Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “My parents’ permission?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m eighteen years old. Don’t need their permission. I have an appointment in two weeks at a clinic down in Jeffersonville.”

  “Two weeks? Isn’t that moving a little fast?”

  “Fast? I’ve been pregnant since before Memorial Day. I should’ve done this last mon—”

  “I don’t want you to get an abortion!”

  It takes me awhile to find my way to the words, but I say them. If anything, I think my candor strengthens Laura’s resolve.

  “It’s not your decision to make,” Laura says. “I think maybe you just should go home now.”

  “But I’m heading out for Hoosier Boys State tomorrow morning. We can’t just leave things like this.”

  “My appointment is still fifteen days away, and nothing’s going to change in the next week. I’ll be here when you get back.”

  “Laura, I can’t leave now. I can’t let you do this.”

  She grabs me and kisses me on the lips. She reaches her arms around me and leans into my ear. “I’m not asking you to do anything, so don’t say something you’re going to regret. I’ve dropped a lot on you tonight. It’s taken me a month to deal with this.”

  “A month? You’ve known for a month?”

  “At least that long. I’ve been taking a pregnancy test about every other day since the beginning of June, hoping it’ll come up negative or that I’ve spontaneously miscarried without knowing about it.”

  “A month, Laura?”

  “My point being, I’m sure as hell going to give you more than a half hour to…”

  “To come around?” I wiggle from her grasp, open the car door. “Is that what you want me to do?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “And what if I never come around?”

  “I don’t want to think about that right now.”

  “Well, maybe you should.”

  “Come on, Hank.”

  “This is a huge deal to me.”

  “Are you trying to make this a Catholic thing?”

  “It’s a little more than a thing, Laura. It’s my faith.”

  “I realize that, and I’m trying to be respectful here.”

  “Well, you’re failing miserably.”

  “Okay then, what’s your faith say about premarital sex, condoms, or masturbation?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Really? If they keep track of those things, my guess is you’ve masturbated your way to hell and back by now.”

  “I’m going to go, Laura.”

  “To hell?”

  “Maybe. But for now, just to my house.”

  Laura wipes her eyes. “I think that’s best.”

  I get out of the car. I hold the door open, staring at my feet. I want to add something to this moment. Something poignant. Something insightful. Just something. But all I can think to do is shut the door.

  I step over to the Subie and open the door. I sit in my car, shut the door, and stick the keys in the ignition. The car fires twice before it starts. I sit there for five minutes with the motor running. Laura is still in her car. She’s crying.

  The Subie is a manual transmission, so I pop the clutch, throwing the stick shift in reverse. I forget to press the accelerator. The car lurches backward a few inches, and then the engine dies.

  I hear a car door shut. Laura is out of her car. I open my door. “Laura, I…”

  Her back is to me. She slumps her shoulders and leans her back against the driver’s side door of her Calais, head down.

  I run around the back of the car and embrace her, both of us crying. This is my moment. I can feel it. It’s my time to say my piece, one way or the other. Either take a stand or else just support her.

  “Laura, I knew this girl in eighth grade…” No, I didn’t.

  “She got mixed up with an older guy…” I should stop while I’m ahead.

  “I was there for her. Saw her go through so much. She had an abortion, and it ruined her. Almost ruined me seeing her go through it…”

  A one hundred percent fabrication. All of it. I ramble on for a couple more minutes. My story doesn’t register with Laura. Her eyes are vacant and her tears have stopped. She’s just hanging in my arms.

  Not that it matters.

  I was given my chance to step up. My chance to be a good Catholic or a good man or a good boyfriend—to be a good something. And instead, I plagiarized the plot of The Last American Virgin.

  Jesus might have wanted to be a carpenter, but I got no fucking tools for this.

  Chapter eighteen

  Hoosier Boys State, Hoosier Boys State

  We are one and all for you…

  We will fight for, we will strive for

  All the things we’ve pledged to do…

  Ever loyal, ever faithful

  And we’ll always be true blue…

  All the rules of right we will follow honor bright,

  Hoosier Boys State we’re for you!

