Fingerprints of You

by Kristen-Paige Madonia

  “Do you think he’s too quiet or too artsy?” Emmy would ask me before he’d show up at the lake. “Do you think he’s too nice? Or too boring, maybe?” she’d ask as she sucked on a cigarette and stared out at the water.

  I’d nod or shrug, thinking of how similar Dylan and Emmy were, how brave and fearless, carefree. Emmy was one of the popular kids who hung out in the parking lot between classes smoking cigarettes but also landed her name on the honor roll, while I was the kind of kid who just aimed to blend in. I was the new girl, an increasingly curvy loner who’d had to walk home from school before I met Emmy and Dylan, and it constantly surprised me she’d chosen me to be her partner in crime. I asked her about it once when we were parked down at the lake and she was venting about a girl in our class, Jenny Myers, who’d just gotten a new Mini Cooper. I knew she and Jenny had been friends, but we never hung around with her, and I wondered why she’d bailed on her old friends and replaced them with me.

  “Aside from the obvious fact that I’m ridiculously intelligent and adorable, why’d you pick me and walk out on them?” We were good enough friends by then, and I was feeling honest—honest and maybe a little worried she might walk out on me, too. Plus, I’d heard some of the girls had been giving her a hard time, the girls with the right clothes and the right boyfriends. I’d seen the notes scrawled on the bathroom doors. They called her a fake and a traitor, and I wanted to give her a chance to talk about it.

  “I spent three years with the Preps and the Partiers, you know?” she said, and I nodded.

  Before I came along, Emmy was part of a close-knit crew of Partiers, and she’d told me she and Jenny Myers and Allyson Carter and Maggie Rothbright had founded their clique freshman year in French class; the group of boys followed shortly after.

  “And I knew who I was supposed to be when I was with them. But it was never really me. Those kids come from families with money, and I always felt like I was playing catch-up.” We were standing in front of her truck, and she dug the toe of her red Vans into the mud. “This summer I just got sick of it. It’s like I knew they were just friends of convenience, party friends. I knew we wouldn’t keep in touch after graduation,” she said, and shrugged.

  And I understood exactly what she meant. I’d felt the same way about most of my friends in high school too. All the kids I’d spent the last years with never felt important, except for Molly-Warner and Emmy, maybe because I always figured we’d move before anyone had the chance to really get to know me.

  “And then you showed up,” Emmy said. “You rescued me, really,” and I loved the way she said it like that. “Plus, you were cool. And not cool in a knowing-about-the-best-parties or having-the-best-clothes kind of way.”

  I shook my head. “I am definitely not that kind of cool.”

  “No, you’re authentically cool, though,” she said. “Cool in the way that you can be totally happy sitting in my truck bed reading a book while me and Dylan make out in the front seat, and you’ll actually have something smart to say afterward.” She pulled out her pack from her back pocket and lit a smoke with her lucky yellow lighter. “You actually care about what you read and don’t just pretend to be reading because you think it will make you seem smart.”

  “That would be totally lame,” I said, and she nodded because she knew by then how important books were to me even if she didn’t share the interest.

  “And it’s cool that you don’t care if you have a lot of friends, if you’re popular,” she said.

  “I have no skills at being popular.”

  “And I love that,” she said.

  “Rumor has it, popularity is overrated,” I said back.

  “Exactly. You rescued me, really,” she repeated, and then she elbowed me and smiled before she took a long drag.

