Friends from Home

by Lauryn Chamberlain

  “I see more than you give me credit for.”

  “Well, maybe I’d give you credit if you’d talk about something other than yourself. Than your wedding.”

  “Hey, at least I love Jake! Heaven forbid I talk about that or get excited about that. And sorry that I haven’t made a mess of my life, is that hard for you?”

  “Oh, I have no doubt you love Jake. He’s the perfect ‘happy ending,’” I spat. “But you want me to be just like you, just because it makes you feel better. It validates you, it always has, and don’t try to tell me that’s not true. I know you, too. You fucking forget it, but I do.”

  She stayed silent then. I heard her drawing a breath, composing herself so that she could call me the hysterical one, perhaps. When she still hadn’t said anything a minute later, I thought she might have hung up. And suddenly everything seemed real again, horrifyingly real, and I was embarrassed at what I had said. Shame spread through me slowly, like the feeling of waking up after a night of heavy drinking.

  “I don’t want to fight with you about this,” I finally said. “I literally do not have the energy to fight about this anymore.”

  “That’s not what I called to do. But if you’re not going to listen to reason, or think about what you’re really doing, then—”

  And then I did something I had never done before. I cut Michelle off completely. A time of firsts in my life indeed, I thought, as I said, “Michelle, that’s it. Stop it. I made my decision.”

  “Then I just don’t know what else to say,” she said in a way that made it sound like there was a period after every word. “Except that you should be ashamed. You lost yourself.”

  “No,” I told her quietly. “I think this is who I’ve always been.” I bit my tongue to resist the urge to say “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, then I guess I’m the sorry one here, Julie.” Her voice wobbled, and it sounded like she was about to cry but didn’t want me to know. “I can’t believe you.”

  It had finally happened, I realized. We had drifted too far apart. I tried to figure out when it had started and couldn’t. Perhaps the day almost a year ago, when she had called me to ask about using Jake’s monogram, but it also might have been far longer ago.

  “So, now you’re finally concerned about me again? About what I do with my life?” I replied. “Like I said, when was the last time you talked about something or someone other than yourself? And you still wonder why I didn’t come running to you when I had a problem?”

  “Well, we can’t all be you, Julie!” she shrieked, hysterical all over again. “You found a life that made you happy. And then I find someone that makes me happy, and I talk about it, and all you can do is spit all over it and make fun of me—I know you do, don’t lie—like nothing and no one back home is good enough for you! Well, I think I’ve had enough.”

  By the time I went to say something back, the line had gone dead.

  I kept the phone in my hand as I turned over on my side, curling my knees up toward my chest. It was ironic: Michelle had always thought of friendship as something you could never lose, and relationships with men as something you could—therefore making relationships the more precious resource. For me it was always the opposite. I saw true friendship as more rare, more purely special. It was like being in love without the fragility, the only thing that it made any sense to invest in. Now it looked like we were both wrong. I pulled a blanket up over me, all the way to my chin, and stared at the ceiling in silence.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Dana got off work at ten, I told her what had happened. Her matter-of-fact response? “Insensitive bitch. I’m sorry, but it’s true.” We didn’t have long to dwell on it. She had to go to work early the next day, but she promised that she would still be there to pick me up from the clinic.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve totally taken over your life talking about this,” I told her before we hung up the phone. “I hope I get the chance to pay you back soon.”

  “I actually hope a situation like this never comes up,” she said lightheartedly, trying to make me laugh. “But thank you. And don’t apologize.”

  For a moment, I thought about how I wished I could have known Dana when we were growing up. I imagined her telling off girls like Darcy, imagined us applying together to all the same colleges. But who knew how that might have worked out, or what it would have meant for us as adults? History had a strange power over friendships. Maybe it was simply the process of watching someone change slowly, almost imperceptibly, until one day when you finally noticed how different they’d become. The friendships that could survive that transformation were unbreakable. But how many relationships withstood such evolution? I couldn’t know how Dana and I might have felt about each other if we had grown up together. I decided that it was enough that I had her now.

  “You’re the best.”

  “Call me if you can’t sleep,” she said, and I said, “You, too,” but after hearing her say it, I knew that I would fall asleep just fine.

  CHAPTER 23

  That night before the procedure, I did fall asleep quickly, but odd dreams plagued me all night, in the predictable way they always did in times of stress. In the clearest, I was stuck in Birmingham, trying to make a flight back to New York. Every time I looked up, my gate had changed. As I ran through the terminal, the hallways mutated and changed shape, twisting in that kaleidoscope way that dreams do. I knew I was trapped. I started to scream, but everyone just sat there at their gates, flicking through magazines, playing Candy Crush. No one even looked up.

  I woke up gasping. I looked around at the room, growing light in the early morning sun, and recognition settled over me slowly. I was safe in New York, in the middle of my very own confusing life after all. At nine thirty, I took an Uber to the clinic on Thirty-Fourth Street by myself.

