by Caela Carter
“Evelyn,” my mother’s voice warns.
“I really don’t know. What do you want from me?” I spit back at her. Her mouth snaps shut. “All I know is, I don’t want the whole city of Jacksonville to know I’m … to know about this.”
“We’ll figure it out, Evelyn,” Mom says, ignoring the way my eyebrows knit in confusion.
“Well, you really need to think about who you want to raise this baby,” Dr. Elizabeth says, which must be a joke, because my mother thinks we’re going to figure out a way for me to somehow keep my GPA and my class rank, and hide the fact that I’m pregnant from the entire school. Never mind that it happens to be full of nuns and prudes and horny guys who objectify all of the parts of our bodies every day and would notice if my stomach swells to the size of a grape, let alone a watermelon. But Dr. Whatever is now droning on and on about prenatal vitamins and regular checkups and the high likelihood of postpartum depression (no biggie, I’ve been depressed for years), and early delivery (which means my life is over even sooner than I thought—goody).
But when I finally get to school at lunchtime, I find Sister Maria and ace the chem test. Mom’s fantasy plan is working so far.
21 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind
The week goes by with no Todd, barely any Lizzie, and absolutely no fights. My parents do this weird thing they haven’t done since right after Dad returned: they pretend to like each other. Dad says “good morning” when Mom walks in the room at breakfast. Mom brings Dad’s mail all the way down to his office instead of sorting it and leaving it on the kitchen table. And twice we eat dinner together, all three of us. This is a huge production staged for an audience of one—me—and I hate it. They recite lines back and forth, and I’m expected to perform but I never get the script. I guess this charade is more like the old days, but somehow all the pretending feels worse than the silence.
At lunch on Friday, Lizzie jabbers to the other girls at our table—Bethany and Mandy and Cate, and I guess to me too—about how to hook up in secret at a party. She’s pretending to be upset that everyone in the school knows she keeps hooking up with Sean.
“So, Evelyn, how do you do it?” She glances at me and my cheeks go pink. It’s a weird thing for her to say. She usually stays as hushed about my sex life as I do.
Bethany says, “Huh?”
Mandy swerves her head. Suddenly I’m the center of attention. I much prefer life when Lizzie is in this position. I stop moving my Sharpie, stop writing “St. Mary’s sucks” on the side of the cafeteria table. “Who have you done anyway, Evelyn?” Mandy asks.
“Did you hook up with someone last week at Bethany’s?” Cate says.
“No. And you know me. I don’t kiss and tell.”
“But you also don’t get an S-L-U-T reputation like yours for nothing!” Cate squeals and the four of them dissolve into laughter. I try to join it convincingly. If I weren’t pregnant and if I were still screwing around with Todd, this would be a happy moment. This would make me laugh. No wonder Lizzie thinks something’s wrong with me.
“So … have you done it with Sean?” Mandy asks. She hangs with us, though she’s a prude.
“No, Mandy, I have not had sex with Sean.” I shout the word to make her jump. They all start laughing again. I kind of hiccup alongside and enjoy the stares of the surrounding dumbasses at different tables.
Cate recovers first. “Who then?”
Bethany starts the roll call: Joe? Pete? Mark? I realize that she’s going to get to Todd eventually so I stop shaking my head and start shrugging. She rattles off ten more names.
“A good girl never tells,” Lizzie says, and I roll my eyes at her. She knows I hate it when she calls me that.
“What do you know?” Cate demands. When the bell rings, I almost feel normal again. I need to tell Lizzie. She’s the soundtrack of my life. If I cut her out, my ears will starve.
I follow Lizzie home after school and she commences fashion show number three of junior year. There have never been so many parties to go to. There were always other things we did too—football games and video games and carnivals and movies at the cineplex. Ever since I got pregnant, all anyone wants to do is drink.
She’s not asking me anymore. She’s being too quiet, letting Jay-Z and Rihanna create noise in the room as she tosses clothes out of her closet.
