by OSTOW, MICOL
A storm cloud darkens across Lucy’s features. “We broke up,” she says simply. “Last week.”
A lump forms in my throat. Oh.
My mother buys the test without incident (“At least as far as I know,” she tells us, emerging from the Rite Aid thoroughly nonplussed) and drives us straight over to the closest McDonald’s. We can’t take the test into the house, my mom assures me. Someone might see the box or the stick or Tía Rosa might simply smell that something’s amiss.
Lucy runs into the bathroom, and we split a super-size fries and a chocolate shake while we wait the requisite three minutes for the test results. I have never felt more like a refugee from an after-school special, the sight of my mother slurping on a fast-food shake lending the whole experience a particularly surreal quality.
Three minutes and fifty-nine seconds later, Lucy gingerly digs into her tote bag where the stick is wrapped in thick wads of toilet paper. She tentatively strips away the paper like layers of an onion, and I can tell she is both dying to look and desperate not to look.
The suspense is killing me; I can only imagine what it must be doing to Lucy. It takes every ounce of restraint to resist flinging myself across the table and wrenching the stick out of her hands.
Finally the stick is clean and paper free. Lucy bites her lip, wrinkles her forehead, looks up at us. “There’s a pink line,” she says, her voice hollow.
I squint at the packaging. “One pink line or two?”
“Just the one,” Lucy says.
“The test line or the one in the window?”
“Wait—which is supposed to be the test line? I think it’s . . . maybe it’s . . .”
Mercifully my mother takes the test from Lucy to confirm. “There’s nothing there. In the test window,” she concludes. “You’re not pregnant.”
“But I’m usually regular. What if the test is wrong?”
“How late is your period?” my mother asks.
“Two weeks,” Lucy says, nervous.
My mother shakes her head. “Nope. This thing would have picked it up. It’s designed to pick up trace hormones as early as two days after your missed period.”
“Are these things reliable?” I ask, because I know that’s what Lucy’s thinking.
My mother nods emphatically. “They are. Remember I helped put together the curriculum for Feminism, Law, and Reproductive Biology last semester.”
Sometimes I forget that my mother’s job is actually really cool.
“So why is it so late?” Lucy asks.
My mother shrugs. “It could be anything, really. Stress, changes in diet . . . all of these things will affect your cycle. And then I’m sure worrying about being pregnant didn’t help . . . ironically.”
“I guess I have been upset,” Lucy admits. “With abuela passing and . . . I really never thought that Rafael and I would break up. Ever.”
I had assumed that their breakup had something to do with the pregnancy, but the way Lucy’s talking now makes me think that there’s more to the story, that the pregnancy scare is the end of it rather than the beginning.
“I had a friend who went through the same thing,” my mother says. Her voice is far away, and I get the feeling that she’s talking more to herself than to either of us, lost in her memory. “At pretty much the same age. And of course, we had no idea what to do. I couldn’t very well ask my mother to pick up a test for us.”
“So what did you do?” I ask.
“What could I do? Nothing. We didn’t have anyone we could go to, and we were young, scared, and naive. We chose the ‘duck and cover’ technique. You know, we pretended it wasn’t happening.”
“So you just . . . did nothing ?” I ask, incredulous, even though of course that’s exactly what she just said. My mother, the most responsible person in the world, would never do something like that. Never.
“We did nothing,” she says flatly. “After about three months, of course, she started to show. Cecilia—her name was—Cecilia had been very slender, so at a certain point there was no hiding what was going on, no matter how baggy she bought her clothes. Anyway, they shipped her off to have her baby with some distant relatives in the countryside, and then I guess they put the baby up for adoption. Eventually Cecilia came back to school, but she never wanted to talk about it. So we never did.”
My mother drums her fingers across the linoleum tabletop. I can tell she’d kill for a cigarette. “That was when I knew,” she says. “That I had to come to the mainland for college. That I had to go to college. Somewhere . . . there would be more options.”
