by Andrea Ring
We kiss. I cannot breathe enough of him in.
We drive back to my house, and at midnight, all is dark. We tangle on the living room couch, and Jay finally gets his hands where he’s wanted them for months.
“Tell me no,” he says as he kisses my neck.
“No. Just this. Just let me feel your hands on me.”
I do. He’s everywhere, and I fight to memorize each touch, each whisper, each thought in the dark. I know this has to end, but I want a memory to hold on to, one more moment with Jay to lock in my heart.
It’s perfect.
Until it’s time for him to go.
“I’ll stay,” he whispers into my shoulder.
I raise my head in alarm. Someday he’ll hate me, but I’ll be damned if that day comes now.
“No, you won’t.”
“I can go to USC. You know how hard they recruited me.”
“No,” I say, the word falling too easily from my lips. “You have a dream, too. I couldn’t live knowing I took that away from you.”
“It would be my choice.”
“No. And what happens if we don’t work out? I’m not worth it.”
“You are to me.”
“Jay, no. We’ll make it work. I’ll visit. You’ll visit.”
“You don’t want me here,” he says, pushing me gently off him.
“That’s not it. I just don’t want to be the reason you screw up your life.”
He laughs even though none of this is funny. “Don’t worry. I won’t stay if I’m not wanted.”
“You are.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
And he dresses and walks out, leaving me half-naked in the dark.
I have tried so hard to keep his hatred at bay. I’ve tried so hard to make it up to him.
I guess in the end it was just inevitable.
***
Jay won’t return my calls. He avoids me at school. Maybe it’s better this way, but this time hurts worse than last time, I think, because I’m choosing it.
I guess we’re over.
I spend the rest of the week working my tables and trying not to feel anything.
On Saturday night, I’ve already changed into sloppy sweats and slippers when Gabi and Baby T show up without warning.
“Did we have plans?” I ask as they shove their way past me and into the kitchen.
Bea is asleep, and Mom and Dad are watching television in the living room. They don’t acknowledge the intrusion.
“You said you were tired,” Gabi reminds me. As though I’ve forgotten.
“Was I speaking Swahili?” I ask, resigning myself to sitting at the table and hearing them out. They sit across from me, double-teaming.
“Get dressed,” Gabi says. “We’re going out.”
“Have fun,” I say.
“Come on, Leni,” Baby T says. “Jay will be there.”
“Then I’m definitely not going.”
They exchange an exasperated look.
Gabi pleads with me. “He’s dying, Leni. He missed all his free throws in his game last night.”
Damn him.
“He’s like a little lost puppy dog,” she continues. “Just talk to him.”
“Look, I know you guys mean well, but Jay and I are never gonna see eye to eye on this. You know why I can’t go. Jay can’t accept that. What am I supposed to do with that? He has to go his way, and I have to go mine.” I stand and push in my chair. “I’m going to bed.”
And I leave them staring after me.
Chapter Fifteen
Clark is in lecture mode, and it’s kinda nice to just sit back and listen. But of course it doesn’t take long for him to say something that provokes me.
“So moral relativity. Morality can be defined by situation. Classic example—poor family, sick baby, so Dad steals the medicine. Extenuating circumstances change what is right and wrong.”
“I’d probably do the same thing in the dad’s situation, but if you allow for extenuating circumstances, you can find an excuse for anything,” I say. “You can’t define morality based on what-ifs.”
“Why not?” Clark says. “Our justice system is based on degrees. First degree murder, deliberate and calculated. Second degree murder, deliberate but unplanned. Manslaughter, caused by the defendant by neglect or circumstance, but not deliberate. And so on.”
“But our justice system isn’t based entirely on morality,” I argue. “If I plan a murder in self-defense, plan to kill someone before they kill me, it’s still murder one.”
“Maybe, maybe not. The DA will weigh public opinion before bringing an indictment. It’s not automatic. Plus there’s wiggle room to play on the jury’s sympathy.”
“Sympathy doesn’t define morality, either,” I say.
“No, but it’s one of those extenuating circumstances.”
I frown. “Those nasty buggers again.”
Clark laughs.
My stomach flip-flops pleasantly.
“Haven’t you ever broken your moral code and rationalized it?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say. “We all do that. It doesn’t change whether something is right or wrong.”
“But it does,” he says. “You probably haven’t, but I’ll ask anyway. Have you ever had a near-death experience?”
I sip my coffee to cover up the sudden trembling in my hands. “We’re back to truth?”
His eyes widen. “You have?”
“I…yes.”
He waits for me to say more, but at this point in our acquaintance, I feel like a pathetic little girl with the weight of the world on my shoulders. I hardly want Clark feeling sorry for me, or more sorry than he already does. “Can we leave it at that?” I ask.
“I don’t think so.”
We stare each other down, and just when I’m about to speak, Clark beats me to it.
