The Space Between Us

by Jessica Martinez

  The next one made me laugh. I couldn’t help it. It caught me off guard. It was of just Charly, from the beginning of last summer, and she had a powdered donut hole wedged in her mouth, the sugar all over her face. She was wearing a tank top and frayed jean cutoffs, and stood beside her bike, with her right arm poised like she was about to hurl the donut hole in her hand at the camera.

  The picture was from before the golf course tan and the losers from Baldwin, when we had nothing better to do than putz around and ride bikes to Dunkin’ Donuts. Seconds after the picture was taken she’d decided to start chucking holes off Tremonton’s one and only overpass. I’d pulled the box away from her and sped off before she could get us both arrested.

  I didn’t even recognize that girl.

  The picture changed to a close-up of Will and me before a youth dance at the church. He hated dancing, but he always took me to the dances anyway, just because he knew I loved them. He would only dance the slow ones, and spent most of those whispering stupid jokes in my ear. I loved those stupid jokes.

  I got up and turned off the monitor.

  • • •

  “Are you awake?”

  I blinked. Charly’s voice had reached into my dreams like a hand and yanked me out.

  The moonlight from the window was just enough to see her outline as she made her way across the room.

  “No.”

  She crawled clumsily over me and flopped down between my body and the wall. The bed bounced like a trampoline, springs squealing. I was still too much asleep to be properly confused by her wandering into my room and crawling into bed to talk like she used to.

  “What do you want?” I asked. I sounded more annoyed than I wanted to. This was something, wasn’t it? Her coming to talk.

  “I don’t know.”

  We lay there, just listening to ourselves breathe, staring at the star stickers on the ceiling. They’d been there for seven years. We’d put them up together, before Charly had moved across the hall, but we’d run out of stickers so they were mostly clustered above my bed.

  A minute passed. Maybe two. It felt like twenty.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said finally, “but I need you to guess so I can just say yes or no.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because.”

  “Not an answer.”

  “Because I don’t want to say it out loud.”

  “But how am I supposed to guess it?”

  She paused. I felt her cross her arms beside me. “Something’s wrong with me.”

  “As in you’re sick?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “Pick one.”

  “Not officially.”

  “But you think you have a disease or something?”

  “I wish.”

  “Good to know your inner drama queen is still intact.”

  I looked over at her. Even in the dark I could see she was pale, almost greyish, and her skin looked like it was draped over her cheeks, making shadows beneath them. Gaunt, that was the word. Maybe she was doing drugs. Liam and Asha smoked pot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those idiots from Baldwin did meth. Except Charly hadn’t even seen them in forever. She hadn’t seen anyone.

  It was my job to ask. I knew it. And she’d asked me to, but I didn’t want to say the words, because she just might answer.

  “Charly, are you on drugs?” I closed my eyes tight.

  “No.”

  “Are you lying?”

  “No.”

  Thank you, God. “Then why do you look so pale?”

  “Because I’ve thrown up every day for the last two weeks.”

  Bulimia. The word exploded in my brain like fireworks. I hadn’t seen anything—how had I not seen anything? She didn’t look any skinnier, and she ate crap, but that wasn’t new. Skittles, Little Debbie cupcakes, onion rings—she’d always been proud of her junk food addiction. How’d I miss the purging?

  It didn’t make sense. She’d never been one of those girls who cared, the ones like Savannah, who ordered salad with no dressing and Diet Coke and knew exactly how many calories thirty minutes on the elliptical trainer burned. Charly was just thin.

  I was the worst sister in the entire world.

  Thalia French came to mind. She was PHS’s poster child for eating disorders. Thalia stood down a row and to my left in choir, close enough for me to see her knobby arms, like flamingo legs, and her buggy eyes when she turned to the side. Her jaw looked too big for her face, and the skin hung loose around her mouth.

  I turned back to Charly, who was still staring at the ceiling. She looked nothing like Thalia. Yet. I wanted to yell at her, grab her arms and shake her hard, but I stopped myself. She’d come to me for help, not a freak-out. Besides, an eating disorder wasn’t something I could shake out of her.

  “Why would you do that to yourself?” I asked. “You need to stop it. Now.”

  “It’s not like I can just stop it.”

  “You have to. Sticking your finger down your throat every day is crazy and dangerous. Look at Thalia. She’s like a skin-wrapped skeleton. People die of bulimia, Charly.”

  “What? I’m not sticking my finger down my throat. That’s disgusting.”

  I paused, taking in the change in her tone. She’d gone from tragic to outraged in a second. “I know it’s disgusting. You’re the one who just said you were puking every day.”

  “Because I have morning sickness.”

  The stars above me, the ones that hadn’t moved in seven years, suddenly quivered and slid across my view. I blinked. Back in place.

  “Morning sickness,” she said again, “but not really in the morning.”

  I wanted to reach out and put my hand over her mouth, but it was heavy and numb by my side. My whole body was paralyzed.

  “It’s all day,” she said. “It’s every time I’m not stuffing food down my throat, but the food doesn’t even taste good and I think I want it, but then once I’m eating it I realize it isn’t what I wanted at all, and I just want to puke it up . . . . ” She trailed off weakly.

