The Truth About Alice

by Jennifer Mathieu

  “Mom, who were the Melvins?” I asked, handing her the photograph.

  My mom took it out of my hands. My mom with the normal mom hair and ironed khaki slacks and little gold cross hanging around her neck. For the briefest, teeniest, tiniest second I think she smiled, but then it was like she’d been caught doing something illegal because she shoved the picture inside the shoebox and pushed the box into a pile she’d designated for the trash.

  “Just a band,” she said, her smile gone. “From back in the bad old days.”

  Mom used to tell me all the time that I was the reason she rediscovered Jesus and was saved from a life of sin. From the time I was little, she’d told me how surprised she’d been when she’d turned up pregnant with me, and how she’d moved back home to Flint after my dad said he wasn’t sure if he wanted to have a kid at nineteen. But then, after my mom started going to church with my grandparents and started praying really hard for Jesus to come into her life again or whatever, my dad had a change of heart and followed her to Flint and they got married and one month later I was born.

  “Jesus worked on Dad’s heart and my heart, and it’s all thanks to you, Kelsie,” my mom would say to me. I wondered—if that were true—why my dad sometimes fell asleep during church and argued with my mom about whether or not God wanted him to have that third Miller Lite. But when my mom told me this as a little kid, it made me feel special. This was back when I was pretty sure God loved me. Back before The Really Awful Stuff.

  * * *

  The Really Awful Stuff happened the summer Alice was working at Healy Pool North, and it involved Tommy Cray. It was the summer of Mark Lopez and the blow job and Alice lying to me and then telling me I could never possibly understand because I was a virgin.

  But before I explain what happened, what has to be said is that Tommy Cray was and is gorgeous. He’s got this permanent smirk that looks more handsome than mean, muscles that are obvious but not too overwhelming, and gorgeous calves with the lightest blond hair on them, so light you can barely see it. Back then, that summer before tenth grade, I could have stared at his calves all day. I think it’s fair to say he’s way more gorgeous than Brandon Fitzsimmons ever was, if you ask me.

  Whenever I’d bike down to Healy Pool North to hang out with Alice, all I’d think about on the ride there was how I was going to get to watch Tommy Cray. The way he walked, the way he chewed gum, the way he twirled his lifeguard whistle around his finger three times to the right and then three times to the left. I tried really hard to make it look like I wasn’t trying too hard to catch a glimpse of him, but I knew Tommy Cray could tell how much I liked him anyway. It was like I was drunk or on drugs or something that summer. I couldn’t stop thinking about Tommy every millisecond that I was awake, and sometimes I thought about him when I was asleep, too.

  “Hey, Kelsie,” he’d say, grinning at me when he saw me working on my tan or heading toward the snack bar to say hi to Alice.

  “Hey, Tommy,” I’d answer back, acting like I was just walking by, like I hadn’t even known he’d be working that afternoon. I’d imagine he was staring at my butt as I left wet footprints on the cement. But I never turned around to make sure.

  One afternoon toward the end of the summer, a few days after Alice had admitted to me that she’d lied about giving Mark Lopez that blow job, I was hanging out by myself at the pool, reading Seventeen. Even though I was still kind of mad at Alice for lying to me, I was texting her and trying to get her to come down to see me even though she wasn’t scheduled to work, so she could keep me company as I stalked Tommy.

  And then, all of a sudden, the most miraculous thing happened.

  Actually, it was the worst thing ever as I came to realize later on.

  But in the moment, it was miraculous.

  “You wanna go for a ride?”

  I looked up and there was Tommy standing over me, wearing a Healy Pool North T-shirt and red board shorts. His blond hair had gotten even blonder over the past couple of weeks, and I knew that behind his Ray-Bans his blue eyes probably looked even bluer.

  I was being asked by Tommy Cray if I wanted to go for a ride. Even though I couldn’t really talk to boys very well, here one stood before me. The one I wanted. And he was talking to me.

  Somehow, on that steamy August afternoon, I managed to open my mouth and say, “Uh, now?”

  “Yeah, now,” Tommy Cray said. “Why not?”