“When I was thirteen, my parents got kicked out of their apartment and we went to stay with my aunt. They went on a bender that first night, and my dad pulled me out of bed at God knows what time and decided to beat the shit out of me. Who knows why. Broke an arm, punctured a lung…I thought I was dead. I crawled out of the house, not really looking for help, just…kind of like a wounded animal looking for a place to die. A neighbor found me.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper, and I can feel the tears gathering in my eyes.
Clark, though, seems emotionless.
“When I finally woke up a couple days later, I told them I fell out of a tree. Even the cops. And I told them my parents were away on a trip and I was staying with my aunt. Aunt Linda, of course, threw my dad to the wolves and threatened my mom with the same if either of them ever showed up again. But I stuck to my story, even if it didn’t do the old man any good.” Clark sits back in his chair and sips his coffee. “I made a decision in that moment to protect them. Even at death’s door, I didn’t want to be like them.”
I want to argue with him. I want to scream that turning them in was hardly the same thing as beating their son nearly to death. But Clark has defined his own morality, and who am I to say he’s wrong?
Then again, this is exactly what we’ve been discussing the last few sessions: relative morality versus universal morality. And even if I don’t always live the example, I know which side I believe is right.
“Clark,” I say gently, “you still feel you made the right decision?”
“Yes,” he says. “Absolutely.”
“Could it be…I mean, could that have been a decision made by a frightened thirteen-year-old boy, and not one made by a twenty-two-year-old man? Let’s say you’re on the outside of the same situation, looking in. Your best friend beats his son. Do you turn your best friend in?”
A muscle ticks in his jaw. “You know I would.”
“So you believe the child abuser should pay,” I say. “Absolutely, no excuses, no extenuating circumstances.”
Clark looks down and studies his coffee cup. “No excuses,” he says.
He won’t meet my eyes, doesn’t say anything
else. I regret speaking, regret interjecting my opinions into a situation that so obviously defines him and shaped the man he has become. I wonder if he’ll ever speak to me again. I try one more time to draw his gaze, but he seems intent on ignoring me.
I finish my last swallow of coffee and get up to throw the cup away. When I return to the table, he finally speaks.
“So Linda rescued me. I didn’t make it easy on her, but she stuck it out.”
I ease back into my chair. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Why did you move back in with them, Clark?”
“They found me on Facebook a couple years ago. They needed help.”
“I think these are extenuating circumstances.”
Clark looks at me, finally, and smiles. “I can finally take care of myself. And I get to rub it their faces every day that I’m alive and well, no thanks to them.”
I smile back, just to let him know I get it, even if I don’t.
“Your turn,” he whispers.
I know I have to reciprocate, I want to reciprocate, and my hand automatically covers my belly.
“A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer.”
“Wow,” he says, sitting forward suddenly. “Not what I thought you’d say.”
I give him a wobbly smile. “Yeah, that’s what I thought when the doctor told me.”
“What kind?”
“Ovarian. I had stage one, grade two epithelial cancer on my left ovary. Stage one means it was contained and hadn’t spread. They did a unilateral salpingo oophorectomy.”
“That’s a mouthful,” Clark says. “What is it?”
“Just a fancy way of saying they took out the one ovary and fallopian tube.”
“How did you know you had cancer?”
“I had…” I pause, embarrassed to give the details. “My periods were weird, like I was bleeding when I shouldn’t have been. I was really tired, and I lost my appetite. And my stomach grew. I’d always had a flat stomach from tennis and dance, but it looked like I was bloated, like I was pregnant. My mom actually saw me come out of the shower one day and accused me of it. She took me to her doctor, insisting they do a pregnancy test. After my doctor talked to me and found out my other symptoms, she ran tests. I was lucky they found it. The symptoms are so generic that most women don’t figure it out until it’s too late.”
“Did you go through…”
Clark pauses as he realizes why I always wear a bandanna. Tonight’s is hot pink with little black skulls that each wear a red bow. I saw the bandanna when I was buying a birthday present for Gabi, and it reminded me of Clark, so I bought it. And wore it tonight.
“Do you have any hair at all?” he asks me bluntly.
I shrug. “Some.”
Clark studies my face while I study the tabletop.
“You have a perfect oval face. Your eyes…now I know why they dominate your face. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before…but there’s nothing to distract from them. You almost look like an anime character.”
“Gee,” I say.
“Leni, my point is you don’t need hair.”
“But I want it,” I mumble.
Clark reaches across the table and takes my hand in his. “Can I see?”
My heart starts thumping so hard I can feel the blood pound in my fingertips. I shake my head.
“Please.”
It’s the gentleness in his voice that undoes me.
No one has seen my head in the past six months except for my doctor. I have bandannas stashed in the bathroom, in my backpack, even under my pillow. I sleep with one on (not that it stays). And it’s not vanity, it’s really not. I like not having to mess with my hair. I like not having to dry it. Now that my eyelashes have grown back, I don’t even mind the way I look when I see myself in a mirror.
The problem is when other people see me. The look of pity in their eyes. The gasps, the wonder, the realization that they are looking at someone who is sick.
I’m not sick anymore, and I can get through a couple of weeks without even thinking about the whole ordeal. But seeing that look on someone else’s face reminds me, and all I want to do is forget.
