Olivia ignored me, but Hilary lifted one lazy corner of her mouth, lashless eyes regarding me with an amused glaze. I expected this when I agreed to Dean’s terms. It may seem like it wasn’t the smartest move to betray the HOs, but Dean was a powerful force. Get in with him and the rest of the guys, and it didn’t matter if Olivia and Hilary secretly hated me. They would hide it, and that was all that mattered.
Dean shifted left in his seat, patting the open sliver next to him. I sat down, my thigh pressing against his thigh. I swallowed a scorching mouthful of acid, wishing it was Liam’s leg next to mine.
Dean leaned in, his French fry breath in my ear. “So how you feeling, Finny?”
“Fine.” A film of sweat was collecting between our legs. I didn’t want Liam to see this, I didn’t want Liam to think that out of the three, I’d chosen Dean.
“What are you doing after practice?” Dean asked.
“Going right home,” I said. “I’m grounded.”
“Grounded?” Dean practically shouted. “What are you, like, twelve?”
I flushed when everyone laughed. “I know. I hate my parents.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with. . . .” Dean trailed off.
“Bad grades.”
“Phew.” Dean wiped his brow. “Because I mean, I like you, but if my parents find out about that party, well, I don’t like you that much.” He laughed aggressively.
The bell rang and everyone stood, leaving their greasy paper plates and candy wrappers on the table for the janitor to collect. Olivia made a beeline for the quad, which she would cut across to get to Algebra II before anyone else. She was a good student, a nervous student—breaking down in tears over a B+ on a pop quiz in Chem that pretty much everyone else failed. She didn’t notice when I hurried after Liam.
“Hey.” My head lined up perfectly with Liam’s shoulder. Dean was too tall, too big, a circus gorilla who would rip you limb from limb if you didn’t hug him back.
Liam looked at me and laughed.
“What?” I laughed back, uneasily.
He wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and, for just a brief moment, I entertained the relief. Maybe he hadn’t been acting aloof, maybe it really was all in my head.
“You’re crazy, girl.”
The cafeteria had emptied out. I paused in front of the door, anchoring Liam to me. “Can I ask you something?”
Liam tilted his head back and groaned. The way he said “Whaaaat?” was how I imagined he spoke to his mother, when he sensed the thing she had to ask him about was when he would ever get around to cleaning his filthy room.
I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. We were in this together. “Did you use a condom?”
“That’s what you’re worried about?” His bright eyes rolled in a complete circle, like a ventriloquist had given him a stern shake. For a moment, his eyelids hooding the blue, he wasn’t nearly as attractive as I’d thought he was. There was something about his eyes, you could have named a Crayola crayon after them, that made him extraordinary.
“Should I be?”
Liam put his hands on my shoulders and brought his face close to mine, our foreheads almost grazing. “Tif, you only have a twenty-three percent chance of getting pregnant.”
Oh, how this random number has stuck with me through the years. The stodgy old head of the fact-checking department at The Women’s Magazine won’t even accept stats lifted from an article in The New York Times. “YOU MUST PROVIDE ORIGINAL SOURCE,” her all-staff e-mails remind us, at least once a month. Yet I was willing to accept this number, espoused by the person who I later learned found me on the floor of the guest bedroom, the square of my body from my belly button to my upper thighs naked (Peyton made a halfhearted attempt to pull my pants up for me). He dragged me into bed, wrestled my pants off my dead weight legs, and plunged inside of me without even bothering to take the rest of my clothes off. He said I woke up and moaned when he did that, and that’s how he knew I was okay with it. I lost my virginity to someone who’s never seen my breasts.
“Well.” I shuffled my feet. “I was thinking maybe I should go to Planned Parenthood. Get the morning-after pill.”
“But”—Liam grinned at me, his sweet little idiot—“it’s not the morning after.”
“It works for up to seventy-two hours.” This is how I’d spent the rest of my weekend, researching the morning-after pill on the family computer in the basement, then researching how to hide my search history.