  I followed the melody of her voice, listening but not listening, twirling around inside her words and keeping my eyes on the stars, holding them in place with my gaze so they wouldn’t slide again. The air-conditioning was turned up too high, and the sweat dripping down my sides into the small of my back had turned cold. Shivering, I pulled the sheet up around my shoulders.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked. I could hear a shimmer of panic in her voice.

  I didn’t want to say anything. As long as I didn’t take her words and assign them meaning, I wouldn’t have to see the cataclysmically stupid thing she’d done.

  “What am I supposed to say?” My voice was hollow. “I don’t even understand what you’re saying.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Morning sickness.

  I wasn’t going to say it for her. She couldn’t just hint and suggest around it, so that I was the one who had to say it and make it real.

  Morning sickness.

  My heart and my stomach dropped down down down through my body and the bed and the floor, leaving me empty. Charly. You idiot.

  “Say it.” My voice sounded flat and hard in my own ears, but I couldn’t infuse life into it. Everything had already drained out of me.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Say it, or I won’t help you.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  I felt nothing. I rolled onto my side and looked at her. She was chewing her bottom lip, staring at the same fake stars. And she was wearing the silver hoops Savannah had bought me for my birthday. Not that she’d asked if she could borrow them.

  That’s when the flood of sadness fell on me, forcing the air out of my lungs, crushing every bone in my body. And that casing of anger I’d built around myself, I could feel the brittle shell crack and six weeks of hating just shatter and fall like broken glass.

  Pregnant. That wasn’t even physically possible. It�
��s not like I was totally naive, despite Dad’s refusal to sign the sex ed waivers every year. I’d been sent to the library to do projects on careers in the arts or money management, but I’d gotten all the info from Savannah later on, and I’d made sure Charly knew.

  But it was impossible for a virgin to be pregnant, and Charly was a virgin. Like me. Like Dad and Grandma and God expected us to be. She didn’t even have a boyfriend, and that wasn’t something she could’ve hidden from me. I would have known. She’d told me every single detail of her relationship with Finn Grier last winter, from first glance and first kiss to final fight. She would’ve told me if she was seeing someone, and even if she hadn’t, I would have seen.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said again.

  “No, you’re not. That’s not funny. You’ve never even had sex.”

  She shuddered, brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, eyes closed.

  “Right?”

  She didn’t answer. She started to cry. I watched her, forcing myself not to close my eyes or plug my ears. I kept watching, even when it got ugly, when the crying became gasps and sobs and gulps, and I was dying to pull her to me and squeeze her until it wasn’t true. Or roll out of bed and run away from her and this feeling.

  I’m pregnant. Those words ended everything.

  “Dean?” I asked.

  “What? No. Of course not.” She wiped her face on the sleeve of her shirt and hiccupped. “He’s nobody. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know about it, and I’m not going to tell him.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head, and wrapped her arms back around her knees. “Trust me, he doesn’t want to know.”

  I looked away so she wouldn’t see the disgust in my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I was just so . . . disappointed. Except that word didn’t hold half of what I felt. She wasn’t who I thought she was. Definitely not who Dad thought she was.

  Anger flickered somewhere inside of me.

  “Since when . . . ,” I started, feeling the flame spread. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me you were having sex, and what . . . I mean, I just can’t believe you’ve been doing this behind my back. Dad is . . . and Grandma . . . ”

  “I know.”

  “You know? No, you don’t! You don’t know anything! If you’d thought for one second about what you were doing, if you’d even once considered what it would do to Dad and to Grandma, then you’d know. And you wouldn’t have done it.”

  She had no response.

  “But you did do it, because the only thing you really know is that you’re the center of the universe.”

  It was true, and I wasn’t going to feel bad about saying it just because she was all curled up and wounded and crying. “You know what you are now? A statistic. Another pregnant sixteen-year-old. You should give MTV a call and see if they’ll take you. Oh, and not just any pregnant sixteen-year-old, but a pastor’s daughter—an abstinence-preaching pastor’s daughter.”

  “I know, but—”

  “The entire world already points their fingers at us and thinks we’re religious freaks, and now you’re fuel for their fire. You’re making us all look pathetic and ignorant.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “I have no clue what goes on inside your head. This’ll kill Dad. I’m assuming you at least get that, right? And Grandma will be too humiliated to leave the house for the next decade. Have you even thought about the gossip? The entire congregation—no, all of Tremonton—is going to be talking about this forever. You can’t just ride this out. The pastor’s daughter isn’t allowed to get knocked up.”

  I paused to breathe. My voice had gotten loud without me noticing and the silence burned my ears. No answer from Charly, but the crying had stopped. I almost wished it hadn’t. I needed to feel her hurting, for what she was doing to all of us.

  “A baby, Charly,” I whispered. “That’s forever. Your life is over.”

  “I know.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Silence. Then finally, “I don’t know. Whatever you tell me to do.”

  Of course. It was on me, because it always is. A thousand scenes flew by, of strawberries and sugar in the black walnut tree, of painting our legs with mud after rain, of tanning on the dock by the lake in matching summer bikinis. They kept on coming, swirling together like a spinning pinwheel until they weren’t separate anymore.