“Is that why . . .” I trail off, not sure I have the guts to ask the question that’s been nagging at me. “Is that why you broke ties with Grandma and your family? Why you converted?”
“It’s why I met your father, sure,” she says. “He was a big hippie back then too, so we kept running into each other at all sorts of rallies and things. It was pretty obvious very early on that we had a lot in common. And then when I got to know him and his values, I really related to them. Being Jewish felt . . . it felt right,” she says finally. “In a way that nothing else ever had before.”
“So why couldn’t you be Jewish and still be connected to your family?” Lucy asks.
For my part, I am simply unable to believe that my mother, who is fiercely loyal to my father, Max, and me, would just turn away from her past like that.
“You’re missing the point,” she says, a crooked smile on her lips. “I would have loved to be connected to the family. But it wasn’t an option. I didn’t sever ties with Grandma, sweetie. Grandma severed ties with me.”
And suddenly, everything that I thought I had known about my mother is completely and utterly turned around.
Fourteen
Lucy and I decide to go for coffee—that is, to really go for coffee this time. Mom tries to protest, telling Lucy to go home and take it easy, but Lucy and I both know that we’ve got a free pass for the day, and we’ve both got big, sloppy mountains of pent-up nervous tension to expend.
“Your mom, she’s great,” Lucy understates, stirring an espresso with telltale intensity.
“She is,” I agree, meaning it differently, more fully, than I ever have before.
“I never knew . . . well, I always figured that she was the one who turned away from the family. I assumed that was why my mother said—” She flushes, cuts herself off abruptly.
“Your mother didn’t have such nice things to say about mine.” I shrug, trying to let Lucy off the hook. “I guess she didn’t approve of my mother’s choices.”
It was a vicious cycle, I realize. Mom’s parents cut her off, her family judges her, and in time she stops reaching out to them. How hard it must have been for my mother to come home now, I realize. Especially knowing that she wasn’t going to have a chance to make things right with her own mother.
No wonder she’s trying so hard with Rosa. No wonder she’s going along with the laundry list of “to-dos.”
Maybe—and this is really just a maybe—that’s why she was so cool with Lucy. Why she didn’t judge. Maybe being back here, helping Lucy out, was her way of reconnecting with her past—but drawing on the person she’s become since . . .
Well, since she left.
Maybe.
“Yeah,” Lucy replies, snapping me out of my reverie. “And my mom—you know, she’s so traditional.” She shakes her head, almost in disbelief. “And I think she gives me a hard time.”
It occurs to me that Tía Rosa does give Lucy a hard time. The way that Lucy lives, the household chores, the level of responsibility that is expected of her always seemed excessive to me. It never dawned on me that it might seem excessive to Lucy too.
“I owe you an apology,” Lucy says.
“For what?” I ask.
“For being such a bitch,” she says. I open my mouth to protest, and she laughs and cuts me off. “You know I was. I was, I don’t know. . . . From everything my mother told me, I was expecting you to be t
his spoiled brat from New York.”
“Which I sort of was,” I say, cringing to think of how resentful I was when we first arrived.
“Yeah, but I didn’t make it any easier. It was a weird situation. I could have handled it better.”
“We both could have,” I say, knowing that it’s the truth.
The moment is starting to feel a little too Dr. Phil for my taste, but there’s something more that I need to ask. “Why did you break up with Rafael?”
It’s none of my business, and I can’t believe how uncharacteristically nosy I’m being, but what the hell. I’m really curious, and there’s no guarantee that Lucy will ever be this open with me again. So it’s sort of now or never.
“Oh, you know, the usual stuff,” she says. “We had been together for so long, it was starting to feel like we were one person.”
I frown. Isn’t that the whole point of being with someone? Getting close to them? “I thought that was a good thing.”
“Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s what you want eventually. But this isn’t eventually. I’m barely out of high school. I need to figure myself out before I’m attached at the hip . . . to anyone.”
