Bounce

by Natasha Friend

  Inside, my heart is playing the bongos. My brain is flinging open storage drawers, in search of the perfect outfit.

  Family Meeting Night. I have on a black camisole and tight black jeans—castoffs from Jules. Also lipstick. It’s the kind of ensemble that a girl with short hair and no curves whatsoever could actually look good in. Even sexy. Maybe. If you were to squint at her from a great distance.

  I come to the table, hoping I won’t say anything stupid—hoping my crush-blush will behave itself.

  But when I get there, Linus’s seat is empty. Apparently, he has a take-home exam due on Monday, and it’s half his grade. He’s not here, and for the dinner portion of the evening I’m devastated.

  The knee slapper is this: I only think I’m devastated. I don’t know real devastation yet. No one does. Not Mackey, not Thalia, not the sweater twins, not Ajax, not Phoebe. Real devastation won’t hit us until after dessert. Until after we file into the living room. Until Birdie and Eleni are standing right in front of us, beaming like a couple of halogen lightbulbs. It hurts my eyes to look at them.

  “Kids.” My father slides his arm around her shoulders and squeezes. “We have an announcement.”

  They move closer to each other. Closer. Closer. So close, her head gets wedged under his armpit. While the two of them blather on, I think about the fact that only the thinnest layer of oxford cloth separates her head hair from his pit hair.

  “Blah, blah, blah. We wanted to make absolutely sure. Blah, blah, blah.”

  Sweat is soaking through the fabric onto her scalp.

  “Before we told anyone. Blah. Blah. Blah.”

  Instead of Pantene, her hair now smells like armpits.

  “But we went to see the doctor this morning. Blah, blah, blah. And of course we wanted you to be the first to know. Blah, blah, blah.”

  Shampoo de B.O. Ha!

  “We’re pregnant!”

  We’re pregnant!

  The words hit me like a soccer ball to the face.

  We’re pregnant.

  We.

  WE are pregnant.

  The silence in the room is deafening.

  Birdie is looking at me. He’s looking for a reaction, but I don’t have one because my facial muscles are paralyzed. They can’t move a bit. And if they could, I don’t know what they’d do. If my mouth could open right now, what would come out? Noooooooo! He’s still looking at me, and I am still frozen.

  “Mazel tov,” someone says, breaking the seal of silence.

  Mazel tov.

  I look around and see that it’s Thalia who said it. Thalia is getting up off the couch and walking over to Eleni, kissing her cheek. Then, kissing Birdie.

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  “Mommy’s having a baby? When? Can I name it? Is it a girl? How will you get it out? Can it live in my room? When Hannah’s mommy had baby Jillian, Hannah got to—”

  “You’re pregnant? How are you pregnant?”

  “So that’s why you gagged when I lit up my incense.”

  “Did you have the ultrasound yet? Do you know the sex?”

  They’re all talking at once. Words are flying through the air like hail balls, and every one of them hurts.

  I look at Mackey. He looks at me and shakes his head—in what? Disgust? Disbelief? I can’t tell.

  “We know this may come as a shock,” Eleni says, “but we hope we’ll have your support in the coming months.”

  Support.

  “We hope you’re as excited as we are.”

  Excited.

  “We might have to do a little switching around, room-wise, when the time comes, but—”

  “Because what, we’re not cramped enough already?” Ajax sounds pissed. “Where are we supposed to put another kid?”

  The room erupts again—voices getting louder and louder and louder—until suddenly I can’t take it anymore. I have to get out of here.

  Scrambling up from the couch, I step on Phoebe’s foot and she yelps, but I don’t stop to see if she’s okay. I just run.

  “Evyn?” Birdie calls after me. “Ev?”

  “Let her go,” I hear Eleni say. “She just needs time.”

  Time? She thinks I need time?

  I run through the dining room.

  What the hell does she know about what I need?

  Through the kitchen.

  I don’t need time. I need…I need…

  I don’t know what I need.

  I run into the backyard.