  Chapter 6

  We had to tell Grandma. Unless we weren’t going to tell Grandma. Because as soon as Grandma knew, we’d lose an option. The option we weren’t saying out loud.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Of course I’m sure.” She was chewing her raw lower lip.

  “Stop doing that. It’s going to start bleeding again.”

  She stopped.

  We were standing in the bathroom, pretending to get ready for school. I was already done, and Charly was looking bad regardless.

  “Because that’s the only way that nobody would know,” I added.

  “I know that. But it’s still . . . you know.”

  I nodded. Murder. We weren’t saying that word either. It’d been three days and we weren’t even saying pregnant anymore. Amazing the things we could talk about without saying.

  “Yeah,” I said, wishing I could disagree. I just wished I didn’t. I kept hoping that if I reasoned it through, I would be able to come to a different moral conclusion, that there was a loophole no one had thought to mention. One that made abortion for immature idiots permissible.

  “So why do you keep bringing it up?” she asked.

  “I just want you to think through every possibility.”

  “That’s not what it feels like to me.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, but my tension headache ignored the effort. “Then what does it feel like to you, Charly?”

  “It feels like you just want this all to go away, and that it doesn’t matter that it’s all on me. But it’s, you know . . . my soul, right?”

  “All on you? Of course it is. You’re the one who got herself pregnant.”

  She grimaced at the word.

  “Yeah. I said it.”

  That shut her up for a minute. She stared at herself in the mirror, grumbled and pulled her hair elastic out again. She’d been trying to put her wet hair up in a ponytail for the last five minutes, but kept ending up with bubbles.

  Tears welled in her eyes. This was the third time today, or at least the third time I’d seen. I took a pick from the drawer and fished some detangler out from under the sink. “Kneel,” I said. She obeyed and I started spritzing.

  I took a section of wet curls and tugged through it with the pick. Right and wrong were so much clearer from a distance, or in a sermon, or in somebody else’s life. But this was so muddy, I couldn’t even see Charly in it, and she was right in front of me.

  I used to know exactly what kind of girl got pregnant, and exactly what kind of girl got an abortion, and Charly wasn’t either. Except Charly was pregnant. So either I didn’t know who she was at all, or she was an exception to the rule—accidentally shuffled into the teenage slut category.

  “Dad would never forgive me if he found out.”

  “Probably not.” Not to mention God. “But that’s the point. Dad and Grandma and everyone else wouldn’t have to find out.”

  “Yeah, but I’d go to hell. Right?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “I don’t know. You think you know everything else. And you’re the one who keeps bringing it up.”

  “So now I’m trying to lead you down to hell? Maybe if you’d been a little more concerned about your soul’s destination in the first place we wouldn’t be here.”

  Charly ignored me. I yanked through a knot.

  “Ouch.”

  “Did you even use conditioner?”

  “No. My hair has been so greasy lately, I thought it would help.”

  Greasy hair. Another symptom to add to the nauseating list of complaints. Th
ere was the vomiting, the dizziness, the sore boobs, the crazy dreams, the crying, the exhaustion, the hot flashes, the freaky veins, and they just kept right on coming. I’d been in the know for three days, and already it was getting old. Buying her a diary was number one on my list of things to do, just so she could have somewhere else to park her symptoms.

  “And my skin,” she muttered at the mirror.

  “Your skin looks fine.” Her face was a pimply mess, but I couldn’t handle more tears.

  She took a deep breath and met my eyes in the mirror. “I don’t know how God ranks sins, but I’m pretty sure fornication and murder aren’t equal. I mean, I’m in trouble, but I’m not . . . ”

  She reached up and grabbed the pick in my hand. I had no choice but to let go.

  “Of course not. You know that’s not what I meant.” I didn’t think it was what I meant, that she was beyond forgiveness or redemption or whatever. She couldn’t be damned.

  She put the pick on the counter, accepting defeat. “Do I have time to shower again?”

  “No. Pass me that clip,” I said, pointing to a big tortoiseshell claw on the counter. She did and I wrapped her hair into a lumpy twist.

  She inspected it in the mirror. It looked less bad. “Good enough.”

  “So. Grandma, then?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “You’re telling her for me, right?”

  “Hilarious.”

  She cracked a smile. I saw it and realized—she hadn’t smiled in forever. “I just thought, seeing as she doesn’t already hate you, it might be easier for her to hear it from you. Ya know?”

  “Nice try. The whole easiest-on-Grandma angle is very clever.”

  “I thought so too. But you’ll be there, though, right?”

  I smiled back, but it made my insides hurt. Being angry was easier. “Of course.”

  “Okay. Tonight, then.”

  “Tonight.”

  • • •

  “You’re never going to believe who broke up!” Savannah squealed when she found me by my locker.

  “Wrong.”

  “What?”

  “I believe ninety-nine percent of these idiots will break up.” I glanced around me at the throng of couples, almost-couples, wanting-to-be couples, just-over-being couples. Nobody had staying power. “And the one percent that stay together will wish they hadn’t.”