I know some people say abortion is murder—a sin against God. That’s what Carole says, and Danni agrees with her mother on this one. I don’t see things that way. I mean, we’re talking about a lump of cells here. It’s not like it has a brain yet, or feelings. Besides, I’ve got lots better things to do with my life right now than to have a baby.
Two summers ago I went up to Northern California for a four-week internship at the Guide Dog Training Facility—the place where Grams got Casper. I stayed with another intern and her family, and I actually got to work with the dogs. It was so cool! Ever since that time, I’ve known I want to be a trainer. But to be the kind of trainer I want to be takes a college degree.
Last year these college recruiters came to our school and watched some of our games. The guy from Cal Poly and the woman from Stockton both talked with Nikki about me and Danni and Krystal. She says if we play as well as we did last year, we’re sure to get scholarships. That’d be so cool! No way can I have a baby!
Every morning on the way to school, our bus goes past the corner where this girl, Sarah, and her baby wait for the van to take them to some special school for teen parents. I remember Sarah from last year, in our ceramics class. She came up with some of the best pots in the class. Mine were always lopsided, but hers were perfect, like something you’d have to pay a lot of money for in a store. She was always laughing and joking around, too. Now she waits on that corner looking tired, and bored, and depressed. I always try to wave to her, but she never even looks up. That’s not for me.
Besides, if Jason found out I was pregnant, I know he’d want to get married and raise a little junior Jason Garcia. How lame would that be?
I was sooooo stupid to get in this mess, but I’m not going to pile more and more stupid things one on top of another, like giving up college and marrying Jason, and whatever else would go with a baby. No way! I don’t care what Danni thinks. Or, I do care what she thinks, which is why I’m keeping my secret to myself. And why I never even told her what happened on Jason’s birthday.
Danni called me that next morning after I’d been out with Jason. I was still groggy and maybe sort of hung over, but I dragged myself out of bed to answer the phone.
“How was the birthday dinner?” she asked, still sounding mad.
“Okay,” I said, my head swirling with images of what I wished hadn’t happened.
“That’s all? Just okay?”
“Yeah . . . well . . .the food was good.”
Danni waited for more details, but what was I going to say? Jason wears boxers? Champagne had a strange effect on me? I gave it up to the love of your life? I don’t think so. So one secret led to another and another, until the only thing I feel safe talking to Danni about is school and volleyball.
At least Jason is in Iowa now. Danni’s not quite so obsessed with him out of her line of vision. I’m super relieved that he’s gone. No matter what I tell him, Jason’s convinced that one stupid night meant I was truly in love with him. All that night really meant was that I drank champagne when I shouldn’t have. And life got very complicated. Four more days, though. That’s all. Then I can go back to being just a regular high school senior with nothing to hide.
Crossing one leg behind the other, I lean forward, stretching the weight-bearing ankle, holding the stretch for ten seconds, then switching sides.
The clatter of pans accompanies my dad’s off-key breakfast-making rendition of “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine.” Dad was a kid in the sixties, and he’s a total Beatles freak. He probably knows all the words to every song they ever recorded.
Grams and Casper make their way slowly through the living room. Usually Grams doesn’t need to use Casper at home because she knows where everything is. Right now, though, all of the rooms are cluttered with boxes because we’re moving to a new house next week, so she’s depending on Casper to lead her around the boxes and into the kitchen.
If I weren’t all worried about the pregnancy thing, I’d be totally excited about the game tonight. We’ve got a really good chance to go to State, which definitely would improve my scholarship chances. And I’d be all excited about the move, too. It’s the first house we’re actually buying, and my new bedroom is about twice as big as the one I have now. And there are two and a half bathrooms, which means I can take as long as I want without having to hear about anyone’s elimination emergencies. And it’s only a few blocks from Hamilton High, so I won’t have to depend on the bus anymore. But it’s not easy to be excited about the good stuff with this big worry hanging over my head . . . or in my belly.
I wait for Grams to get settled at the kitchen table, Casper lying close beside her chair with his nose resting on his front paws, then I go in to warm the syrup and set the table. I move flower catalogs and paint samples from the table to make room for plates. For weeks now,. Dad’s been reading about roses, trying to decide what kind to plant at our new house. He’s looking for deep color, a long blooming season and, for Grams, a strong fragrance.
Dad stands at the counter, mixing the pancake batter and singing, “. . . And our friends are all aboard, many more of them live next door, and the band begins to play . . .”
Here Grams does the horn sounds, her hands curled around an imaginary trumpet.
I join in on the chorus. It’s not that I love to sing, it’s the price I have to pay for pancakes. No singing, no pancakes. That’s Dad’s rule. I go along with it ’cause my dad’s pancakes are amazing.
They’re so happy, my dad and Grams, singing and playing pretend instruments and goofing around, that whenever I even think of confessing to them that their good little girl hasn’t been so good after all I get this thick, heavy lump in my chest.
I reach into my pocket and touch the heart-shaped stone I always keep with me—the one my dad gave me on the day I got my first period. He was all sentimental that day, talking about how I was becoming a woman and blah, blah, blah. He said the time was coming when I would be doing more and more on my own, beyond his protection.