Liam read the clock on the wall above my head. “We had sex around midnight.” He closed his eyes, his lips moving as he did the math. “So you can still make it.”
“Right. I was going to get it after school. There’s a Planned Parenthood in St. Davids.” I held my breath as I waited for his reaction. To my great surprise he said, “I’ll figure out a way to get us there.”
Liam secured us a ride with Dave, Bradley’s very own personal chauffeur, even though we could have easily taken the train, could have avoided one more person knowing about the humiliating turn my life had taken in the last sixty-four hours. Sixty-four hours—I still had eight hours left.
The trees were just starting to shed, and through their spare limbs I caught a glimpse of Arthur’s house as the car hiccuped over speed bumps, before making a right onto Montgomery Ave. I wasn’t so desperate for him now, not with Liam glancing back at me from the front seat, asking not once but twice how I was doing. Some very small, frenzied part of me wished that we were too late, that my period wouldn’t come next month, that the drama, the “What should we do?” that connected us now could last a little bit longer. I understood that, when it was gone, Liam would be too.
We maneuvered onto Lancaster Ave, and from there it was a straight shot. Dave made a right into the parking lot, but, instead of finding a spot, he just pulled up to the entrance of the clinic and unlocked the doors.
“I’m going to drive around for a bit,” Dave said as I climbed out of the backseat.
“No, man,” Liam said, nervously, stepping onto the pavement and next to me. “Just wait.”
“No way.” Dave pulled the gear stick into drive. “Crazy people always want to bomb this place.”
Liam slammed the car door shut much harder than he meant to, I’m sure.
The waiting room was mostly empty, save for a few sets of women scattered among the chairs along the walls. Liam found a seat furthest away from the nearest occupant, wiping his palms on his khakis and glancing around, accusingly.
I approached the receptionist and spoke through the opening in the glass divider. “Hi. I don’t have an appointment or anything, but is there someone here I could see?”
The woman pushed a clipboard through the opening. “Fill this out. Indicate the reason for your visit.”
I plucked a pen from an old 76ers McDonald’s cup and settled into the seat next to Liam, who peered over my shoulder at the form.
“What did she say?”
“I’m just supposed to write down the reason I’m here.”
I started to fill in the boxes. Name, age, DOB, sex, address, and signature. In the space next to the words “Reason for your visit today,” I scrawled, “Morning-after pill.”
When I got to the part that asked me for my emergency contact, I looked at Liam.
He shrugged. “Sure.” He removed the clipboard from my lap and settled it in his. Next to “Relationship to the patient,” he wrote, “Friend.”
I got up and passed the clipboard back to the woman at the front desk, now blurry behind the filmy pane of tears. The word “friend” was lodged in my stomach like a knife, like the paper-thin Shun I’d envision splicing my fiancé’s kidneys one day.
Fifteen minutes passed before the white door opened and I heard my name. Liam crossed his eyes at me and gave me a thumbs-up, a goofy expression, like he was distracting a small child from the tetanus shot she was about to get. I managed a brave smile for him.
I followed the nurse into an examining room and
scooted onto the table. Another ten minutes passed before the door opened and a woman entered, blond hair fine and cropped close to her neck, a stethoscope draped leisurely around her neck. She frowned at me. “TifAni?”
I nodded and the doctor placed my file on the counter and paused over it, her eyes walking back and forth across my information.
“When did you have sex?”
“Friday.”
She looked at me. “Friday when?”
“Some time around midnight.” Apparently.
She nodded, lifting the stethoscope off her shoulders and pressing it to my chest. While she examined me, she explained what the morning-after pill was. “Not an abortion,” she reminded me, twice. “If the sperm has already implanted the egg, it won’t do anything.”
“Do you think it has?” I asked, my heart pumping harder for her to hear.