  Laura called me at Hoosier Boys State to tell me she was vomiting a lot and couldn’t keep anything down. I told her I was running for governor and was stressed out about the primary election.

  I didn’t even make it out of the primaries. I lost my party’s nomination to a scrawny cross-country runner from Fort Wayne. The guy was a relentless coalition builder. I won our debate, but he had sixty percent of the votes in his pocket before he even opened his mouth. He went on to win the governor’s race. I left the campus of Indiana State thoroughly disenchanted with two-party politics.

  I drive straight to Laura’s house. Her car is the only one in the driveway. The front door is unlocked. I let myself in.

  “Laura!”

  The house is quiet, the lights turned off, the curtains drawn throughout. I step into the hallway off the foyer. The master bedroom is the only room in the hallway with its door shut. I don’t even knock before I open the door.

  “Hey, boyfriend, welcome home.” She’s in her parents’ bed, her head peeking out of the top of multiple sheets and quilts, fists clenched beneath her chin. She looks like Dennis Hopper in Hoosiers when he was trying to dry out in the clinic.

  “Thanks.” I make a cautionary descent to a sitting position beside her, leaning in for a kiss. She turns, offering me her cheek.

  “Still pissed about the election?” Her voice is aspirated, her complexion pale.

  “I’m over it. How you feeling?”

  “Horrible.”

  “Eat anything today?”

  “Not today, not yesterday.” She closes her eyes, wincing. “What is it?”

  “Stomach…out of my way.” Laura pushes me aside and rushes to the bathroom.

  She shuts the door behind her. I can hear her dry-heaving through the door. A flushed toilet. The sound of running water as she washes her hands and then brushes her teeth. The door opens. Laura emerges wet-faced and weary. She doesn’t even try to make eye contact.

  “Laura, at least look at me.”

  “I can’t.”

  She tries to crawl back into bed, but I block her path and grab her by the arms. “Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”

  “Don’t have to. I’m sure I look exactly like how I feel.”

  “You’re well into your first trimester, and you look as if you’ve actually lost twenty-five pounds.”

  This is not an exaggeration. Laura’s eyes are sunken into her face. Her cheeks, once round and close to plump, are little more than skin-hued cheekbones. I can see the skeletal outline of her ribcage through her T-shirt. Her shorts hang from her now-boney hips. Her ankles, knees, and elbows are all swollen and disproportionate to her legs and arms, the fatty tissue they once rested in sucked dry by weeks of near-starvation.

  Laura hazards a
quick glance at me. The disconnect between us is palpable. Laura doesn’t feel like my girlfriend. She feels like that girl. That varsity cheerleader we all felt sorry for last year who couldn’t do cartwheels because of a “bruised abdomen” and spent half a semester hounding three guys for paternity tests. That classmate Mom used to tell me about from her high school days, the one who would disappear from St. Mary’s Academy, existing only in the hushed whispers of her peers and the stern countenances of a cadre of nuns. That hussy left to her own anguish, a scarlet letter pinned to her left breast, wandering without rule or guidance into a moral wilderness…where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude!

  “Hank.” Laura collapses in my arms, crying. “I just want my life back. I want us back.”

  I want us back. That’s all it takes. As my shirt soaks through to the skin with the sobs of a broken girl not yet ready to be a broken woman, my choice becomes that simple.

  I lay Laura down in the bed, pulling the blankets back up around her face. She isn’t that girl. She isn’t an afterschool special or one of those stupid fucking PSAs. She’s not Nancy McKeon, telling me in the middle of my Saturday cartoons, “Hi, I’m Nancy McKeon, and I’ll be right back with One to Grow On.” Laura is my girlfriend. She is real. And I love her.

  “Laura.” I kiss her full on the lips, my thumb and index finger grasping her chin. “I’m driving you to the clinic next week, and I’m paying for it.”

