by Eva Darrows
“Yeah, it is,” I said. He glanced at me, his worry on full display. I managed a small smile for him in spite of it all. Yes, he’d pissed me off, but I was warming up to him again because, in part, I’m a sucker for punishment, but also, can you really blame me? My micro-crush had just admitted to micro-crushing back. Morgan’s explanation certainly painted Leaf in a better light, and in Leaf’s shoes, maybe I’d have done similar.
Slow down, Sara. Slow down.
He’s still new. You need to be smart about this.
I cleared my throat. “I mean, it’s not okay what you did, but I don’t hate you or anything. I’m mad, but that’s mostly because everyone around here is acting like they’ve never seen a pregnant chick before.”
“They haven’t because she dropped out,” Leaf said. “Got her GED instead. She didn’t want to deal with the garbage. She was one of three brownish girls in her senior class, and people were crappy to her already, never mind with a baby coming, so she went to night school instead. I hope you have a better time of it than she did.”
“I hope so, too.” While his sister’s path wasn’t one I particularly wanted for myself, acknowledging it existed if things went topsy-turvy—or topsier and turvier, if that was possible—was a comfort. Well, it would be if everything turned out okay for her, anyway. “How’s she doing? Your sister?”
Leaf smiled, the strain on his face evaporating as he talked about his family. “Miri’s great. She lives with her husband, Eric, and my niece, Elana, at a military base in Florida. Just got stationed there. We’ll see them again during the holiday, or we’ll go see them if he can’t get time off. I’m not sure how that works with the army but I’m excited. I miss her.”
“That’s cool.”
Leaf nodded and reached into his bag for his phone, promptly producing a zillion photographs of a toddler with black hair and dark brown eyes. I could see a little bit of Leaf in her nose and chin.
“She looks like you. Right here, the jaw shape in particular.” I tapped the screen of his phone.
“The poor kid.”
I snorted. “Hardly! You’re cute as hell! She’s a lucky kid.”
The words spilled out before I could think better of them. Heat flooded my cheeks, my eyes darting up to his face. He was peering at me, his head cocked to the side. “You think so?”
“Well, yeah. Different circumstances, sure.” The silence between us was heavy, like sediment, and I squirmed in my chair, devolving from teenaged girl to a worm on hot pavement in two seconds. “I know you can’t really date a pregnant girl, though.”
“Oh? Well, not if she doesn’t want me to, no.” He reached for his phone, and I slid it into his big palm, my fingers grazing his.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought, after we talked the other night, you were all set with me that way. I suspected you liked me, but you got different after I told you about the kid.”
“I was worried about what my father would think more than anything,” he admitted. “I think I told you that some Rom have strict beliefs? My grandmother was a traditionalist, and I was afraid—well. It doesn’t matter what I was afraid of because my father was good about it. He said you’re like Miri, if she hadn’t been lucky enough to find a good boy. He told me to consider that it’s extra responsibility to support someone in your situation, but I’m okay with that if you are.”
It sounded almost too easy. Wasn’t it supposed to bother him more? Or bother me that people would judge him because of me?
“Would you like to go out with me on Friday?” he asked, gentle and quiet and unassuming, which was not a side of Leaf I’d seen before. He was big and brash and loud, but this was none of those things. “If not, I completely understand, and I’d be glad to be your friend, either way. I really don’t want you to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” I said.
Anymore.
Earlier, I kinda wanted to light you on fire, sure, but who’s counting?
He eyed me from under a fringe of thick inky lashes. “There’s a movie playing everyone’s talking about. A comedy. Really funny, I guess? I’d cook for you before, maybe?”
That sounded way more awesome than it should have. Where was all that irritation? Where was my righteous indignation?
Did Aaron teach me nothing?
“I’d love to,” I said.
Nope, nothing.
“Good. Great. I... Thanks, Sara.” Leaf stood from his seat, smiling and reaching for his backpack. “I won’t let you down. I gotta go now, though, if I want to catch something to eat before the bell.” He motioned over his shoulder at Mr. Chekowitz. I hadn’t noticed until then that he was eyeballing us, probably to inform me that his leniency regarding my lunch didn’t extend to my friends, too, without explicit permission.
That’s just how adults do.
“Okay, thanks. I’ll see you later,” I said.
In class.
And then on our date.
Holy crapsicles.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“He probably thinks you’re easy,” Mormor said.
“Mom! Will you just...talk less. Okay? Talk less.”
Both my mother and grandmother glowered at one another over a pile of potatoes. I, meanwhile, shoveled food into my maw. Sure, what Mormor said was screwed up, but when you expected very little of people, they rarely disappointed you.
It was how I survived living with Mormor most days.
“What? She is pregnant! There is only one way for that to happen.” Mormor snorted and poured gravy over everything on her plate. “I love Sara, but we cannot avoid the truth that she had intercourse to get here. Now, this boy is probably thinking he can have plenty of it with her without consequence.”
