The Inconceivable Life of Quinn

by Marianna Baer

  Before she could process this, the librarian was right next to her, his hand stretched out to take it. Quinn finally managed to decline the call and give it to him. The phone not ringing left a hole in the air, exaggerating the silence.

  As the librarian huffed back to his desk, a guy coughed. Then another did. And before she could make her legs work, she realized it sounded a bit like they were saying “Slut.” Or had she imagined it? A couple more guys made the same noise and she turned, trying to figure out who it was and whether she was actually hearing right: Slut, slut, slut . . .

  Someone else, a girl, called out, “Shut up!”

  The librarian said, “Shhh!”

  But the coughs kept coming. Slut, slut, slut . . . And Quinn just stood there, her throat swelling. Eyes burning. Trying to breathe.

  The first thing she did when she got home that afternoon was take a bath. Her skin itched horribly, as if that word, slut, was crawling all over it like tiny sand crabs. She spent the first while so reclined that her ears were underwater, wanting to block out the sounds of the day. Maybe if she listened hard enough, she could hear all the way through the network of pipes and into the sea with its comforting lap, lap, lap, and shush and roar. She rested her hand on her belly and reminded herself that Noë had been right—people were only giving her a hard time because she was a girl. If they saw her as a slut, and saw that as a bad thing, well . . . that was their problem, not hers.

  (So why did it still hurt so much?)

  She finished her bath, moisturized her itchy skin, and shuffled back to her room, thinking about asking her parents if she could increase her number of weekly sessions with Dr. Jacoby. If therapy was how she was going to figure this out, shouldn’t she go as often as possible?

  She didn’t notice until she was a couple of steps into her room that Ben was standing at her desk and Lydia was bouncing on her bed, holding her rainbow stripe–covered iPad.

  “What are you guys doing in here?” Quinn asked, annoyed. She tightened the towel that was wrapped around her. “I need to get dressed.”

  Ben held out his hand, palm up.

  “Oh. Right.” She found the phone in her bag, tossed it to him. “Your ring is really friggin’ loud. I got in trouble.”

  “That’ll teach you not to steal it again.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What about you?” Lydia was visibly excited, completely different from how she’d been on the way to school this morning after the scene with their father. Knowing how stubborn her sister was, Quinn had thought they’d be dealing with the aftermath for weeks.

  “I figured it out!” Lydia said. “The great and wonderful Lydia figured it out!” She raised a fist in the air.

  “The cure for cancer?” Ben said. “Peace in the Middle East?”

  She handed Quinn her tablet. “Parth . . . parthenogenesis. It happened in a shark and in a python named Thelma, and it happened in you!”

  Oh, god. Parthenogenesis. A cloning process, sort of. “Lyddie, it can’t happen in humans,” Quinn said, not even reading the article on the screen. She’d read about parthenogenesis already, during her searches about virgin pregnancy, and had definitely ruled it out.

  “They didn’t think it could happen in sharks, either,” Lydia said, bouncing. “But it did! And in Thelma!”

  “Yeah, but people are different. It really can’t work with us. Doctors are positive.”

  “But I found all of these articles that say it can. It happened to ladies in England. That article was in a real medical journal. I can show you.” Bounce, bounce, bounce. “It means no one hurt you. It means you don’t have to worry and people can stop saying mean things.”

  “I appreciate you trying to figure it out. I do,” Quinn said, getting frustrated that she wasn’t listening. “But there’s no way it’s parthenogenesis.”

  “But there’s an article from a real medical journal. You have to read it!”

  “Lydia,” Quinn snapped.

  “What? Why won’t you listen?” She stopped bouncing.

  “Because. I told you. It’s not parthenogenesis. End of discussion.”

  Lydia’s jaw tightened like their father’s. “If I was anyone else you would listen to me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  She looked like she was going to explode, but she just stuck out her tongue and stomped out of the room.

  “Way to encourage the budding scientist,” Ben said, as they heard her door slam for the second time of the day.

