by Caela Carter
It will be impossible to hide.
28 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind
I’m in last-period British literature, trying to keep my eyes open while Sister Susan drones her way through a Shakespearean sonnet. We already studied the sonnets. We study them every year. I understand them. I actually like them, but it has been hard to sleep and hard to stay awake all week. And so, I mean honestly, I’m sick of them. I’m ready for the weekend; ready to go home, take a nap in the Empty House, eat in the Silent Kitchen, and study in my Locked Room. I’ve figured out that it will be April by the time this stupid thing is born, almost the end of the school year. If I get a 4.0 the first three quarters, I may not have to destroy my GPA completely until after junior year. I probably won’t be valedictorian anymore, but I can still get into somewhere outside of Florida, maybe.
“Sister Susan?” the loudspeaker crackles, and half the class lurches to attention. I guess you don’t need to be pregnant to get distracted in this class today.
“Yes?” She rolls her eyes at the loudspeaker so the class snickers.
“Would you send Evelyn Jones to the main office with her things, please? Her mother is here for early dismissal.”
My heart bounces around in my chest, hitting every bone imaginable. I don’t think Mom has set foot in this school since freshmen registration day, which was, of course, before the shit went down. She looks at my report cards, awkwardly pats my hand while telling me she’s proud of me, and other than that, she butts the hell out. Someone must have died. Please, not Aunt Linda. My hands and arms move to gather my things off the floor. Holy crap, it’s my dad. She’s finally leaving my dad. Then my heart stops dancing, stops moving completely, and falls into my shoes. She knows. Oh God, oh shit. She knows.
I feel like a planet walking down the halls, like my slightly swollen abdomen is the size of a beach ball by the time I turn the corner. When I finally get to the office, a tiny voice squeaks, “Evelyn, honey, ready for the dentist?” It’s coming from a mouth so far beneath my eyes it’s out of my vision. Mary’s arms stretch to hug my waist and I jump. What the hell? I ask with my eyes. She forms little words with her mouth: trust me.
I don’t. She’s going to tie my hands behind my back and force me to get an abortion. She’s going to sit me down with my real mother, point a gun to my head, and warn me that if I don’t spill my guts all over the floor, she will. Mary is insane.
But neither of these options seems all that bad. At least if I’m dead, I don’t have to have a baby and I get to keep my 3.9. If she forces me to have the abortion, it won’t be my fault. So I follow the little woman, wondering how she doesn’t melt into her gray blazer in this heat, thick as canola oil. A fresh wave of nausea lines my stomach when I choke the outside air into my lungs. I trail her footsteps toward her car and swing my bookbag into the space in the front seat. When I sit, she says, “You sure about this?”
This time, I try to make my eyes say F you.
“If you don’t want to leave school, tell me now and I’ll walk you back in and say we rescheduled the appointment.”
I don’t say anything.
“If you close the door, I’m starting the car and taking you to the park.”
What the crap is at the park? I keep my hand steady on the car door handle. But then she flips open the glove compartment and pulls out a ginger ale, obviously cold from the way the condensation is beading the green surface. I shut the door and open the can.
We sit on a bench facing the playground. I hold the still-full can up to several places on my neck, making goose bumps break out among the pockets of sweat on my skin. The playground is crawling with kids: flying on the swing sets, digging in the sand, screaming on the seesaw, hanging on the monkey bars. There are so many of them, it almost looks disgusting. Like piles of ants writhing in your picnic basket.
“I was worried about you,” she says, her voice dripping with phony sincerity so syrupy it adds a coat to my nausea. “What happened?”
I take a sip. It makes me feel like talking, which sucks. “What do you mean, what happened?”
“You scheduled the abortion. You claimed you were coming in to discuss details on Saturday. That was almost a week ago, Evelyn. Are you all right?”
“ ’Course I’m all right.” I hate myself when I lie.
“Then where have you been?”
“I changed my mind. People do that, you know.”
Mary sighs. “Evelyn, I know you are going through something difficult now, but I want you to consider the position you put me in. You were seeing me almost every day. I came to care about you a great deal—”
I snort.
“And then you just stopped. I want to make sure you are okay, you are being careful, you are being cared for.”
“Don’t you have a pamphlet for that?” I spit.
“I suppose I deserve that,” Mary says.
What a bonehead. What does that even mean? I down my ginger ale and move. I can walk back to school from here. It’s only like a mile.
“Please, Evelyn,” Mary says. “Don’t you feel like talking?”
I do feel like talking but I don’t want to feel like talking. I feel like talking to Aunt Linda, but I’m terrified to change her opinion of me, or to Lizzie, who jams up my words like traffic. But maybe I just feel like talking even to this nimwad sweating next to me on this burning metal bench. It’s nice not to be in that creepy office with all of those pamphlets though. I’m still half poised to leave—one butt cheek leaning off the bench—when Mary reaches into her briefcase and pulls out another frigid can. That slumps my body back to the bench. Ginger ale is my new drug.
“So, I take it you decided against abortion?” Mary asks. She always knows where to start. This is exactly what I don’t want to talk about. I know she wants me to decide that getting one is the easiest thing, but I won’t. I can’t. I wish I could, but I just can’t.
