“Well, now I’m curious. You’re not being yourself and I don’t get what could be so bad that that boy, who is crazy about you, wouldn’t be able to stomach.”
I looked out the window. Maine was still in the grips of winter, but this year it had been mild. We’d only had a few snowstorms, and it was looking like spring would come early this year. I was looking forward to it.
“I’m not going to tell you, Trish. So stop trying.” I snapped at her and she whistled in surprise.
“I knew that you had a sassy side to you. I’ve been waiting for it to come out.” She smiled at me. “You’re just a bitch like the rest of us.”
“I’m not a bitch.”
“Sure you are. Be proud of it.” I shook my head and went back to staring out the window.
“Thank you again for doing this for me. I really appreciate it. I can give you gas money or whatever.”
Trish shook her head and turned on the radio to something loud and raucous.
“Don’t worry about it. Friends don’t bother to pay each other back because you know that it will all even out in the end. I’ll do something for you, you’ll do something for me and then we’ll be even.” For a girl who seemed to have terrible social skills, Trish knew a lot about how relationships worked.
“Well, I still feel weird about not giving you gas money.”
“Okay, okay. We can stop somewhere and you can buy me something to eat. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Trish didn’t say anything else about my reasons for going home the entire ride. I kept giving her directions, but my house wasn’t that hard to find.
“This is pretty nice,” she said when we pulled down my street. Most of the houses were relatively new, and built right next to each other, with square lawns in front. Everyone seemed to compete with each other in the summer to prove who had the greenest and best-kept lawn.
“Yeah, I guess.” Something in the pit of my stomach had congealed and gotten heavier the closer we’d gotten to my house. I was dreading the conversation with my mother, and then the drive tomorrow to the hospital to get the bone marrow test. It was a lot easier to manage now than it used to be, but I was still freaking out.
I didn’t want to see Maria. Seeing her just made me think of that terrible day when my daughter was born.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to see her. Maybe I could just go to the hospital, my parents would bring me home and then I could pay my brother to take me back to campus early.
“This is it,” I said to Trish, pointing at my house. “You can just pull over here.” She nodded and stopped the car. I didn’t bring much home with me, so I grabbed my purse from its place on the floor.
“You call me if you need anything. I know what it’s like to have a shitty family, but I had my brother to take care of me. I just want you to know that there’s someone here for you. And if you ever tell anyone that we had this talk, I will hurt you.” She fiddled in the glove box and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t tell her that she wasn’t supposed to be smoking. She and Stryker had quit, but I definitely still caught them lighting up every now and then.
“I will. Thanks, Trish.” I got out and she honked a few times before she drove away and I turned to face the house.
I’d only been Audrey-free for a few hours and I was miserable as fuck. We had dinner at Katie and Stryker’s and Lottie was doing her best to cheer me up by making fun of me and trying to piss me off by insulting Star Wars.
Normally, that would have worked, but right now, I felt awful.
“I know what it’s like,” Stryker said, coming over and sitting next to me on the couch. “It’s like part of yourself is missing and you don’t know it’s gone until they take it with them.” His eyes followed Katie as she walked around the room. I didn’t think he was aware that he was doing it.
“Agreed,” I said. “I think I need a drink.”
“That I can help you with,” he said, getting up and going to the fridge. We mostly kept our drinking activities to a minimum, sensitive to how alcohol had affected Zan and Lottie’s life. Stryker tossed me a can of Bud Light and got one for himself.
“Cheers,” he said and we both popped our cans open, sucking up the foam that almost spilled onto the floor.
“William!” Lottie yelled from across the room.
“It’s just one, Lot. Calm the fuck down.” She glared but didn’t make any other comments. But in the back of my mind, what had happened to her best friend, Lexie, hovered. A constant reminder of how quickly life can change. In the blink of an eye.
“Wait until you move in with her,” Stryker said, shaking his head and leaning back in his chair. “You’d think it would be annoying, having her around all the time, but then she’s gone for a few hours and you realize that you miss her.” Stryker somehow made talking about his feelings for Katie sound poetic.
“I don’t think we’re ready for that step yet. We’ve only been together for a week or so.” He shrugged again.
“That doesn’t matter. When you know, you know. No sense in waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Katie said, coming over and sitting on the arm of Stryker’s chair.
“Waiting to move in. I was giving Will advice.” This time Katie rolled her eyes.
“Advice on what? You give terrible advice.” She had a smirk on her face and I knew she was baiting him.
“You are asking for it, sweetheart.”
“You can punish me later,” she said, running her hand through his hair. He’d stopped spiking it so much and had let it flop in his eyes. Probably just so Katie would reach up and push it away. I totally understood that.
“That’s another upside of living with a girl. The sex,” Stryker said, which earned him a smack in the chest from Katie.
The sex. That was definitely an incentive to move in, but we pretty much had the sex covered, even though we didn’t live together. It would be nice if we had just one place where we could be completely alone. Those dorm walls were so thin and there were always people in the hallways. I wanted to take Aud to a place where it was just the two of us. A cabin in the woods, or a yurt on an island, or somewhere isolated. We could pretend that we were the only two people on the planet.
