Good Girls Don't

by Claire Hennessy

  “Breathe, okay? Just breathe.”

  “I’m trying!”

  “I’ll be over to see you in a little while, okay? Make yourself a cup of tea or something. We’ll sort this out,” I told her.

  “Thank you,” she sniffed.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “You want to watch a movie?” she suggests as we go downstairs to the family room.

  “I don’t know, Lucy, you know how I hate the film industry,” I grin.

  “How does The Talented Mr Ripley sound to you?”

  “Jude Law? Sounds good.”

  “Or we could watch Girl Interrupted.”

  “That movie depresses me. Although, Angelina Jolie . . . it’s tempting.”

  “How about a movie where you won’t spend the entire time drooling over the cast? Like Shrek?”

  “I don’t know, Lucy, the donkey is pretty sexy . . .”

  “I think that’s illegal, Emily.”

  “Thinking about it isn’t.”

  “I really hope you’re joking.”

  “Don’t worry, I am.”

  “The men in the white coats are going to come for you one day, you know.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “No, but I like my interpretation better.”

  “So are we going to watch Shrek or not?”

  “Sure, but it always makes me get all mushy.”

  She rolls her eyes. “It’s a kids’ movie, Em.”

  “It’s not really,” I say. “It’s multi-layered, you see. Like The Simpsons. You can watch it as a kid and think it’s funny, and watch it when you’re older and see other meanings in it. And Shrek is a very complex film, dealing with the isolation of the outcast.”

  “Mrs O’Shea must love you. Do you spout this type of crap in class?”

  “When I’m awake.”

  “Ah, I see. I hear it’s a good thing to stay conscious in school, now that you mention it. Something to do with learning.”

  “I think that’s just a vicious rumour,” I say.

  She nods. “You’re probably right.” She switches on the TV and puts in the video. The door opens, and Lucy’s mum sticks her head around it.

  “Hi, Emily,” she nods to me. “I’m making tea, do you girls want any?”

  “Sure, Mum,” Lucy says.

  “Emily?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I say.

  “Did you have a good time at the party last night?” she asks me.

  “Yep, it was great.”

  “Missy here wasn’t back until four in the morning,” she says, her hand on Lucy’s shoulder.

  “That’s disgraceful, Lucy,” I say with a grin.

  “You’ll have to knock some sense into her, I think.” She winks at me before going on.

  Lucy turns to me and rolls her eyes. “How is it that my mother thinks you’re a responsible person?”

  I shrug. “I have no idea. My mother thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

  “We really should swap,” she muses.

  But I know she doesn’t mean it. Lucy and her mum get along really well. They go shopping together and they have long talks and share everything. I think it was the accident that brought them closer together. Before that, they were never really especially friendly.

  Of course, before that, Lucy was out of control. Parents don’t like that. They like their children to be following the rules and doing everything correctly. Step outside the lines and you’re letting them down, disappointing them, making them wonder why they ever became parents in the first place.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I leave Lucy’s late in the evening. Her mum drops me home. I make a beeline for my room. I watch the rest of Amelie and consider whether setting a modern fairytale in Dublin would work – can anything filmed in Dublin be fairytale-like? The city looked pretty in About Adam, though, so I suppose you could make Dublin magical if you chose the right locations – before glancing at the Irish homework I’m supposed to do. If I were an organised person I’d do it now until of putting it off until tomorrow night. Or I’d have done it on Thursday, when we were given it. However, I’m not organised, so I leave it on the desk and stare at the walls instead. There’s a picture that Andrew took last summer of me, Barry and Lucy getting ready to go out one night.

  ***

  “Barry, hold still,” I ordered.

  “It’s hard to hold still when you’re poking me in the eye,” he said.

  “I’m not poking you in the eye!” I protested. “The idea is that it goes around the eye.”

  “And I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of it,” he told me.

  “Well, we saw what happened when you tried to put eyeliner on yourself,” I reminded him.

  “Let us not speak of that day.” Lucy giggled. She was painting his nails black.

  He groaned. “Maybe I should just not look stupid.”

  “You don’t look stupid,” I told him. “You look sexy. If anyone looks stupid, it’s Andrew.”

  “Hey!” Andrew protested.

  “I think he looks great in PVC,” Lucy said loyally.

  “See?” he told us.

  “Lucy’s your girlfriend. She has to say that,” I explained. “As your friend, I have to say – you look absolutely ridiculous.”

  “Look who’s talking! You’re making poor Barry wear make-up!”

  “I’m not making him do anything. Besides, he looks good.”

  Andrew pretended to cough, muttering, “Drag queen!”

  “I heard that,” Barry said.

  “Gender-bending is trendy,” I said. “Look at Brian Molko. Early Brian Molko, of course. Sex on legs.”

  “She’s got a point,” Lucy said, blowing on Barry’s nails.

  I handed Barry a mirror. “What do you think?”