I pull a black spaghetti-strap tank top over my head and shake my red mane at the mirror. My stomach is still flat, but it kind of looks pregnant to me, as if my eyes are telling the future. This must be how anorexics see their reflections—skinny and fat at the same time. I’m wearing khaki shorts, tiny ones that would show half my ass if I bent over. I look good. For now. Should I go to the party, even after I tell her, or should I just go home?
I’ll decide after I tell her. I’m going to tell her. I have to tell her.
“Lizzie.”
She’s halfway into a red minidress, one strap pulled over her shoulder, the other hanging under her armpit.
“Yeah?”
It’s the damn word. I haven’t been able to say it once.
“That dress is too skimpy, even for you.” She giggles.
My phone rings and I dig it out of my backpack, cursing myself for hoping it’s Todd. Maybe he’s going to say, Do you want to blow off this party? Maybe he’ll say, Let’s go to a movie and get some ice cream and my mom’s out of town so you can stay in the guest room again and I’ll stay with you, be a comma around your body, and stroke your inner elbow all night long but we don’t have to have sex if you don’t want to. Maybe he’ll say, You can just move in with us. Your parents are crappy, but Mom and Rick are great and she’ll stay home and take care of the baby so you can go to college wherever you want and get the hell out of Jacksonville and my mom will love this baby more than you ever could.
It’s the Stiff-Ass. I reject the call.
Lizzie emerges in a white sundress. “You wore that one two weeks ago, remember?”
“Damn,” she says.
“Hey, Lizzie?” Maybe I can act it out for her the way I did for Todd. Maybe I can drive her down to Planned Parenthood and make Squeaky Mary tell her too.
“Yeah?” she calls from the depths of her closet while my phone rings again.
“Why the hell does the Control Freak keep calling me?”
“Who?” she asks.
“My mom,” I answer.
“At least you hate her less.” Lizzie laughs. She means less than my dad.
I turn my phone off. “I don’t hate either of them,” I say. “I just don’t like them. I don’t like anyone, really, you know?”
Lizzie comes out of the closet in a pale-pink dress. She looks stunning, but it falls all the way to her knees. There’s no way she will wear it.
“What about me?”
“I don’t mean you. But I don’t like most people.”
She jumps on my lap where I’m sitting on the bed and covers my cheek in kisses. “Good. Because I looove you.” After a pause she adds, “Which is why you need to tell me what’s going on.”
I laugh. “I know.” It feels good to have her on my lap, actually, but I shove her off me. “Lizzie, I—”
Her face floods with relief because she knows I’m finally about to talk, but she cuts me off anyway. This is the game we play. She’s letting me get comfortable, get laughing, then she knows I’ll talk. “Uh-oh. Are you about to tell me you’re a lesbian or something? Is that how you keep from falling for Todd? Did I just, like, totally turn you on?” She collapses to the floor, a giggling pile of pink. There’s a knock at her door. Her mom stands there holding a phone.
“Oh honey,” she says, “I do wish you would wear that.” They both laugh. Then her mom crosses the room and hands the phone to me. “It’s your mom. She says it’s a family emergency.”
Lizzie mouths, “Oh shit,” so I have to force a smile as my mom tells me I have to come home for a family talk. A family talk composed of individuals who never talk.
&nbs
p; “No.” I don’t need to explain.
“You can meet up with Lizzie later,” she says.
That doesn’t work for me. Later, Lizzie will be a drunken, stumbling mess. Later, I will be sober and outside the fun that everyone else is having. Later, I will have to share space with Todd, who makes me feel like my insides are about to explode through my belly button, bean-baby and all. Later, I won’t be able to tell Lizzie anything.
“No,” I say.
She puts the Stranger on the phone.
“It’s time to come home now, Evelyn.” Crap, he used my name. This might be the third time in sixteen years he’s ever used my name.
“Later.”
“It’s dinnertime,” he says.
I almost say, “Exactly,” but I’m not that kind of Bad. I am the quiet kind of Bad. The kind that quits everything and sneaks her not-boyfriend in the house and gets knocked up but still cowers in front of her parents. “Later, please.” It’s not fair, them tag-teaming me like this. I’ve had no time to prepare for a mutual strike.