  Over to Clam, who’s asleep under a bush. I flop down on my belly, not caring about the dirt, just wanting to smell his smell.

  We’re pregnant!

  I snake my way along the ground, scratching my face on the branches, until I reach his pudgy little body.

  And as soon as I touch him, I know.

  Because of course. Isn’t this exactly what would happen now?

  I remember when I was five and Mackey was seven, and we had a parakeet named Pete, and one morning we came downstairs for breakfast, and Pete was lying on the bottom of his cage, cold and perfectly still, and I cried for a week.

  But tonight, the tears don’t come. Instead of crying, I run to the back door and yell, “Clam’s dead! Are you happy? Is everybody happy now?”

  Then I grab a bunch of twenties from Eleni’s purse and take off.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I can’t get the words out of my head.

  We’re pregnant.

  We.

  WE are pregnant.

  “I need to get to Portland, Maine,” I tell the lady in the ticket booth. She has on a Red Sox visor with a mushroom hairdo sprouting out the top.

  “Yah can’t get they-ah from hee-ah,” she says, and at first I think she’s making fun of me, doing the old Maine hillbilly routine, but then I realize it’s how she really talks.

  “This is Ahlington. You need South Station.” She takes out a little map and points with a pen. “Change hee-ah, at Pahk Street. It’s wicked easy.”

  “Thanks,” I tell her.

  “Shoo-ah.”

  It’s my first time riding the T, and I am alone. Well, not technically. I’m packed in with hundreds of other people who all seem to be drunk and wearing Red Sox jerseys, but I don’t know any of them.

  “I hate that pitchah,” says the guy who’s pressed up against my back.

  And his buddy, whose elbow is jammed into my solar plexus, says, “He’s a pissah.”

  I lean my cheek against a pole that’s probably swarming with salmonella and wonder why nobody at the March School talks that way. Or the Gartoses. They don’t have the accent. Why? Because they’re loaded?

  “Yankees suck!” someone on the other end of the train yells.

  The whole train starts chanting, “Yan-kees suck, Yan-kees suck, Yan-kees suck, Yan-kees suck.”

  And even though I don’t want to, I think about Birdie. Because he grew up in New York, and he still has the Yankees cap he wore when he was a kid. Because he took me and Mackey to a baseball game last summer. It was only the Portland Seadogs, minor league, but still. The three of us ate peanuts and Cracker Jack, and ice cream out of tiny baseball cap bowls. Then, during the seventh-inning stretch, Birdie stood on the bleachers and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the top of his lungs.

  I picture him in his sawdusty overalls, bits of popcorn stuck in his beard, embarrassing the crap out of his children in public, and a wave of sadness hits me.

  I want to go back.

  “Pahk Street! Pahk Street Station next!”

  I want to go back to that summer, to that baseball game, to that exact moment in time.

  The subway slows. As the doors open, I feel myself start to panic. Because I can’t decide which way to go.

  Stella? It’s me, Evyn.

  I close my eyes and wait. All around me, bodies are moving.

  Stell?

  Nothing.

  I have two choices, right? Go back to Al and Betty Boop and their love child, or go home t
o Maine. Home, where I no longer have a house. Where my best friend may or may not be my best friend anymore. Where—

  “Pahk Street! Pahk Street Station! Change here for the red line!”

  People are shoving past me, but I stay where I am, waiting.

  Stella?

  “Hey,” someone says.

  There’s a hot blast of beer breath in my ear.

  “Move it or lose it, sistah.”

  I wait another second, but Stella doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even show her face. It’s like she never existed.

  So I get off the train, stumbling through a sea of elbows and Red Sox jerseys, and I feel so scared and alone I want to cry.

  But I don’t.

  I just keep moving.

  In South Station, I find a pay phone. I don’t have a credit card so I have to call collect.

  “Guess where I am,” I say.

  And Jules says, “Where.”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t know. The mall?”

  “The train station!” I sound more enthusiastic than I feel. “I’m coming to visit!”

