by Holly Cupala
Hard to explain, but when I visited the board, all the stuff that sucked in my life seemed to go away. Kamran and I were happy together, Delaney was a loyal friend, I was following my dreams, and we were excited about the baby on the way.
When I posted, I introduced myself, my new life, and my most pressing pregnancy complaints: namely, weird cravings and the dreaded fat stage. Nik, “FemmeNikita,” said, “Don’t worry, honey, relief is only a few weeks away. You’ll be doing the happy dance before you know it.” I didn’t see myself dancing any time soon. Besides, dancing made me think of Kamran and Delaney. I wished I could tell the other mommies about it, or at least Nik. For some reason I thought she would understand.
The tech was out and the lab closed, so I headed for the library to catch up with my new circle of friends. Nik was telling everyone about feeling the first kick, since none of the rest of us had experienced it.
Reading about Nik’s baby made it even more obvious: I needed to tell the other moms the truth. I opened a new window and began to type the whole story—Xanda, Kamran, Delaney. I was just about to send it when I heard a familiar giggle around the corner.
“That was a pretty harsh way for you to dump her,” said the voice. Delaney. “I feel kind of sorry for her.”
“I wasn’t trying to be harsh.” Kamran. I should have known he would be here, in between studying for the latest practice test, AP exams, and interviews. But I hadn’t expected Delaney.
“You should have heard her, though, talking about you guys planning to get married right after school. I mean, for all you know, it’s not even your baby. Did you actually do it with her?”
Kamran was silent.
“Oh, no, you didn’t. Last summer? At my cabin?”
More silence. I could imagine him nodding gravely, maybe even with his head in his hands.
“But there were other guys, right? I mean, was she just trying to trap you? I would, if I had that family. Have you ever met them?”
Kamran spoke. “She’s gotta deal with her stuff. I was always telling her.”
Is that what he thought of everything I’d shared with him about Xanda? Stuff I had to deal with?
“I know, right?” Delaney agreed. “For the longest time all she talked about was her dead sister.” One of them took a bite of something and the faint scent of pomegranates wafted through the bookshelves.
“She’s been through a lot,” Kamran said.
“Yeah, but she tried to drag the rest of us through it with her. I swear, she imitated me. I want a friend, not a doppelganger.”
Outrage washed through me. Is that why she liked Chloe?
“I should have told her at the beginning of the summer. Stupid of me. I never should have let this get out of hand, and now…”
“You’re not stupid. You’re a nice guy. Nice guys do the right thing.” Another giggle and the sound of a chair scooting. “So…what do you think’s in your future now, Mr. Nice Guy?”
I looked back at the long letter of truth I had typed to the BabyCenter girls, waiting for me to hit SEND. As long as I didn’t, I could pretend none of this was happening—at least to them.
I logged off the computer and slipped out of the library without a sound.
I nearly collided with a few people from the drama crowd, though Essence wasn’t with them. I put my head down and walked the other way.
It was fairly easy for me to avoid Essence these days—we hadn’t planned our schedule together like we had every other year. But it was impossible to avoid her on Sundays.
Mom didn’t say a word to me or Dad on the way to church. She hadn’t said much since Miz Wrent’s unceremonious departure. Instead, she spent every waking moment at her laptop—a new script, or maybe a memoir entitled Humiliation: A Chronicle of Motherhood. I had always wanted to be like Xanda, and now I was. I just didn’t know it would involve this much guilt.
“So what have you been working on?” I asked my mom.
Dad glanced toward her for a split second. Mom continued to stare straight ahead, zooming toward the church at uncharacteristically high speeds. “I’ve made some changes to the Christmas montage.”
I could see it already—if I wasn’t sorry enough in real life, she’d make sure I would be onstage. No amount of repentance in real life would be enough. “What did you change?”
“You’ll see.” Then she turned her conversation toward my dad and the sets—how to construct the perfect alternate universe.
