Fingerprints of You

by Kristen-Paige Madonia

  Molly-Warner was my most confident friend even though she was a little bit fat, and she had short, spiky hair that made her look tough and unpredictable. She wasn’t weirded out when I told her about all the different places my mom and I had lived, and she’d been nice to me from the start even back when I was the new kid in school, the daughter of a single mom who lived in the junky apartment complex near the mall. She never was one to judge. Both her parents worked at the furniture factory in town, and they bought her a used Toyota when she turned sixteen so they wouldn’t have to worry about driving her to school. She was my only friend with a car, and I was her only friend who didn’t mind talking about what it felt like to have sex.

  “Did it make you feel important?” she asked one afternoon as she wove her way through town with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hanging out the window.

  I had my nose buried in a not-very-good collection of Jim Morrison poems, and I shook my head and kept my face turned down toward the book. “Not really.”

  “But it was exciting, right? To be with him like that?”

  She hit the brakes, and I looked up, eyeing the red light that put the car on pause. She was staring at me like I was supposed to say something significant as she raised her dark eyebrows high, punctuating her face with them like two big quote marks. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I also didn’t like to lie.

  “I guess it . . .” I tried to find an easy way to describe the weight in my stomach the first time we did it, the distinct and lonely feeling that comes when you realize something important has happened and that, if you had blinked just a second longer, you almost would have missed it. “I guess it felt good to do something memorable,” I said.

  She returned her eyes to the road with a “humph,” trying to translate my statement into something satisfying, a recommendation maybe, or a promise.

  We lied and told Johnny Drinko we were nineteen, and when he said he was twenty-seven, I decided he was too young for my mom anyway, that he probably didn’t know she’d be thirty-six in November. She had a convenient habit of letting the fact slip through the cracks.

  “You girls like living here?” he asked as a woman and her son nudged past us and headed into the sub shop.

  I looked at him and tried to decide if he liked living there, but it was too hard to tell, since he was wearing sunglasses and watching Church Street in front of us as the cars moved down the road.

  “It’s okay, I guess.” I shrugged.

  “It’s a shit hole is what it is,” Molly-Warner said, and I wished I could sound as assertive as she did when I talked. It was something she was always telling me I needed to work on.

  “Oh, yeah?” Johnny eyed her up and down, and I tried to telepathically tell her to suck in her gut. I wanted him to think I was the kind of girl who had interesting thin friends with strong opinions.

  “There’s nothing to do here—it’s the same shit all the time.” She flicked her cigarette onto the pavement.

  “That’s kind of what I like about this town,” Johnny said. “It’s mellow, no surprises. I dig that.”

  I wanted to tell him that’s exactly how I felt, that that was what made the town my favorite place Stella and I had lived, but I kept my mouth shut and finished my smoke instead.

  We were pretty drunk by the time my mom got home, so my voice was slow and slurred when I tried to explain why Molly-Warner and I were sitting around in our underwear taking tequila shots and playing strip poker with Johnny Drinko. She said something about us acting like prostitutes, and then she told me to get some clothes on and go to my room. Now. Johnny was on his feet pretty fast considering how many cocktails he’d had, grabbing his T-shirt off the floor and pulling his tennis shoes on as he headed toward the door.

  “It’s cool, Stella,” he said as he dug in his pocket for his keys. “We’re just hanging out.”

  Molly-Warner and I stood in the doorway that connected the kitchen to the living room, and we held hands and smiled as we watched my mom throw her cell phone at Johnny’s head.

  “Are you insane?” she yelled right before the phone hit the wall.

  We stopped smiling then, and I started to feel a little queasy when Molly-Warner began to cry, the tequila sneaking up on me and uncoiling in my stomach, stretching out. But I squeezed my friend’s hand and whispered, “Shh, it’s gonna be fine,” and then Johnny called my mom a crazy bitch, and he opened the door and headed down the hallway.

  She followed him out and stood at the top of the stairs, yelling, “They’re only seventeen, you sick shithead” until he was gone. I hoped the neighbors weren’t home from work yet.