His voice loses the edge. “Why, Pumpkin? Is there something important going on right now?” Mom would never bother with this question, but it makes my blood boil. Part of me realizes I should give him points for trying, but he’s not supposed to say “Pumpkin.” I hang up.
“I have to go.”
“Okay.” Lizzie has pulled off the pink dress and is standing in the middle of her closet in a tan strapless and a white lace thong. “I would hug you but you might try to take advantage of me, so I’ll just see you later.”
I force a laugh. “Bye, Lizzie.”
“Hey, E?” She pokes her head around the closet door.
“Yeah?”
“You’ll tell me what’s going on when you get back, right?”
“I promise,” I say. But family dinner might at least save me from a third weekend in a row of tiptoeing around other people’s puke and wishing my warm beer was ginger ale.
I’ll tell her tomorrow if I can’t tell her tonight.
My house is a scene from a horror movie. The lights are out in the kitchen and the upstairs hallway. A green lamp glows in the living room, shining vomit colored through the kitchen door. My parents sit in there together, the green making streaks in my mother’s hair and highlighting the underside of my father’s eyes. We never go in this room. They’re sitting next to each other on the couch, murmuring back and forth in low voices, barely audible. They never sit next to each other. They don’t murmur. If they talk, they yell. I wonder if they are planning to kill me.
Three cans of ginger ale hiss on the coffee table, straws poking out of them. The Control Freak’s notebook sits in the middle. Bean-baby becomes Demon Baby, clawing at my insides when I tiptoe into the room.
Mom points to the rocking chair next to the couch. I sit. Dad hands me a ginger ale. I sip. The bubbles escape the straw and dot my tiny khaki shorts.
“We have a plan, Pumpkin,” the Stranger says.
“Don’t call me that,” I say, without looking down. But at the edge of my vision, I can see his eyes fall to the floor. It’s creepy enough in this room. I shouldn’t say anything.
“We have a plan, Evelyn,” Mom says.
“We think we have a plan,” Dad repeats, green shadows shifting all over his face.
If they kill me, I can maintain my GPA and class rank and no one will know I’m pregnant.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” Mom asks in a hushed whisper. It’s supposed to be soothing but soothing doesn’t come easily to her.
I sip my ginger ale and shrug.
“You’re going away for your junior year.”
I wish they’d killed me.
“Starting when?” I ask.
“Well, that’s why we wanted you to come home so quickly. It’s up to you, really. I could drive you out there this weekend. We’ll leave first thing in the morning. Or, if you want some time to say good-bye to all the kids at school”—I snort—“we can leave next weekend.”
Ha. Some choice.
“Where are you driving me?” I ask.
“To your aunt Linda’s. In Chicago,” Dad says.
Relief floods my body in tingles. That’s much better than some Unwed Mothers’ Home run by nuns. But it still hurts that they’d just get rid of me, even if I did screw up.
Mom keeps talking. “I had a few meetings with Sister Maria, your guidance counselor, this week.”
“Meetings? You had meetings? Like, in person?”
“Don’t worry, sweetie.” Mom tries to coo, sounding like a cow. “I didn’t tell her that you’re—about our situation. I just said that we have some family in Chicago and someone is sick and that you might be spending the school year there. She said your grades can transfer from Aunt Linda’s school, especially since it’s a Catholic prep school. And Aunt Linda says that there will not be any consequences to your being—to your condition at her school.”
“You told Aunt Linda?” I’m horrified.
“Weren’t you going to tell her? You love Aunt Linda.” She says this the way she always does—like me loving Aunt Linda means that I don’t love her, means that she isn’t good enough. I feel guilty because she’s kind of right. Aunt Linda is warm and funny and loves me so obviously. She lived here when I was a kid and we all pretended it was so my parents would help her get through college when really it was so she could take care of me when my mom shifted between health problems and depression. But Aunt Linda is ten years younger than my mother, a Chinese adoptee, and her polar opposite. They’re complicated.
So why is she shoving me out the door and into Aunt Linda’s arms?
And what does Aunt Linda think of this crappy situation?
“So, what do you think?” Dad says.
