“I love this room,” my aunt said with a sigh, setting my suitcase on the floor. “It’s so comfortable.”
“It’s nice,” I forced out. After she left me alone to unpack, I plopped down on the bed, still in disbelief that I was actually here. At this house, in this place, with this relative. I stared out the window—noting the rust-colored wooden planking on the neighbor’s house—wishing with every blink that I’d be able to see Puget Sound or the snow-capped Cascade Mountains, or even the rocky and rugged coast I’d known all my life. I thought about the Douglas fir and red cedar trees, and even the fog and rain. I thought about my family and friends who might as well have been on another planet, and the lump in my throat grew even bigger. I was pregnant and alone, marooned in a terrible place, and all I wanted was to turn back the clock and change what had happened. All of it—the oops, the barfing, the withdrawal from school, the trip here. I wanted to be a regular teenager again—hell, I would have taken being just a kid again instead of this—but I suddenly remembered the blue plus sign on the pregnancy test, and the pressure began to build behind my eyes. I may have been strong on the journey, and maybe even up until then, but when I squeezed my teddy bear to my chest and inhaled her familiar scent, the dam simply burst. It wasn’t a pretty cry like you see in Hallmark movies; it was a raging sob, complete with snorts and wails and quivering shoulders, and it seemed to go on forever.
* * *
About my teddy bear: she was neither cute nor expensive, but I’d slept with her for as long as I could remember. The thin coffee-colored fur had worn away in patches, and Frankenstein stitches held one of her arms in place. I’d had my mom sew on a button when one of her eyes had popped off, but the damage made her seem even more special to me, because sometimes I felt damaged, too. In third grade, I’d used a Sharpie to write my name on the bottom of her foot, marking her as mine forever. When I was younger, I used to bring her with me everywhere, my own version of a security blanket. Once, I’d accidentally left her at Chuck E. Cheese when I’d gone to a friend’s birthday party, and when I got home, I cried so hard I actually puked. My dad had to drive back across town to retrieve her, and I’m pretty sure I held on to her for almost a week straight after that.
Over the years, she had been dropped in mud, splashed with spaghetti sauce, and soaked with sleep drool; whenever my mom decided it was finally time to wash her, she’d throw her in the laundry along with my clothes. I’d sit on the floor, watching the washer and dryer, imagining her tumbling among the jeans and towels and hoping she wouldn’t be destroyed in the process. But Maggie-bear—short for Maggie’s bear—would eventually emerge clean and warm. My mom would hand her back to me and I’d suddenly feel complete again, like all was right in the world.
When I went to Ocracoke, Maggie-bear was the only thing I knew I couldn’t leave behind.
* * *
Aunt Linda checked on me during my breakdown but didn’t seem to know what to say or do, and apparently she decided it was probably best to let me sort through things on my own. I was glad about that, but kind of sad, too, because it made me feel even more isolated than I already did.
Somehow, I survived that first day, then the next. She showed me a bicycle she’d bought at a garage sale, which looked older than I was, with a cushy seat big enough for someone twice my size and a basket on the front hanging from massive handlebars. I hadn’t ridden a bike in years.
“I had a young man in town fix it up, so it should work fine.”
“Great” was all I could muster.
On the third day, my aunt went back to work and was out of the house long before I finally woke. On the table, she’d left a folder filled with my homework, and I realized that I was already falling behind. I hadn’t been a great student even in the best of times—I was middle-of-the-pack and hated when my report cards came out—and if I hadn’t cared much about acing my classes before, I was even more apathetic now. She’d also written me a note to remind me that I had two quizzes the following day. Even though I tried to study, I couldn’t concentrate and already knew I was going to bomb them, which I promptly did.
Afterward, maybe because she was feeling even more sorry for me than usual, my aunt thought it might be a good idea to get me out of the house and drove me to her shop. It was a small eatery and coffee bar that offered a lot more than just food. It specialized in biscuits that were baked fresh every morning and served either with sausage gravy or as some sort of sandwich or dessert. Beyond breakfast, the shop also sold used books and rented out video cassettes; shipped UPS packages; had mailboxes for rent; offered faxes, scanning, and copies; and provided Western Union services. My aunt owned the place with her friend Gwen and it opened at five in the morning so the fishermen could grab a bite before heading out, which meant she was usually there by four to start baking. She introduced me to Gwen, who wore an apron over jeans and a flannel shirt and kept her graying blond hair in a messy ponytail. She seemed nice enough, and though I only spent about an hour in the shop, my impression was that they treated each other like an old married couple. They could communicate with a single glance, predicted each other’s requests, and moved around each other behind the counter like dancers.
