Tell Me a Secret

by Holly Cupala

  Delaney strode across the stage in a white column dress, poised with bashful humility. “Thanks, everyone,” she said as the crowd hooted and clapped—everyone but me.

  Kamran waited next to Chloe on the other end of the stage, and the gravity of what I had to do spread out before me. Tell him the truth. The whole truth. About Andre and Xanda. About Delaney. And most of all, about trying to make him into something he was not.

  Milo broke into my thoughts with yet another enthusiastic announcement. “The voting will be revealed in a few short moments, folks. Don’t go away, ladies and gentle-germs, we’ll be right back atcha.”

  An affectionate groan rose up from the audience as Delaney descended the stairs. Her eyes surveyed the landscape and landed on one person, a girl who stood out in the crowd like a glow-in-the-dark barn. My chance to talk to Kamran alone had come and gone in a blip.

  When she reached me, she dug her nails into my arm as she steered me out of the ballroom and down the stairs. Every step thudded with heaviness and finally ended in the auditorium basement, an expanse of concrete studded with pillars. Fluorescent tubes cast a pallid light onto Delaney’s face. I forced the next wave of pain into a marble-sized ball.

  “What are you doing here?” Upstairs, Milo once again reminded us from the podium that the countdown has begun, ladies and gents. “I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re trying to ruin this for me.”

  “I didn’t come to talk to you. I came to talk to Kamran.”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “Because of all the lies you told him about me?”

  Delaney looked scornful. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The marble grew to a tennis ball. “Why did you tell him I was sleeping around?”

  She didn’t see Kamran follow us into the room a dozen feet behind her. How much had he heard already?

  “Because he deserves to know the truth. Come on, Rand. I was at the same parties you were.”

  Those days flashed by in a blur. How we would show up together and end up apart—Delaney disappearing with Milo or someone else while I let her think I had done the same. It was what I wanted, to be like Xanda. Be wanted. To paint myself so successfully that Delaney—and now Kamran—couldn’t tell the difference.

  What had I done?

  I shook my head. “But I didn’t. You were going off with Milo or whoever, and I waited for you.”

  She looked confused. “You mean you never hooked up with any of those guys? How many guys have you been with?”

  “Only Kamran.” I glanced at him. His eyes were saying something, but I didn’t know what.

  “You’re lying.” Then she laughed. “That’s so pathetic. Why would you do that? Why would you pretend?”

  The pain rippled through me, and I thought, This is it. I was going to have my baby in the basement of the auditorium, and Delaney was going to be lecturing me the whole time. I couldn’t wait for Kamran to chime in, asking me why, exactly, I couldn’t be more like her.

  “I wanted to be more like you. More like…”

  “Xanda. Of course. It’s always about Xanda. I’m so sick of hearing about your dead sister. More like Xanda. More like me. Why can’t you just be real?”

  “Okay,” I said, too weary to argue. “Let’s be real. Why did you get kicked out of View Ridge?”

  Delaney went pale.

  I don’t worry too much if I only miss one, she had said.

  It was as if she was no longer skin and makeup but a sliver of glass, hard and dazzling and clear—so clear I could see right through her.

  “You were pregnant,” I whispered.

  Delaney said nothing, but her eyes told me the truth.

  “And you came here to start over.”

  In that moment I saw that Xanda and Delaney were nothing alike at all, just as Kamran could never become the Andre of my memories. It wasn’t fair to try to force him. Where Xanda felt bound, Delaney struggled to find something—anything—to tether her to the ground. Parties. Attention. And now Kamran—earthy, strong, and true. All this time, I thought Delaney had what I wanted. Now I saw it was just the opposite. She wanted what I had, and she took it.

  Maybe Essence saw a piece of this when she tried to enlighten me. Enlightenment wasn’t exactly right, but there was something religious about how I felt, peering through the worst pain I had ever experienced and for once in my life being entirely present, the moment wrapping around me like a cloak. Music echoed from the upstairs dance floor, punctuated by Kamran’s steps as he walked up behind Delaney and didn’t speak. My mother would call it an epiphany. Maybe Xanda would have called it a moment of perfection.