Is that what I did in that truck? Have “intercourse”? ’Cause it felt a lot like fu—
“Or maybe he’s a decent kid and that didn’t occur to him at all.” Mom grabbed a roll from the basket for herself before lobbing one my way. It bounced off my head and onto my plate, splashing gravy across my shirt and making me look like a Jackson Pollock painting. My care cup was empty. I bit into the roll and eyed my grandmother while I chewed, slow and deliberate, not unlike a cow with its cud.
“She can still get the AIDS,” Mormor announced, swinging her watery blue gaze my way. “You will need to practice safe sex regardless.”
“Great dinner conversation. Really engaging. So glad I brought up that I have a date,” I said. “I love it when we talk about The AIDS over meat loaf.”
Mormor snuffled. “You have a baby to think about now is all I am saying.”
Mom looked like she wanted to crawl under the table and die. Instead, she grabbed my hand and squeezed my fingers. “This is her way of worrying about you, I promise. On the bright side, aren’t you glad your mom is a functional adult most of the time? The weirdest thing I ever did was have an abbreviated Juggalo phase and name you Serendipity.”
“Are those the murder clowns?” Mormor demanded. “I hated them. That was terrible. You looked like a demon slut.”
Anything I could say—about Leaf, murder clowns or The AIDS—would turn into an argument I didn’t want to have. I kept to my food and minded my business. My mother hadn’t told me I couldn’t go out with Leaf, so I was keeping my plans. If in some weirdo parallel universe he really was just going out with me because pregnancy equated to easy in his mind, he was going to be really, really disappointed.
Jack was the exception, not the rule. It took Aaron a year to go spelunking in my undies.
The conversation shifted from me to Mormor’s bridge quartet, Mormor complaining about her friend Florence’s insistence on cutting the crusts off her finger sandwiches. I took that as a cue that I was clear to take off and, finishing my dinner, I loaded the dishwasher before excusing myself to study. I pulled out my review packets for an exam I had the next day, b
ut I also pulled out my phone and immediately messaged Devi.
Wifey. Guess what.
What, she sent back.
Date with Leaf Friday.
NOWAY. She followed that up with, What time I’ll do your face. lol do your face get it.
I snickered.
pervy ace friend is pervy. no idea on time yet.
gray ace perv thx. see you after school Fri. :) :)
I put the phone aside and concentrated on my homework. There wasn’t much to review that I didn’t already know, so I finished before eight. I slid out of my school clothes and into some light cotton pajamas. Sprawled out in my bed, I played phone games, overcame a preggo hormonal surge by wanking myself stupid and then passed out. The early nights were becoming habitual, as were the mornings where I woke covered in sweat, my discarded pants lying in a heap on the floor beside my bed. Hormones had turned me into a furnace.
A shower to rinse my gross body, and it was back to the grindstone: dressed, breakfast, heart palpitations as I approached the school doors and trudging down the hall with my head high, eyes not meeting anyone else’s.
I was almost to my first class when I heard the voice.
“Hey, Mamacita! How you doing today?”
I turned toward the kid, blinking slowly, my hand gripping the nylon strap of my backpack so hard I thought I’d tear it off the main satchel. I didn’t even know his name. He was tall and handsome and wearing a Patriots’ Brady jersey, which immediately added to his pecker-head quotient. I was fine-ish with other players, but Brady was an insta-eyeroll.
“What’d you say?”
He glanced at two of his friends, grinned and shrugged. “Just saying hey.”
“No, you said mamacita. Why?”
He blinked at me. “It was a joke.”
“Oh? It’s funny? HAHA, sure, okay. Super funny. Are you Spanish? Latino?” I closed in on him, until I was less than a foot away, my head tilted back so I could look him right in the eye. His eyes were pinched at the corners, mouth flat, smile evaporating.
“Me? No. I’m Irish.” Again, he looked away from me, color rising in his cheeks. “It was just a joke.”
“Pointing out I’m pregnant and Hispanic is a joke? Wow. You’re a comedian. Super funny. Like, I nearly peed my pants.” I turned on my heel and stomped away, shaking my head. “I’m going to be laughing all the way to first period, whatever-your-name-is. You are one funny guy!”
He was braver now that I’d put distance between us, and called out, “You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”
Which was promptly answered by Mr. Hayes, one of the chemistry teachers, shouting out “MICHAELS, GET IN HERE, NOW!” from the doorway of his classroom.
Bagged, asshole. Enjoy your detention.
There was some satisfaction there, but not enough to overcome the sheer WTF-ery going on in my brain about the situation. I got through my classes like a zombie, not seeing or hearing, not really keeping with the program beyond shuffling along and groaning every once in a while. When lunchtime came, I debated where I should go to eat—to the library for some peace, or to the cafeteria to sit with my no-longer-so-estranged friends.
As much as I’d have liked to stare at Leaf awhile, appreciating that he had not two dimples but only one on the left side, the library won out, particularly after Mamacita. I settled in with a book and my packed lunch, inhaling my tuna fish with not a small amount of indelicacy. I would regret this choice mere minutes later when none other than my Friday date himself presented himself on my proverbial doorstep.
I smelled like a haddock.
Awesome.
“Hey,” I said, eyes sweeping over his jeans, new sneakers, T-shirt and a plaid shirt he’d left unbuttoned.