I take a sip, nod my head.
“What are you going to do instead?”
My head shoots up. I slap my abdomen with more force than I thought I had in me and say, “I’m going to have this thing. No other choices.”
“Evelyn, there are a million other choices. Not alternatives, but choices that come after that one.”
“Like what?” But I know the answer.
“Like, how are you going to raise it? Where will it live? Where will you live? What do you expect from Todd? What do you expect from your parents? And more immediately, who will deliver the baby? Where will you go? Plus there are things you need to take into consid—”
“You see, this is exactly why I didn’t want to talk to you. This thing is not going to be here for, like, eight months still. I don’t really give a shit what else there is to do. I just want to keep my GPA up and stay skinny so no one knows. I don’t want to think about anything else.” I’m yelling, which isn’t smart since we’re outside and I don’t want anyone to know.
“I see.” Mary looks down at her own Diet Coke; her tiny fingers work the can in circles. She’s hurt, the annoying fool.
“I didn’t mean to yell at you,” I say, even though I am Bad Evelyn now, and bad girls yell without feeling sorry.
“Okay, Evelyn.” She sounds tired. We let the moisture buzzing in the air and the kids screaming their heads off do the talking for a while.
Directly in front of us, a blond boy tosses a rubber ball to a smaller boy who looks Cuban or Dominican. The blond kid has freckles and messy hair. He keeps wiping his nose on his bare wrist. He squeals his friend’s name every time he drops the ball: “Carlos! Carlos!” Carlos stays quiet. His eyes are dark and serious, focused completely on the rubber ball. How old are these kids anyway? How can you tell that?
One of these is, like, inside my stomach right now. It might be a blob, but if it just keeps growing and I don’t get rid of it, it will grow arms and legs and fingers. It might throw a ball one day. It might squeal and get covered in dirt or sand or snot. And I won’t even be
able to tell how old it is.
I breathe deep in an attempt to slow my heart.
“Evelyn?” Mary whispers. I almost forgot she was there.
“How do you have so much time for me?” I feel Mary’s eyes move from the side of my face to the army of germs and screams swarming in front of us. For a few minutes, it seems like she’s not going to answer.
Then, finally, she starts talking. “My mother was a teenager,” she says.
I can’t help it. I almost turn my head to look at her. I wonder if that’s all she’ll say, but after a minute the words come again.
“I don’t think she ever wanted me, not really. She told me once that she only had me because my father promised to marry her, but he disappeared when I was still a toddler. My mother went after faraway jobs and complicated business plans and left me with different relatives in different schools almost every year.” Mary turns and looks at me. “No, Evelyn. Don’t think that. She wasn’t a bad person, but she was a kid. She had no idea what she was doing. It just stayed like that our whole lives. You remind me of her, I guess. I wasn’t there, obviously, but I imagine she felt and acted a lot like you when she was pregnant.”
I’m so surprised by her honesty, I forget that it’s time for me to speak. It’s sort of a compliment to have an adult talk to me like I’m a real person who can understand life. Like I’m not a total idiot. But what she said doesn’t make sense.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “If your mother was like me, why do you want me to have an abortion?”
“Evelyn.” She puts a hand on my shoulder, and I finally meet her gaze. A fat raindrop falls from the sky, spreading through my hair like a raw egg. Mothers and nannies appear out of nowhere, ushering kids into cars with hand pulls and piggy-back rides and bribes of toys and desserts. But Mary stays still and so do I. “I don’t necessarily want you to get an abortion. I want you to have a plan. A serious, well-developed plan, so that, should this fetus become a child, it will feel wanted.”
But I don’t want it. Out loud I say, “I don’t know how to do that. How to make a plan.”
“Well, let’s take things one question at a time then, shall we?”
My heart speeds up. I don’t want to think about any questions at all, let alone one after another. I say no, but I say it so quietly I don’t think she hears me.
“Your parents. How are you going to tell them?”
“I’m not telling the Stranger anything.”
“The Stranger?” Mary asks.
“Sorry, my dad. I’m not telling him.”
“Do you always refer to your father as the Stranger?”
“Usually only in my head.”
She sits her little body up like a beanpole. Her fingers twist the Diet Coke can with a newfound vigor.
“Does he hurt you? Neglect you? Why do you call him that?”
She’s practically sitting on the edge of the bench. A chance to call Child Protective Services must be like a big break in the world of social workers.
“They hate each other, not me,” I say. She is still buzzing with excitement, so to get her to stop, I agree. “I’ll tell my mom. This week.”
Her chin lowers toward her knees. “Okay. Then come back and let me know how it goes, all right?”
I’ve had enough. Anyway, now I have something else to work on besides the stupid sonnets. I stand up, ready to trudge the mile back to school. But she follows me, and drives me back to my Jeep.
When I wake up from my nap that afternoon, I clomp down the dark hallway and jump at the loud sound my hand makes when it knocks on Mom’s office door.
“Evelyn?” she says. “That you?”