My cancer may be gone, but the whole ordeal isn’t. I guess I have to face that truth.
I take my hand away from Clark’s and slide the bandanna off my head. I look into Clark’s eyes.
He smiles, reaches out a hand, and rubs it carefully over my head.
“It’s so soft,” he whispers, lowering his hand.
I take my coffee and sip. “It wasn’t like this before. It was lighter brown, for one, not so dark, and it was thick.” I run a hand through the two-inch, baby-fine hair that’s probably sticking up in every direction.
“You don’t look sick,” Clark says, as if he’d read my thoughts. He settles back into his chair. “The hair style looks deliberate. You don’t have to hide it.”
I shrug. “It’s too edgy for me. I’m more sedate. It just doesn’t seem like me.”
“But it is you,” he says. He picks up the bandanna and stuffs it in his pocket. “So. You had the oo-ectomy thing and then you had chemo?”
I laugh and shake my head. “Oophorectomy. Not at first. My…I wanted to have kids someday, so I chose just to have the one ovary removed, even though my doctor recommended they take both, and he wanted to do chemo after. But my mom freaked out after reading about all the side effects of chemo.”
“But?”
I sigh. “It spread. In ten months, it spread to the other ovary and came up in the fluid of my stomach.”
“Shit.”
I can only nod.
“But you’re okay now,” he says.
“I guess,” I say. “I ended up having a full hysterectomy and my other ovary and fallopian tube removed. Six cycles of chemo after that. Lost all my hair, everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I looked like an alien, like those Roswell aliens. It was over a year ago, and I got my eyebrows and eyelashes back, finally, but the rest of my body just doesn’t want to cooperate. The only upside is not having to shave my armpits.”
I see Clark’s eyelids lower as he contemplates what I mean by “everywhere.” So I have to add, “And I have a nasty scar. No more bikinis for me.”
Unbidden, Clark’s gaze grows dark. Heated.
“I love scars,” he says quietly. “Proof of life.”
Chapter Sixteen
December 14th. Three more days of school before winter break. Three more days until I can spend an extended amount of time studying Mom, to see how bad she really is.
After school and practice, I take a shower then sit on my bed with my laptop to check my email.
It’s December 14th.
The latest message is from Stanford, received at 4:34 PM. I hover the pointer over the message, take a deep breath.
It would be so easy if it’s a rejection—Stanford would be making the choice for me. But I’ve asked for choices. So I click.
“Dear Ms. Eleanor Marquette,
The Admissions Office at Stanford University is pleased to inform you that you have been accepted…”
I click on Delete.
I empty the Trash Bin.
Pretend I never got it.
I’ve made my choice.
Pretend I never got it.
***
Mom knocks on my door thirty seconds after I delete the email and enters my room without asking for an invitation.
“Well?” she says. She looks so expectant, so hopeful, that I can’t bring myself to speak.
I shake my head.
“No, you didn’t get an email, or no, you didn’t get in?”
I hesitate. “No, I didn’t get in.” The lie burns like acid in my chest.
Her face falls. “It’s a mistake. Let me see the email.”
“I’ve already deleted it.”
She turns her head away from me. “It’s only early decision,” she whispers. “You’ll still get in.”
“I think,” I say, fighting to speak past t
he lump in my throat, “it’s a done deal. It’s not a big thing. I’ll go somewhere else.”
“We want you to go to Stanford.”
And I want a real mother. A doting father. My little brother back. Can’t always have what we want, Mom.
She shakes her head and walks to the door. She pauses, leaning on the jamb for support.
“Your father will be so disappointed.”
“I know,” I say.
“We did everything right. I can’t understand it.”
I don’t say anything.
Then she turns back to me with a sudden burst of energy.
“You put on your application that you’re a cancer survivor, yes?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“And the dance. You’ve won competitions. You even partnered once with that Max guy on TV. You told them that, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The tennis…you didn’t have four years of varsity tennis because you were out of school. Athletics are important to a school like Stanford.”
“They are,” I whisper.
“But you…you have perfect grades. High SAT scores.” Her voice rises as she lists my accomplishments. “Work experience, volunteering, well-written essays! I don’t…I don’t get it…I don’t know why…” Then she folds herself in half and sobs.
I get off the bed slowly and put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay, Mom. Really. I’m okay with it.”
She stands up straight and looks me in the eye. “But what about me!”
I take two steps back from the hatred in her eyes.
“Whoa, ladies, what’s the trouble?” Dad comes into the room with a wooden smile on his face.
Mom takes one look at him and rushes out of the room.
“Mel!” he calls after her, but he doesn’t move. “What was that about?”
I can’t look my father in the eye. “I didn’t get into Stanford.”
My father is silent. I force myself to look at him. He’s studying his wedding ring.
“You’ll get in. Early decision is next to impossible. We knew that.”
I nod.
“You okay?” he asks, and I feel a burst of love for my father that he’d even ask that question.
“Yeah, Dad. It’s okay.”
He kisses my cheek. “You know what always makes me feel better? Root beer floats.”