by Sarah Dessen
I shut up.
Macon was waiting for me outside my homeroom, leaning against the fire extinguisher. Since my birthday, things had changed between us, almost imperceptibly; everything was a little bit more serious. Now just the sight of him gave me a sense of looking down and finding myself in midair, dangling lost above the world.
“Hey,” he said as I came closer, “where have you been?”
“Arguing with Scarlett,” I said. “She’s so cranky lately.”
“Oh, come on. Cut her some slack. She’s pregnant.” I’d told him the night of my birthday. He was the only one besides my parents, Marion, and us who knew.
“I know. It’s just hard, that’s all.” I stepped a little closer to him, lowering my voice. “And keep quiet about that, okay? She doesn’t want anyone to know yet.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” he said. Behind me people were crowding into my homeroom, bumping backpacks and elbows against me. “Sheesh, what kind of a jerk do you think I am, anyway?”
“A big one,” I said. He wasn’t laughing. “She just wants to wait until she has to tell people. That’s all.”
“No problem,” he said.
“Faulkner!” someone yelled from behind us. “Get over here, I gotta talk to you.”
“In a second,” Macon yelled back.
“You said you were going to homeroom today,” I reminded him. “Remember?”
“Right. I gotta go.” He kissed me on the forehead, quickly, and started to walk off before I could stop him. “I’ll see you third period.”
“Wait,” I said, but he had vanished in the shifting bodies and voices of the hallway. I only saw the top of his head, the red flash of his shirt, before he was gone. Later, when I was hunting for a pencil in my backpack pocket and found a handful of Hershey’s Kisses, I wondered again how he did so much without my noticing.
Later that morning I was in Commercial Design, the only class I had with Scarlett, looking for some purple paper in the supply room. I heard someone behind me and turned around to see Elizabeth Gunderson shuffling through a stack of orange paper. She’d been slumming since Michael’s death, quitting the cheerleading team, chain-smoking, and taking up with the lead singer for some college band who had a pierced tongue and a goatee. All of her copycat friends were following suit, casting off their J. Crew tweeds for ripped jeans and black clothes, trying to look morose and morbid in their BMWs and Mercedes.
“So, Halley,” she said, moving closer to me, a sheaf of orange tucked under one arm. “I heard you’re going out with Macon Faulkner.”
I glanced out to the classroom, to Scarlett, who was bent over the table, cutting and pasting letters for our alphabet project. “Yeah,” I said, concentrating on the purple paper in my hand, “I guess I am.”
“He’s a nice guy.” She reached across me for some bright red paper. “But just between us, as your friend, I think I should warn you to watch out.”
I looked up at her. Even with her ripped jeans and styled-to-look-stringy hair, Elizabeth Gunderson was still the former head cheerleader, the homecoming queen, the girl with the effortless looks and perfect skin, straight out of Seventeen magazine. She was not like me, not at all. She didn’t even know me.
“I mean,” she went on, stepping back and tucking her paper under her arm, “he can be real sweet, but he’s treated a lot of girls pretty badly. Like my friend Rachel, he really used her and then never talks to her anymore. Stuff like that.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, trying to get around her but she wasn’t moving, just standing there with her eyes right on me.
“I got to know him really well when I was with Michael.” She said his name slowly, so I’d be sure to get it. “I just didn’t know if you knew what he was like. With girls and all.”
I didn’t know what to say, how to defend myself, so I just stepped around her, knocking my shoulder against a shelf just to slip by.
“I just thought you should know, before you get too involved,” she called after me. “I mean—I would want to know.”
I burst out into the classroom. When I looked back she was still watching me, standing by the paper cutter talking with Ginny Tabor, who practically had radar for these kinds of confrontations. I threw my paper down next to Scarlett and pulled out my chair.
“You would not believe what just happened to me,” I said. “I was in the supply room, and—”
I didn’t get any further than that, because she suddenly pushed her chair back, clapped a hand over her mouth, and ran toward the bathroom.
