“So this is strictly a business relationship.” Sarah sighed. “At least you’re being honest.”
I shook my head. “I don’t mean to be rude. I just don’t usually hang out with girls like you. No offense, but we don’t have enough in common to be friends.”
“Other than eating ice cream in December?”
I smiled. “Yeah, other than that.”
Sarah finished her ice cream and stuffed her hands into her oversized coat. For someone that was so fashion savvy, I didn’t know why she was wearing a coat that was obviously too big for her.
“You feeling any better?” I asked. “You don’t need to throw up again, do you?”
She gave off a forced, spotty laugh. “I’m okay,” she said, looking away from me. “I’ll be glad when I get over this virus.”
“How long have you been sick?”
She fidgeted in her seat. “I don’t know. Maybe a few weeks.”
“A few weeks? What type of stomach virus lasts that long?”
Sarah didn’t reply. The color in her face had disappeared—I was afraid she was going to vomit again. She had the worst virus I had ever seen. For as much as she was throwing up, it was almost like she was—
My mouth dropped open, and suddenly, I knew. Unfortunately for Sarah, everything now made sense.
I toyed with the buttons on my coat, trying to decide if I was going to say anything or not. I slowly exhaled, watching the white fog escape from my lips and disappear into the night.
“How far along are you?” I finally asked.
Sarah whipped her head around and looked at me like a deer in headlights. “What … what are you talking about?”
I inched closer to her. “The bulky clothes and the vomiting gave you away.”
Sarah’s entire body drooped. “Seven weeks,” she said under her breath. It was the first time I had ever heard her speak quietly.
“Does anyone else know?”
She shook her head. “I don’t even know why I wear the bulky clothes. I haven’t gained a pound in the past two months, but every time I look in the mirror, I feel like my stomach is getting bigger.”
I flashed back to the earlier scene of Sarah throwing up. “How bad is your morning sickness?” I asked.
“Pretty bad,” she said. “Mine just doesn’t come in the morning, though. It seems like I’m always throwing up.”
I closed my eyes and went through a mental checklist. “Have you tried crackers? Or maybe mints?”
“Doesn’t work.”
“Then try ginger. You can take it as a tea or as tablets.”
She nodded. “That’s exactly what I read on the Internet.” She struggled to get up from her sitting position on the bench before frowning at me. “Hey, wait a minute. How do you know that?”
As I looked at Sarah, a million explanations (okay, lies) popped into my head. I mean, she was just my student, I was just her tutor, right? I wasn’t obligated to share my life history with her.
But as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t lie to her. I knew how miserable she felt. I had felt the same way.
I coughed a few times to try to clear my throat. I had to force myself to open my mouth. Secrets like mine didn’t offer themselves up without a fight.
“My doctor suggested the same thing a few years ago,” I said.
I stared at Sarah, as her gaze transformed from a look of questioning to a look of shock to a final look of understanding.
“Maybe we have more than a love for ice cream in common after all,” I said.
Sarah nodded. “Maybe so.”
I rose from the bench, and Sarah and I headed back to the center. We didn’t speak a single word on the walk back. There wasn’t much to talk about. By the time we got to the community center, the tutoring session was over. We ran inside to get our books.
“Are you coming back?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“You know, Mrs. Hawthorne is a pretty fair teacher. You may be able to convince her to give you a re-test.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
I yanked a sheet of paper out of my notebook and scribbled my number on it. “If you end up studying this weekend, feel free to give me a call.”
Sarah folded the notebook paper into crisp, neat lines and tucked it into her purse. “If I have some questions on … other stuff, can I give you a call?”
“Any time.”
Sarah gave me a quick smile before turning and waltzing out the door. I sighed and followed her out. Whether she realized it or not, Sarah Gamble was just beginning her own “Year of Hell.” I only hoped it would go better for her than it did for me.
My own “Year of Hell” didn’t start off terribly badly. I was a freshman at Piedmont Academy, one of the premiere private high schools in Columbia. I hated the stuck-up atmosphere of the school, but Piedmont’s math and science departments were the best in the city. If I wanted to go to a top-notch engineering school, this was the only place to be.
On the first day of class, I met Christopher McCullough, a half-white, half-black preacher’s son with a ferocious dunk. Within a month, I was his algebra tutor. By Thanksgiving, I was his girlfriend. He was perfect, and for the first time since Mom died, I felt important. Special. Loved.
I made my first mistake when I had sex with him. I wished I could say it was romantic or spectacular or even enjoyable. But all I remembered was that it was in the back of his mother’s Saab, it hurt like hell, and it lasted all of forty-five seconds.
The second mistake I made was that I kept on sleeping with him. It got so extreme, we would sneak off during lunch for quickies (and let me stress the quick portion of the word). I really hated sleeping with him, but I thought I loved him. His affection more than made up for the few minutes of sexual discomfort.
But then, it all ended. Christopher showed up one day and dumped me. He didn’t even wait until after school—he did it during lunch. He said some crap about needing space, but apparently he didn’t need that much space, being that he had a new girlfriend by the following week.
