by Holly Cupala
“She’s had orange juice!” Essence shrieked, but no one was listening. It was a victory, though it felt more like I had slammed a door and locked it behind me.
Delaney dragged me outside with Chloe not far behind. The cool air couldn’t chill me to the bone any more than Delaney’s look. “What the hell happened?” she demanded. Chloe stopped giggling on the spot.
I held up my glass of orange juice, my feeble excuse. Her fists were on her hips, her head swinging back and forth.
“I know you weren’t drinking anything, so what’s going on?”
Chloe stared at me with a mixture of curiosity, admiration, and horror. Both of us were holding our breath, waiting to see what would happen.
If only Kamran were here. If only he had called me instead of Delaney.
I crumbled right there on the porch, which rattled with music and the wild laughter still echoing in the bedroom. Something drastic was in order. Tears sprang from nowhere, and I couldn’t stop them.
Chloe put her arms around me and Delaney followed suit. Here, swallowed up in their friendship, I almost felt safe.
“I need you guys so much right now,” I sobbed. “I’m so scared.”
Delaney and Chloe held me tighter. “Just tell us what’s the matter so we can help,” said Delaney.
Chloe echoed, “We’ll always be here for you.” We sank down on the front steps together, ignoring the cigarette butts and bottle caps.
“I’ve taken two tests now.” It felt exciting to say, because I hadn’t even let myself feel the realness of it until the words tumbled out of my mouth. A bubble of happiness floated up, followed by a rush of tears. “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, God,” Delaney said. “Have you told Kamran yet?”
I shook my head. “And you can’t tell him!”
“What are you going to do?” Chloe asked. She was crying, too. Delaney, though, looked thoughtful. “I can go with you,” she said.
“You mean to the doctor? I haven’t even thought that far ahead.”
“I mean to the clinic. You’re going to get rid of it, aren’t you?”
A million thoughts spun through my head at once. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to scream no. I wanted to follow Delaney’s lead and let her take care of everything. I wanted Kamran back. And a baby. His baby. Because without a baby, I knew where things were headed. But with a baby? There was really only one hope left.
“I don’t know,” I blurted out. “Maybe not. I mean, we’re planning to be together, both of us going to school, and having a life together and everything…I guess maybe we’ll just get married sooner.” I ended lamely. Married. It came out of nowhere. But then, I felt a tiny triumph, seeing the look of shock on Delaney’s face. Maybe they had a past together at Big Boss, but he and I had a future. Chloe gasped and put her hand over her mouth, shivering.
Thunk. A car door slammed on the side of the house, and all three of us jumped. Essence’s car—a clunky yellow hatch-back—rolled past on the gravel road, spitting rocks. Her eyes met mine through the window, and she smiled darkly.
My God. I hoped she hadn’t heard.
Nine
Essence didn’t come to school today, but her legend lived on. She was no longer Essence, but the far nobler creature, Cross Your Heart. Milo spread the gospel far and wide. “Cross Your Heart! It was fan-freakin’-awesome!” I heard people talking who hadn’t even been there.
Which was good, because it meant nobody would be talking about me.
Delaney knew. Chloe knew. And then there was Essence.
She hadn’t even looked in my direction at church. Mom didn’t notice my puffy eyes—or the shapeless, drooping excuse for my Sunday best. She was too busy posting the results of the Christmas montage tryouts and the rehearsal schedule beginning in a few weeks. Dad didn’t seem to notice me at all. He sat at the back of the sanctuary and snuck out early to work on his latest job. I kept my eyes on stained-glass Jesus, hoping he could find it in his heart to forgive me.
I kept calling Kamran, but he must have already gone to Big Boss. The line went straight to voicemail, the same greeting since always: “Kamran. Hey. Speak.” Was Delaney still working there? He’d probably talked to her ten times by now, severely testing her vow of silence.
I didn’t leave a message.