  “I was supposed to tell her she was right?”

  He shrugged and headed toward the hall. “I have to pack. Going to Florida. Some show about bodybuilders.” Ben had become friends with the producers of the urban surfers show (which never even aired) and worked for them as an assistant now. “But you can call me if you need to talk. About anything.”

  Quinn nodded. “I know. Thanks.” He was almost out the door when she said, “Hey, Foley called you. Do you think . . . Do you think he and Marco know?”

  Ben looked at her strangely. “Not sure. Why do you care?”

  “I don’t.” But she did. She cared because she didn’t want word to get back to Ben about what had happened with Marco.

  “Well, I called Foley about something else. I’m sure he was just getting back to me.”

  “Oh,” Quinn said. “‘Something else.’” She made air quotes as she said it. Ben had stayed in touch with Foley all these years and sometimes bought weed from him, she knew. Other drugs, too, probably.

  “Right,” Ben said. “Something else.”

  Quinn had just finished putting on sweats and was brushing out her hair when Lydia barged back into the room.

  She flung a drawstring plastic bag from Old Navy onto Quinn’s bed. “Here,” Lydia said. “I don’t want any of it.”

  “What—” Quinn began to ask. But her sister had already left.

  She peered inside the bag, emptied the contents on her floor.

  It looked like trash at first. On closer inspection, she realized that they were all things of hers. She knew Lydia had the habit of filching little things like barrettes and lip gloss, but hadn’t known she’d taken all of this totally random stuff, too. A silly toy car that Jesse had given her because of a private joke. An early list of possible destinations for the island-hopping trip. A smallish conch shell. A rock. A postcard of a work by Andy Goldsworthy, her favorite artist, that Caroline had sent her from London. A folded sheet of wide-ruled school paper, the kind with dotted lines in between solid ones. She opened it, saw writing in a kid’s hand.

  The deps are my frends. we play games and won time so did my cat. that was funy. Cats dont like water. The end.

  Quinn recognized it as something she had written, probably in kindergarten or first grade. Lydia must have snooped in the boxes under her bed. For a split second she thought “The deps” was talking about the Dubs, but of course it wasn’t, because she hadn’t become friends with them until years later. So she had no idea why she had called her friends “the deps.” (Maybe there had been kids on Southaven whose last name was Depp?) The cat was definitely Haven, though. Quinn remembered the day she’d come down to the beach and chased the surf.

  Reading it gave her a bitter taste in her mouth and a vague sense of guilt, like she’d gotten in trouble for writing the story. Like someone had told her it wasn’t true. No more lies, Quinn! Maybe because it was so weird to think of a cat on the beach? Or maybe the feeling was just because so many of her childhood memories were clouded by a sense of having done something wrong. She folded it up and put it in the back of her desk drawer.

  BEN CUTLER

  Ben’s phone rang at close to midnight.

  “What the fuck, Cutler?” Foley said when Ben picked up.

  “I don’t know what. You’re the one who called me,” Ben said, lying down on his bed. (No, not his bed. The guest room bed. His parents had wasted no time converting the room when he moved out.)

  “You know what I mean. Marco. I don’t know w
hat the hell you think you’re doing. But I’m telling you, you better stop harassing him.”

  “Since when is sending a few messages harassing?”

  “A few messages? You call that ‘a few’ messages?”

  “I’ll stop if he answers me.”

  Ben heard his mom out in the hall and hoped he hadn’t spoken too loudly. God, he was so fucking sick of staying here. He’d had to sublet out his own place until he made some more money. Not that he’d told his family that. He wasn’t going to give his dad the satisfaction of knowing that he was having trouble supporting himself, since that was exactly what Gabe had predicted when he dropped out of NYU.

  “Look, Ben,” Foley said. “He’s here for baseball. You know that. If there’s any word about him hooking up with some sixteen-year-old, that’s gone.” He paused. “Whatever happened that night was your sister’s fault. So leave Marco out of it.”