  “W-what? But I—”

  “Shhh…” I put my hand on her lips. “Let me do this one thing for you.”

  “Hank, it’s not that simple.”

  “Let me be the man in the relationship I should have been when you first told me.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “My mind is made up.” I pull the sheets up, tucking her in. “I’ll show myself out. Get some rest, and try to eat something, anything.”

  Laura sits up. She throws her covers off. “For God’s sake, would you stop and listen to me?”

  “But I thought this is what you wanted.”

  She stands up, folds her hands in front of her chin, measuring her words. “Last week…you told me…not to do it.”

  “I was being selfish. You took me by surprise, and I didn’t know what to say.”

  “So you said exactly the opposite of what I wanted to hear?”

  “Well, yeah I guess. I’m sorry. I should—”

  “You should have said something, something before now.”

  “What difference does it make? The point is I came around.”

  “No, that’s not the point.”

  “Laura, please.” I grab her by the arms. “I’m confused here. Just tell me what you need me to do. I have the money.”

  “It’s taken care of.”

  “I want to help. It’s my responsibility.”

  “It’s done.”

  “‘It’s’ done. What’s done?”

  “The abortion,” Laura says. “I went to the clinic two days ago.”

  Chapter nineteen

  Laura’s calendar in her room is covered in black Xs. They’re counting down to today, August twentieth, which she’s circled in bright red permanent marker.

  I walked out on her when she told me about the abortion. I managed to hold out for all of twenty-four hours. Like a moth to a flame, like Kenickie jumping right back on that Ferris wheel with Rizzo as if nothing happened, I drove back to her house the very next day and told her we’d get past this.

  To be sure, “this” isn’t worth much. Our relationship is falling apart. Experiencing the unintended consequences of sex firsthand with a healthy second course of deceit makes for a great chastity belt, and Laura is doing her best to pull that belt in a few more notches. This last month she’s been withholding even token affections—the touch of her hand, a kiss, even something as small as a compliment or a wink. She returns maybe every other phone call, if I’m lucky. Wrestling team conditioning has started up and is taking up a lot of my time, but I still try to make time for dates or even to just hang out. And yet, each and every one of these encounters ends with a door in my face, a turned back, a brush-off.

  She had an abortion. I fucking get it!

  As I look back on these last few weeks, I rationalize that Laura has only herself to blame for my late-night phone calls to Beth.

  On the bright side, Bucknell called three days ago. And Laura got in.

  She leans up against her bursting-at-the-seams Calais. “This time apart will be good for us, Hank.”

  “I agree.”

  Our goodbye kiss is short, choreographed. Laura drives away. I don’t even cry.

  We haven’t officially broken up. But I can’t shake the feeling that somewhere in the trunk of Laura’s silver Oldsmobile Calais with the Fitzpatrick license plate frame, in a box labeled toiletries, tucked in between her disposable contacts and disposable tampons, is our disposable love for one other.

  Chapter twenty

  Prep beat the Ridge tonight in football 35–0, so Hatch and I have decided to get shitfaced. Truth is, we’d be getting shitfaced even if the Ridge had won 35–0—I’m a wrestler and Hatch is a golfer, so it’s not like we really care—but a belligerent drinking binge is always preferable to a melancholy one.

  We get to the party at Claire’s house just past ten o’clock. The beer and the shots are flowing. I don’t see Claire or Beth. Hatch heads straight to the bar.

  “Undefeated against Prep for three years,” I say. “We had never lost to those fuckers before tonight.”

  Hatch pats me on the back. “I know, Fitzy. It fucking sucks, man.”

  Our drink of choice tonight is “triple shots.” Hatch lines them up on the bar: a shot of beer, a shot of whiskey, and a shot of cough syrup, the last of which I’ve hit more than a few times since the Great Black Butt Incident.