In English class on Monday, Kamran came in at the last minute and was the first to leave. Not once did we make eye contact. When I touched his arm as the bell rang, he jumped back like I’d slapped him. He said nothing, only threw his pack over his shoulder and disappeared around a corner.
Delaney swept me into the bathroom before my last class. She looked sparkling, her hair loose and framing her face. Last time I checked, I looked like I’d swallowed a dead cat. “I just saw Kamran. He seems pretty upset…,” she began.
The dread swirling around me all day settled into a giant lump in my chest. “You told him?”
“Of course not, but Essence…I think she heard us talking…”
I’d seen Essence with a few people from the drama crowd, surrounding her and looking as menacing as if they were the Jets and I was a Shark. I’d never seen her look that mean before. Would Essence have told him?
Delaney pulled lip gloss out of her bag and handed it to me. “I could talk to him for you. We hung out a lot over the summer…”
My face must have given me away, because she stopped and took my hand. “Rand, I just want you to know, whatever happens, I’ll be there.” She looked so sincere when she said it, I suddenly felt an avalanche of guilt for every suspicion I’d ever had.
“Thanks,” I said.
I had choices to make about this pregnancy, every one leading to something final. When to tell Kamran? Abort or keep? I knew I couldn’t tell my parents. If Xanda couldn’t help me, Delaney would be the next best thing.
AP art found us practicing medieval perspective—except for me. I was banned from doing anything remotely resembling labyrinths. “Try portraits,” Mrs. Crooker had said. “It would be a good exercise for you. Loosen you up. Besides, you will need to show your breadth if you want to get into Baird.”
My assignment was to draw the student next to me. After I blocked in the head shape, the features, the hands holding the pencil, I zeroed in on the paper beneath—spiraling through a medieval city, along corridors, down staircases, into my own private path to the spider’s nest. When the teacher dropped by, she rolled her eyes in exasperation. I lingered after class, finishing the ever-shrinking path in my drawing. Maybe I could avoid the inevitable.
I had to tell him myself, before someone else did.
I found Kamran after the final bell rang—not at my locker, but at Delaney’s. The two of them were cozied up like two old friends, laughing; not at all like they were feeling the weight of the future.
When she spotted me, Delaney’s smile shifted from coy to the kind of smile she might give to someone dying—pity, mixed with a tinge of survivor guilt. Kamran’s gaze followed me darkly.
“Hi, sweetie,” Delaney cooed, putting her arm around me. “How are you feeling?”
I muttered, “Like crap.”
“Come with me, I’ve got just the thing,” she said, steering me toward the bathroom. “I got a new—”
“I don’t want to come with you. I need to talk to Kamran.” She looked surprised and a little hurt.
“Oh, okay. Do you—”
“Delaney, don’t,” Kamran snapped suddenly. “This isn’t something you can fix.”
Fix. Oh, God.
He grabbed his pack and stormed past me, leaving Delaney to scurry off with a “You guys have some stuff to work out, I guess. I’ve gotta find Chloe before she has a panic attack.” As if I wasn’t having one right here in front of her.
I followed Kamran out to his motorcycle, where he had already put on his helmet and revved the engine. A piece of tape covered the tear in the seat where I was always scratching my leg last spring. It curled upward, like a Band-Aid that just needed to be ripped off.
I straddled the front wheel. “Kamran,” I shouted over the rumble. Who cared if people were staring. “Kamran, we have to talk!”
He tore the helmet from his head while the engine still growled.
“Yeah, you’ve been doing a lot of talking, it sounds like. Only not to me.” I’d never heard him use this tone before. Usually he was totally unflappable. Now his voice rose to an alarming volume.
People were curious. They gathered, though not close enough to be a target for a hurtling helmet, should he decide to throw it. Students sitting in their cars discreetly rolled their windows down a crack.
“Kamran, I tried to call you. I’ve been trying to reach you all summer, and you didn’t return half my calls.”