After Christopher dumped me, things were never the same between me and my other so-called friends. They would do things like plan events and mysteriously forget to invite me. Truthfully, I wasn’t surprised when I showed up for lunch one day and found someone had taken my usual seat.
So there I was, lonely and depressed. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t have any other friends. And when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it happened: I missed my period.
By this time, Christopher had transformed from my knight in shining armor into the shallow, uncaring, spineless loser that he really was. He had the audacity to claim it wasn’t his. He didn’t even have the decency to face Dad when I told him.
Dad was the one that signed the consent forms at the women’s clinic. He waited with me in the lobby with all the other young, scared, confused girls. He waved good-bye to me as the nurse ushered me into the cold room for the procedure. He was the one that helped me to the car when it was over, and fed me soup when I could finally eat again. He was there when I magically transformed from his baby girl into his great disappointment.
After the procedure, I rededicated myself to my studies. I found comfort in the exactness of math and the precision of science. And like Euclid, the father of geometry, did in the Elements, I even created a set of rules that would govern the remaining three years of life in high school.
From these postulates, I created the twenty-one theorems that now shaped my life. My theorems ranged from the flippant (Theorem 18 proved that cake and ice cream should be part of my daily required food intake), to the serious (Theorem 4 proved that I could achieve extreme happiness by earning a scholarship to Georgia Tech).
My rules may have seemed a little extreme to most people, but I
didn’t care. I’d take my Elements over the Year of Hell any day.
“How are things going with the Gamble girl?” Dad asked as we sat at the table. Tonight was spaghetti night, and Dad was already on his second helping.
I shook some Parmesan cheese over my food. Oh, pretty bad. She’s seven weeks pregnant and too scared to tell anyone. But other than that, she’s great. “It’s okay,” I said. “She’s a nice girl.”
“I think I remember seeing her at one of the football games. She’s very pretty, although it looked like she wore too much makeup for someone her age.” He spun his fork between his fingers, collecting a large amount of noodles on the end. “You know, your mother never wore makeup. She didn’t need it.”
Dad was right, Mom was beautiful. No, better yet, she was perfect. She was the type of mother that baked cookies and sewed Halloween costumes. She had eyes that could illuminate the scariest of dark bedrooms. She had a smile that made you feel all warm and toasty on the inside.
“Do you have any plans this weekend?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Maybe we can still get tickets to the USC game.” I pushed a meatball around with my fork. “It’s been a really long time since we’ve gone to a game together.”
When I was growing up, we always went to the college games. We’d even go to a few professional games in Charlotte. But all of that stopped after my freshman year. It was like there was some unspoken punishment I had been on ever since then. Now the closest we got to attending sporting events together was watching highlights on the evening news.
Dad was too busy stuffing food down this throat to look up. “Sorry, honey. Jackie and I are going out this weekend.”
I rolled my eyes. “The Teeny Bopper.”
Jackie, Dad’s new girlfriend, was about as sophisticated and graceful as a bucket of spit. I didn’t know what Dad saw in her—she didn’t even compare to Mom.
“Don’t you think you’re robbing the cradle? You’re old enough to be her father.”
“Maybe if I had started having children when I was twelve.” As he took a pause from his meal, the creases around his eyes deepened. “It’s been almost seven years,” he said, his voice low and quiet. “I had to start dating eventually.”
I shrugged. “You’re the one who still keeps Mom’s picture on your nightstand, not me.”
As soon as I said the words, I regretted them. Dad dropped his gaze to his plate and slowly chewed his food. I could see his jaw muscles tighten with every bite he took.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m glad you keep Mom’s picture up.”
He just nodded and continued to eat. I knew I should have done a better job of apologizing, but truthfully, I hated the idea of Dad dating Jackie. She wasn’t Mom. She had no right coming in here and trying to be Mom. Dad and I had made it this long on our own. We didn’t need anyone swooping in now.
Thankfully, the phone rang, making us both jump. Usually, we had a rule that no one answered the phone until we finished dinner. But with the way both of us were feeling, I thought we needed a little break.
I leapt from the table and answered the phone on the second ring.
“This is Sarah Gamble. May I speak with Rhonda?”
Sarah’s voice was confident and perky, the total opposite of what it sounded like earlier that evening. She sounded more like a cheerleader than a mother-to-be.
“Hold on for a second, okay?” I held my hand over the receiver and looked at Dad. “I’m gonna take this, okay?”
He nodded, and I ran off to my room with the cordless phone. I cranked up the radio and plopped down on the bed. “Hey, you sound much better,” I said. “You were really stressed out earlier today.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t anything that a quick pedicure couldn’t fix.”
I looked down at my midsection. Maybe I should follow her lead and get pedicures instead of eating when I was depressed.
“Well, the cheerleading coach called tonight. Sure enough, I got kicked off the squad.”
“Is that why you were getting tutored? So you could continue cheerleading?”