  The lobby of the office was clean and workmanlike. It had the same plastic chairs and water-stained magazines as just about any doctor’s office, but the staff was unusually helpful and kind, all offering pens and smiles when I said I needed something to use to fill out the paperwork. As I wrote on the clipboard, I said a silent thank-you for the fact that I lived in a place where I could do this at all—and without having to walk by dozens of protestors at the door. I felt sick enough already without having to deal with all that.

  They warned me at check-in that I might need to wait for a bit, but I couldn’t get my eyes to focus on any of the “10 Tips for Amazing Abs!” magazine articles that were on offer. My mind wandered, and I found myself remembering a night from a long time ago. The first time I had ever thought about what it might mean for someone to have an abortion.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was a summer night right before my senior year, and I had gone over to Michelle’s while her parents were out at a charity benefit. I didn’t even bother to leave a note for my mom on the kitchen table. A year had passed since Michelle and I had pulled into the driveway after the trip to my father’s house. That day, I had felt like my relationship with my mom might really have been about to change, that I might walk into the house and find her waiting for me, and I could tell her that I understood why she had lied, what she had tried to protect me from. That hope glowed inside me for only a moment, but when I walked inside and she wasn’t there, it was like a firefly released as soon as I had caught it in my hand. When she finally came home late the next day, I didn’t tell her where I had been. Without her knowing why, we took another step back from each other and fell back into the rhythm of coexistence, she with her boyfriends and me with Michelle, silently counting down the days before I left for college.

  The evening of the benefit was warm, late August, with a breeze blowing just hard enough to cut the humid air and make it bearable to be outside. Michelle grabbed us a bottle out of her parents’ liquor cabinet, making a big show of sneaking it by her brother, even though he was too
busy with a video game to notice and wouldn’t care if he had. We took the bottle and one of those battery-powered lanterns out into the backyard, and we went to sit on the hillside under a willow tree that we had climbed as kids. Michelle sprawled out on the grass, one hand propping up her head and the other raising the bottle to her lips. She handed it to me after a couple of swallows, and I followed suit.

  “Okay, now I can tell you the big secret. But promise not to say anything,” she said, keeping her voice hushed even though we were the only people around, maybe for miles. When she spoke quietly and lightly like that, it reminded me of wind chimes. It didn’t seem possible that an actual human voice could sound like that, but hers did. She knew it, too; she always asked boys at school to lean in so she could talk right into their ear, even if only to ask what teacher they had for homeroom.

  “Promise.” I took a long swallow—we had stolen rum, apparently—and grimaced.

  “DeeDee’s pregnant.”

  “Shit.”

  “Language,” Michelle mocked in a singsong voice, imitating Marcia.

  DeeDee Morrow wasn’t a close friend of ours, but she was a cheerleader and she was on student council, so everyone knew her. She had been dating Jack Grable for all of junior year, and most of our high school knew him as an athlete with scholarship potential.

  “So it’s Jack’s? How do you know this, anyway?”

  “Of course it’s Jack’s. Oh my gosh, what if it weren’t?” Michelle snorted. “Anyway, Darcy helped her get the pregnancy test and was there when she took it. So Darcy told me, but Darcy knows I tell you everything anyway. So now you can’t tell anyone.”

  I had no one to tell, and Michelle knew it. She was the vessel through which all gossip flowed.

  “Isn’t it just awful? Can you imagine? Poor DeeDee.”

  I couldn’t imagine. I imagined that being pregnant would be hard no matter what, but there was a whole other kind of shame in the whole town talking about it. In having no choices.

  “What is she going to do about it?” I asked, even though I knew. If Darcy had already found out, everyone would know soon. Parents, teachers, pastors, everyone. And we all knew that this was not a place where these kinds of things just quietly “went away,” to use one of Marcia’s euphemisms.

  “What are you asking? Of course she’ll have the baby.” Michelle sounded genuinely shocked. “But since we’re graduating next year, the only question is whether she’ll get engaged to Jack after graduation or not. And that’s not much of a question. She kind of has to, right?”

  “I guess,” I said, thinking of DeeDee’s professed plan to bulk up her extracurriculars in order to get into Tulane, like her sister. I wondered if it would matter now.

  “It’s just sad,” Michelle concluded. “But that’s why you use birth control.”

  “Miche,” I scolded. “Shut up, you’re a virgin, too.” We both were, though I knew Michelle had been wavering about whether she would finally sleep with her long-term boyfriend, Jared, after homecoming next month. Maybe I’d do the same with my date. He wasn’t a long-term boyfriend, but unlike Michelle, I wasn’t so convinced about the point of waiting for true love.

  “Not for long.” She giggled, drinking more and dribbling a little bit down her chin. I reached out and wiped it off her face, getting my hand sticky. “But when we do it, we’ll do it right,” she added. “Can you imagine getting stuck here married at eighteen?”

  “No way,” I agreed. “That’s why I’m applying to Cornell.”

  Michelle made a face. “Can’t you go to Auburn or something? There are plenty of good schools we could both go to.” She planned to apply to Auburn, U of A, and a handful of other schools that had solid academics but were closer to home and fully Marcia approved.