“I was busy. I was working. And you call me a thousand times just to ‘hear my voice,’ so it’s hard to know which calls are the important ones.”
A few people snorted. Even teachers were watching now, stopped by their cars.
“I tried to call you yesterday,” I said. “I tried all day, and you never called back.”
“You called to inform me we were getting married? Like you told your friends and God knows who else Saturday night? When, exactly, is that supposed to happen? When I’m at MIT?”
A group of Hacky Sackers stopped Hackying, except for one disinterested dude who kicked the bag up and down with the cadence of a time bomb.
“Oh,” he laughed, so that his jaw tilted up and I could see his neck constricting, “and here’s the best part.”
Oh, God, he already knew. Please don’t say it. Not here in front of everyone.
“No,” he said, “We’re not going to go there. I’m not going to do this anymore. In fact, I was going to tell you this summer if it wasn’t for the last time…forget it.”
“Wait a second.” I was still straddling the front wheel as he backed out. “Wait a second. Is this…Are you breaking up with me?” It was me, the skaters, the basketball players trickling out of the gym, waiting on the edge of a razor to hear his reply.
His eyes flashed sadness—and fear. “You lied to them,” he said, his voice barely rising above the bike. “I can’t believe you lied.” He said the last part almost to himself.
“You didn’t even tell me…it’s like you did it on purpose.” He broke off, for the first time seeming to notice we had an audience. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to get to work.” He shoved his helmet back on his head and revved once more.
“But wait—you didn’t give me a chance—” My words drowned as he sped off, and I was left to stand in the parking space alone. I didn’t even have a chance to tell you myself.
No one else wanted to hear the news, either. As soon as he left, the lurkers dispersed.
“Dude, that was harsh,” one of the Hacky Sackers said before kicking the bag across the circle.
Maybe my mom was right. Maybe I did take something beautiful and turn it into something ugly. Maybe what was supposed to be beautiful in another timeline had somehow turned rancid in this one.
I glanced at the double doors of the school’s main entrance. Delaney stood there, watching.
Ten
When I came home, the house was eerily quiet. Usually I could count on Mom chatting to herself as she wrote, or on the phone with the prayer chain. Silence meant she was probably at the church getting ready for the first rehearsal. Which meant I could grieve my own private grief.
My stomach—ravenously empty about every half hour now—protested too much for me to consider life’s complex and looming problems. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, starvation came before sorrow.
I padded up the stairs to my room with a tuna sandwich, balancing my plate on one hand and my broken heart on the other.
Nothing I knew about Xanda prepared me for this. She left no roadmap for rejection, no secret blog. No notes on dealing with decimation. I had tried to pour Kamran into myself, filling those tunnels of despair left over from Xanda with tendrils of hopefulness, the way being with Andre seemed to fill my sister with a kind of tempered steel. Now that Kamran had forcibly ripped them out, I was reeling from emptiness. Imminent total collapse.
Just before I bit into the sandwich, Mom stormed through my door—white face exploding with pink. I’d seen this face before.
“No tuna!” she shrieked, slapping the sandwich out of my hand and sending it splattering onto the front of my dresser.
Before I could recover, she spun on her heel and fled to her bedroom—an old script for Xanda, but a new one for me.
I could only hear faint, muffled crying on the other side of the door. Maybe my dad had finally had enough. Maybe someone on the prayer chain was dying of a tuna-inflicted coma. The tightness rose in my chest when I considered anything else.
Like the reel of a bad movie, I saw Essence slinking around the corner at the party and tearing off in her yellow hatch-back. First Kamran, then my mom. Oh, God. Let it be anything but that.
“Mom,” I said, my voice quavering. “Mom, are you okay?” For a moment I considered fleeing before I could find out, but the door opened, revealing her towering, trembling figure.
“I got a call from the prayer chain,” she said in an even voice, belying the loose hairs she flicked away with a fist.