  “What? When?”

  “Now! I mean, I don’t have a ticket yet, but there’s a train that leaves at eight-forty. It gets in at eleven-something. Do you think your mom can pick me up? Or your dad?”

  “Um.”

  This is her response. Um. Not Oh my God, Ev, I’m so psyched to see you!, but um.

  “What?” I say. “You don’t want me to come?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just…it’s Friday night.”

  “So?”

  “So, I have, you know, plans.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  “Just this high-school party.”

  Just this high-school party, she says. Like she’s been going to high-school parties all her life.

  “So?” I say. “Your curfew’s ten-thirty. Your mom can pick you up from the party and then she can—”

  “Ev.”

  “What?”

  “The thing is…I’m sleeping over at Jessie Kapler’s, so, you know…”

  So, you know. You’re not invited.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “I mean, I want you to come and everything, it’s just…Hey, did you call Raquel? Or Ann? Maybe you could stay with one of them.”

  Right. Because now that Jules has Jessie Kapler, who needs Raquel and Ann?

  I stare at the wad of sweaty bills in my hand. I think about what I could do at a train station with all this money.

  “Or, like, you could come another weekend…Ev?”

  Who needs a ticket to Maine when you can get a Seventeen, gum, and forty scoops of Ja-makin’ Me Crazy Fudge?

  “Great,” she says. “Now you’re mad? Hey, it’s not my fault I have plans tonight. You could have given me a little notice.”

  By this stage there is no point in explaining why I wanted to come in the first place—no point in telling her my whole life is falling apart. The conversation has already deteriorated.

  “You’re right.” I laugh into the phone. It’s the kind of laugh that comes out when nothing is the least bit funny. “Next time I’ll give you notice. Next time I’ll take out an ad in the Portland Herald. No, wait. I’ll hire a blimp to fly over your house!”

  I slam down the receiver before she can say anything. That’s the great thing about pay phones, you can just hang up and walk out.

  I make my way over to JB Scoops. Fifty-two flavors. Maybe I’ll try them all. Maybe I’ll eat until I’m sick, until I never want to eat ice cream again in my life. Until I explode.

  It’s not like anyone is here to stop me.

  Ohhhhh, my stomach. I can’t believe I just did that.

  In the restroom mirror, my face looks warped and pasty. I splash cold water over it again and again. I rinse my mouth and spit. Rinse and spit, but my teeth still feel like they’re wearing individual caramel-fudge sweaters.

  I hate ice cream. I really do.

  After that, I wander around. I find the escalator and ride it up and down a few times. When we were little, Birdie would take me and Mackey to the Maine Mall, not to shop, but to ride the escalator. We thought it was the coolest thing. He would hold our hands and we’d ride together, hundreds of times probably. “Again, Birdie!” we would say, and he wouldn’t get impatient like most parents. He’d just laugh and say okay.

  Tonight, I ride by myself. It’s ten o’clock on a Friday in Boston, and I’m a teenager out on the town. I can eat what I want, buy what I want, go where I want—no parents anywhere. Woohoo!

  At first there’s a little thrill in it, but then it’s gone. All I’m left with is the sick feeling in my stomach.

  I walk over to a bench and sit down. My feet are tired from walking. My eyes are tired, too. I think about curling up right here and going to sleep. I could stay here all night. I could live here. Hey, those kids in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler did it; they lived in the Met. Why not a train station? People are doing it right now. See? There’s a homeless guy over there, using newspapers for a blanket.

  Oh my God, there’s a homeless guy over there, using newspapers for a blanket!

  I am alone in a train station at ten-thirty at night, in a strange city. All I have left in my pocket is thirty-seven cents. And I am just moments away from getting strangled and thrown in a Dumpster.

  I. Am freaking. Out.

  I move to a different bench, closer to the security guard, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. So I close my eyes.

  Stella? It’s me, Evyn.

  Stell…?

  Are you there?

  Nothing.

  Please?