God, I missed her.
My parents barely spoke to me when I walked in the door and the silence continued on into the next morning. Dad had to deal with something at the restaurant, so Mom was the one who was in charge of taking me to the hospital.
I was walking down the hall to the bathroom, and I passed my parents’ room where she was talking on the phone. I didn’t have to listen for more than a few seconds to know who she was talking to. I put my head down and walked as fast as I could past her.
“If you’re not a match, you’ll have to find that boy you slept with,” she said after a few minutes of driving in silence. I jumped at the sound of her voice. She just stared through the windshield, determined not to make eye contact with me, even though she had to talk to me.
“What?”
“That boy that you slept with. You’ll have to tell him so that he can get tested too, if this doesn’t work out.”
“Eddie. His name is Eddie.” She knew his name. We lived in a pretty small town and there hadn’t been a lot of people in my high school. Not to mention his father was on the school board.
Even if I had kept my daughter, my mom didn’t want to me to tell Eddie. Because then we’d have to deal with custody issues and so forth.
“I can’t believe you did this to me,” she said, shaking her head.
Those words uncorked something inside me and I finally lost it.
“Did this to you? Yes, Mom. I got drunk, had sex and got pregnant because I hate you. It’s all about you. God, I can’t believe you.” I stared out the window. My body shook, I was so angry. I could count the number of times I’d yelled at my mother on one hand.
“You can’t believe me? I can’t believe you! Going out and sleeping with that boy like a common slut. Li
ke one of those girls who lives in that trailer park up the road. We raised you better.”
“You didn’t raise me at all! You just yelled at me and made everything I did seem shameful. I was just a kid and you made me feel awful. You never told me you loved me.” If I wasn’t careful, the anger was going to turn into hurt and I was already close to tears. I didn’t want her to see me cry. I never let my mother see me cry.
“That is ridiculous, Audrey. We told you we loved you. I’m not having this conversation with you anymore. This wouldn’t have happened if you’d just kept it in your pants. You let your hormones get the best of you and gave it up to some boy and then you dragged me and my sister into it. And now look where we are.”
Yes. Look at where I was. This was why I didn’t tell Will. Because I couldn’t deal with him looking at me the way my mom was looking at me. I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against the cool glass of the window.
Audrey called me on Saturday night, her voice low so her parents wouldn’t hear. It was late, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was to hear her voice. Okay, so I wanted to see her and smell her skin and touch her hair and whole lot of other things, but if this was the best I could get, I’d take it.
“How did it go?”
“Fine. Everything was fine.” Her voice was flat, and I wished I could see her eyes to see if it was just the stress of being in her house that was making her act this way, or if it was something else.
“I wish you were here,” she said.
“Hey, I could get in my car and be there soon. Sneak in through your window. I’ve had a lot of previous window-climbing experience.” Kandy’s parents weren’t as strict as mine, but they sure as hell didn’t want their teenage daughter’s boyfriend sleeping over.
“That sounds wonderful, but I don’t want to risk it. For now, this is enough. Just hearing your voice. How was dinner?” I wanted to ask her more about how she was doing, but this was one of those times when she didn’t want to talk, so it was up to me.
“We had a session and Stryker tried to teach Simon how to play spoons. It did not go well. He kept fake-cursing and dropping them. Oh, and you should have seen the new boots Trish got. They have these little compartments in the heels so she can put things inside. I’m pretty sure she was hiding cigarettes and a lighter in there.”
“She’s been having a problem quitting,” she said, and I could finally hear the smile in her voice.
“And . . . what else? Oh, Simon’s out of the Resolution Game. And so is Max. So it’s you, me, Lottie, Zan and Stryker left now. I’m surprised that many of us are still going.” She laughed softly, more like an exhale. I saw her in my head, wearing a tank top and a ratty pair of shorts, her hair fanned out on her pillow. No doubt she had Harry Potter sheets with posters all over her wall and books stacked everywhere.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know,” she replied and I almost choked on a laugh.
“You know that’s a Star Wars reference? Han Solo says it to Leia.” She was definitely smiling now.
“I remember. I figure if I learn enough about your fandom, you’ll want to learn about mine.” It wasn’t that I didn’t like Harry Potter. I’d just never really read the books. I tried, but they just . . . I don’t know. They didn’t do it for me. But Aud was constantly bugging me to read them and she’d even said she would read them to me out loud. I’d suggested strip reading, where she took off an item of clothing for each chapter that I listened to. So far, she hadn’t gone for it.
“What are you wearing?”
She muffled a laugh.
“You’re such a perv, you know that? I’m not having phone sex with you.”
“I’m not asking you to have phone sex. I’m asking what you’re wearing. That’s a perfectly innocent question.” I was totally bullshitting her.