  Milo’s announcement boomed upstairs, a call to the Winter Ball royalty to take the stage. Delaney’s face was wet, but I could no longer make out why. I was about to tell her to go back upstairs when the rush of sound in my ears enfolded me into a warm, dark cloud. Kamran stood behind her, sideways, and I wondered from the look on his face why he was still here—here, in this tunnel of darkness while Xanda smiled at me, a baby in her arms.

  This must have been what Xanda wanted when she ran away with Andre. One luminous instant of perfect understanding and perfect peace, marred only by the icy concrete floating up to the side of my cheek.

  Thirty-four

  The darkness gathering around me and Xanda felt close, warm, like we were wrapped up together in our plaid sleeping bags when Dad took us on his annual camping trip. I don’t know what happened to those sleeping bags after Xanda died. We never went camping again.

  Being alone with her, in that warm, flannely memory, was like recapturing the Dad we lost, too. Except that we were in a tunnel, the darkness smeared by Xanda’s faint glow and the glow of the bundle she held as she stayed several paces ahead.

  As I followed her, groping and struggling to catch up, I passed darker places, places that looked like if I stepped into them they would swallow me up like one of Kamran’s wormholes and deposit me into some other space and time. Kamran’s voice broke through one of the walls, like a claw reaching out to pull me in. Xanda and the baby slipped around a corner. I plunged into darkness.

  “What is her name again?”

  “Miranda. Miranda Mathison.” Kamran’s voice again. And someone else—Delaney?—saying, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod…”

  A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Hold her.” Arms gripped me, light pierced me, pain enveloped me. Metal on metal, clanking. A woman with pale red hair hovered over me. Xanda was gone.

  I couldn’t breathe because of the cup over my mouth. I reached up to rip it off, sucking in air. Everything was so white, except for the two square, black eyes staring down at me from the wall, lights tearing through them at a furious angle. We were moving. But I couldn’t move the cup off of my mouth.

  “Miranda, listen to me,” said the red-haired voice. “You have to relax. You have to keep the mask on. You have to breathe.” She had no eyebrows. Or they were so pale they disappeared on her white, white face. “Do you understand me?”

  There was so much pressure on my chest, pounding from deep inside my body. “Lexi.” I didn’t know if the words came out of my mouth or not because of the pounding in my ears. But the woman seemed to hear.

  “The baby is going to be all right, Miranda. But you have to relax. If you don’t relax, it’s going to be very difficult. Very difficult for the baby.” Her hot breath on my face was making my heart race faster. “Back,” I said, or tried to say.

  “I’m going to count, and I want you to breathe along with my counting. Can you do that for me? Raise a finger if you think you can do that for me.” Instructions from my brain fired off toward my finger, but I wasn’t sure if they got there. “Good,” she breathed. “One…” Deep breath. “Two…” My heart was slowing down. “Three…” And I was starting to feel my body return to normal, the muscles wrapped around me finally releasing their cast-iron grip.

  “Good,” she said, and kept counting while I kept
breathing, my heart rate slowing as I breathed, breathed, not daring to look at those two black eyes hovering in front of me or toward the voices—whether or not one of them would be Kamran or worse, Delaney.

  My body felt warm and wet, like I was sleeping in a pool of sticky liquid. I tried to sit up and see what was happening. If Kamran was standing over me, I didn’t want him to see me wet myself.

  The redhead was watching a monitor, a green blip that seemed to be steadily going downhill. But her attention, for the moment, was away from me as I struggled to peek over the oxygen mask. We were alone in a small, white, moving room.

  Then I saw the blood. A dark pool.

  And I heard the cry.

  The cry that was mine.

  And the downward whine of the monitor as the sharp point pricked my skin and the liquid pool filled the room, up and over my head.

  When I woke again, it was chaos around me.