  The afternoon Simon found out I was pregnant, Dylan showed up at the spillway on his bike around five, and I sat on the grass and read the pregnancy book Emmy stole from the library, while they got stoned and made out in the front seat of the truck. I’d Googled some details already and had learned about dating the pregnancy by the first day of my last period and warding off the nausea by eating small meals and sipping, not chugging, my liquids, but the book broke it down week by week and had more information about nutrition and development and childbirth than I ever could have needed. Eventually Dylan drove me home, one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on Emmy’s knee as she sat between us on the bench seat and mumbled the words to a Rolling Stones song on the radio. It was the middle of November, and Dylan liked to drive with the windows rolled all the way down and the stereo turned all the way up, which was one of the things Emmy and I liked best about him. I watched Dylan instinctively rub his thumb over the plane of her knee, the gap of tan skin between skirt hem and boot shaft, and I wondered how long you had to be with someone before that kind of thing became second nature. Except for the pothead, the boys I’d made out with back in Virginia were inconsistent interactions, guys I’d had classes with. And none of them would’ve taken the time to ask your last name, let alone hold your hand at school.

  “Looks like your mom’s man-friend got a new ride,” Emmy said when Dylan parked the truck behind a glossy blue, four-door Tacoma in my driveway. “That thing is gorgeous.”

  Mom and Simon were sitting on the front porch with Simon’s dog, Pace, lying at their feet next to a half-empty bottle of liquor. She was laughing, and from the driveway she looked young. Young and maybe a little drunk, but mostly she just looked happy as Simon reached over and pushed a strand of hair from her face.

  I took my nose ring out, slid it into my pocket, and opened the door as Emmy turned down the radio.

  “Am I allowed to call Stella Grandma yet?” she asked, leaning her head out the passenger side window as I grabbed my backpack from the back of the truck bed.

  “Watch it,” I told her.

  “Too early?” she said.

  Dylan rolled his eyes as he backed the Ford out the driveway, and I headed to the porch.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Mom said when I reached the front steps.

  Pace lifted his head and looked up at me, so I dropped my bag and squatted down to scratch the spot between his ears he liked to have rubbed. There was a small watercolor drying by the door, an abstract painting with quick slashing brushstrokes flung across the canvas with seemingly no pattern or purpose. I imagined that if I looked at it too long, the sharp angles and lines of chaos might kick open a migraine or another round of nausea.

  It was a Friday, and Stella seemed a little more boozed than usual as she told me about Simon buying the new car and about the celebratory dinner she was planning on cooking that night. Tacos and margaritas, fresh guacamole and salsa. It should have sounded good, but by then I was sick of having dinner with Simon and Stella. I was tired of watching another guy fall for her, knowing that eventually she’d screw it up. I liked this one more than I’d liked most of them, and I could tell how much he liked us back. Simon was complicated since he was Stella’s boss, and I worried that in another month or so, when the relationship turned to shit, we’d be broke again. She’d lose her job and make us move to another small town where we’d have to start over. There was a formula, and Simon was one of the good guys, one of the men who’d be stunned when Stella woke up one morning and just walked away because she was bored or jaded or in a bad mood. Guys like Simon, the nice ones, were better than guys like Denny and Rocco, the not-nice ones, but by then I knew none of them ever lasted.

  “I thought I might go out with Emmy and Dylan for dinner,” I said even though my mother had unofficially grounded me since she caught me with Johnny Drinko that day back in Virginia. She never actually said I wasn’t allowed to go out at night, but I knew not to ask. It was clear I couldn’t do anything fun once I was pregnant.

  “Give me a break, Lemon,” she said just before she asked Simon to top off her glass. He poured her a drink as I geared up for a fight with my mother.

  “You can’t hold me captive,” I
said. “I want to go out.” In truth, I’d been going out to the spillway every afternoon, but I’d recently decided that didn’t count. I wanted my nights back. I wanted to drive around with Emmy, to drink beer, to get out of the house where I was beginning to like the man my mom was pretending she’d keep around.

  “You’ve been out enough,” she said, bringing the glass to her lips and peering at me over the rim of her third or fourth vodka tonic. I noticed Fire Engine Red paint on her fingertips. “You smell like cigarettes, Lemon, Jesus Christ.”