It occurs to me that perhaps I haven’t given Lucy enough credit.
“He was so pissed,” she continues, more to herself than to me. “And the girls . . . well, everyone thinks I’m making a huge mistake. In Puerto Rico you have your boyfriend and you stay with him and eventually you marry him and you have babies.” She flinches on the word babies.
“Yeah,” I say, as though I get it, even though I so don’t. But I’m trying to. I’m definitely trying to.
“You’ve got a boyfriend back home?”
I nod. “Yeah. Or, well, a something.” I frown. “It’s ending, I think. We’re both going off to different colleges and . . . we’ve been avoiding talking about it. But yeah. It’s ending.” As I say the words out loud, I know that they’re true. “Ugh. I have to call him. I hate having things up in the air.” Which of course is how they’ve been all summer. Shana Rivers can have him, I tell myself. Then I realize I’m slightly bitter, slightly sad, and nostalgic. But definitely ready to make a decisive move.
“You’re a little bit into Ricky,” Lucy says. It’s not a question.
“It’s confusing,” I tell her.
“I know. But he’s my friend. And he’s a good guy. So just . . . don’t hurt him,” she says.
She turns back to her espresso, and I can see that the subject is closed.
Later that night I steal outside to the pool to call Noah. He answers quickly, on the second ring, so quickly that I guess he’s been napping on the sofa in front of some game or another. The blaring television in the background tells me that I guess right. “Hey,” I say, willing my resolve not to crumble.
“What’s going on, babe?” he asks blearily.
“Oh, it was a crazy day,” I say. “Lucy was, um, sick.” It’s easier than getting into a long story, and besides, it’s Lucy’s story anyway.
“So did you have to, like, do all of her chores for her and stuff?” he asks, like he thinks that’s maybe a little bit funny.
“Well, I helped out, sure,” I say. “But not, you know, more than usual.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he mumbles. It’s obvious he’s concentrating on the game. Good. That makes this easier.
“Look, I was thinking I’d love to get together when I come home,” I say. “We haven’t seen each other in so long.”
“Sure, of course,” he says.
“But I mean, we both know that I won’t be coming home for another few weeks. So . . . I don’t know. . . . And with how we’re both going away to college in September . . .” I swallow, hoping he’ll pick up on what I’m not saying.
“Yeah,” he says shortly. “I was thinking that too.”
He was? “You were?”
“Yeah. But, uh, I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Right, well. I mean, I wish it were different; I wish I were home”—as I say the words, I realize that they’re actually not true at all—“but I’m not. So maybe we should just plan on seeing each other . . . when we see each other,” I finish lamely.
He clears his throat. “Is there—I mean, is there someone down there?”
“Like am I seeing someone?” I ask.
I think of Ricky and the almost kiss. It was Ricky who tried to kiss me rather than the other way around, but it’s not as though I hadn’t given the idea any thought.
“No,” I tell him. Then a horrible thought strikes me. “Are you?”
“No,” he assures me.
But maybe he’s not seeing, oh, say, Shana Rivers the same way I didn’t kiss Ricky. But sort of wanted to. I push the image out of my mind. At this point it hardly matters.
“Right, cool,” I say. “Well, uh, I have to get back inside”—not true—“but I’ll call you. . .”
I realize that we’ve just broken up, and suddenly I have no idea how to finish that sentence.
“Yeah,” Noah says. “Um, good-bye.”
“Bye,” I say. I hang up the phone and stare at it, blue LCD screen glowing in my palm. For a moment I’m swept with the urge to call him again, to take it all back, to tell him we should be together forever.
But the moment passes, and I go back inside.
I call Ade and Izzy to tell them what happened—with Noah, I mean, not with Lucy. They’re both sympathetic, but Isabelle definitely seems a little more distant than Ade. It’s typical, but I find that it bothers me less than it typically does. Interesting.
Lucy finds me in the living room, sitting on the couch and staring off into space at nothing. “It’s done,” she guesses.
