Stormy Daniels - Full Disclosure

In December, I was at the barn cleaning Jade’s stall when Jacob got called home for dinner. It was freezing cold. Baton Rouge can still have mild weather during the day that time of year, but it can dip down to the thirties and forties at night.

“Your mom’s coming soon, right?” he said. We were both thirteen, but we looked out for each other in that way.

“Yeah,” I said. She was supposed to be there at six o’clock. Six went by, then seven. I didn’t have a cell phone to call her, so I didn’t know if or when she’d show up. I was too embarrassed to walk over to Jacob’s house. I sat in the feed room, hugging myself for warmth.

Around eight, Jacob’s mother saw the barn’s lights were still on, so she sent Jacob down. She thought I’d left without turning them off. Jacob walked in and I held out my arms to hug him. He put his coat on me, and I kissed him. We started making out, and, as they say, one thing led to another. It was my choice, and I felt completely safe with him. We had sex on top of a deep freeze they used as a feed bin. It was the first time making love for both of us, and I was blessed and cursed that I had an orgasm. It sounds good, but do you know how hard it was to find a boy to do that for the next fifteen years?

After that night, we fucked like bunnies. We would go up in the hayloft to have sex. It was always furtive and half-dressed. I don’t think I ever even saw his penis. His family was so religious that this was all wrapped up in sin.

This went on into the summer before ninth grade, when we were found out. No one ever walked in on us, as far as I know, but his parents sat him down. They told him he could never see me again, and he followed their orders. They made me move Jade out of their barn and let me know that I was a piece of white-trash shit.

This piece of shit had the straight As to get into a magnet school, so come ninth grade, I didn’t see him again anyway. Scotlandville Magnet High School, an engineering school with a focus on science and math, was about five miles from my house, but they would bus you out. It was better than going to my neighborhood school, where I probably would have been killed. I wanted Baton Rouge High because they were known for their arts programs in dance and writing, but they were full and on the wrong side of town.

Writing was all I wanted to do besides ride Jade. English was my favorite subject, and I took creative writing classes. Later I would get into all the AP English classes and become editor of my high school newspaper. With my photographic memory and an eye for detail, storytelling came naturally to me. I would always finish my work early in class, and to pass time while everyone else finished tests, I would write funny short stories about me and my friends. They were basically scripts, embellished versions of what was going on in our lives. Exactly what I do now when I write scripts for films. Just like my high school friends, my friends know that they need to be careful around me. They’ll tell me something funny that happened to them, and they’ll recognize that funny look on my face as I press Record in my mind.

“Oh, shit,” they’ll say. “I’m a script now, aren’t I?”

“You totally are,” I answer.

Back in high school, the star of most of my friend stories was my best friend, Elizabeth. We sat alphabetically in class, and her last name fell right after Gregory, so she was always right behind me from the first day of ninth grade. She had come from a small private school and knew absolutely no one at school, whereas I had moved with a crew. I turned around to say hi the first day and she was wearing a pale pink T-shirt that showed a row of cats walking from behind, their tails in the air.

“I’m sorry, is that a line of cat buttholes on your shirt?” I asked.

Elizabeth looked down, pulling her shirt out to get a better look. “I guess so,” she said.

“Okay, we’re going to be friends,” I said. “Because you really need one.”

Boy crazy and Catholic, she was the perfect wingwoman. She worked at McDonald’s all through high school, and I could always count on her to feed me free food when I was hungry, which was often. To this day, when Elizabeth and I are in the same room we are those two girls again, talking over each other about some boy and laughing. Thank God for those cat butts.

When I had to move Jade so abruptly from Jacob’s barn, I boarded her at Farr Park Equestrian Center. It became my real home. I got special permission from my high school to take a bus every day down to the LSU campus area, so I could then walk two miles south to go see her. I knew I’d lose Jade if I couldn’t afford to board her, so I started working at Farr Park, whether it was teaching kids at their summer horse camp or doing secretarial work in the office. I did anything to keep Jade with me.

I began taking lessons with a trainer, Nancy Burba, and I worked off the payment by exercising her horses. On the weekends, we started doing horse shows. At one point, somebody offered me fifteen thousand dollars for Jade. That kind of money would have been life changing, but I didn’t think about it for even a second. “She’s not for sale,” I said. Besides, Jade wouldn’t let anyone else ride her, and she wouldn’t perform for anyone else, either.

Never once did I fall off of that horse. Not one single time, which is a miracle, because it’s just a fact that you come off your horses. Whether they dump you or they spook, you come off. It’s not if you get hurt, it’s when. And how bad.

She protected me, too. We were out galloping one day, riding through a neighborhood the city was starting to develop. It had been a while since I’d ridden back there, so I didn’t know that they had dug huge drainage canals, about twenty feet across. The grass had gotten tall, so we were going full speed and I didn’t see the new canal until two strides out. I felt Jade see it and I could tell she was thinking, Fuck it, I won’t be able to stop . She leapt into the air, clearing the twenty-foot jump.

I was so scared that when I got to the other side, I got down from Jade. “Oh, my God,” I said, walking in a circle, kicking out my legs, which one second ago I was sure would be broken. “Oh, my God.” Jade nuzzled me and I looked her in the eye.

“Good job,” I said.

People who knew Jade’s history told me I saved that horse, but she saved me. Since I hated being home, if I hadn’t had the barn to go I would have just hung around my little crack neighborhood, smoking and drinking with the other kids my age. I was too busy going to horse shows on the weekends to spend time at the mall flirting with boys. I would see yet another girl who lived around me suddenly pregnant and say to myself silently, Can’t ride a horse if you’re pregnant .

That meant that any guy who wanted to be around me had to make room for Jade. In my freshman year, I started dating Kris, a brown-haired tenth grader who was two years older than me. They’d held him back a year when his family moved over from Poland as a small child, but he was really smart, and his parents were biochemists at LSU studying carcinogens. He had a car and would drive me to the barn and all my horse events. Kris bought my first dressage saddle, so I could compete, and he would take pictures for me at all my shows. He was not going to get on a horse, but he bought a mountain bike so he could ride along with me and Jade. He taught me how to drive, and I’m actually a great driver because of him.

And he taught me how to say what I liked in bed. “Do you like when I touch you like this?” he would ask me, genuinely wanting me to enjoy our time together. Whereas Jacob was so conservative, Kris would just walk around naked in his room, comfortable with his body. We didn’t do anything freaky, but we had a lot of sex, and more importantly, we could talk about it without shame.