  “What do you mean ‘whatever happened’?” Ben sat up.

  “Just what I said. Not saying anything did happen, just saying that we all know she was acting pretty jacked up.”

  “Why the fuck would you say that and then think I’d leave Marco alone?”

  “Cutler, you’re the one with the dad running for office. You don’t leave him alone, I’ve got plenty of shit to tell the press. Okay? Like, the amount of shit you buy from me is more than what you’d use yourself.”

  “Fuck you, Foley. You’re going to admit to the press that you sell?”

  “Who cares about me? No one. You’re the one with the family name.”

  “You are such an asshole. You always have been.”

  “Well, your sister’s always been a freak, so I guess people don’t change.” With that, Foley hung up.

  A vision of smashing him in the face jolted through Ben. He threw down his phone. Hands laced behind his head, he closed his eyes and took a breath through his nose to calm himself.

  Whatever happened that night was your sister’s fault. So something had happened.

  He debated talking to Quinn again but didn’t want to upset her and didn’t trust she’d tell him the truth.

  No, he needed to talk to Marco. He’d do it in person after Florida if he had to. If Marco was too big a coward to even answer the phone, Ben would go to Connecticut and see him in person. Fuck Foley’s threat.

  QUINN

  Today will be better.

  That’s what Quinn said to herself every morning as she lay in bed, wishing she didn’t have to get up.

  Today I will feel normal again, like a regular girl at school.

  Today my friends will be totally relaxed around me, without any of those uncomfortable moments where something calls attention to the pregnancy—like my frequent need to pee—or to the fact I’m still not telling them who the father is.

  I won’t hear whispers when I walk down the hall, or catch people looking at my boobs or my bump, which seem to get bigger every day. And if I do, I won’t care.

  I’ll stop looking at the guys like they’re all criminals in a lineup.

  I won’t be reminded about the ways this is making my dad’s campaign more difficult. Won’t overhear him talking about slipping in the polls or being snubbed by so-and-so or so-and-so. He’s going to win. The Democrat always wins in this district.

  Today I will figure out how I got pregnant.

  None of it happened.

  She felt like she was bobbing in the water, watching her identity as Normal Quinn float farther and farther away. As the baby was growing, she was shrinking into the distance.

  Her grades were nowhere near as good as they usually were; she’d never recovered from falling behind at the beginning of the semester. She’d had to let Sadie take over running the Adventurers club, because she had therapy on Saturdays so wasn’t free for the trips. She wasn’t playing ultimate—too much chance of collision or falling on her stomach. She was still a member of Earth First but often missed the meetings, again because of her therapy schedule.

  She and Jesse spent as much time together as they could, but even though they tried to act like everything was the same, there were differences: the cold shoulder his family gave her; the awkward tension with their other friends; the fact that while they still kissed, they didn’t do anything else now—a change that had happened without any discussion. (Quinn’s hesitation was that because of the baby it felt like there was always someone else in the room with them.)

  And along with all of this loss was a constant simmering of anger under her skin, anger at herself for still not having figured it out. Sometimes it boiled over into fury. What is wrong with you?

  But what more could she be doing?

  Aside from her increased number of therapy appointments (three times a week), she’d done everything she could think of, including secretly going to one of the psychics on Seventh Ave, who had prattled on about helping Quinn figure out her romantic problems and then spent most of the time trying to sell her a more expensive reading. Clearly what she’d have said to any teen girl. Quinn had left feeling like an idiot for even trying.

  Hypnosis attempts didn’t go much better. No matter how hard she tried to take it seriously, and to believe that it could work, it never stopped feeling like a waste of time. Lying there, listening to Jesse recite the cheesy script: “Imagine you’re in a sunlit field, safe and secure . . . Relax your feet . . . Relax your ankles . . . Relax your fingertips . . .” All it did was make her want to scream. (How the hell did you relax your fingertips, anyway?) They only kept trying because it was something concrete to do, which was better than nothing.