  “Okay, sure,” I said, trying to act like boys were always asking me to go for rides. My heart was beating so strongly it was like my entire body was pulsating on the pink-and-white lounge chair.

  A few minutes later we were eating Sonic hamburgers in his used Toyota, and when I got ketchup on my chin, Tommy reached over with one finger and scooped it off, then licked it off his finger. I thought I might get sick from nervousness, sitting there in that car with Tommy Cray. He did most of the talking. How he was leaving for college in a few days, how he had to pack all his stuff, how he wasn’t sure if he was going to like his roommate or not.

  “Well, we’ll all miss you around here,” I said. Oh my God, how stupid I sounded. Like a total nerd.

  But Tommy Cray just smiled at me.

  Then he asked me, “You wanna come over and hang out at my house for a while?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, my head all swimmy and dizzy.

  It was the middle of the day and there was no one home. As I followed him inside, I think I knew what was going to happen even before it happened. My whole body felt electric, numb. I heard Alice’s words marching through my head: “Kelsie, it’s just … you know … you haven’t, like … been with anyone … in that way. And that’s … fine, okay? But … it’s just, like … once you’ve had sex … I mean…”

  I was scared and excited at the same time. Right then I knew. I was going to lose my virginity to Tommy Cray.

  * * *

  Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not stupid. I don’t think I ever thought that by sleeping with Tommy I would make him my boyfriend. Even as I followed him to his bedroom wordlessly, even as I let him peel off my cover-up and untie my bikini top before we’d even shut the bedroom door, even as all of this was happening to me, I knew that Tommy Cray would be gone in a few days. I knew he would soon be meeting gorgeous college girls who would want to mess around with him immediately. I knew that he thought I was a Stalker Girl. Easy access. I knew all of this, but it was like I had to do it. That had been the whole point of the entire afternoon. Maybe even the entire summer.

  Tommy Cray had a huge poster of Jimi Hendrix on one wall of his bedroom. It was bright yellow and purple and in a loopy, trippy font it said “Are You Experienced?”

  Well, Kelsie—are you?

  I wasn’t, but Tommy Cray was. He leaned into me, the chlorine scent of his skin slipping over my body.

  “Kelsie, you’re so beautiful,” he said. “I’ve noticed you all summer long.”

  I just smiled back and nodded, unable to talk. I tried to memorize everything about that moment. The way the hair on his chest was so fine and blond and curled just so, just like the hair on his magnificent calves. The way his lips tasted like Sonic and vanilla Carmex. The way he put his hands on me wherever he wanted to, and I let him.

  I’m doing it. I’m actually doing it. Right now at this moment I’m doing it.

  It hurt. Like hell. And it was over in three minutes.

  Afterward, all I wanted to do was put on my clothes. It had all happened so fast that my bathing suit was still damp from swimming in the pool that afternoon. I yanked my cover-up over me and sat up on the bed, not sure what to say. Tommy reached over and grabbed his shorts. The little whisper in the back of my head that reminded me we hadn’t used protection got louder all of a sudden, but I told it to shut up. Tommy hadn’t mentioned using anything, and I guess I just followed his lead.

  “You didn’t tell me,” he said.

  It hurt between my legs. Ached, actually.

  “I didn’t tell you what?” I ask
ed. His room was a mess, I noticed suddenly. Even though he was leaving for school soon, he hadn’t packed a thing, apparently. A sandwich that looked about five days old was sitting on his desk. I was pretty sure it was growing mold.

  “That you’d never done it before.” He wasn’t looking at me. It was like he thought I was going to freak out. I think at that moment I wanted to, but I knew I wouldn’t ever let myself freak out in front of him.

  “So what?” I said like it was no big deal. “Everyone has to have a first time at some point.” I wondered how he could tell. I guessed whatever I was supposed to have done, I didn’t do correctly.

  No, I wasn’t experienced. Not at all.

  Tommy Cray picked at a mosquito bite on his ankle, and then I caught him glancing at the clock radio by his bed. I saved myself some embarrassment and said, “I should be getting home.”

  “’Kay,” he said. He seemed relieved.

  We’d hardly even kissed.