  The redhead and black-eyed windows were gone, and I could no longer feel the rumble of the road. Instead, I was in a cavernous hall with blinding lights overhead and the murmur of people walking every which way—coming in close for a look at my body, my shirt stripped upward and away from my stomach—now dotted with round, white monitors—and then rushing away, clipboards or instruments in hand. No one stopped moving. I no longer had an oxygen mask, but when I reached up to touch my face, I felt the pull of a tube inserted into the back of my hand. Clear liquid loomed over me in a bag dangling from a metal hanger.

  Another frightening cramp gripped me, and I cried out, only this time it was my stomach, whose contents were threatening to spill onto the clean white sheet.

  The threat became a quick, horrifying reality before I could do anything to stop it. Hot acid filled my mouth and nose while tears streamed down my face. If I hadn’t been tangled up in tubes and wires, I would have lunged for the sheet to cover my humiliation. Instead, I threw up in front of a throng of scrubbed onlookers. But as another wave of nausea gripped me, I realized I didn’t care. I only wanted it to stop. I was sobbing for it to stop. I buried my face in my arm until the IV split open a crack and a tiny ribbon of blood branched out through the crevices in my skin.

  “What is happening?” I cried, and a curvy, dark-haired nurse in scrubs rushed toward me with a towel.

  “It’s the magnesium sulfate,” she muttered in my direction, giving the monitors a more critical eye than she gave me. “Some people don’t react well.”

  A very great relief, I wanted to say, but I was feeling too nauseous to be a smartass. Instead, I zeroed in on the footsteps, the curious faces, the bright liquid stain.

  “There’s a boy in the waiting room who says he’s the father. If he is, he can come—”

  “No,” I said. I couldn’t forget the way he just stood there, watching. “I don’t want to see anybody.”

  In a quick movement, she gathered the damp sheet and towel and whisked them off. My parts were all exposed except for a tiny towel the nurse tossed on her way out. Another towel was balled up, pink with blood.

  “Wait,” I called to her, and I realized I was crying. “What is happening to me? What is happening to Lexi?”

  She stopped for a moment, her arms full and her face softening. “I’ll try to send the doctor in soon. She can tell you what’s happening. Just rest. We’re doing everything we can to save it.”

  To save it. The words stuck in my head. But I couldn’t speak, because the real me—not the me who was sitting half-naked in the ER attached to six monitors and a bag of magnesium whatever, but the me of my mind and heart—had floated away from my body like I was watching myself in one of my mother’s plays, separated. On a stage, I would have screamed. First a whimper, then building into a wail, then a scream commanding every doctor in the building. To save her. To stop whatever they were doing and save her.

  But this wasn’t a play. No one was paying any attention to me, and I barely had the strength to move the towel to cover myself when someone wheeled in what looked like a very ancient ultrasound machine hooked to a monitor. I hardly noted his face, only the way he squirted the jelly onto my stomach in one quick, cold spurt and looked at the fuzzy image projected by the ultrasound wand. I had no voice to stop him when he rolled the machine away.

  I had no strength at all to stop the new tears rolling down my face. I tried to sit up, to call to someone, when a spiral of dizziness captured me in its undertow. My eyes closed to keep the world from spinning apart.

  Thirty-five

  A pinch on my backside awakened me, pulling me out of the twists and tunnels of my mind. It was dark in the room, like a warm nightmare. I heard someone say, “Three twenty A.M. Another dose of beta metha…whatever in twelve houuurrsss…” And the room spun again, and I was back in a writhing meeting of time and space, drowning my lungs in liquid and parching my tongue with the most unbearable thirst.

  “Water,” I mumbled, wondering if some other tunnel was a flood while I had chosen the desert.

  Kamran was here, and now he wasn’t. Further down this shadowy passage was Lexi, a miniature copy of my sister, with accusation in her eyes. Her father—I’d sent him away. Would she hate me for it? But at least here she was still alive. In another passage, translucent through the depths, her cold form lay wrapped in Xanda’s arms.