We arrived to a chorus of drama groupies whose whispers halted when we approached. I was stuck lugging in the box of new scripts. Mr. Warren (aka “Kindly Old Man”) stepped in and said, “You shouldn’t be carrying that.” My mother didn’t so much as bat an eyelash.
Essence was among the groupies. I was betting she couldn’t wait for this moment.
If the rest of them were waiting around to witness the carnage, they obviously didn’t know my mother. She took the stage with her usual, enviable composure. “All right,” she said as she handed out the new scripts, “we’ve got some major changes in the works. I’m posting a new cast list as of today. Essence?”
“Yes, Mrs. Mathison?”
“You are taking over the part of Brenda.”
Essence smiled. They deserved each other. “Absolutely. I already know Brenda’s lines! I will be Brenda. Brenda and I will be one. So does that mean Miranda’s taking my part?”
“No…”
Thank you, God.
“…Claire will be taking over for you.” Claire, a fourteen-year-old with perma-grin, squealed with happiness. “Mandy is going to be working on sets with her dad.”
Essence snickered as she read over her script.
So that was it. I was demoted back down to set designer, a job I’d performed for half my life and even kind of liked.
Except for the first time since Xanda died, I’d had my own part in the play. For the first time, however briefly, the daughter my mom noticed was me.
Fifteen
After Miz Wrent’s visit, I expected my mom to champion my health care, but all she said was, “If you’re adult enough to get yourself into this, you’re adult enough to handle the consequences.”
It wasn’t so difficult to see a doctor—just a quick web search and a phone call. I almost told Kamran in English class, where I watched the back of his neck the way I had a thousand times on the back of his motorcycle. But I couldn’t. He gave me one look. Still angry. Scared. Maybe sad, too. Then he was gone.
When I arrived at the hospital, they gave me some paperwork and I handed them my insurance card. The nurse at the desk was horrified when she saw the date of my last period.
“June? And this is your first visit?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh, honey. I’ll try to squeeze you in for an ultrasound today, too. We’ll see how far along you really are.” She handed me a water bottle. “Drink this.”
The ob-gyn turned out to be this long-haired hippielike woman, only her sweater was pink with hearts embroidered on it. She had a kind face with bright blue eyes. After asking me a bunch of questions about my family medical history, she began asking questions about the pregnancy. I didn’t know why, but I found myself pushing down the burning in my tear ducts. All of these things, from the moment I found out to the present, spilled out of my mouth and into the tiny hospital room.
She asked when I had my last period. Right at the end of junior year, though I couldn’t remember the exact day.
I did remember the night the baby began, every detail. The way Kamran looked in the firelight. The way Delaney laughed and then paused to see who was watching her. Maybe we’d still be together, if that night had never happened.
Twenty of us went out to Delaney’s dad’s cabin for Fourth of July weekend: me, Kamran, Delaney, Milo, a few skaters, a few freshly graduated seniors, Chloe from French class, a few on the fringes of the popular crowd, and one unwelcome camper who somehow got the memo. That being Essence.
“Did you i
nvite her?” Delaney growled.
“No, of course not. I have no idea how she found out.” I knew it wasn’t rational, but somehow it made sense to blame Essence. Because blame was so loud, it could drown out the softer, more insistent voice. Shame.
After taking the ferry across Puget Sound, Delaney led us up the path to her dad’s waterfront cabin a mile or so from the docks. We reached the beach as the sun sank over the other side of the island. The boys grabbed some lighter fluid and sprayed the fire pit while I embraced the role of Delaney’s partner in crime: “Milo and Ty, get some sticks from that grove over there.” “Lin and Chloe, go get the booze.” I felt powerful until I noticed Delaney standing off to the side, sharing a private joke with Kamran.
“Delaney!” She leaped to my side and smiled sheepishly. Once she was there, my mind went blank. Stop flirting, I wanted to say.
Kamran’s face was unreadable. I knew what he would have said—they were just getting to know each other, the two best friends I’d always kept apart.