I nod glumly, sigh. “Stick a fork in it.” I look up at her. “I feel weird about it,” which is about as close to accurate as I can get.
“Tell me about it,” she says. “I told Rafael about the test and he was relieved, but he wants to see me.”
“You don’t want to see him?”
“I’m not ready yet. We’re going to have to see each other sooner or later—I mean, all of our friends hang out together; that’s one of the sucky things about breaking up with someone you’ve been with, like, forever.” She pauses. “But, you know. Not today.”
“I get it,” I say, because I really, really do.
Lucy grins at me suddenly, her eyes lighting up in a way that I didn’t expect. “You know what we need?”
“Chocolate,” I tell her. “Chocolate, cheese, and ice cream.” My standard depression diet.
“Salsa,” she clarifies.
“You mean, like with chips?” I ask, confused.
“No, silly.” She laughs. “Dancing.”
“Oh, no,” I say, shaking my head emphatically. “No, no, no.”
She leans over, grabs my arms, tugs me until I’m finally standing upright. “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.”
Fifteen
We sneak out, of course. Lucy’s got it down to an art form; I feel like Jennifer Garner or some other action heroine. She knows exactly where to step to avoid creaks in the floor, exactly how wide to push open the door, exactly the right angle at which to shimmy through the doorway. And when it comes to backing her car out of the driveway, she’s like a criminal mastermind. I’m somewhat awed.
The club is packed tonight, and for once I’ve got the dress code down. I still wouldn’t be caught dead in white pants—I don’t care how trendy they are; they are not my finest look butt-wise—but I’ve got a bright, tangerine-colored halter on that looks like Lucy lite. Of course, being well costumed doesn’t make me feel any less self-conscious when Lucy drags me out to the center of the dance floor. Pia, Ramona, and Teresa are there, hooting and whooping in the background.
I stumble around at first—it’s been years since tap and ballet lessons, and I don’t really know how helpful those would be now anyway. Lucy laughs and shakes her head in mock despair. She pulls a Patrick Swayze and instructs me to follow her feet. I promptl
y step forward and clock her with my huge, Cro-Magnon forehead. Has my cranium always been so massively misshapen? I’m like the Elephant Man, if he were also rhythmically challenged.
Lucy only laughs harder, and suddenly I realize that I’m laughing too. She twirls me in, out, does a little cha cha cha that’s half camp, half elegance, and total Lucy. To my sheer and utter amazement, I find myself imitating her, though I know I still need practice. Ramona catcalls from the sidelines.
Pia, Ramona, and Teresa step forward, flanking Lucy on either side as she moves backward. They form a small circle and begin weaving in, out, and around each other. Before I can feel left out, though, I’m whirled in the opposite direction, spun, and dipped. I look up.
It’s Ricky.
I stagger slightly, and we go down. He’s left lying on top of me in a heap, and it’s so awkward, so absurd, so totally ridiculous that we both lose it completely, laughing hysterically until I’m wiping tears from the corners of my eyes. I can’t remember ever laughing this hard. It feels good.
No, it feels great.
“Come outside,” he shouts, leaning in to be heard over the music. “I need some fresh air.”
Ricky’s idea of “fresh air” is lighting a cigarette and sucking it down greedily, like it’s a glass of water and he’s just pitched a tent on the sun. “Nice,” I say, gesturing at the cigarette disapprovingly.
“I’m quitting,” he says, grinning. “Besides, how many times have you seen me smoke since you got here?”
“Good point,” I say. “Okay, just this once.”
He puffs away and we stand side by side in comfortable silence. “I can’t even remember the last time I had one,” Ricky comments. He squints as if trying to spot a faraway point on the horizon. He must remember then, because his face falls. “I guess I’ve just been tense . . . lately. . . .”
“Oh,” I say. “Right.” He’s not saying it point-blank, but I understand what he’s getting at. We both pause. “Look, about that night—” I begin, when I absolutely can’t stand the tension.