“There is no way for me to know that,” she apologized. “We do know that it’s most effective when taken as close to the intimate encounter as possible.” She glanced at the clock above my head. “You are on the cusp of the cutoff, but you did make it.” She slipped the stethoscope underneath my shirt and pressed it into my back. With a soothing sigh, she said, “Deep breath.” In another life, she could have been a hipster yoga instructor in Brooklyn.
She finished examining me, told me to hang tight. There had been a question burning in my throat for the last ten minutes, but it was her reaching for the handle of the door that forced me to say it.
“Is it rape if you can’t remember what happened?”
The doctor opened her mouth, as though she was about to gasp “Oh no.” Instead she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it, “I’m not qualified to answer that question.” She slipped out of the room soundlessly.
Several more minutes ticked by before the nurse, her peppiness especially noticeable in the wake of her cool, serene superior, returned, a brown paper lunch bag full of brightly colored condoms bunched underneath her arm, a prescription bottle in one hand and a glass of water in the other.
“Take six right now.” She shook six pills into my clammy palm and watched me chase them down with water. “And six twelve hours from now.” She looked at her watch. “So set your alarm for four A.M.” She shook the paper bag at me, teasingly. “And being careful can be fun! Some of these even glow in the dark.” I took the bag from her, all that careful fun rattling around inside, mocking me with its fluorescent futility.
Liam wasn’t in the waiting room when I returned, and the paper bag went damp and flimsy in my hand as it occurred to me that he might have taken off.
“I was here with someone,” I said to the woman at the front desk. “Did you see where he went?”
“I think he stepped outside,” she replied. I caught a glimpse of the doctor behind her, the blond hairs gnarled around her neck like a claw.
Liam was outside, sitting on the curb.
“What are you doing?” It came out shrill. I heard Mom in it.
“I couldn’t be in there any longer. I felt like they thought I was gay or something.” He stood and brushed dirt off his butt. “You get what you need?”
I would have welcomed some crazy’s bomb going off in that moment. One last tragedy that would anchor Liam to me. I pictured him rushing me, covering my body with his as fiery shards of building sphered through the air. No screams at first, everyone too stunned, too singularly focused on just surviving. That would be the most surprising lesson I’d learn at Bradley: You only scream when you’re finally safe.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
I feel like I’m in the south of France!” Mom lifted her champagne flute.
I almost didn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. “It’s Prosecco,” I sneered.
“So?” Mom set her glass on the table. A lipstick mark, so pink it was embarrassing, printed the rim.
“Prosecco is Italian.”
“Tastes like champagne to me!”
Luke laughed, and his parents joined in gratefully. He was always doing that, saving Mom and me from ourselves.
“And with this view you certainly can’t tell the difference between France and the States,” added Kimberly, our wedding planner, who corrected Mom every time she called her Kim, which was every time. She swept her hand out in a grand gesture, and we all turned to look at the Harrisons’ backyard as though we hadn’t seen it a million times before, the lime green grass that ended sharply at the ocean’s horizon, so that after a few Dark and Stormys, it appeared as though you could waltz straight out onto the water even though it was a thirty-foot drop to the sand. There was a splintered staircase embedded in the side of the earth, twenty-three steps to the bitter tongue of the Atlantic. I refused to wade in any deeper than my kneecaps, convinced it was churning with great whites. Luke thought this was hilarious and loved to swim deep, his perfect stroke taking him further and further out in the frosty water. Eventually, he’d turn, his head bobbing like a blond apple, raising one freckly arm in the air and beckoning to me. “Ani! Ani!” Even though terror was ripping my insides apart, I’d be a good sport and wave—he would only go out further and stay out longer if I revealed one iota of fear. If a shark got him, held him under until blood formed a film on the surface of the water like a magenta oil spill, I would be too afraid to go in after him. Afraid for my own life, sure, but just as much afraid of the carnage of his body, the leg missing beneath the knee, a jagged edge of bloody muscles and veins, the sweet, musky odor the body emits when it’s been opened like that. I smell it still, even though fourteen years have gone by. It’s like a few molecules have been trapped in my nasal passages, the neurons reminding my brain any time I almost forget.