  She felt like she might have more luck tapping into her memories alone, so she had started a new notebook full of writings about anything related to those two weeks. Whenever she had time before bed, she lay in a bath and wrote out every single thing she could remember, no matter how small, even if she didn’t add anything new. She wrote in a stream-of-consciousness flow, like they’d done in the one creative writing class she’d taken.

  Her idea was that if nothing came up during the actual writing process, maybe doing this before bed would spur her mind to think about it when she was asleep, and that maybe she’d dream something helpful, or wake up to a revelation. But the only dreams she ever remembered were guilty ones where people were calling her a liar, usually her father. Sometimes Jesse. One time, he said to her, “You didn’t tell me what you were really like. I wouldn’t have been friends with you. No one would have.”

  The emotions from the dreams lingered throughout the days, a layer of grime she couldn’t seem to wash off.

  QUINN

  On a Saturday in October, the F train trundled out of the tunnel and into the bright sunlight toward the Fourth Ave and Ninth Street stop. Quinn sat with Isa and Sadie and Caroline on their way to Caroline’s home in Cobble Hill. The girls had met up in the Slope at a church where Caroline had been volunteering at a book sale. One of Caroline’s moms was starting a homemade organic beauty products line, and they were going to test out some of the facial masks and moisturizers. It was the first time Quinn had hung out with the Dubs in ages, and she’d been anxious all morning.

  But as the train rumbled underneath her, Quinn was laughing. Laughing with her friends. She couldn’t believe how good it felt.

  Isa was wheezing. “I’m going to pee my pants,” she said. “Seriously.”

  “Please don’t,” Sadie said, scootching farther away from her and closer to Quinn on the smooth, light blue bench seat.

  Sadie had been telling a story about how she’d rigged her little brother’s laptop to suddenly announce, “Take your shoes off. Now!” when he opened a certain program. It was so silly, but her description of her dumbfounded brother hurrying to take off his sneakers was hilarious. Sadie kept barking, “Take your off shoes, now!” and then mimicking her brother’s face. The girls were laughing so hard that other people on the train kept giving them dirty looks, which made them laugh even harder.

  “You know, Jesse is convinced
you’re going to end up in prison one day, Sade,” Quinn said, while texting him a recap of the story.

  Sadie smiled proudly. Her hacking had already gotten her suspended for replacing photos on the school’s website with other images, like a picture of a lion tearing apart a carcass above a caption that said, “Students relax and socialize in the upper school lounge.”

  The joking continued through a detour to get pumpkin spice lattes and the longish walk to Caroline’s family’s duplex apartment, which was on the outskirts of Cobble Hill, close to the waterfront. Caroline’s mother Juna wasn’t quite ready for them when they arrived, so they got snacks and went to Caroline’s bedroom. Caroline and Isa flopped on the bed; Sadie and Quinn sat on the floor.

  “Oh my god,” Isa said, head turned to one side, long black hair spread out around her. “Is that your peacock costume?” She pointed to the side of the room, where there was a pile of shiny fabric in different greens and blues folded up on a chair next to Caroline’s sewing machine.

  “Yeah,” Caroline said. “But it’s not nearly done.”

  “It’s going to be so awesome,” Sadie said. “We all know you’ll have the best one.” She turned to Quinn. “Speaking of which, you still haven’t RSVP’d. You’re coming, right?”

  “Oh,” Quinn said, a tug in her chest. “Uh, I’m not actually sure.”

  There was a charged silence. Sadie shifted into cross-legged position and said, “Why not?”

  “I don’t think my parents will let me. And . . .” She shrugged. “You have friends from other schools, Sade, and I don’t know . . . I don’t feel like being on display. It’s hard enough being at school around people who see me all the time. And I don’t have a costume.”

  More silence. “I understand,” Sadie said. “But it wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  “I’ll help you with a costume,” Caroline said. “No problem.”