Business was steady but not booming, and I spent most of my time thumbing through the used books. There were Agatha Christie mysteries and westerns by Louis L’Amour, along with a good-sized selection of books by best-selling authors. There was also a donation box, and while I was there, a woman who’d come in for coffee and a biscuit dropped off a small crate of books, almost all of them romance novels. As I riffled through them, I thought to myself that if I’d had less romance in August, I wouldn’t be in the mess I was in right now.
The shop closed at three during the week, and after Gwen and Aunt Linda locked the doors, my aunt took me on a longer, more extensive tour of the village. It took all of fifteen minutes and didn’t change my initial impression in the slightest. After that, we went home, where I hid out in my room for the rest of the day. As weird as the room was, it was the only place I had some privacy when Aunt Linda was home. When I wasn’t half-assing my way through my schoolwork, I could listen to music, brood, and spend way too much time contemplating death and my growing belief that the world—and especially my family—would be better off without me.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of my aunt either. She had short gray hair and warm hazel eyes, set in a face deeply lined with wrinkles. Her gait was always hurried. She’d never been married, never had children, and sometimes came across as a little bit bossy. She also used to be a nun, and even though she’d left the Sisters of Mercy almost ten years ago, she still believed in the whole “cleanliness is next to godliness” thing. I had to straighten up my room daily, do my own laundry, and clean the kitchen before she got home in midafternoon as well as after dinner. Fair enough, I suppose, since I was living there, but no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to do it right. Our conversations about it were usually short, a statement followed by an apology. Like this:
The cups were still damp when you put them back in the cupboard.
Sorry.
There are still crumbs on the table.
Sorry.
You forgot to use 409 when you cleaned the stovetop.
Sorry.
You need to straighten the covers on your bed.
Sorry.
I must have said sorry a hundred times the first week I was there, and the second week was even worse. I bombed yet another test and grew bored by the view when I sat on the porch. I eventually came to believe that even if you stuck someone on a fabulous tropical island, the sight would get old after a while. I mean, the ocean never seems to change. Whenever you see it, the water is just there. Sure, the clouds might shift around, and right before sunset the sky might glow orange and red and yellow—but what fun is watching a sunset if there’s no one to share it with? My aunt wasn’t the kind of woman who seemed to appreciate such things.
And by the way? Pregnancy suc
ks. I was still sick every morning and sometimes it was hard to make it to the bathroom in time. I’d read that some women never got sick at all, but not me. I’d barfed forty-nine mornings in a row and I had the sense that my body seemed to be going for some kind of record.
If there was a plus side to the barfing, it was that I hadn’t gained much weight, maybe only a pound or two by mid-November. Frankly, I didn’t want to get fat, but my mom had bought me the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and as I reluctantly thumbed through it one evening, I learned that a lot of women put on only a pound or two in the first trimester, which made me nothing special. After that, though, the average weight gain was about a pound a week, right up until delivery. When I did the math—which would add twenty-seven more pounds to my smallish frame—I realized that my six-pack abs would probably be replaced by a keg. Not, of course, that I had six-pack abs in the first place.
Even worse than the barfing were the crazy hormones, which in my case meant acne. No matter how much I cleaned my face, pimples erupted on my cheeks and forehead like constellations in the nighttime sky. Morgan, my perfect older sister, never had a pimple in her life, and when I stared in the mirror, I thought that I could give her a dozen of mine and still have skin that looked worse than hers did. Even then, she’d probably still be beautiful, smart, and popular. We got along okay at home—we were closer when we were younger—but at school she kept her distance, preferring the company of her own friends. She got straight A’s, played the violin, and had appeared in not one but two television commercials for a local department store. If you think it was easy being compared to her while I was growing up, think again. Toss in my pregnancy, and it was pretty clear why she was far and away my parents’ favorite. Frankly, she would have been my favorite, too.
By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was officially depressed. That occurs in approximately seven percent of pregnancies, by the way. Between barfing, zits, and depression, I’d hit the trifecta. Lucky me, right? I was falling further behind in school and the music on my Walkman grew noticeably gloomier. Even Gwen tried and failed to cheer me up. I’d gotten to know her a little since our first introduction—she came to dinner twice a week—and she’d asked me whether I wanted to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. She’d brought over a small television and set it up in the kitchen, but even though I’d practically forgotten what a TV looked like by then, it wasn’t enough to entice me from my room. Instead, I sat alone and tried not to cry while imagining my mom and Morgan making stuffing or baking pies in the kitchen and my dad in the recliner, enjoying a football game. Even though my aunt and Gwen served a meal similar to what my family usually had, it just wasn’t the same, and I barely had any appetite.