As we stoked the fire, Milo passed around a plastic cup of soda and something else to make us all feel a bit warmer in the cool, early summer air. After I had a few sips of Milo’s concoction and the boys ran out of bottle rockets, I began to relax.
“What do we do now?” giggled Delaney after we’d made a circle around the bonfire. She tilted her head to one side and beamed—I thought—in Kamran’s general direction. “There’s always Spin the Bottle,” she suggested coyly, “or Truth or Dare, or I Never, or—”
“I Never,” I spoke up. Then I could have kicked myself. Was I that worried? I looked around the circle of faces, flickering golden in the firelight. They were laughing, drinking, talking, none of them paying much attention to me.
“I Never is good,” Delaney said. “Everybody know how to play? Someone says ‘I never…I dunno…screwed a purple dinosaur in the jungle.’ If you have done it, you drink. Got it?” Murmurs of agreement followed.
The couples among us snuggled together. I knew after the game we would all stagger off to separate corners of the cabin, some of us with someone and some of us not. Kamran sat next to me, but we weren’t touching. That was the way he liked it—no public displays of affection. He didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable. “You know I love you,” he would say. “Why do I have to prove it in front of everybody?”
“Who goes first?” someone asked.
Someone else said, “It was your idea, Delaney, why don’t you go first.”
Delaney sat to my left. That meant I would go last—plenty of time to formulate my statement. But I already knew exactly what I would say.
“I never…,” she drawled, smiling at the circle. I could see her eyes narrow as she located a target. “I never did it with Ty Belkin.” Three girls sipped, each glaring at the other two. Ty stretched out his arms and grinned.
“We calculate the due date from the first day of your last period. That would put your due date around…” The ob-gyn paused. “March twenty-sixth, give or take a day. You’re just beyond eighteen weeks now.” March 26. Xanda’s birthday. I thought it would be around the same time, but I didn’t know it would be exactly that day. Again, I couldn’t shake the feeling Xanda had something to do with this baby, that she had given me a secret gift. XandasAngel.
“Have you felt any movement yet?”
“No.” I thought of Nik, telling all of us about her baby’s flutter. “Is that normal?”
“You can start feeling it any time between sixteen and twenty-two weeks, but most first timers don’t feel it until maybe twenty.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Some women describe it as champagne bubbles,” she told me. Then, giving me an appraising look, said, “Or soda-pop bubbles. Or, it can feel like a light tapping—like butterfly wings. The best time to feel it is at night, when babies are most active. Try lying on your back and waiting to see what happens. Would you like to hear the heartbeat now?”
I nodded. She helped me hop up on the table and pressed the end of a Doppler instrument into my flesh. It immediately emitted a static echo. Faintly, a deep, rhythmic thud emerged. I could feel my heart pounding, the sound echoing like a shadow. “Is that the baby?”
“No, that’s you. I haven’t found the baby yet.” The knob rolled toward my hip, and the deep echo of my heart faded away. Another sound layered on top of it at a higher pitch—a smaller, faster blip blip blip underscored by the low, background thud.
“That’s the baby. The heart sounds nice and strong.”
“And fast!” I strained to commit the sound to memory. The digital screen read 150 beats per minute, now 156, now 148.
The ob-gyn smiled, adjusting the instrument. “Hello, baby!” she said to my stomach, and for the first time I realized it could hear me. “We can’t wait to meet you.”
The thought of it brought tears to my eyes. Happy tears, and tears of utter alarm.
Sixteen
After Ty Belkin’s moment of truth, questions and answers blurred together until Delaney elbowed me merrily and said, “Hey, Rand, yooou’ve been dumped, haven’t you? Drink!”
Huh? Was she talking about middle school? Did everyone else know something I didn’t? Kamran raised an eyebrow.
Essence caught my eye from across the circle. An image of her ex–Siamese twin (Eli, attached at the tonsils) flashed before me: drama geek, smartier than thou, whose sole fashion statement consisted of badly fitted khakis and rugby shirts faded from washing out his pungent body odor. I couldn’t believe Essence didn’t notice. But I guess you could forgive a lot of things when you’re the center of somebody’s universe. As if Delaney would want to steal him.