  I told Tommy to drop me off a block from my house so my mother wouldn’t see his car.

  He leaned over and gave me a quick peck before I got out of the Toyota.

  “Well, good luck at school,” I said. I was desperate for him to say something sweet or romantic. Something to make me feel like maybe it had all been worth it.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You should text me sometime.”

  “Cool,” I said, and I got out of the car and walked home. Halfway there I realized I didn’t even know his number.

  * * *

  I didn’t tell Alice. I know. Half the reason I probably even did it with Tommy was because there was this weird little part of me that wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t some inexperienced virgin. Of course, after I did it with Tommy, I mostly felt like an inexperienced nonvirgin, so I wasn’t sure much had changed. But the thought of telling Alice that I had slept with a guy who wasn’t even my boyfriend—just a guy who’d picked me up at the pool for God’s sake—was just too weird. Too embarrassing. Sure, Alice had fooled around with Mark Lopez under similar circumstances, but she hadn’t slept with him.

  For days after it happened, I kept waiting for Tommy to call me or text me, and I kept walking around the house those last few moments of summer, staring at myself in mirrors and thinking, “I’m not a virgin anymore.”

  He never texted me or called me.

  But that’s not The Really Awful Stuff.

  Not even close.

  * * *

  So what do you think happens to the girl from the Christian family who only does it once? Do I actually have to spell it out for you?

  By the time I found out I was pregnant, Tommy Cray was a freshman at Texas Tech and I was a month and a half into my sophomore year at Healy High. Everyone was focused on the start of school, on who they were going to take to the first Fall Dance, on the likelihood of the Healy Tigers taking state … and I was trying not to throw up in my breakfast cereal every day.

  It can’t be, I thought to myself. But it was. All those True Love Waits rallies my mother had dragged me to, all those lectures about saving myself for my future husband, all those reminders that Jesus prefers virgins … it was like some sort of ridiculous joke. Who gets pregnant from doing it one time?

  But the answer was me. Kelsie Sanders.

  One Saturday afternoon while my dad was working and my mom was taking my sister shopping for shoes, I walked down to Seller Brothers and stole a pregnancy test. All the cashiers know my entire family, so there was no chance I could buy one. I figured I’d already fornicated, so what was stealing a home pregnancy test going to do to me?

  The two blue lines stared up at me like they were proud of themselves. They were so blue. There was no doubt in their existence. They were just there, proving the worst possible thing in the world.

  I was going to have a baby.

  I told nobody. Nobody. When I did it with Tommy Cray, my entire body went numb. But this was like my body didn’t even exist anymore. It was just my brain and those two blue lines. I was a zombie. I wrapped the pregnancy test in some toilet paper and hid it in the drawer of my nightstand. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror just like I’d done after doing it with Tommy. I stared at my dark brown hair and my even darker brown eyes. At the freckles on my nose. At the gap between my front teeth.

  I was going to have a baby.

  I mean, I had to. There was nothing else that I could even picture happening. Ever since I’d been a kid, my mom had been dragging me to the Women’s Care Clinic and Planned Parenthood on Saturday mornings and making me hold up pictures of aborted fetuses. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been told to pray for the souls of the preborn. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been taught that having an abortion is pretty much basically the worst possible thing that any woman could ever do ever. Ever.

  After all, wasn’t I, Kelsie Sanders, proof of the power of Choosing Life? Hadn’t I, Kelsie Sanders, been an unplanned pregnancy? A surprise from God, as my mother liked to put it? A surprise that got her to dye her hair back to a normal color and leave Chicago and stop listening to bands with weird names?

  So now it was my turn. Only I hadn’t even had a chance to get my nose pierced.

  But I was going to have a baby anyway.

  It was like trying to picture myself making dinner on Mars or speaking fluent Chinese. It was impossible, but it was the only option.

  I thought about living in my parents’ house for the rest of my life. Me and the baby. Me and the baby in the wood-paneled den and me and the baby in the kitchen with the refrigerator that never stops humming and me and the baby in my teeny pink bedroom in the middle of the night, staring out the window at the stars and planning our escape.

  All I could think was, I’m sorry, baby.