  I knew my mother had smoked Marlboro Reds the entire time she was pregnant with me. In fact, she smoked them the entire time I was a kid and quit smoking only when the relationship with Rocco fell apart. I also knew that the night before she left him, Rocco put his cigarette out on Stella’s arm when he was piss-drunk and jealous, something she’d tried hard to hide from me. So when we left the Jersey Shore, she left her smoking habit with Rocco back in the pool hall he managed for the woman he was screwing on the side. Denny was the con in Philadelphia, Rocco was the rite of passage in New Jersey, and I suppose Johnny Drinko was the one who knocked up her kid in Virginia.

  “Emmy and Dylan smoke,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

  She put her glass on the porch, by her chair, and leaned forward toward me, perching her elbows on her knees.

  “Look at me, Lemon,” she said. So I did. “I don’t want any of this. But now that it’s happening, what I want is for you to take some responsibility, to take care of yourself. To take care of—”

  “Mom.” I stopped her and looked at Simon, who was leaning in his chair, calm and curious, ready.

  “You should tell him,” Stella said as she picked up her glass and leaned back. “He should know.”

  Simon moved his hand to her knee and squeezed. “Be cool, Stella,” he said. “We’re celebrating tonight.”

  I guess by then he figured my mom and I fought in the way most teenaged girls fight with their mothers—provokingly and intentionally—but he didn’t know yet about Johnny Drinko. He didn’t know he was dating a woman who would be a grandmother soon. I guess I had hoped I wouldn’t have to tell him, since the whole thing was pretty humiliating. Plus, part of me worried he might take off if he found out what a loser his girlfriend’s daughter really was, that he might disappear and leave us on our own again.

  “Tell him,” she said. “He should know.”

  I looked down at Pace and up at the rotting wood of the windowsill above us and over at the weeds creeping up from the lawn and onto the front porch. “I’m pregnant,” I said. “I guess I’m having a baby in July.” And before he got the chance to ask, I lied, “The dad is a boy from my school in Virginia. He doesn’t know, though.”

  Stella liked to say her favorite thing about Simon was that he was really good at rolling with the punches. So when I told him about the baby, he was calm and collected and told me, “Sometimes the best things that happen to us are the ones that aren’t planned,” and then he took a long swig from his glass, draining it, before he looked up and winked. And I thought that might be the end of it, but the vodka must have hit Stella all at once then, because her cheeks flared up red just before she rose to her feet and started yelling. Yelling at me for being an idiot and yelling at Simon for being so apathetic, yelling at no one in particular for this being the life she had not imagined. A knocked-up daughter, a shit hole in the middle of West Virginia where she couldn’t even buy a bottle of booze on a Sunday. She kicked over her glass by the chair, which startled the dog, who popped up and bolted down the stairs and into the front yard, where he rummaged behind a bush and started rolling on his back.

  “Jesus, Stella,” Simon said. “Chill out.”

  Stella started in on him about his mangy dog he cared more about than her and how she felt like she was running a boardinghouse with him and his mutt staying at our place all the time, with Simon’s dishes in the sink and the dog’s toys all over the floor. But I couldn’t watch her yell at him, watch him take it just like I did when she turned on me that way. It made me sick to see her treat him like a child, so I picked up my backpack, slid inside through the screen door, and headed to my bedroom.

  THAT NIGHT, I TALKED MY MOM INTO letting Emmy come over, so the two of us sat on my porch and talked about her dad, who had left the week before.

  “He always left,” she said as she slumped back into the camping chair and crossed one leg over the other. “One weekend a month he’d train in Preston County at Camp Dawson, but he always came back. He’d be tired and sunburned and he’d cuss more at first, but eventually the training would work its way out of him,” she said, and she reached down into her bag and pulled out her cigarettes. “He always came back,” she repeated in a way that meant she knew this time there’d be no guarantees.

  Emmy’s dad and the butcher at the grocery store and the guy who changed my mom’s oil down at the gas station had all left town, and a whole slew of kids like Emmy became what I had always been: fatherless. Thinking about it too much made me wish I was still allowed to smoke and drink.