I can’t believe you’re kicking me out. You are awful excuses for parents, but I can’t believe the minute I start causing the problems you send me and this thing away. That’s what I think. I shrug again.
“Your father and I really think this is the right plan. Your aunt Linda will take good care of you.” And we all know you wouldn’t send me to her unless you were completely sick of taking care of me yourself. “We can talk about the Ivy plan depending on what you decide with the baby.”
I nod.
She reaches out to grab my hand. “We’ll talk every day, Teeny,” she says, as if that’s what I was worried about.
I move my hand away.
The Stranger finally looks at me. His eyes are red. “Are you upset, Pum—Evelyn?”
“No.”
Don’t pretend I have a choice when you already made it for me. When you stepped all the way out of my life, and now you want to force your way back in as the hotshot director.
“Let’s leave tomorrow,” I say. “But I’m going out tonight.”
I walk straight out the door before they can say anything else.
Lizzie is still at her house when I pull back in the driveway, about nine o’clock. Now I really have to tell her. Right now, before she gets drunk.
She’s eating a bowl of cucumbers and tomatoes at her kitchen table—no dressing. Suddenly, I am starving. Dad said it was dinnertime, but no food ever appeared.
“You’re back!” she squeals, jumping up from the counter when I let myself into the kitchen door. She looks me over. “You don’t have any makeup on. And you need to brush your hair. And I think I found a cuter top for you.” How the hell am I going to live a year without her? “But first sit and tell me what’s up. No more lesbo jokes, I promise.”
She pulls out the wicker chair next to her and I crash onto it.
“Sorry. I had to leave as soon as possible after the family meeting. I’ll get ready real quick here.”
“You should wear that white dress,” she says.
“I’m too pale for it. And you just wore it two weeks ago.”
“Wear it anyway. It’ll look great with your hair.” My hand automatically pats the frizz on top of my head.
“Lizzie,”
I say. I’m going to tell her. I have to.
“Yeah?”
“My aunt Linda, remember her?” She nods. Why am I starting here? “She’s sick.” I hear the lie fall out of my mouth and crash to the floor. I don’t need to tell her, or anyone. Ever.
Lizzie’s eyes go wide. “With what?”
“I don’t know. But my mother’s sending me there to help take care of her. Since Aunt Linda’s got the kids and all now.”
Lizzie narrows her eyes, angry.
“No!” she says. “For how long?”
“Probably for the whole year.”
Lizzie covers her hand with her mouth. “Then, will she be, like, dead?”
I shrug. I suck.
At the party, Lizzie is determined to get me shitfaced. It’s almost like she wants to make it impossible for me to leave this party sober. She drags me to anyone who has ever been my remote acquaintance and announces that I am leaving for a year, starting tomorrow. Everyone wants to chug a beer or do a shot with me. If I hesitate their eyebrows arch with suspicion because all these drunkards are used to me being the most wild girl at the party, though not the most drunk. Lizzie always got that prize. After making up a game where we chug with our eyes closed so I can pour three entire beers in the grass, I finally find a moment when the kitchen is empty and pull a water bottle out of Sean’s refrigerator and go to the bathroom. I empty the water and step on the bottle to make it look beat up, then fill it with water from the sink. The rest of the night, I take huge gulps and breathe deeply after each one. It works. No one even asks me what it is.
By the time the partiers are falling and puking and sticking dirty tongues down each other’s throats, I’m almost happy I’m leaving. I sit by myself on Sean’s swing set, still chugging water. Next week, I’ll be in a school full of other gossipy teenagers where it’s freezing and you can’t party outside for eight months of the year. But in Chicago, it will be okay to bury myself in whatever bed I sleep in and not come out except to go to school. In Chicago, I won’t have a stupid, wonderful best friend in my face constantly yammering on about something being wrong with me. In Chicago, Aunt Linda will—Crap, Aunt Linda. Aunt Linda will be disappointed. Aunt Linda will want to talk about it and about Todd and about what the hell I’m going to do with my life. My head is spinning. My stomach churns. I lean off the swing and puke into the grass. It’s two a.m. Morning sickness has begun. My charade is complete.