‘This Time, He Went Beyond Calling Her Names’

About three months ago, my hometown best friend told me that she’d had an abortion. She had gone to a Planned Parenthood clinic by herself two months earlier and found out what she didn’t want to know--That she was pregnant. Without telling her mother, her boyfriend, or me, she went in for the abortion the following week.

But Kim had told me about her boyfriend, Jason. At least once a week, she’d call to say that they had just broken up, that this time he had gone too far. I learned to wait for a call to report that things had been worked out. There were never many details. Usually, the story was that he had stood her up to go out with his friends and this had led to a terrible fight. A couple of days later, he’d buy her a card or flowers and say all the right things until all was well.

Jason has a dark tan and crystal blue eyes, two of Kim’s favorite features. He has dark hair and is a little taller than she is. He doesn’t talk much unless he’s speaking directly to Kim; his words are often too quiet to understand. He stares at his feet or at the TV when other people are around, carefully avoiding eye contact.

It wasn’t until I went home for the winter break that Kim told me what had really been going on. Jason was abusing her. If she wore the wrong outfit or a put on a color of lipstick that he didn’t like, he would yell at her, tell her she looked ugly and refuse to talk to her for the rest of the day. One minute, everything would be perfect. Then, for the smallest reason, Jason would get mad. I spent one day with Kim when she and Jason were having a fight. He called dozens of times within a single hour to tell her that she was “a bitch.”

I was infuriated. Kim was intelligent, beautiful and fun. To say that this jerk was not good enough for her would be an understatement. I also found out that Jason, 24, did not have a job and lived (WHERE?). He sat around watching television and getting high all day. He treated her with total disrespect and yet she continued to give him money and let him drive her car whenever he wanted. I told her she deserved better, that she didn’t need to put up with being treated the way Jason was treating her. But nothing I said seemed to make any difference.

“Do you remember the night I had Jason arrested?” she asked. Of course I did. She had called me the next day, still distraught, and told me the events of the night before. They had been at a friend’s house. Jason was drunk and angry again. But this time, he had gone farther than calling her names or throwing himself on her car to keep her from driving away. He had broken the front windshield with his fist, the proceeded to kick in the front end of the car. When Kim tried to calm him, he hit her, several times in the head, several times in the stomach.

‘Thank goodness you weren’t pregnant,” had been the reaction of the few people who knew that Kim had worried about that possibility. But no one knew that she actually was. She had found out only a few days before.

She sat on her bedroom floor, hugging her legs to her chest, as she told me about that loneliest week of her life.

It was not something she’d wanted to share with her mother. Kim had moved out of her mother’s house after being told that Jason was not welcome there. Kim’s mother, separated from her third husband, didn’t want Kim to have the same bad experiences she’d had. Not long after she confided in me, she told Jason about the abortion but not the pain. He didn’t seem to care.

It was the sort of tragic story I expected to hear about another person, though not about Kim. The Southern California Coalition on Battered Women say that the percentage of high school and college age females that are abused by a boyfriend or spouse is about the same as the percentage of abused women in the adult population.

Kim and I have been like sisters since kindergarten. I don’t know how or why she allowed a guy like Jason to take over her life.

Months have passed. Kim goes on trying to work things out with Jason after each fight. I continue to tell her he’s not worth it. Several weeks ago, he dragged her across the living room floor during one of their fights. The week before that, he picked her up by her arms and threw her down the stairs of her apartment. And just last week she told me she might be pregnant again.