As the game rippled around the circle and each person spoke their clever I Nevers, I stared at Essence, the contempt building in my throat. She didn’t drink once, even though I knew she should.
The game stopped with her. She raised her head, eyes searing across the circle. For a moment, they flickered toward me with something else. Regret. Or sympathy. Then she looked straight at Delaney.
“I never tried to steal someone’s boyfriend,” she intoned, like a prophet of doom. The crowd burst out laughing, most of all Delaney. She looked stunning—hair caught up in two messy pigtails, gray eyes, movie-star cheekbones. She turned to me, inviting me to share in the joke, and for a moment I basked in the glow of her reassurance. Her gaze slipped past mine. I turned to see Kamran staring back, grinning. Then Delaney took a drink. A long drink. I had to get out of there. I had to pee.
Next stop: ultrasound, a room shrouded in warm darkness. I thought I was going to die, I had to go so badly—more and more the state of affairs these days, now that the baby was bigger. “Sorry, but we need a full bladder to see the baby,” explained the ob-gyn.
The technician squirted some warm goo on my tummy and plopped the scanner right in the middle of it. She rolled it around, casting light and shadows into the connecting monitor. The white and black form mesmerized me, constantly morphing and completely foreign, like shadows and faces in a charcoal drawing. Finally a row of lines came into focus, a web of five long pips splaying into a recognizable shape.
“That’s a hand,” said the tech.
It was as though the hand unlocked the door. Suddenly I was able to make out an arm, then two arms. She showed me feet and legs, then back up to investigate a face emerging from the shadows.
“Do you want to know what you’re having?” asked the tech.
“You can tell already?”
She laughed. “Do you have a sense of whether it’s a boy or a girl?”
“No,” I said, though I had a hope.
She rolled the scanner up to my belly button, and a U-shaped blob appeared on the screen. My heart slowed at the sight of the round shapes.
After Essence’s I Never, I stumbled through the trees toward the cabin. Nettles snaked up and made itchy marks on my bare skin. My white shorts and tee, which looked so hot when I put them on, were now dusted with a laye
r of soot and the telltale imprint of my butt cheeks on the ground. So much for trying to keep Kamran’s attention.
Well, what would Xanda do? For one thing, she would make the most of being dirty. She would be dirrrty. Grrr. “Grrr,” I said aloud, then laughed at myself, as if Xanda were right there listening. “Okay,” I panted, standing up straighter and putting my hand on my hip. “Let’s try this again. Grrrrr!”
“Grrr, yourself,” a low voice said out of the darkness. I could see Kamran’s shape, lit up from behind by the moon through the forest canopy. His dark hair, grungy red tee, and worn jeans, just as dirty as mine and looking all the more delectable because of it, made me want to tattoo myself into his heart. We were alone. The campfire crowd hummed down the hill, laughter stretching out into blurry hoots.
So what if they were laughing at me, or if they weren’t? Kamran had come.
“What happened back there?” he asked softly. Softly enough for me to wonder if I was imagining everything.
The choice spread out before me like threads in a labyrinth, here in this black forest. I could tell him the truth, my fears and insecurities laid out for him to dissect and dismiss. That road was well-traveled, and I knew exactly where it would lead. He could deny it all he liked, but I could see it clearly, even in the firelight.
Worse, he could confirm my fear—that in one moment, she’d captured his heart and stolen him away.
Or I could take another path, traveled by others but undiscovered by us. Delaney would have done it long ago, and she would have him wrapped around her finger. Here, with him looking at me like that, my “Grrr” still echoing in the moist heat and making me feel dirrrty and sexy and maybe even confident. Here we could discover a new path, past this present uncertainty and into a certain future. I could do that. I could take the chance. I could be more like Delaney in order to be more like me. In order not to lose him, I could take the first step.