I also thought a lot about my best friends, Madison and Jodie. I hadn’t been allowed to tell them the truth about why I’d left; instead, my parents had told people—including Madison’s and Jodie’s parents—that I’d gone to live with my aunt in some remote place because of an urgent medical situation, with limited telephone availability. No doubt they’d made it sound like I’d volunteered to help Aunt Linda, being that I was such a responsible do-gooder. Lest the lie be discovered, however, I wasn’t supposed to speak with my friends while I was gone. I had no cellular phone—few kids did back then—and when my aunt went to work, she would bring the cord from the home phone with her, which I guess made the limited telephone availability part as true as the urgent medical situation part. My parents, I realized, could be just as sneaky as I, which was a revelation of sorts.
It was around that time, I think, that my aunt began to worry about me, though she tried to downplay her concerns. As we were eating Thanksgiving leftovers, she casually mentioned that I hadn’t seemed particularly chipper lately. That was the word she used: chipper. She’d also eased up a little on the tidiness thing—or maybe I was doing a better job of cleaning, but for whatever reason, she hadn’t been complaining as much recently. I could tell she was making an effort to engage me in conversation.
“Are you taking your prenatal vitamin?”
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s yummy.”
“In a couple of weeks, you’ll see the OB-GYN in Morehead City. I set up the appointment this morning.”
“Swell,” I said. I moved the food around my plate, hoping she wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t really eating.
“The food has to actually go in your mouth,” she said. “And then you have to swallow it.”
I think she was trying to be funny, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I simply shrugged.
“Can I make you something else?”
“I’m not that hungry.”
She brought her lips together before scanning the room, as if searching for magic words that would make me chipper again. “Oh, I almost forgot to ask. Did you call your parents?”
“No. I was going to call them earlier, but you took the phone cord with you.”
“You could call them after dinner.”
“I guess.”
She used her fork to cut a bite of turkey. “How are your studies going?” she asked. “You’re behind in your homework and you haven’t been doing that well on your quizzes lately.”
“I’m trying,” I answered, even though I really wasn’t.
“How about math? Remember that you have some pretty big tests coming up before Christmas break.”
“I hate math and geometry is stupid. Why does it matter whether I know how to measure the area of a trapezoid? It’s not like I’m ever going to need to use that in my real life.”
I heard her sigh. Watched her cast about again. “Did you write your history paper? I think that’s also due next week.”
“It’s almost done,” I lied. I’d been assigned to do a report on Thurgood Marshall, but I hadn’t even started it.
I could feel her eyes on me, wondering whether to believe me.
* * *
Later that night, she tried again.
I was lying in bed with Maggie-bear. I’d retreated to my room after dinner, and she was standing in the doorway, dressed in her pajamas.
“Have you thought about getting some fresh air?” my aunt asked. “Like maybe going for a walk or bike ride before you start doing your homework tomorrow?”
“There isn’t anywhere to go. Almost everything is closed for the winter.”
“How about the beach? It’s peaceful this time of year.”
“It’s too cold to go to the beach.”
“How would you know? You haven’t been outside in days.”
“That’s because I have too much homework and too many chores.”
“Have you thought about trying to meet someone closer to your own age? Maybe make some friends?”
At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Make friends?”
“Why not?”
“Because no one my age lives here.”
“Of course they do,” she said. “I showed you the school.”
The village had a single school that served children from kindergarten through high school; we’d ridden past it during the tour of the island. It wasn’t quite the single-room schoolhouse I’d seen in reruns of Little House on the Prairie, but it wasn’t much more than that, either.
“I guess I could head to the boardwalk, or maybe hit the clubs. Oh wait, Ocracoke doesn’t have either of those things.”
“I’m just saying that it might be good for you to talk to someone besides me or Gwen. It’s not healthy to stay so isolated.”
No doubt about it. But the simple fact was that I hadn’t seen a single teenager in Ocracoke since I’d arrived, and—oh yeah—I was pregnant, which was supposed to be a secret, so what would be the point anyway?
“Being here isn’t good for me, either, but no one seems to care about that.”
She adjusted her pajamas, as though searching for words in the fabric, and decided to change the subject.
“I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea to get you a tutor,” she said.
“Definitely for geometry, but maybe for your other classes, too. To review your paper, for instance.”
“A tutor?”
“I believe I know someone who’d be perfect.”
I suddenly had visions of sitting beside some ancient geezer who smelled of Old Spice and mothballs and liked to talk about the good old days. “I don’t want a tutor.”
“Your finals are in January, and there are multiple exams in the next three weeks, including some big ones. I promised your parents that I’d do my best to make sure you don’t have to repeat your sophomore year.”
I hated when adults did the logic-and-guilt thing, so I retreated into the obvious. “Whatever.”
She raised an eyebrow, remaining silent. Then, finally, “Don’t forget that we have church on Sunday.”
How could I forget that? “I remember,” I finally muttered.
“Perhaps we could pick out a Christmas tree afterward.”
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