  After all this time, the moment I need her most, she’s gone. She’s really gone. And I know this sounds crazy, but I miss her. I miss my dead mom that I never got the chance to know. I miss our talks, even if they weren’t real. I miss her smile. I miss the way she could find good in any situation. I miss—

  “Evyn?”

  My eyes fly open.

  Plaid shirt.

  Stubble chin.

  White, white teeth. Oh.

  My. God.

  Next to me there’s an empty spot, and Linus sits down. He holds out a roll of mints, and I shake my head.

  “We didn’t know which train station,” he says, peeling off a mint and popping it into his mouth. “So we had to split up.”

  I am too stunned to respond. I am too busy being glad I’m not wearing horse pajamas.

  “Your friend called. Jules, is it? She was worried about you. So your dad took Back Bay, Thalia took 128th Street, and I came here.”

  You came here.

  I can’t think about Jules or my dad or anything. All I can think about is Linus’s hand, which has found its way to my knee.

  “Let me call home real quick.”

  He takes a phone out of his pocket and starts punching in numbers.

  “Ma,” he says, “I found her. South Station. Yeah, I think so.” He turns to me. “You okay?”

  I nod. I am now.

  “She’s fine…Uh-huh. You want me to bring her back?”

  And I don’t know where I find the courage, but I grab his arm. When he looks at me, I shake my head like crazy.

  “On second thought, Ma…”

  And suddenly, miraculously, he starts wrangling with his mother about where I should spend the night. He uses terms like “decompression time” and “adolescent anxiety overload,” and he is so incredible that he actually wins the argument.

  I can’t believe I am walking into a college dorm right now. No, not I. We. We are walking. Linus and me. Together.

  “The room’s a sty,” he says. “Just to warn you.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. Because it is. Everything about Linus is okay. Better than okay. Everything about him is just right.

  At this very moment, he is taking a keycard out of his pocket and sliding it into the door. I am about to walk into his dorm room, and I feel nervous and e
xcited and, more than anything, ready for what will come next.

  The door opens, and we walk through together. Me and Linus.

  “Babe?”

  Babe?

  “Babe? Is that you?”

  Me, Linus, and the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. No, not girl—definitely not girl—woman. Woman, jumping into his arms.

  “Babe!”

  I am speechless.

  She has her legs wrapped around his waist, and he is rubbing her back, which is mostly skin because she’s wearing some sort of skimpy number that barely covers anything. And when he puts her down, even though I don’t want to, there is only one place to look and that’s her chest.

  “Evyn, this is my good friend Pamela.”

  Good friend. Right.

  And after I have recovered from the size of her boobs, I look into her eyes and see that they are a color not found in nature. Not blue, not green, but something in between. Teal, maybe. With the longest lashes ever.

  “Pamela, this is my sister Evyn.”

  “Hi, Evyn,” she says. And of course there are the lips, and just when I am wondering if I could possibly be any more devastated, she says, “You’re adorable!”

  And she pats my head.

  From my sleeping bag on the floor, I can hear them whispering.

  Linus says, “She’s having a tough time. I feel bad.”

  And Pamela says, “Yeah, I remember thirteen. It was awful. I was a band geek.”

  “C’mere, my little band geek,” he says.

  They kiss in the neon glow of the Budweiser sign on the wall. Both of their faces turning blue, then red, then blue again.

  When I wake up, Pamela is gone.

  The room smells like cigarettes. There’s an empty wine bottle by the window, a glass with lipstick smudges all over it.

  Linus is sitting on the couch, typing away on a laptop.

  I watch him for a while. The curls. The shoulders. Everything.

  When he looks up, he sees me and grins.

  Oh, the dream teeth.

  “Morning, kiddo.”

  And there you have it. Kiddo. Open heart, insert dagger.

  “Your dad called,” he says. “I told him I’d have you home by nine. I’ll ride the T back with you.”

  When I don’t respond he says, “Hey. Sorry about your dog. That sucks. Then the baby and everything. Double whammy.”