  As if through a thick layer of consciousness, I could feel my body tensing—slowly, murkily, in the way it had been since I last saw my mother. I could hear her voice echoing. It’s better this way.

  “I don’t want you here,” I said, and she vanished as quickly as she came. Then Nik appeared—or was it Shelley? They merged and divided, holding a tiny white bird.

  The darkness parted, making way for a hazy light and voices.

  Placental abruption, they whispered. Twenty-six weeks. Too early. Magnesium sulfate, watch for lung fluid. Still having contractions. Blood. The voices were underscored by a low, mechanical moaning and an insistent blip blip blip.

  “Make it stop,” I whispered, but the blip wore on. Another pinch, a poke, and darkness fell again. I lost track of space and time, though the terrible thirst hounded me through my dreams and nightmares. The floodwaters in my lungs and the waves of pain and the taste of acid refused to recede.

  I knew I must be dreaming again. Because Xanda was there, holding Lexi in her arms and smiling like they were very old friends. Because the dark tunnels I had been traveling for so long were flooding with cold, fresh water, washing past our ankles and rushing into the hidden corners. Because I could almost breathe again. Because an angel who looked just like the ob-gyn hovered over me.

  “Miranda,” the angel’s voice said gently, like the ob-gyn would have done. She had long hair, bright blue eyes.

  “Miranda, I’m here now. I came as soon as I heard you were admitted.”

  Admitted where? “To heaven?” I asked.

  A strong odor hit my nose, smelling of metal and sulfur. Heaven smelled like the hospital. The ob-gyn angel laughed softly and stroked my cheek. “No, not yet.”

  My eyes blinked open, and it was true, though I didn’t dare try to sit up. I was in a new place, a room with a wall of windows lighting up the ob-gyn’s halo of hair. She stopped stroking my cheek and offered me a cup of ice chips. “Miranda, can you talk to me right now?”

  I nodded, my mouth full of ice. I felt like I hadn’t had a drink in days. “Your mother has been in the waiting room—”

  “No,” I said, too loud in my own ears. “No, I don’t want her here.”

  “But—”

  “No,” I pleaded, my heartbeat getting louder on the monitor hovering over my head. “Please don’t make me.”

  “We can’t make you do anything, Rand,” the ob-gyn said, patting my hand. “No one can come in without your permission.”

  I reached for my belly and felt Lexi’s foot move underneath. Alive. Still alive. “What about Lexi?”

  “She’s okay, for now. But things are going to be difficult for both of you. Lexi needs you to be str
ong. Do you understand?”

  I nodded my head, not really understanding anything. My muscles began to clutch again. She gripped my hand as she watched the monitor needle arch upward, plateau, and then ebb. “We’ve been giving you a drug to try to stop your labor, but it’s not working.”

  “It’s making me sick.”

  “I know. But that part is over—it should be wearing off. You were having side effects—hallucinations and your lungs filling, which is why we couldn’t give you any water. So our next step is getting the baby here safely.”

  “What is happening?”

  “You are twenty-seven weeks pregnant right now, almost six months. Babies are supposed to be born at forty weeks, at the earliest thirty-six. But Lexi is different. She’s trying very hard to come early, and we’ve been trying hard not to let her.”

  “Is she going to die?”

  The ob-gyn took a breath. “The good news is, medicine has come a long way. It used to be that babies born at twenty-seven weeks had no chance, but now…it’s better now. The bad news…”

  I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the bad news.

  “Babies born very early can have problems,” she continued. “Their lungs aren’t developed, they are vulnerable to viruses…so many things. That’s why we were trying to slow down your labor, to give her a few more days.”

  It was daylight outside, filtered by the cloud cover, and I couldn’t tell how long I’d been there. A day? A week? The ob-gyn was wearing a wreath pin. Was it Christmas yet? How long had my mom been here?

  “If she survives, she’s going to be in the hospital for a long time. We’re going to have to keep her in neonatal intensive care until she’s strong enough to breathe and eat on her own. That’s going to be a very long journey, with no promises.”