Sheila sat next to me and sensed my angst. She turned and touched my arm and urged, “What? You can tell us anything.” The others nodded in agreeme...t with her statement about our openness with each other.I blurted out with great uncertainty, “I want to have a baby ... to get pregnant by Mark.”Thirty seconds of silence is a long time after you’ve made a major confession about your deep feelings on one of the most important things that’ll ever happen in your life. My sisters all stared at me with. I did some things I shouldn't have. I guess I felt I was doing it for the wrong reasons. There was no going back. Once I had had sex with you, there's no turning it off. That is why I stopped seeing you."When we got to college, I thought things could be different, but they weren't. You still wanted sex. That is why I broke it off again."Brad let the smoke out again. He looked down at Amy. She was older now. At thirty nine, she still had the figure of a teenager. She had a large black Stetson. Within I felt The Stick relaxing, fading away like a mist. How tightly wound I'd been! The Stick had been holding me, guarding me, shielding me from verbal assaults that, in reality, had been few, but just frequent and erratic enough to keep me off-balance and on my guard.Mercifully, for every insult there had been a -- what's the opposite of insult? Praise? Compliment? How many had said "way to go Dee!" with a pat on my back or a high five? More than once a snide crack had been met with scorn. Don’t just stand there looking silly, you’ll make me look bad,” Elizabeth said. I looked at her and she had a huge smile on her face. I threw my arms around her neck and hugged her hard laughing and jumping up and down. “Can I take that as a yes,” the sponsor asked? “Yes,” I said enthusiastically struggling not to cry with tears of joy. I couldn’t believe it I was going to be on the varsity cheerleading squad. Then the coach handed me a plastic bag with a varsity uniform in it. “Try that.