“Scarlett?” Mrs. Pate, our teacher, was a little high-Strung; outbursts made her nervous. She was supervising the paper cutter, making sure no one lost any fingers. “Halley, is she okay?”
“She’s got the flu,” I said. “I’ll go check on her.”
“Good,” Mrs. Pate said, redirecting her attention to Michelle Long, who was about to sever at least half her hand with slap-dash cutting behavior. “Michelle, wait. Look at what you’re about to do. Can you see that? Can you?”
I found Scarlett in the last stall against the wall, kneeling on the floor. I wet some paper towels at the sink and handed them to her, then said, “It’s gonna get better.”
She sniffled, wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve. I felt so sorry for her. “Are we alone?” she asked.
I walked down the row of stalls, checking underneath for feet, and saw none. It was just us, the deep blue cinderblock of the girls’ bathroom, and a dripping faucet.
She leaned back on her heels, dabbing her face with the wet paper towel. “This,” she said in a choked voice, sniffling, “is the worst.”
“I know,” I said, telling myself not to talk about Month Four or the joy of birth or the little life inside of her, all things that had failed me in the past. “I know.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, closing her eyes. “It’s like, whenever I used to see pregnant women, they always looked happy. Glowing, right? Or on TV, in those big dresses, knitting baby afghans. No one ever tells you it makes you fat and sick and crazy. And I’m only three months along, Halley. It’s just going to get worse.”
“The doctor said—” I started, but she cut me off, waving her hand.
“It’s not about that,” she said softly, and she was crying again. “It would be different if Michael was here or I was married with a husband. Marion doesn’t even want me to have this baby, Halley. It’s not like she’s being that supportive. This is all me, you know? I’m on my own. And it’s scary.”
“You are not on your own,” I said forcefully. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’ve been holding your head while you get sick and bringing you saltines and letting you crab like crazy at me. I’m doing everything a husband or anyone would do for you.”
“It’s not the same.” In the fluorescent light her face seemed paler than ever. “I miss him so much. This fall has been so hard.”
“I know it,” I said. “You’ve been really strong, Scarlett.”
“If he was here, I don’t even know what might have happened between us. We were only together for a summer, you know? Maybe he would have turned out to be a major jerk. I’ll never know. But when it gets like this, and I’m miserable, all I can think is that he might have made everything okay. That he was the only one who understood. Ever.”
I knelt down next to her. “We can do this,” I said firmly. “I know we can.”
She sniffled. “What about childbirth classes? What about when I have to give birth and it hurts, and all that? What about money? How am I going to support a whole other person scanning groceries at Milton’s?”
“We’ve already talked about that,” I said. “You have that trust your grandparents put aside, you’ll use that.”
“That’s for college,” she moaned. “Specifically.”
“Oh, fine,” I said, “you’re right. College is much more important right now. This is your baby, Scarlett. You have to hold it together because it needs you.”
“My ba
by,” she repeated, her voice hollow in the cool deep blue of the stall. “My baby.”
Then I heard it: the creak of a door opening, not the outside door either but closer, just behind me. I turned, already dreading what I’d see. A set of feet I’d somehow missed, belonging to somebody who now had heard everything. But it was worse than that. Much worse.
“Oh, my God,” Ginny Tabor said as I turned to face her, standing there in a white sweater, her mouth a perfect O. “Oh, my God.”
Scarlett closed her eyes, lifting her hands to her face. I could hear the lights buzzing. No one said anything.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Ginny said quickly, already backing up to the door, her eyes twitchy and weird. “I swear. I won’t.”
“Ginny—” I started. “It’s not—”
“I won’t tell,” she said in a louder voice, backing up too far and banging against the door, her hand feeling wildly for the knob. “I swear,” she said again, slipping out as it fell closed between us, a flash of white all I saw before she was gone.
