listened in as Lauren went on with her tale with a coldness growing in my gut that wasn’t there before.

“I knew it was only a matter of time before he left me for you. You’re alike you and him; you’re both rich; you’ve spent your whole lives in the lap of luxury while I had nothing. But you’re never going to have him.” She made a move towards Jenny, and that’s when I burst into the room.

I stopped watching and listening, just sat there taking it all in, trying to remember if there were any signs that I’d missed. I felt numb, betrayed, and stupid. In the background, I heard Jenny and mom talking about her taking the girls while my parents followed me to the hospital.

I heard Jenny telling my mom not to worry that she’d take good care of my girls. Heard mom ask her if she was still in love with me. I turned back to the screen then and saw the way she hung her head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

I watched mom pull her in for a hug as she reassured her that none of this was her fault. After that, it was silent again until hours later when mom and dad brought me home from the hospital. This was picked up on the cameras in the hallway upstairs where my room and the nursery is.

It went silent again for a while and then there was Jenny, she stopped at the bedroom door and looked in then walked in. I waited and waited for her to come back out again, but when she did, I sat bolt upright in my seat. “What the fuck did I do?”

Derrick

I didn’t react, not right away; I couldn’t even though I wanted to run over to her house and get some answers. I re-watched that one splice of video over and over again, though.

The part where she came out of my room disheveled, her hair mussed in that just fucked way and still fixing her clothes as she walked crookedly down the hallway as if she’d just been fucked by an army of orcs.

The longer I watched, the more I remembered as I tried to separate reality from dream. I remembered the blood on the sheets, the blood that I’d thought was from one of my scrapes, which I now know couldn’t have been.

The day after Thanksgiving, when the cleaning crew was here, one of the women had asked me if I wanted to change the mattress because the blood had soaked through, and she wasn’t sure if it had soaked into the stuffing and dried. I was too fucking preoccupied to make sense of it then.

It was her blood, her virgin blood. I looked back at the screen at her face as she left my room. There was happiness there as well as a hint of sadness; it made my guts hurt. Because I wasn’t just seeing her the way she is now, I was remembering the little girl, like mine who’d wanted to be loved, to be accepted, and the shitty way in which I’d treated her.