Sarah chuckled. “I couldn’t care less about being a cheerleader. I didn’t like standing out there at those football games and freezing my ass off, anyway. But Mom was a cheerleader, so I was destined to be a cheerleader as well. She said it builds character. The only thing it did for me was give me sore feet and a hoarse voice.”
“Does this mean you’re finished with tutoring?” I asked.
“No, but I am finished with going to the community center. Mom finally caved and decided to let me hire a tutor. I need more one-on-one help, and I just can’t get it there.”
I hated to agree, but Sarah was right. Bryce had rearranged my schedule so I could tutor Sarah, but realistically those thirty minutes every other day weren’t enough. She was smart, but she had way too much material to make up in order to pass.
“Well, I know a few good private tutors.” I grabbed my address book from my desk. “There are a few girls at USC that—”
“I don’t want another tutor,” she said. “I was hoping you could be my private tutor. You know, maybe you could come over to my place for a few hours a week and give me some extra help. I’d pay you, of course.”
I stopped paging through my address book. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
Um, let’s see. My father thinks that if I spend too much time with you, I’ll end up on all fours in an empty classroom with the next guy that approaches me. I am totally speechless when I’m around your brother. And I don’t know if I can handle being this close to you, especially after learning about the “situation” growing inside your stomach. I’ve been down that road before, and I have no interest in going on the trip again, even if only as a backseat driver.
I grabbed a blanket and threw it over my toes. “I don’t want to take time away from my studies.”
“Come on,” Sarah said. “You’re a genius. You probably don’t even need to study.”
I shook my head. “I wish I could, but—”
“Listen, I’m sure you know who my mother is. She could be a big help when you start applying to colleges. Where are you thinking about going to school?”
The words were out of my mouth before I realized it. “Georgia Tech.”
“That’s perfect,” she yelled, as if she were still a cheerleader. “My mother went to Tech.”
I took a deep breath. “I know,” I said. “I was kinda hoping she’d write me a recommendation …”
“You help me get my grades up, and the old hag will probably not only write you a recommendation, she’ll hand-deliver you to the president of the college.” There was a slight pause, and her voice reverted back to that of the scared girl at the bus stop. “I really need someone to talk to about my … predicament. You’re the only friend I have that I can talk to about it.”
I almost dropped the phone. Did she call me her friend? This week was the first time I had ever really spoken to the girl, and we were already best buddies?
Man, she must have really been hard up for someone to talk to.
By the time we got off the phone, Sarah had hired herself a private tutor. The way it was looking, she may have gotten a friend in the process, whether I wanted to be that friend or not
I felt anxious as I stood at Sarah’s doorstep, waiting for our first private tutoring session. I rang the doorbell, and then knocked twice on the sturdy wooden door for good measure. The house was an island in an ocean of green grass—it was almost a half-mile from the gated entrance to the front door. Stoic oak trees lined the perimeter of the grounds, guarding the house against unwelcome, prying eyes. The grounds themselves were immaculate—not one stray leaf from the oak trees littered the yard. Closer to the house sat perfectly squ
are ficus hedges. The lawn was flawless, save for the few renegade wildflowers creeping up around the base of one of the shrubs. Apparently, even people like the Gambles had weed problems.
I turned my attention back to the door once I heard it open. I expected Sarah, or her mother, or even a maid to answer the door. Instead, I was greeted by one hundred and fifty pounds of cuteness.
“Hey, Rhonda,” David said. “Come on in.”
I could feel the heat rising to my face as I entered the house. God, what was wrong with me? Remember Postulate 1—Boys are not to be trusted.
David’s eyes were hazel like Sarah’s, but not quite as inviting. “Sarah’s on the phone, but she should be off in a second.”
I nodded quickly and flashed him a weak smile. Although his expression stayed the same, it seemed like his eyes relaxed, if just a little.
I followed David into the living room. The furniture could have been wrapped in cellophane, it seemed so new. A huge portrait of the Gamble family hung over the fireplace. The portrait was probably a few years old, but the children looked the same. Sarah was smiling and David was brooding.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” David said as he headed down the hallway. “I’ll get Sarah.”
I was almost afraid to sit down. The furniture looked extremely soft and comfortable. The last thing I wanted to do was leave a huge, permanent butt print in their designer sofa.
A few minutes later, Sarah burst into the room (unfortunately, David was nowhere to be seen). Sarah actually came up and hugged me. I was too stunned to hug her back.
“I’m glad you came,” she said. “Let’s get started.”
I followed Sarah to the kitchen. Her books were strewn across the table, along with two platters of cookies.
“Our cook outdoes herself sometimes. Help yourself.”
For the first time in my life, I was too nervous to eat. I pushed one of the platters away from the edge of the table and pulled out my calculator and notebook. “Did you talk to Mrs. Hawthorne about your grades?”
“Yeah, she said I could take another exam in a couple of weeks. If I show significant progress, she’ll pass me.”
My Life as a Rhombus Page 3