  * * *

  So, abortion was out of the question, and I wasn’t going to be one of those girls who can hide her pregnancy under a sweater for nine months and then give birth at the prom. So I did what I had to do. I told my mother. She made me take three tests in front of her. I literally had to pee in front of my mother. In between tests I took big swallows from a can of Diet Coke balancing on the bathroom sink. After each test my mother grabbed the stick from my hands, and I think some of my pee actually got on her at one point. She didn’t seem to care. She just reached down between my legs and took the test and stared at it, and then she ripped open another package.

  “All right,” she said to me. She was weirdly calm. My mom was just never that calm. She quotes Jesus constantly and everything, but even having the love of the Lord inside of her hasn’t made her very relaxed. She still manages to snap at me constantly and criticize me all the time and get all tense with my dad, and even if she does stop to close her eyes and quote some Bible verse, my mom just isn’t a naturally calm person.

  Until I turned up pregnant.

  “All right, Kelsie, I will take care of this,” my mother said, and all of a sudden I thought I was going to have to give this baby up for adoption. I put my arms around my stomach when I thought about it. I’m not going to sit here and lie and tell you I felt instant love for that baby. Mostly, I just felt sick all the time and so tired I could barely stay up past seven o’clock. I thought about handing the baby over to some nice couple from Louisiana or whatever, and it didn’t seem so bad. Maybe they’d send me Christmas pictures and let me come to his first birthday party. Maybe they’d let him have a dog, unlike my mother who thinks that animals in the house just make a gigantic mess.

  I promised myself that if I got to choose the adoptive parents, I’d make sure they’d let him have a dog.

  * * *

  About a week after I took the tests, my mother woke me up at five in the morning on a Saturday. I didn’t know what was going on.

  “Get dressed, Kelsie,” she said to me, whispering. She was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which was weird because my mom always wears makeup. And she almost always wears skirts and dresses and khaki slacks, not jeans.

  �
��What’s going on?” I said. As soon as I sat up, a wave of nausea ran through me. I pressed my hands down on either side of my body, trying to steady myself, and I took a deep breath.

  “Get dressed,” she said again, standing there next to my bed.

  My dad and sister must have still been asleep. I pulled on some clothes and followed her out to the car. I kept asking her what was going on, but she just told me to hurry up. Usually, I don’t mind talking back to my mom no matter how many Bible verses she says I’m disobeying, but this morning my mom was being so weird, I was scared to say anything.

  We pulled out onto the highway and headed for the city.

  “Kelsie, we’re going to take care of things,” she said, staring out the windshield, not looking at me. I glanced at her face once in a while and then I looked out at the billboards and the rundown houses that popped up on the sides of the highway. It was still dark, but the sun was just starting to come up. I think that was the moment I knew what my mom was planning, but I couldn’t believe it could possibly be true.

  There in the car that morning when I glanced at my mom’s neutral expression, I kept thinking back to that picture I’d found in the attic back in Flint. The funny-colored hair. The nose ring. The look on her face that told me—even if she’d never admit it—that back then, she’d been having fun. Lots of it. I knew I could stare at my mother’s face for the rest of her life, and I’d never see that same expression on it ever again. She’d left it back in Chicago in 1993.

  She kept on driving.

  All the times I’d seen the Women’s Care Clinic, it had been from the outside. It’s big and gray and the windows are small, skinny strips of glass that are so tiny they might as well not even exist. It looked like a prison. I’d felt really bad every single time we protested there, if you want to know the truth. Even though deep down inside I was pretty sure that abortion must be murder (after all, what else could it be if it isn’t that?), when I looked at the faces of the girls and the women walking in for an appointment and how sad and confused they looked, I didn’t see the point of all the protesting. What is it ever really going to change? Sometimes I’d seen girls that looked my age walking inside, and they’d be holding on to women who had to be their moms, and the girls would sort of lean their heads in and cry against their moms’ shoulders as they walked past us. The couple of times I’d seen a mother-daughter pair like that, I’d been a little jealous. Me. Jealous of a girl getting an abortion because she gets to cry on her mom’s shoulder.