  “Not bad,” he smiled.

  “Great.”

  “Smile!” Andrew said, holding up his camera.

  “Oh, put it away,” Lucy told him, hiding her face in her hands.

  “Are you going to carry that everywhere this summer?” I asked him.

  “Pretty much,” he shrugged.

  I groaned.

  “I’ll make you a copy of the pictures,” he promised.

  “Not much of a compensation for tormenting us for three months,” I told him.

  “Oh, just smile for the camera,” he said,

  Barry and I struck a pose, and Andrew clicked.

  ***

  So Lucy’s to the side, trying to get out of the way of the picture, and Barry and me are in our rock-star pose, all made-up and dressed to kill. I remember that night. We got hassled at the bus stop for looking weird, and then we went into town where half the people there were dressed “weirdly” and we were nothing special. We had a good time. We went to a club that played mostly what you’d call “alternative” music, I guess, although I didn’t think it was that alternative – just not that much chart stuff.

  We danced all night and were hot and sweaty at the end of it. Going home I realised that I hadn’t hooked up with anyone or done anything out of the ordinary, but I’d had a really great night out with my friends, and that maybe that was all you really needed to be happy.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Lucy calls me up again on Sunday, which is unusual in that we can generally manage for more than twenty-four hours without talking. There’s a part of me that suspects there’s something she wants to tell me and meant to yesterday but couldn’t, maybe to do with her and Andrew. Then again, she could just want to see me, but I have a feeling that isn’t the case.

  I look at the date and realise that it’s two years to the day since the accident. I should have remembered. Everything happened at around the time of her sixteenth birthday, which fell on Holy Thursday, if I recall correctly. She was in the hospital two days later. I remember praying, even though I hadn’t prayed properly in years. We pray in school, of course, but every
one sort of mutters the words and doesn’t think about what they’re saying.

  Maybe that’s it, maybe that’s what she wants to talk about. Only she’s never been that good with remembering dates. I had to remind her of when her anniversary with Andrew was.

  I could be overreacting. She told me once that those few days in her life were blurred together for her now, and that she doesn’t remember much of it, especially not what she was feeling. Maybe that’s a good thing.

  She comes over and we go to my room and sit on the bed. She looks at the photo from my birthday party and says, “We all look so young.”

  “We are young,” I remind her.

  “Yeah, we are, aren’t we? See, that’s what I thought, we’re still young, we have our whole lives ahead of us, don’t we?” she says, sounding stressed.

  I nod. “Does this have anything to do with Andrew and the whole being tied down thing?”

  “Yeah,” she sighs. “You know the way you said birthdays make you think about that sort of stuff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, you know what else makes you think about that sort of stuff?”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “Marriage proposals.”

  I gape at her. “What?”

  She nods. “I know! It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? He thinks it’s time to take the next step in our relationship. We haven’t even finished school and he’s talking about getting married.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, not soon, after college, I think, but he wants us to be engaged. To be able to say, yes, we’re serious about each other and we’re going to get married and have two point four kids and a dog and a goldfish and a dishwasher and a white picket fence.”

  “It’s a bit scary,” I say.

  “A bit?” she shrieks. “I’m still revelling in the idea that I can buy alcohol legally now and he’s saying, ‘Hey, let’s plan out the rest of our lives.’”

  “Haven’t you talked about the future before, though?”

  “Well, yeah, of course, but only vaguely. Like what we’re going to do in college, and what jobs we’d like to have, and maybe where we’d like to live and what we’d call our kids, but I never really took it seriously, you know? I mean, you and Barry talk about what names you’d pick for your kids, and you don’t mean it.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not going out, and did you really think we’d inflict names like Ophelia and Horatio onto innocent children? We were trying to be all intellectual and . . . stuff.”

  “Still. You know what I mean. I never thought that Andrew was serious about it. But now he’s all, ‘Ooh, let’s show everyone how much we really care about each other and how mature we are’.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said I’d think about it. What else could I say? It was after we got home on Friday night, and we were sitting in the car talking, and he brought it up. And I was going right, okay, what’s going on, have I stepped into an alternate universe or something? He’s really pissed off with me for not saying yes right away, though. He got all huffy. So I haven’t spoken to him all weekend.”

  “Oh, Lucy, you should have said something yesterday. Me going on about Declan when you had this to think about.”

  “Yeah, but I was kind of hoping he’d call around and say he didn’t really mean it and he’s sorry for bringing it up. Now that I think about it, though, he’s been hinting at this for a while. And it’s so ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, I can’t be engaged!”

  “I know, I know.” There’s a sense of déja vu about this, and I suddenly remember what comes next.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  As I suspected, the girl in Boots didn’t even blink when she saw that I was buying a pregnancy test. I found myself imagining what it would be like to be actually buying it for myself, though.