The prayer chain. Essence. Whose mom could set the entire chain in motion before the news reached my mom.
“I thought we could trust you,” my mom spat. “I should have known something like this would happen, sooner or later.”
It’s not like I hadn’t heard these words before—they were just never directed at me. “What do you mean?”
“Everyone is praying for us, for our family. For you and your”—she glanced down contemptuously at my nearly flat belly—“your condition.” The words looked like poison in her mouth. “Everyone is talking about it.”
Of course they were. Divine humiliation. I could think of nothing worse.
“Who is the father?” she demanded.
“What do you mean, who is the father? It’s Kamran!” My parents had barely crossed paths with Kamran, but they knew about him. They knew his name, knew I spent time with him, knew he was headed for MIT. “Why would you think it would be anybody else?”
“Well, I didn’t know. If you’re having sex, God knows who you’re having it with.”
She took my silence as confirmation.
“How many people are you having sex with, Miranda?”
I’m not even having sex, I thought miserably.
“I had hoped after everything your sister put us through, you would learn something. That’s why we sent you away for the summer, because we thought…well, apparently, it was stupid for us to think we could keep you from screwing the first boy who looked at you.”
She grabbed her forehead as though it were paining her to even look in my direction. “Right now you’re as dead to me as your sister.”
I don’t even remember the gasp escaping, or running down the hall and out the door.
I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, over the hill and down to Madison Park’s playground and picnic tables, empty in the late September cold and covered with bird crap. The restaurant on the dock showed signs of opening, but I had left my money at home. She never even told me why I couldn’t eat tuna.
My feet found the trail, joining the few joggers who braved the heavy, pre-rain air. Little did they know they were jogging past the worst day of my life.
I made my way around the trail for hours—or at least, it felt like hours—until the chill, darkness, and an insatiable desire for a piece of toast forced me home. Dad might even be there by now, although I knew it was useless to look for salvation from him.
Mom would have already related the gory details. At the Hanson job or the Travertoli job or the City of Seattle job, he would get a call. He would listen, and then say he needed to work a few more hours. There was no way he would take the blame this time. He didn’t even know Kamran.
The house seemed deserted—every light off, except
for a faint glow. Dad’s truck was in the driveway. I guess that was good news. At least they would be talking. My delinquency might be enough to put them on the same floor.
I tiptoed in, hoping to reach my room undetected. Maybe some Easter candy lingered, some marshmallows from camp. A pasta necklace from second grade.
The glow came from the dining room, where I could hear forks clinking against china, glass tapping the cherrywood of the table. A voice—my dad’s—murmured a low cadence.
I had barely seen my dad since I came home from camp, so I’d forgotten the musky smell surrounding him when he’d been on the job. The way the dust settled in his hair, the cracks of his hands, the weave of his shirt.
My mom’s voice interrupted at an urgent pitch. I heard my name.
They weren’t talking. They were praying.
My stomach reminded me of the looming threat of starvation. After a final amen, I made my way to the table where a plate of food had been set for me. Peas, chicken, rice. No toast. I bowed my head quickly for appearances, though my prayer was more of the help me variety.
“It’s nice of you to join us, Mandy,” Mom said. I braced myself for yelling—maybe, if this had been Xanda, there would have been. I glanced at my dad for some kind of support, but he was busy counting his peas.
“Mom—,” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“The only thing to do is to put it up for adoption.” I half expected her to suggest abortion—I’d thought of it myself. But not now that everyone knew. Sometimes it was hard to tell her true religion—the one where God was involved, or the one where everyone looked good.
“Adoption,” I repeated, considering the idea for the first time. But it’s mine. The decision is mine. She wanted everything hidden; my dad wanted nothing more than to avoid conflict. What did I want?
“And starting tomorrow, you’re not going to have anything to do with that boy.” That boy. Like Andre. Though not at all in the ways I’d hoped. “As of tomorrow, the only places you’ll be are school, church, and home.”