  Hatch pours a second round of triple shots, which we down in short order. The music is loud, but not loud enough to mask an unmistakable background sound.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  I turn my head. “You hear that?”

  Hatch cocks one ear higher than the other. “Hear what?”

  Knock, knock, knock.

  “That!” I point to the ceiling and turn my ear to the offending noise. “Somebody’s knocking pretty fucking hard on both the front and back doors.”

  Claire comes running into the room. “Cops!”

  A laid-back affair turned frantic. Teenagers scurry around like carpenter ants just after you stepped on their hill.

  The Empire Ridge Police Department moves us into the family room. Hatch sits in front of the fireplace by himself, sobbing and inconsolable. Off the top of his head, he invents a touching story that incorporates “breaking his dad’s heart” and “Butler University pulling his football scholarship.” Neither of these things are true, given that Hatch’s dad has never cared for him, he’s going to Indiana University with me, and I doubt Butler is clamoring for the services of a golfer with a fourteen handicap and the arm strength of Karen Carpenter.

  The cop motions to Hatch. “Mr. Hatcher, please blow into this.” The cop holds in his hand a breathalyzer, a black remote control-like device tipped with a disposable plastic mouthpiece.

  The cop’s eyes narrow. He grinds his teeth, looking at Hatch. “Again, please.”

  Hatch blows again.

  The cop stands back, eyes still narrowed. “I got a negative here.”

  According to the Empire Ridge Police Department’s breathalyzer, after no less than six shots in the last ten minutes, Elias Hatcher has not consumed a drop of alcohol.

  “Negative?” My best friend screams and hugs one of the cops. He leaves the house without so much as a passing glance or cursory “hang in there” to anybody in the room.

  Beep.

  “Son.” The policewoman pulls the breat
halyzer out of my mouth. “Step over here please.”

  They arrest me and Claire. We’re sitting together in the back of a police car. She appears to be sucking on something.

  “Claire, what the fuck is in your mouth?”

  “Pennies.”

  “You know that doesn’t work, right? I suppose you gargled with hand soap before you left the house, too?”

  Claire blows me a kiss. I catch a perfumed whiff. “Dish soap, actually,” she says.

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “You need to relax, Henry David.” She winks at me, unfazed by all of this, her green, saucer-like eyes accentuated by the strong jawline and thin neck of her mother. Every guy has his one Hottest Girl I Never Tried to Sleep With, and Claire Sullivan has been my undisputed titleholder for the three years I’ve known her. She’s that one girl all your girlfriends hate because she deems it her prerogative to flirt with you in front of them. That one girl who makes you feel small without even trying and makes you love every second of your unworthiness.

  Handcuffs are where it begins and ends for us. No fingerprints. Nothing. We’re escorted into a room where they administer a more accurate breathalyzer test. I blow into a long, clear tube that ends in a square machine resembling an electronic produce scale.

  The police officer looks unconvinced. “Point-zero-two.”

  He might be unconvinced, but I’m downright disappointed. “Point-oh-two? The least I could’ve done is make this arrest worthwhile.”

  I laugh. The cop doesn’t.

  Claire takes her turn, her breath reeking of dish soap and Abraham Lincoln.

  “Point-one-eight,” the cop says. Even he seems impressed, and Claire basks in the notoriety.

  Chapter twenty-one

  My criminal record notwithstanding, lately, Dad has been on a constant emotional high. Hell, he’s downright exultant.

  Notre Dame is fucking winning football games this year.

  All of them.

  It started with the home opener versus Michigan. A diminutive walk-on kicker by the name of Reggie Ho kicked four field goals, including one with a minute seventeen left in the game. Dad and I were seven rows up in the south side of the end zone when Michigan’s Mike Gillette missed a forty-seven yard field goal as time expired. The final score was Notre Dame 19, Michigan 17. Notre Dame beat its next three opponents—Michigan State, Purdue, and Stanford—by a combined score of 112–24, then the Irish went on the road to beat a dangerous Pitt team 30–20.