The Easy Way Out

She strides along the road with focus and determination, for she can see her future ahead of her as clearly as the stars scattered across the vast Kansas sky. She is seventeen, and in a year she will graduate from high school. Then she will start working to pay her way to that degree, first through community college and then to a real university. She will get married to her high school sweetheart, her boyfriend of four years. Everything will work out.

Though all along the road are temptations, she doesn't fall. She has her dreams, her friends, family, and love to propel her on.

Senior year is a blast. She lives in her high school bubble, hearing only the contented sound of her dreams rising and sliding against the walls of her pearly cocoon.

Then things fall apart.

Two months before she graduates she feels funny. Queasy all the time, gaining a lot of weight. Her self-esteem plummets, and then she finally realizes the truth – the baby growing inside of her.

Her boyfriend doesn't understand. His parents don't understand. Her parents don't understand. So quickly she is left alone.

But she is strong.

She walks along the lonely path, her heart clutched in her grasp and her head held high. She still has her dreams, and so she still has hope. So she ignores the easy way out calling to her from the side of the road.

She decides to keep her baby. She's living in a one-room apartment in downtown Kansas City and working two nine-hour shifts a day. She is exhausted all the time. But in the back of her mind is that hope that someday she can save up enough to pursue her dreams.

Wiping tables at 3 A.M. one night, she passes out. A combination of dehydration and total exhaustion.

She loses the baby.

Now all she wants to do is forget. And those temptations lining the road start looking real good. So she gives in.

Just once, of course. Just once.

And soon the girl who walked so proudly along the highway is reduced to a waif dragging itself across the asphalt, living from one haze to the next, slowly fading away into the nothingness.