“Um, I’m wearing an old gray tank top that has a few holes on the hem. The material is so thin that if you hold it up to the light you can see right through it. I’m not wearing anything underneath it.” She knew what she was doing to me. I had to swallow hard. Simon was at Brady’s for the night. I flipped off my covers and said, “And what’s on bottom?”
“On bottom, a pair of equally thin shorts. They shouldn’t even be called shorts. They don’t cover much. I wouldn’t wear them in public because they show too much.”
I started stroking myself and I wondered if she was doing the same thing. The rustle of fabric sounded on her end of the line.
“Anything on under those shorts?”
“Um,” she said, inhaling softly. She was definitely doing what I thought she was doing. Fuck, this was hot.
“Nothing under them.” Her voice turned into a soft moan and I started moving my hand faster, unable to control the sounds that came from my mouth.
“What are you wearing?” she said, panting a little.
“Just a pair of boxers. No shirt.” I couldn’t make boxers sound sexy like she had.
“I miss you,” she said and I felt myself getting close.
“Shit,” I said as I came into my hand. “I miss you, too.”
She moaned a second later and then we were both silent. I got up and found a tissue to clean my hand off. I hadn’t planned on that being part of my evening, but fuck, I was glad she’d called.
“We’re doing this every time you’re away from me,” I said and she giggled, a low and sexy sound.
“It was good for me, too. I just hope my brother didn’t hear. But he’s got his TV on so loud he probably wouldn’t hear a bomb if it went off next to him.”
We talked about other things, little things and before I knew it, I was falling asleep to the sound of her voice.
A cheek swab. That was all it took to run the preliminary test to see if I was a bone marrow match. It used to be much harder.
My mother, father, brother and many of my other relatives had gotten tested as well. I was the last on my side and if this didn’t work, I’d have to tell Eddie. If neither of us was a match, then we would have to widen the search. I’d seen other families go on the news and ask for volunteers. The very idea of that happening made me shudder. Even though Maria lived in New Hampshire, and the chances of anyone seeing the story in Maine and connecting it to me were slim, I still worried.
I shouldn’t worry about that. I should be worried about my daughter. I was a horrible, selfish person. Sometimes I wondered if my mother was right about me.
But then I remembered when I’d first found out I was pregnant and my very first thought was that I couldn’t give this baby what she needed. I wanted her to have something better. I didn’t want to marry Bryan, the boyfriend I’d cheated on, and live in an apartment in my parents’ basement and finish high school by correspondence and be stuck in some dead-end job for my whole life. That wasn’t the life I wanted, and that wasn’t the life I wanted for my daughter.
She could have something better. She could wake up every day knowing that someone loved and adored her. She could go to playdates and take ballet classes or karate and have parents who would ooh and ahh over every one of her drawings and tell her that she could be anything she wanted, and would never judge her for being who she was.
She wouldn’t have to live up to expectations. She’d make her own.
So I’d decided to give her up. I knew it was the right thing then, and I knew it was the right thing now.
That didn’t make the situation any easier.
Mom had taken me to lunch after we’d gone to the hospital, and it was a meal full of silent judgment. She could still barely look at me.
“You’d better hope you’re a match so you don’t have to find that boy and tell him.” As if I’d let my daughter die rather than confront Eddie. I didn’t even respond.
All I wanted was to go back to school and pretend this weekend never happened. Trish was supposed to pick me up Sunday morning, even though she hated mornings with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I couldn’t thank her enough for being there for me.
“Morning, bitch. How was it?” She handed me one of the cups and I sipped it, not really caring what it was. Coffee. Black as sin coffee. I took another sip before I answered.
“Awful.”
“Families sometimes are.” I nodded and she pulled away.
Will was waiting in front of my building as Trish dropped me off. He wrenched the car door open and before I knew it, he was picking me up and kissing me so hard, I thought he was going to puncture my lip with one of his teeth. He kissed me until I was gasping for air.
Someone cleared her throat loudly behind us.
“You two are disgusting, you know that? I can’t even look at you.”
“Fuck off, Trish,” Will said, not looking away from my face as he set me down.
“Oh, go fuck yourself, Will.” He just smiled. “I did last night,” he whispered in my ear. I knew he had. So had I.
“Thanks again, Trish. I owe you,” I said, tearing my eyes away from Will. She had her surly face on again.
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I’ll see you tonight. Now you can go fuck each other.” She hopped in the truck and drove away.
“I know you’re probably supposed to be doing homework, but can we have sex first?” Will said, dragging me toward the door so he could get me upstairs.
“Yes, we can have sex first. And food. There should also be food.”
“Yeah, yeah, but sex first. Oh no, I think someone is chasing us. We should get to your room as quickly as possible to avoid being brutally murdered. Ready?” We both took off when we got through the front door of the building and headed for the stairs.
I didn’t deserve to be this happy.
That evening, I was busy thinking of how I should contact Eddie. If I should call him, or if this was something we should do in person. He was easy to find online, and he’d posted his contact information on his Facebook page. I had a blank email document open, but I hadn’t typed a thing.
Slowly We Trust Page 18