  “I don’t want to get stuck here at eighteen,” I joked. “We’ll be best best friends no matter what, though,” I swore. “After all, I know all your secrets.”

  “Oh yeah? Prove it.”

  I closed my eyes and thought about the things that Michelle had told me were her biggest secrets. A random assortment of stories came to mind, but nothing particularly meaningful: her ninth-grade crush on Liam Teale, the universally agreed upon “nerd”; the fact that she hadn’t gotten the joke in Clueless where Tai says, “No shit—you guys got coke here?” Then I remembered the big one. The one from last summer. It was the summer right after Michelle and I had found my father.

  It happened like this: One normal night, Michelle had wanted to use the home phone. She thought Jonah was on the line in the basement, talking to his friends about how to beat some video game. Her mom was out with friends and not around to scold her, so she picked up the extension in the living room to yell at Jonah to get off the line.

  But it wasn’t Jonah. It was her dad, talking in a hushed tone, saying, “I need to be with you again,” to a woman whose voice Michelle had never heard. She hung up the phone quickly, but in the intimate whispers she had heard enough—or so she told me. She sat frozen on the sofa until her dad finally came upstairs, not noticing her, and then she took the phone to her room and called me to tell me what had happened.

  I felt so sad for her then. My dad’s absence was an old wound, and even if our road trip had reopened it a little, it was something that rarely flared up and hurt anymore. But Michelle adored Rich and had looked up to him every day of her life. “What are you going to do?” I asked unhelpfully.

  “I don’t know,” she had said, and Michelle never said she didn’t know.

  So I came to school the next day armed with her favorite candies and ready to support her if she wanted to cry in the bathroom or go on the warpath and tell her mom what she had overheard. I wanted to be there for her like she had been for me. But she didn’t do either of those things. She came in bright and smiling, with just a little bit more makeup on than usual—Marcia usually insisted on keeping it “subtle.” Today, Michelle was dressed to impress.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” she said. The look that passed between us might have been invisible to everyone around, but it told me everything I needed to know. She strode over to her boyfriend’s locker to flirt, and that was the end of that conversation. She never brought it up again.

  And so, for all I knew on the night under the willow a year later, the “secret affair” could have been nothing. Or it could have still been going on. Marcia and Rich had become slightly more demonstratively affectionate to each other over the past year, in a way that would have been imperceptible if I hadn’t spent almost all my time around them. Earlier that summer Michelle and I had watched as Rich had sat behind Marcia and wrapped his arms around her while we all stretched out on a flannel blanket watching the Fourth of July fireworks. She leaned her head back into the crook of his shoulder and closed her eyes. Michelle said, “See, that’s exactly the part I want someday,” and I had known precisely what she meant. But it was hard to tell how genuine the moment was, considering what we knew. I understood then that you could never truly know what passes between two people. How they change each other.

  “Earth to Julie,” Michelle said, grounding me back in the moment beside her, under the tree, the rum bottle nestled against my side. “So,” she continued, her tone slightly changed. “What’s my biggest secret?”

  I thought for a minute. “I’m not going to say.”

  I thought she might challenge me, but she just raised the bottle in her hands to her lips for one last sip.

  “I knew I could trust you,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had thought back to that night over the years, but usually as a sign of how close Michelle and I had been, about all the intimacies we had both known but that had lain silent between us, never needing to be said. Later, I plumbed it for what that history might tell me about why Michelle had chosen Jake. Jake had fallen for
her first and pursued her hard. I understood why she found his steadfastness, his apparent loyalty, so attractive.

  Now I thought more about DeeDee, who, I had heard, was still married to Jack, now with three kids. I wondered if she was happy. I thought about Michelle’s incredulous reply: “What are you asking? Of course she’ll have the baby.” I thought about what it would mean not to have any choices.

  “Jules O’Brien?” A small brunette woman holding a clipboard stood across the room. I snapped to attention. She smiled at me kindly. “You can come back this way.”

  CHAPTER 24

  It ended before I really even knew it had begun.

  The staff briefed me on this beforehand, but knowing that the aspiration procedure would take only ten minutes didn’t mean those ten minutes would feel like ten minutes. But they did.

  The light sedative they gave me left me technically awake, but I still felt hazy once it was over. Uncomfortable due to a few cramps—which I had been told might last the day—and a little bit different, but somehow it felt like a good kind of different. Relieved. That surprised me, too.

  The clinic recommended that patients leave with someone, and I found Dana in the waiting room like she had promised. She jumped up and crossed the room to hug me as soon as she saw me. “Are you okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding sleepily.

  She called us an Uber back to her apartment, and we rode in reverent silence for a few blocks before Dana was back to being, well, Dana.

  “Getting this day off was a fucking nightmare, but I did it,” she said. “Now I’m completely at your service. We can watch Netflix, or even chill and listen to your awful folk music.” When I didn’t say anything, she said, “Am I talking too much?”

  “You’re not. Netflix is good,” I assured her. I placed my hand on my stomach as I felt a subtle cramp. It subsided quickly. I looked up and saw Dana watching me nervously.