  My mom kicked Molly-Warner out, and I sat on the couch as I watched her slam the door and call my friend a dumb slut. Then she turned her eyes to me.

  “Are you crazy? Have you lost your mind?” she asked.

  Which made me think of her at the Motel 6 the week after we left Denny, of the way I dragged her out of bed on the sixth day and dumped her in the shower. It was fast and furious, the misery and depression clinging to her like Velcro she couldn’t get unstuck. I was only fourteen at the time, but I watched as my mother lost herself over Denny, a drunk who treated us like crap, a loser who took all her money.

  “Jesus, Lemon. He’s twice your age,” she said, which wasn’t even close to being true, but I let it slide.

  I looked at her in the tight black miniskirt and the chunky wedge heels she’d worn to work. I looked at our tiny apartment, the stacks of dirty dishes taking over the coffee table and the trash spilling out of the bin in the kitchen. And for the first time I realized how embarrassing it was to have a mother who acted like a child, to live in an apartment where two people in the building couldn’t take a hot shower at the same time. I decided I’d outgrown Stella’s choices: I wanted a permanent address, a home with enough space for us to unpack all the boxes, a family that made more sense than we did.

  “Look at you,” she said. “He works at a tattoo parlor, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re the one who gave him the key,” I said, even though I knew it had nothing to do with me and Molly-Warner getting drunk with the man I figured my mother wanted as her boyfriend.

  “What does that mean?” She came toward me. She ran her eyes over the empty shot glasses that had left sticky rings along the edge of our coffee table, at the tequila that had spilled and ruined her stack of Vogue magazines piled on the floor. At my jeans on the carpet next to the couch.

  “It just means he was here when I got home. He was here because of you.” I stared at her. “They always are.”

  Her face changed right before she slapped me—it was hot and tight and far away, her face like sculpted metal and her eyes like broken glass.

  I brought my hand to my cheek, my skin throbbing and my eyes watering over. And when she turned away, headed to her bedroom, and slammed the door behind her, I knew we’d be moving within the month.

  The last time I saw Johnny Drinko was that weekend, back at the tattoo shop. He was ringing up a man with a buzz cut and a square of Saran Wrap taped to his forearm, and I stood outside the window, looking in as Johnny handed the guy a credit-card receipt. The customer left, and then Johnny came out, lit a cigarette, and squatted down next to me. I didn’t say anything for a long time, but then he reached over and hooked his finger under the edge of my silver anklet.

  “I hope I didn’t get you and your friend in too much trouble,” he said.

  I remembered the way his skin looked when he took off his shirt at our apartment, the way the black tattoo on his back reminded me of the Egyptian hieroglyphics I’d learned about in social studies the year before.

  “Nah, it’s no big deal.”

  He dropped the silver chain but kept his grip on my foot as he rubbed his thumb along the curve of my heel, making me hot and anxious in a way none of the boys from school ever had.

  “You seem like a good kid. It’s too bad.” He stopped.

  I fidgeted with the b
utton on my corduroy miniskirt and imagined how his breath might taste. Like sweat and cigarettes, tequila and ink, maybe. “It’s too bad what?” I asked.

  I thought of the pothead and the way I kept my shirt on the first time we did it in his car down at the cul-de-sac. We were rushed and awkward, childish, and it embarrassed me as I stood outside the shop with Johnny Drinko. I imagined it would be better with Johnny, that he would be smarter and less clumsy. He would make me feel grown up, and I would finally understand why Stella wanted to be with men like him.

  He ran his hand up my calf and squeezed my leg. “It’s too bad about you being so young.” He rubbed his thumb along the slope behind my knee. “And me being so old, I guess.”

  When I followed Johnny Drinko into the shop and behind the white curtain, I was thinking of my mom across town behind the jewelry counter at J.C. Penney, how she was probably planning the move, deciding what we would need to leave behind this time and what we would have space to take with us.