  She lit the Marlboro Light with a pack of matches and told me she and Dylan were thinking of having sex, next weekend maybe, or the weekend after.

  “How come now?” I asked because part of me was surprised they hadn’t had sex already, and part of me was jealous they might have sex soon. Mostly I was just glad to talk about something besides her dad and my pregnancy.

  She said she was pretty sure Dylan might love her and that she was absolutely sure she liked him better than the other guys she had slept with, so it made sense to do it with him. She said she liked the way he wore his hair messy instead of sculpted with product, or worse, cut short and buzzed at the neck like the other boys from school. Dylan wore black high-tops and slim-fitted T-shirts with rock bands on the front, and he read poetry during his free time instead of four-wheeling through the muddy trails out in the country like the kids we knew in town. I nodded when she told me she thought Dylan might be the most interesting boy she knew.

  “I love how he doesn’t give a shit about fitting in. Plus,” Emmy said as she cocked her head to the side and smiled, “I like the way you can see his hip bones nudging out from under those stupid corduroy pants. So cute and rocker. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to date a boy who wears jeans again.” She ran her tongue across her lips and groaned.

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, just be careful,” I said, and pointed to my stomach.

  She laughed, but I think she was pretty sad and restless then. I think she needed to feel important and safe and beautiful.

  “Just be careful, Emmy,” I repeated, that time serious since I wasn’t sure anymore what I thought of sex or what I thought of Emmy giving herself away like that, even if Dylan was a good guy.

  Stella was painting in the living room, and I could smell the fumes leaking out the window screens when Emmy reached into her bag and pulled out a flask, unscrewing the top and tilting the silver bottle back. It was easy to imagine the liquid burning down her throat as she sucked on the lip until her eyes began to water.

  “I swear this town is eating me alive,” she said. “You know, I’ve never been farther away than visiting my grandparents in Miami. Who the hell wants to go to Miami?” she said. “I want to go somewhere great, you know? I want to see the Mississippi River and the Grand Canyon and that place with all those guys’ heads carved on it.”

  “Rushmore,” I said as I waved her smoke away from my face.

  “I need to see Mount Rushmore,” she said. “Shit.”

  It was hard to imagine what it would be like to have stayed in one place growing up, to know the same town and the same group of people for so many years that things became predictable. Stella never let us stay in one place for longer than two or three years before she’d pick a new destination and announce we were moving again. I never got a say about where we went: Each uprooting was always nonnegotiable. I figured I would be a different kind of mother than Stella,
and I thought about the way she was still trying to control me even though I would be a mother myself soon. But then I heard Emmy breathe in wet and heavy, and I realized she was crying, so I took her hand and leaned over to rest my head on her shoulder.

  “Did you hear about Bobby Elder?” she asked when she pulled away. She leaned down to put the flask on the floor.

  I nodded and said, “Yeah, I heard,” because everyone in Morgantown had heard about Bobby Elder by then. Emmy and I just hadn’t talked about it yet.

  Bobby was a twenty-three-year-old kid who’d worked on cars down at Ervin’s Auto Repair on Kingwood Street and gotten killed by a roadside bomb near Kabul a week earlier. The local paper did a feature story about his family and his childhood, about how he was supposed to play football at WVU but lost his scholarship after a knee injury. He joined the Army Reserve instead to help pay his tuition. He wasn’t a soldier, the paper wrote. He was a kid. A linebacker and a mechanic. He was a college student who was studying physical therapy. It was the most miserable thing Morgantown had been hit with in a while, and everyone was talking about it except for me and Emmy because I wasn’t sure what to say to her about Bobby Elder.

  “He was, like . . .” She turned her head away from me, so I could barely hear her say “so young.”

  I nodded and looked at the shadows being thrown around at our feet by the porch light on the wall behind us. It had rained that afternoon, so the air was thick with the smell of mud and bugs and water, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t look at Emmy either, sitting next to me feeling so shitty and depressed. It made me crazy because I didn’t have the words to turn the conversation into something good.