“Yeah.” I walk in. She picks up her head, black eyes shining out from under black, shiny hair. She wears a brown suit. I wonder why brown doesn’t clash with black when the black is your hair. I wonder why she wears a suit when she works at home. I wonder if she wore a suit when she was pregnant, then immediately shake the image from my brain. I wonder why she can’t tell what’s going on when to me it feels like the baby is a gleaming, bouncing bean in my abdomen. She should be able to look at me and just see it.
“Sweetie, do you want to see if Dad wants to have dinner with you? I’m swamped. I’ll give you some money, though. What do you think, pizza or Mexican? Maybe sushi?”
I stand there for a minute, watching her hands shuffle through endless stacks of paper. They are normal, her hands, but her fingers look like sausages because I’ve been looking at Mary’s all afternoon. How am I ever going to tell you anything? You don’t even wait for me to speak anymore. How am I supposed to become a mother when I can’t even tell if my own mother loves me?
“Mexican.”
“Yup.” She pauses her shuffling to smile at me. I turn to go. Then I stop.
“Mom.” The word sounds funny in my mouth. It will sound funnier in my ears. “Can I get on your schedule sometime soon?”
27 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind
It happens so quickly. The next afternoon, my mother and I are zipping down Atlantic Avenue, following the stream of cars racing toward the ocean. It’s like a hundred degrees outside and I feel nauseated and exhausted, so I keep getting startled every time I see the shit-eating grin on Mom’s face.
She yammers on and on next to me about lunch at La Sole and how they have the best fresh-squeezed lemonade. I nod, even though I want a ginger ale. She talks about lying in the sand and catching up and even going for a dip if the waves aren’t too big after the tide comes in. Her words fill up the car like fleas, buzzing in every unwelcome direction, making me itch. I keep readjusting my bathing suit top under my coverup, but she doesn’t get the hint and just keeps blah, blah, blahing. After years of silence, all this talking is just uncomfortable.
Plus, I know how quiet it will be on the car ride home. I don’t know what she’ll say. She doesn’t show love like a normal mom—which is both a good and a bad thing. That disappointed look that would cover the faces of most moms when their daughters get knocked up will not cross hers. But I also don’t know what she will do. Maybe she’ll just zip her lips and walk back to the car, leaving me standing on the beach by myself. I just don’t know.
The mariachi band in the restaurant makes the nerves jump in my gut, and my stomach sloshes close to puking. This is the last person I need to tell. I’ll just spit it out and it will be over. We have a twenty-minute wait for a table, so we sidle up to the bar. She orders a Corona, which makes my jaw drop. She orders me a lemonade, but I shout over her, “No, a ginger ale.”
“I didn’t even know you liked ginger ale, sweetie,” she says as the bartender turns to grab a Corona from the cooler.
“I didn’t even know you liked beer,” I mimic.
She looks bitten for a moment, but then she says, “I have a full afternoon to spend with my beautiful daughter.” She takes my chin between her thumb and forefinger. I forgot how she used to do that. The warm and gooey feeling enhances my queasiness. “I’m celebrating.”
The bile in my stomach feels gray and guilty. I chug the ginger ale and ask for more.
When we are at the table I order a third. Mom raises her eyebrows. “Are you sure you don’t want to try the lemonade?” she asks. “It really is to die for.”
She orders a glass for herself when I shake my head.
“I can’t drink lemonade, Mom,” I say when the waiter leaves. This was definitely not the line I planned to start with.
“Why not?” The Stiff-Ass looks curious. It’s not like she would know if I had an allergy or anything.
“Because … I just can’t stop drinking ginger ale.” I look at her seriously because I know she’ll know. Every female must suffer from ginger-ale addiction when they’re preggo.
And Mom knows all about what it means to be pregnant. She has to know what this ginger ale means.
I wait for her eyes and mouth to widen into saucers while she says, “Oh no! You don’t mean …” or something like that. My gaze
is transfixed on her expression.
But she laughs like it’s a joke. “I just never knew you were such a ginger-ale fanatic. I’ll have to order some the next time I do the groceries.”
She drops the menu to pat me on the hand. It starts tingling the way my chin did.
“Mom, I have to tell you something.”
“Mm-hmm?” Her eyes stay on the menu. I should say it while there’s a barrier between us. The words feel stuck in my nose somehow, like my brain is trying to force them out any way possible and my mouth has refused, so I’ll have to tell my absent mother about my crappy situation through my nostrils. I sneeze.
“What is it, Evelyn?” She almost sounds like Mary, so sincere.
I try to picture her pregnant. Most memories from my toddlerhood involve her telling me that she was pregnant. She was pregnant four times, but I’m an only child. You do the math. It’s hard to picture: not because she’s a bag of bones like me, but because she’s so stiff. Even sitting across from me in her tan one-piece and coverup, her hair is pulled into a suffocating bun, her black glasses perch on her nose so she can read the menu professionally, her neckline reaches her collarbone, obliterating any sense that she could possibly have boobs. She keeps smiling at me, but it’s like she has to tell herself to do it. The pregnant women I see at grocery stores or beaches are all curves and softness: their stomachs, their huge breasts, their smiles, their eyes. Pregnancy just wasn’t supposed to happen to her. Or me.