Of course, it would be even worse if Luke survived, because I’d be a real bitch if I abandoned my legless fiancé. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than spending every day of my life with a physical reminder of the terrible things life can do, of the ever-present reality that no one is safe. Luke, beautiful Luke, with his friends and family who were so good at being normal, the way a restaurant quieted a little as we walked to our table, his hand on the small of my back . . . it had dulled the dread in the beginning. Luke was so perfect, he made me fearless. Because how could anything bad happen around a person like that?
Right after we got engaged—Luke on his knee when we crossed the line of the New York City Marathon, running to raise money for leukemia, which his father had beaten ten years ago—we took a trip to DC to visit his pocket of Hamilton friends stationed there. Most of them I had met at various weddings over the years. But there was one I hadn’t, Chris Bailey. Bailey they called him—a wiry guy, snaggletoothed, limp hair parted down the middle. He didn’t look like the other Aryan gods in Luke’s posse. I met him at the bar we went to after dinner—he hadn’t been invited to dinner.
“Bailey, get me a drink,” Luke said, a little bossy, but playful too.
“Whadya want?” Bailey asked.
“The fuck does this look like?” Luke pointed to his Bud Light, the label wrinkly with perspiration.
“Whoa.” I laughed. A real laugh, at first. It was all in good fun. “Easy.” I put my hand—the one weighed down by the emerald—on Luke’s shoulder. He strapped his arms around my waist and pulled me into him. “I love you so fucking much,” he said into my hair.
“Here you go, man.” Bailey handed Luke a beer. Luke stared at it, threateningly.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Where’s my fiancée’s drink?” Luke demanded.
“Sorry, man!” Bailey smiled, his snaggletooth catching on his lower lip. “I didn’t know she wanted anything.” To me, “Whadya want, my dear?”
I did need a drink, but not from Bailey, not like this. Luke always messed around with his buddies—really, these guys were tan ex-athletes, healthy and jokey, the very definition of a buddy. But there was an inequality in this exchange with Bailey that I’d never seen before. Bailey had the look of a kid brother, desperate to fit in, desperate to please, w
illing to take whatever abuse necessary. It was something I recognized all too well.
“Bailey, please excuse my asshole fiancé.” I looked at Luke, a cutesy, pleading look. Come on, tone it down.
But on it went for the rest of the night—Luke barking orders at Bailey, cutting him down for carrying them out wrong, my horror swelling the drunker and meaner Luke got. I was picturing Luke in college, tormenting this hanger-on, maybe even taking advantage of a girl passed out on the lumpy fraternity couch. Luke knew it was rape if she wasn’t coherent enough to say yes, right? Or did he think it counted only if the boogeyman jumped out of the bushes and ravaged some sober, unassuming freshman on her way to the library? Oh my God. Who was I marrying?
Luke demanded Bailey drive us home, even though Bailey was drunk, even though we were in a bustling area of DC with plenty of cabs. Bailey was happy to do it, but I refused to get in the car. Caused quite the to-do on the street screaming at Luke to go fuck himself.
Later, back at the hotel room, tears in his eyes, all traces of the snarling bully he’d been for the last few hours gone, Luke said, “Do you know how much it kills me when you tell me to fuck off? I would never speak that way to you.”
I raged, “When you treat someone the way you treated Bailey, it’s your own way of telling me to go fuck myself!” Luke gave me the look he always gives me when he thinks I’m being ridiculous. Like I need to get over high school already.
Even though that incident seemed out of character for Luke, even though he woke up the next morning and “felt sick” over how he’d behaved the night before, it was that weekend that I stopped seeing Luke as so perfect and pure. Stopped thinking nothing bad could happen to me while I was with him. Now I was scared all the time again.
I popped a lobster-mac-and-cheese bite into my mouth; it was my third. I’d finally settled on a caterer, the one Mom suggested after reading that she was a Kennedy favorite. Sometimes even she knew the right buttons to push.
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