  Lucy hadn’t even had her sixteenth birthday yet and she might be having a baby. A child. She was going to be a mother and have to worry about whether her kid was wearing mittens and getting enough vitamins and all that stuff.

  ***

  Back then I hadn’t even thought about whether I wanted kids or not. It was never really an issue. Weird, that, considering that sex leads to babies and that while I was aware of the connection it had never really sunk in. I worried more about diseases, really. It’s awful and politically incorrect and even statistically incorrect to say it now, but I’d always associated HIV with gay men, and the first guy I ever slept with had been with one or two guys before me. And I wasn’t stupid; I knew that with all the stuff our crowd got up to, we were at risk for contracting pretty much everything there was. So I was always careful, and because of that, pregnancy had never been a real possibility. And I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have it be.

  ***

  She was waiting for me to arrive. The door was open before I’d even walked up the driveway. I held up the bag, and she smiled.

  “Oh, God, Emily, what would I do without you?” she said.

  I asked if she’d told Andrew yet.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t face him right now.”

  “You’ll have to eventually,” I reminded her.

  “I know, I know,” she said, chewing on her hair distractedly. She had it in two plaits and she looked so young. This couldn’t be really happening, could it?

  She took the bag from my hands and burst into tears. “Oh, God, Emily, I’m so scared.”

  “Shhh, shh,” I soothed her, putting my arms around her. At that moment all I wanted to do was make everything okay. Never mind that we hadn’t had a proper conversation in weeks or that I was only starting to get over her – this was my friend and I needed to do whatever I could, even though I felt completely helpless.

  She dried her eyes and took out the test. “Well. Here we go.”

  ***

  It was positive. Forget about that little sliver of hope that we’d both had, that maybe it was all a mistake and she wasn’t really pregnant. This was the real thing.

  ***

  We sat on her bed, her talking, me listening.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to,” she said. “And Andrew – oh, god. I don’t want to lose him, Em. I really don’t. I don’t know how I’d cope. Just the thought of it hurts me.”

  “You’re not going to lose him,” I reassured her. “He’s crazy about you.”

  “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said. “This whole thing . . . I can’t be pregnant. I just can’t.”

  “I know,” I said softly. “It doesn’t feel real.”

  “Make it go away. Please. Make everything just be back to normal.”

  And then she kissed me.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “I just – oh, I don’t know. Can’t you just make it all go away? Make everything be normal again?” She smiles.

  “What am I, your fairy godmother?” I laugh.

  “You always seem to make things better,” she says. “Make me forget . . .”

  “Forgetting isn’t always a good idea,” I say, but she’s already incredibly close to me. How did that happen? And she’s running her fingers along my lips and I know what’s coming next, because we’ve been down this road before.

  Lucy, you have to understand, is quite skilled in the art of kissing. Which is why I’m too distracted by this for a few minutes to even contemplate the idea of pushing her away.

  It’s not until the door swings open and Janet sticks her head in, asking, “Emily, do you know where –” that we stop.

  “Do I know where what is?” I ask.

  “What?” she says.

  “Whatever you barged in here looking for,” I remind her. “Speaking of which, don’t you ever knock?”

  “What, so you and your little friend can pretend that you’re not up here kissing?” Never have I heard the word “kissing” used with so much disgust.

  “No, because it’s common courtesy!” I say.

  “Don’t try changin
g the subject, Emily,” she says.

  “And what exactly is the ‘subject’?” I ask, exasperated.

  “You! And her! Kissing!”

  “Her name’s Lucy,” I remind Janet.

  “Lucy?” Janet looks closer at her. “Does your mother know about this?”

  “There’s not really a ‘this’,” Lucy says.

  “Oh, so what’s going on here, then?” Janet demands. “Did you ever plan on telling us that you’re batting for the other team, Emily?”

  I roll my eyes at the euphemism. “There’s nothing going on between me and Lucy,” I say honestly. “Now, if you don’t mind, tell me what you’re looking for and then get the hell out of my room.”

  “I’m telling Mum,” she says.

  “You’re telling on me?” I say in disbelief, and then shrug. “Fine. Tell her. I don’t care.”

  Janet looks at me in frustration. Clearly this is not the right response. I should be begging her to keep my ‘secret’. But I don’t care. Honestly.

  “Do you want me to go?” Lucy asks me quietly.

  “No, it’s okay, stay,” I say. “Janet, is there anything else you want?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she snaps, and storms out.

  Lucy looks at me and raises her eyebrows. “Well. That was pleasant.”

  “She’s just the greatest older sister, isn’t she?” I say.

  “Do you think she’ll really tell your mum?” Lucy asks, looking worried.

  I shrug. “No idea.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not really, no,” I say. “It’s not like I’m trying to keep anything a secret. It’s just – well, you know my parents. They don’t have much interest in my life, and that’s the way we all like it.” I think about Lucy and her mum again, friends and not just mother and daughter.

  “Sounds kind of lonely,” she says softly.