  And then Johnny sat down in the same chair my mother had sat in a week earlier and pulled me toward him. Behind him I saw myself in the glass mirror above his work counter, me looking down at him as he tugged me to his lap. He tasted different than I expected. I’d been right about the cigarettes, but there was also something cinnamon and hot, like the thick red After Shock liquor Molly-Warner and I drank sometimes at her house. At first his tongue was slower than the pothead’s, but it sped up as he shoved his hands under my shirt, his fingers darting back and forth across my skin, pinching.

  “Should we lock the door or something?” I asked when I pulled my face away from his and tried to catch my breath.

  “I already did,” he said.

  My mom and I bailed on the month-to-month rental by the sub shop and moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, the following week.

  “I’m doing this for you,” Stella said after we loaded up the car and turned in the key to the landlord. But I just rolled my eyes and looked out the window as she pulled out onto the road.

  I didn’t get a chance to see Johnny Drinko again, but I copied down the address of the tattoo shop from the phone book and promised myself eventually I would find words good enough to write down and send to him from the road. I lost the address on I-77 somewhere between Beckley and Bridgeport.

  The day we left, I ran into the pothead when we stopped at the gas station near the mall. At first he pretended he didn’t know me, but when Stella went inside to pay, he came over to the car and leaned down at my window.

  “I heard about what you did, Lemon,” he said. He reached inside to graze his fingers across my cheek, but I shook his hand away. “You screwed that guy down at Atlas Tattoo.”

  I squinted and looked behind him at my mother, who was handing her credit card to the man at the register.

  “When you turn out like your mom, just remember who taught you first,” he said before he laughed and walked away.

  And in that instant I realized I had become a girl worth talking about, a person worth remembering once I moved away.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER WE WERE SETTLED in a squat two-bedroom house in West Virginia with the same water-stained ceilings and sluggish showerhead dribble as all the other places we had rented, but this time around was different because by the time I enrolled at my new school the first week of November, I was almost six weeks pregnant.

  I spent my first days dodging teachers in the hallways and categorizing students into the distinct groups I’d seen in every school I’d gone to. There were Preps and Hipsters and Weekend-Warrior Partiers with trust funds stitched into their back pockets, the kids who threw ragers at their houses when their parents flew to Vail or Vegas or Key West for vacations. There were the Jocks and the Geeks and the Film Kids, who kept video cameras in their backpacks. The Adrenaline Junkies were the guys who went skydiving or rock climbing on the weekends, and the Low Riders were the country boys who stuck small wheels on big trucks and cranked rap music from their dashboard speakers. I usually slipped in somewhere between the Art Kids and the English Nerds, never committed enough to join the lit magazine staff, knowing we could move again at any time, but too much of a bookworm to be considered an angst-ridden Art Punk or Emo. It always took a while to make friends, but this was the large kind of public school that made it easy to disappear.

  Then, a week after I told Stella about the pregnancy, my new friend Emmy Preston found out her dad was being sent to Afghanistan.

  “You’re shitting me,” I said.

  “I wish,” she said back, and then neither of us said anything as I tried to wrap my brain around it slowly, the shock of it moving over us like fog. It was bigger than all the arguments with Stella, bigger, even, than my frustrations at having moved again before I finished driver’s ed.

  Like a lot of the dads in Morgantown, West Virginia, Emmy’s father enlisted as a reservist for drill pay. That November, when their infantry unit was activated, over a hundred and fifty of the town’s men would have to board a group of old, beat-up school buses and leave for a place that, until then, had existed for us only on television and in newspapers. Now the war infected their families, and Emmy handled the news like the rest of the reservists’ kids: with silent acceptance and a vacant shrug of the shoulders.

  Emmy and I had met in Contemporary Lit on my first day at school, and out of twenty-six other kids in the room, she picked me to lean over and ask with a big wide grin, “WantToGetStonedAfterClass?” She had flawless tan skin and quirky rectangle-shaped glasses she had to wear for reading, and later she said she picked me because of my nose ring, a small silver hoop I wore after I’d secretly gotten my nose pierced when we first moved to West Virginia. I carried the nose ring in my pocket and removed or replaced it depending on the proximity of my mother.