He said I would make mistakes along the way, because everyone does.
“One thing I know for certain, though, whatever mistakes you make, you’ll always figure out how to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
That’s a major theme with my dad. According to him, if everyone on the whole earth worked in whatever way, big or small, to be part of the solution, and not to make problems, the whole world would live in peace and harmony.
When he finished his “you’re becoming a woman” talk, he handed me a little heart-shaped rock, about the size of a penny, only thicker.
“This is just a reminder that I will always, always love you with all of my heart, no matter what. And I know for sure you will grow up to be a part of the solution for this problem-filled world.”
I took the rock and held it to the light, catching glimpses of glittering sparkles of green and gold, not thinking about mistakes I might make, or problems, or solutions.
Now, feeling the smooth surface of the rock that’s been tucked into my backpack, or pocket, or purse, for over five years. I’m sure my dad still means what he said that day. But I’ve done this really big, stupid thing, and I know if he found out, he would be horribly disappointed, and hurt, and even if he still loved me, everything would change. Grams, too. She’s pretty opinionated about girls who get pregnant before they get married. She definitely sees pregnant teens as part of the problem. Love me or not, she’d have a big shift of opinion about her granddaughter.
But. . . four more days and they’ll never have to find out.
“Any dreams last night?” Dad asks, pouring four circles of pancake batter onto the sizzling griddle.
Grams starts.
“I was in the garden at the old house, planting petunias back in that little patch we had behind the garage. Purple, pink, red . . . they were so beautiful.”
She pauses, smiling, like maybe she’s remembering colors.
“Then what?”
Dad asks.
This is what we do every single morning. Not the pancakes part, because weekday mornings are so rushed, but the dream part. “Dream Routine,” we call it. Dad’s usually pretty mellow, but the dream thing is like an absolutely unbreakable rule. Come in late after curfew? He’s reasonable. Get a “D” in geometry? Not the end of the world. But skip the morning dream routine? He gets all red faced and yells and screams and stomps around. It has to do with honoring my mother’s memory, which, as I mentioned earlier, is a very big deal to my dad.
Back when I was thirteen or so and thought my family was the weirdest, I skipped out on dream routine every morning for three days in a row. The third day my dad told me I was pissing on my mother’s grave! That really got me. My dad never uses words like that. He says it shows a lack of imagination.
When I was younger, excited about every new bad word I heard. Dad would play the “trade a letter” game with me, sort of like on that old Scrabble TV show. So when he heard me showing off to Danni by calling some girl a bitch, he traded me a “w” for a “b” and from then on it was witch. I got a long vowel for a short one to say “shite.” It worked the same way, long for short in the “f” word. “Foke” you!” I told Danni once when she demanded I let her borrow my favorite jeans. This wasn’t just Dad’s idea for how his little girl should talk. He used the same substitute system for himself.
With all of the effort Dad put into keeping our mouths clean, I was completely shocked to hear him say “pissing” instead of “wiss-ing.” And then I got this gross, ugly picture in my mind, of me squatting over my mother’s grave and letting go with a torrent of yellow pee, and seeing it flood down into the ground and seep into my poor mom’s casket. That was three years ago, and I haven’t skipped morning dream routine once since then.
Anyway, here’s the way the dream thing got started. A long time ago my mom read about some tribe deep in the jungle of New Guinea that had this practice of telling each other their dreams every single morning, before they did anything else. And there was no such thing as mental illness or unhappiness with anyone, ever, in that tribe. So from then on, Dad and my mom told their dreams first thing in the morning. Then when I came along, and learned to talk, I got in on it, too. Later, when Grams came to live with us, Dad asked her to do the morning dream routine with us, too.
Mom claimed our dream routine worked because no one in our family ever went crazy. The other side of that proof is that Dad does go crazy when we don’t tell our dreams.
I take the orange juice from the refrigerator and pour out three small glasses while Grams continues telling her dream.
“When I looked up there was a giant balloon flying over the garage, and that actress, what’s her name? Used to be in all of those musicals?”
“Mary Martin?” Dad asks.
“No, that other one.”
“Mitzi Gaynor?”
“No, the other one,” Grams says. “The really famous one who drank too much.”
“Judy Garland?” I say.
“Yes, that’s the one . . .”
I don’t know much about old musicals, but I have seen “The Wizard of Oz” about a zillion times.
“. . . and I think the balloon was taking her over the rainbow . . . That’s all I remember, but the flowers, just plain old petunias, they were beautiful . . .”
My grams always says that even though she’s blind, she hasn’t lost her sight. She still sees pictures in her dreams.
“First pancake for you, Kid,” Dad says, handing me a plate with a perfectly round golden brown pancake.
“Test it. If you live the rest of us will eat pancakes, too.”
I slather on butter, pour on warm maple syrup and take the first delicious bite. Weekdays it’s a protein bar and juice for me, and quick dream talk with Dad and Grams. I’m out the door by six-thirty to make a zero period class, so I can devote more afternoon time to volleyball. That just makes me love weekend pancakes all the more.