By lunch we were getting strange looks as we walked to Macon’s car. Everyone seemed to be eyeing Scarlett’s stomach, as if since second period she’d suddenly be showing, the baby ready to pop out at any minute. We ate lunch in the Toyota, parked in the Zip Mart lot around back by the Dumpsters.
“It’s weird,” Scarlett said, finishing off her second hot dog, “but since I know everybody knows now, I’m starving.”
“Slow down on those hot dogs,” I said nervously. “Don’t get overconfident.”
“I feel fine,” she said, and Macon reached over and squeezed my leg. All through P.E. I’d agonized about how it was all my fault, Ginny Tabor faking me out, then spreading Scarlett’s secret like wildfire across the campus. “And I’m not mad at you, so stop looking at me like you’re expecting me to fly into a rage at any second.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said for at least the twentieth time. “I really am.”
“About what?” she said. “This isn’t about you, it’s about Ginny and her huge mouth. Period. Forget about it. At least it’s over now.”
“God,” I said, and Macon rolled his eyes. I’d already planned several ways I could kill Ginny with my bare hands. “I really am sorry.”
“Shut up and pass those chips back here,” Scarlett said, tapping my shoulder.
“Better pass them,” Macon told me, grabbing them out of my lap. “Before she starts eating the upholstery.”
“I’m hungry,” Scarlett said, her mouth full. “I’m eating for two now.”
“You shouldn’t be eating hot dogs, then,” Macon said, turning to face her. “At least not all the time. You need to eat fruit and vegetables, lots of protein, and yogurt. Oh, and vitamin C is important, too. Cantaloupe, oranges, that kind of thing. Green peppers. Loaded with C.”
We just looked at him.
“What?” he said.
“Since when are you Mr. Pregnancy?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said, embarrassed now. “I mean, I’m not. It’s just common knowledge.”
“Cantaloupe, huh?” Scarlett said, finishing off the bag of chips.
“Vitamin C,” Macon said, starting up the car again. “It’s important.”
By the time we got back from lunch, everyone was definitely staring, entire conversations dissolving as we passed. Macon just kept walking, hardly noticing, but Scarlett’s face was pinched. I wondered if we’d see those hot dogs coming up again.
“Oh, please,” Macon said as we passed the Mouth herself, Ginny Tabor, standing with Elizabeth Gunderson, both of them staring, thinking, I knew, of Michael. “Like they’ve never seen a pregnant woman before.”
“Macon,” I said. “You’re not helping.”
Scarlett kept walking, facing straight ahead, as if by only concentrating she could make it all go away. I wondered what was more shocking, in the end; that Scarlett was pregnant, or that the baby was Michael’s. Of course girls got pregnant at our school, but they usually dropped out for a few months and then returned with baby pictures in their wallets. Some carried their babies proudly to the school day care, where little kids climbed on the jungle gym on the right side of the courtyard, running to the fence to watch their mothers go by on their way to class. But for girls like us, like Scarlett, these things didn’t happen. And if they did it was taken care of in secret, discreetly, and only rumored, never proven.
This was different. If we’d started to forget Michael Sherwood, any of us, it would be a very long time before we would again.
Chapter Nine
Then, in the middle of everything, we began losing my Grandma Halley.
It had actually started months earlier, in the late spring. She became forgetful; she would call me Julie, confusing me with my mother, forgetting even her own name. She kept locking herself out of her house, misplacing her key. My mother even convinced her to wear one on a string around her neck, but nothing worked. The keys just slipped away into cracks and crevices, sidewalks and street corners, thin air.
It got worse. She walked out of the Hallmark store with a greeting card she forgot to pay for, setting off all the alarms, which scared her. She started calling in the middle of the night, all anxious and upset, sure we’d said we were coming to visit the next day, or the previous one, when no plans had actually been made. For those calls her voice was unbalanced and high, scaring me as I handed the phone over to my mother, who would pace the kitchen floor, reassuring her own mother that everything was fine, we were all okay; there was nothing to be afraid of. By the end of October, we weren’t so sure.