  “You were new and I was bored with my scene. Everyone likes new, right?” she once said. “Plus, facial piercings score major points in terms of hipness. Even if you can’t drive.” She nudged me then and smiled.

  After class that first day, when I told her my name was Lemon, Emmy said, “Sure it is,” which I was used to, and I followed her out of the building and figured there were worse things I could do than smoke a joint with this long-haired blonde in skinny jeans and a red hooded zip-up. I was almost a head shorter than she, so I had a perfect view of her gold necklace as I walked beside her, the small four-leaf clover resting inside the V of her collarbones. We walked through the back of campus, down by the gym and up a small hill to an empty field, and all the while people watched her. I could feel their eyes on Emmy like the glare of summertime sun streaming through a car window.

  “I lost my virginity here last summer. It was the football field a million years ago,” she said as we crossed over the turf, “but now they never mow it, and the only thing it’s really good for is smoking between classes and hiding when they take us outside for gym,” and I knew immediately Emmy and I would be very good friends. She would be the person who taught me never to apologize for who I really was.

  And in the same way, it took my mother less than thirty seconds to decide she did not like her when they met. Emmy came for dinner, and while we waited for the pizza guy to arrive, Emmy tried to convince Stella to get a better job that paid salary, a better haircut with highlights, and a better house on the north side of town near West Virginia University.

  So while Emmy prepped for her dad’s deployment over at her house, my house became angry and loud as Stella processed the reality of my pregnancy. Once she knew about the baby, it seemed like happy hour happened more frequently. “Get me a beer, Lemon,” she’d say when she got home from work, shifting her eyes away from my stomach with a dramatic “ugh” or “hmph.”

  I was a neon sign in a storefront. I was the intercom voice in the public library announcing someone had left their car lights on. When she looked at me, my body was a stack of catalogues that kept showing up in our mailbox. Unwanted and unnecessary, a waste of natural resources.

  Stella also started sl
eeping with her boss, Simon, a freelance photographer who’d hired her to help him stay organized after he landed an ad campaign with The North Face for a shoot in Dolly Sods Wilderness Area. Simon had grown up in Fort Collins, Colorado, a place that seemed as foreign and far away as Kabul, Afghanistan, where Emmy’s dad was deployed. He’d spent a few years working on a farm in Costa Rica, and even went to college for a little while to study photography, but ended up on the East Coast because he fell in love with a woman who didn’t love him back enough to stick around. That’s what he told me, at least, one night when we stayed up to watch Saturday Night Live together. And then he said he decided to stay in West Virginia once he’d arrived, because he liked how slow it was. He liked the heat in the summer and the green in the spring, and mostly he liked the way Morgantown encouraged people to take their time. The way he said it made me homesick for the apartment that smelled like bread, and my friend Molly-Warner, and it even made me miss the smell of skin and ink a little bit, since Johnny Drinko said something similar the day we made tequila sunrises.

  Stella claimed his upbringing out west made him more cultured and interesting than the other men she’d met in town. I think she liked the way he paid attention to her paintings and the way he’d show up with new brushes or art books, little gifts none of her other boyfriends would have thought to buy. He liked all the same late-night television I did, and he was good at explaining how Spanish conjugations worked, one of the subjects I’d fallen behind in since the distraction of the pregnancy, so I liked him okay. Better, at least, than Denny in Philadelphia or Rocco in New Jersey.

  November turned the town a dark rusty color as orange and red leaves began dropping to the ground, and Emmy and I wasted time hanging out down by the lake every day after school. Sometimes we’d do our homework, and sometimes we’d just listen to music or play cards. She was good at gin rummy, and I was a blackjack badass. By then Emmy was kissing a boy from our physics class, a long-haired guitarist named Dylan who worked after school as the poetry editor for the Morgantown High literary magazine. Dylan liked to listen to the Shins and he liked to smoke pot, but mostly he liked to drive us around three wide in the cab of Emmy’s old blue truck, since his parents hadn’t bought him a car and he usually rode to school on his dirt bike. He was the kind of guy who would never outgrow his long hair, who would never hold a nine-to-five.