“Hello there, Serendipity.” He had such a nice voice, rich and deep, and he played my name like an instrument. It made me wriggle all over like an excited puppy.
...most things did. The hormones were intense.
“Hey.” I glanced over at Mr. Chekowitz. His gray head was dipped forward as he filed books on a cart. “Not sure I’m supposed to have company? They made an exception to the rule to let me eat here.”
“Don’t worry.” Leaf winked at me before sauntering over to talk to the librarian. I couldn’t hear their exchange, but Leaf smiled a lot, motioned at me, and Mr. Chekowitz nodded his grizzled head. The charming boy had charmed someone else. Not surprising, and I pushed aside my book bag at the table so Leaf could sit beside me.
“We have to be quiet. I promised,” Leaf said in a conspirator’s whisper before plopping down into his seat and unloading about forty tons of home-cooked food.
“Whoa, what is this?” I poked at the red top of the plastic.
“Deliciousness.” He doled out portions, halving everything. I eyed my brown-sack lunch, half of it gone already.
“...I kinda ate.”
“You’re not hungry?”
“No, I am. I always am lately. The kid likes their food. I just feel bad.”
“Don’t. Eat or I’ll be insult—mmm. I should explain.” Leaf produced a pair of plastic forks and motioned at me to dig in. “I told you many Rom have food rules, right?”
“Mmm-hmm.” I could have argued more with him about whether or not I should let him throw food into my facial garbage disposal. Or I could enjoy the bounty before me.
Bounty it was.
Leaf continued. “I don’t like to use the word superstitions, but we have certain cultural beliefs. Things are pure or impure—impurity is bad. The word my family uses is mochadi. It means dirty, essentially. We strive to not be mochadi.” He paused. “Mochadi is much more than just a physical thing. It’s spiritual, too, and the rules about how to avoid it change depending on which Romani person you talk to. Even the word changes, because we were run out of most places we tried to settle.
“When we finally got somewhere we could stay, we assimilated. Our traditions are melting pots of our culture and local customs. Where we live, our religion, how many other Romani people are in our communities will determine how we judge things as mochadi. My grandmother was more strict upholding those cleanliness standards than my father. My father is stricter than me. Me and Dad are Americanized, but my grandmother was a refugee from the Holocaust during World War Two. Many Romani people were killed by the Nazis. She was very—the rules were like granite for her. I think in a way they anchored her when she fled to the United States with her family. They were few Rom in a sea of gadze. What they knew were themselves and their traditions.”
I’d stopped eating, not because I was full—I wasn’t sure I’d ever be full again with a human growing inside of me—but because I was interested. “That’s really cool.”
“It is and it’s not? It’s just like anything else, really.” He frowned. “My father brought us to this town because it was near the hospital where my mother was being treated when she got sick. There aren’t any other Rom here, which means many people don’t have our standards for cleanliness. And our traditions—you can catch mochadi almost like a cold. That’s why we wash our hands a lot. There are strict rules about food preparation and dishes. There are even strict rules about leftovers. But like I said before, it’s not all about the physical stuff, either. It’s about spiritual stuff, too. My grandmother wouldn’t talk during meals at all because she believed ill thoughts and bad luck would creep in through her open mouth while she ate. That could lead to uncleanliness. And etiquette—to breach our etiquette rules—could make you mochadi.”
He tapped his fingers on the lid of his Tupperware. “This is a long way of saying one of our customs is to feed our loved ones. If I give you food, it’s because I am showing my appreciation of you. To not accept is a slight—if you were Rom and rejecting my food, you could be suggesting I’m mochadi. While I know you, Sara, aren’t accusing me of being mochadi by refusing, I always wince. It�
�s how I was brought up. I mean no offense.”
“No, I totally get it. Well, I mean, not totally because that was an abbreviated version but I can see why you’d flinch.” I paused. “Do you want me to go wash my hands? I did a little while ago, before lunch. I don’t want you to get mochadi cooties from me.”
“No! No, oh. Oh, Sara. I don’t mean to say—” He frowned and shook his head, reaching for my hand. He looked at it, then up at me. “Look at this hand. It’s wonderful. Exactly as God intended it to be. I don’t think you’re impure, or that you can make me impure. Truly, I don’t. I just wanted to give context. I know I act different sometimes, but you are perfect as you are.” As if to prove his point, he lifted my hand and proceeded to press his soft, dry lips to the pad of my pointer finger. And then my middle finger. And then my pinky. His eyes fixed on mine, and for a moment, my heart stopped. He had a beautiful mouth, truly, with the delicate arch in his upper lip, and that flurry of kisses—to show how mochadi he thought I wasn’t—pretty much destroyed me.
Aaaaand maybe destroyed that resolve I had about not screwing around again.
I’m a slut, maybe.
Totally okay with it.
“Yeah,” I said, because a poet I am not. “Yeah, totally. I get it.”
He let go of my hand, albeit reluctantly, before going back to his meal.
“Good. I am glad.”
So was I.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Devi texted me Thursday night just before nine, when I was deep in my evening PJ sprawl. There was a half-eaten jar of Nutella beside me and no knife. That’s right, I finger-swipe ate half a jar of Nutella and there were no regrets.