I’d always been close to my Grandma Halley. I was her namesake and that made her special, and I’d spent several summers with her when I was younger and my parents went on trips. She lived alone in a tiny Victorian house outside of Buffalo with a stained-glass window and a big, fat cat named Jasper. Halfway up her winding staircase was a window, and from the top sill she hung a bell from a wire. I always touched it with my fingers as I passed, the chiming bouncing off the glass and the walls around me. It was that bell that always came to mind before her face, or her voice, when I heard her name.
My mother had Grandma Halley’s sparkling eyes, her tiny chin, and sometimes, if you knew when to listen for it, her singsong laugh. But my Grandma Halley was kind of wild, a little eccentric, more so in the ten years since my grandfather had died. She gardened in men’s overalls and a floppy sun hat, and made up her scarecrows to resemble neighbors she didn’t like, especially Mr. Farrow, who lived two doors down and had buck teeth and carrot-red hair, which fit a scarecrow nicely. She ate only organic food, adopted twenty kids through Save the Children, and taught me the box step when I was in fifth grade, the two of us dancing around the living room while her record player crackled and sang.
She was born in May of 1910, as Halley’s Comet lit up the sky of her small town in Virginia. Her father, watching with a crowd from the hospital lawn, considered it a sign and named her Halley. It was the comet that always made her seem that much more mystical, different. Magic. And when I was named after her, it had made me a little magical too, or so I hoped.
The winter I was six, we made a special trip to visit her for the comet’s passing. I remember sitting outside in her lap, wrapped in a blanket. There’d been so much hype, so much excitement, but I couldn’t see much, just a bit of light as we strained to make it out in the sky. Grandma Halley was quiet, holding me tight against her, and she seemed to see it perfectly, grabbing my hand and whispering, Look at that, Halley. There it is. My mother kept saying no one could see it, it was too hazy, but Grandma Halley always told her she was wrong. That was Grandma Halley’s magic. She could create anything, even a comet, and make it dance before your eyes.
Now my mother was suddenly distracted, making calls to Buffalo and having long talks with my father after I went to bed. I busied myself with school, work, and Macon; with my grounding over, I slipped off to see him for a few hours whenever I could. I went with
Scarlett to the doctor, read to her from the pregnancy Bible, reminding her to get more vitamin C, to eat more oranges and green peppers. We were adjusting to the pregnancy; we had no choice. And after our being the scandal for a couple of weeks, Elizabeth Gunderson’s tongue-pierced boyfriend fooled around with her best friend Maggie, and Scarlett and the baby were old news.
But each time Grandma Halley called again, scared, I’d watch my mother’s face fold into the now-familiar frown of concern. And each time I’d think only of that comet overhead, as she held me in close to her, all those years ago. Look at that. There it is. And I’d close my eyes, trying to remember, but seeing nothing, nothing at all.
By the middle of November, Marion had been dating Steve the accountant for just about as long as I’d been seeing Macon. And slowly, he was beginning to show his alter ego.
It started around the third or fourth date. Scarlett noticed it first, nudging me as we sat on the stairs, talking to him and waiting for Marion to come down. He always showed up in ties and oxford shirts, nice sports jackets with dress pants or chinos, and loafers with tassels. But this night, suddenly, there was something different. Around his neck, just barely visible over his tie, was a length of brown leather cord. And dangling off the cord was a circular, silver thing.
“It is not a medallion,” I hissed at Scarlett after he excused himself to go to the bathroom. “It’s just jewelry.”
“It’s a medallion,” she said again. “Did you see the symbols on it? It’s some kind of weird warrior coin.”
“Oh, stop.”
“It is. I’m telling you, Halley, it’s like his other side can’t be held down any longer. It’s starting to push out of him, bit by bit.”
“Scarlett,” I said again, “he’s an accountant.”
“He’s a freak.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. “Just you wait.”
Marion was coming down the stairs now, her dress half-zipped, reaching to put in one earring. She stopped in front of us, back to Scarlett, who stood up without being asked and zipped her.