Dad brings a pancake-stacked plate to the table and sits down.
“You want another one, Mom?” he says to Grams.
“One’s already too many,” she says, sopping up the last of the syrup on her plate.
My grams is hecka worried because she can barely get the zipper up on her favorite wool pants anymore.
Just the other day Dad asked Grams, “What do you care if your pants are too tight? You can’t see them.”
“I have a way of seeing tight pants,” she’d said, reaching for his belt and giving it a tug.
We all laughed at that because Dad’s put on a little weight recently, and it’s funny my blind grandmother would notice. Scary to me though, because what if she’s noticing my waistband, too.
Dad finishes a giant bite of pancake, then starts telling about his dream.
“The Kid was on the volleyball court, but it wasn’t really a volleyball court. It was a deep, murky lake and the girls were playing at the bottom . . .”
On it goes, and then I tell mine. All I can remember is that I was supposed to be taking a test, something that would get me into college if I did well, but would keep me out if I blew it. In my dream, I kept going to the wrong room and I woke up tense and worried.
The way things are now. I’d be afraid to tell my dreams if we analyzed them, like maybe a dream would reveal something I want to keep hidden. But we don’t analyze them. We just tell them. That’s all the tribe in New Guinea did and it worked for them.
When we were in the seventh grade, Danni always used to just happen by at breakfast time on Saturday mornings. I don’t know how she managed to time it so right, because sometimes we’d be having breakfast at eight and other times not until eleven. Somehow, though, every Saturday morning, she’d show up just in time for breakfast. She’d probably have done the same thing on Sunday mornings, too, but the Hopkins family all went to church every single Sunday morning, no matter what. They still do.
Anyway, Dad was never more than halfway through the first “Yellow Submarine” verse when Danni’d open the back door a crack and Dad would invite her in for pancakes. It was soooo embarrassing! My dad singing totally off key and my blind grandma playing the pretend trumpet, and then the bizarre dream routine.
“Your family’s so cool!” Danni would say.
“No, they’re not! They’re weird,” I’d tell her. “Why can’t they just be normal, like your family?”
“Normal’s boring!”
Back then we always wanted to trade families. She wanted to be an only child and not have to put up with her little sister, and I wanted a little sister. Hannah was so cute and she totally idolized me. Who wouldn’t want that? Plus I wanted a mom.
Danni never went so far as to say she wished her mom was dead. She just said not having a mom could offer certain desirable advantages.
Now that we’re both over being bratty seventh graders, we’re pretty much over wanting to trade families. Danni is back to eating boring oatmeal with her own family on Saturday mornings and I’m back to liking my dad’s goofy singing and my gram’s colorful dreams. We do sort of share families, though, because we spend so much time at each other’s houses.
Grams and I wash the dishes, then pack them into one of the many boxes labeled “Kitchen.” It’s amazing what all Grams can do. She likes to tell people, “I may be blind, but I’m not useless.”
After we finish cleaning up, I go in my room, close the door, and do jumping jacks. When I first figured out I was pregnant, I started doing twenty-five jumping jacks a day. Now I’m up to eighty. But really, I guess the only thing that’s going to work now is the termination procedure scheduled for next Friday. Four more days.
Chapter
4
“I’ve got to meet Ron at the escrow office to sign some papers, but we’ll be right back,” Dad says, pulling into the parking lot outside the Hamilton High gym.
Ron is the real estate guy and it seems like he’s constantly calling about loans, or inspections
, or some kind of house buying detail.
I grab my gym bag from the backseat next to Casper, who sits tall and straight, scanning the parking lot, noticing other cars, and anyone walking near our car, all while Grams is safe, sitting shoulder to shoulder right next to him. He cracks me up the way he’s always on duty.
“We’ll be back before the game starts,” Dad says. “If this paper signing deal takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’ll just have to wait.”
Grams laughs. “Since when has any meeting with Ron taken less than an hour?”
“Since now,” Dad says. “This is a big game!”
Danni pulls in next to us and lowers the passenger side window.
“Hey, Yellow Sub Guy,” she shouts to Dad.
“Hey, Danni. Is this going to be a win tonight?”
“We’ve got it wrapped up,” she says, laughing.
Dad gives us both a thumbs up.
Grams wishes us good luck. As they drive away. Dad calls out to me in an embarrassingly loud voice, “Kick some batt, Awesome Autumn!”
Casper’s the only one in the car who doesn’t seem interested in this game with Wilson, even though he’s seen every game of the season. That should definitely qualify him as a fan.
Shantell joins Danni and me as we walk into the gym.
“Kick some batt?” Shantell says.
“My dad just traded vowels,” I say. “You know, an ‘a’ for a ‘u’?”
“Oh, right,” she says, smiling and shaking her head. “I wish my dad could be a Mr. Clean. That fucker embarrasses the shit out of me sometimes, the way he talks.”
We’re still laughing when we get to the locker room. But then Danni gets serious.
“This is going to be a tough game,” she says.
“I just heard you say we’ve got it all wrapped up.”
No More Sad Goodbyes Page 3