So that should tell you something.
When we went into the clinic, it was so early there weren’t any protestors outside yelling at us yet, and I knew my mom had planned it this way. I didn’t get to cry on my mom’s shoulder. Not that she would’ve let me if I had tried. She just walked me into the lobby and we got frisked by a security guard who looked like he weighed about five hundred pounds. Then we got buzzed into another room, and from that moment on it’s just this weird blur in my mind.
My mom never actually said, “Kelsie, you’re going to have an abortion.” Later on, I figured out my mom probably believed not saying it makes it like it never happened. Because after that day, she never talked about it again. Like that day just never even happened.
I knew the clinic people must have recognized us, but they acted like they didn’t, and for that I was really thankful. I sat in the waiting room and I stared at my sneakers, and I tried to figure out how I felt. Relieved? Scared? Sad? Really, I don’t know what I felt. I didn’t have time to feel.
My mom filled out some forms and she didn’t talk to me once. I overheard her confirming with the nurse that we lived at least one hundred miles away from the clinic, so we could have the procedure completed in just one trip. Soon I was in a room with just a nurse and a doctor, and I was holding the nurse’s hand, and the nurse was so nice. She was, like, ridiculously nice. She kept explaining everything that was going to happen step by step by step, and the entire time she never let go of my hand. Her hand was so warm and soft, it was like wrapping my hand up in a cotton T-shirt straight from the dryer.
“You’re so nice,” I said to her. “Thank you for being so nice.” Hot tears were sneaking out, and I tried to blink them back, but I couldn’t, so they just ran out of my eyes and down my cheeks.
“Of course, sweetheart,” the nurse said, and she leaned into me, crinkling my blue paper gown. She pressed up against my shoulder and I smelled her skin, which smelled like talcum powder. She was wearing a thin chain with a tiny cross around her neck just like my mother’s. Her purple scrubs were covered in butterflies.
“Thank you for being so nice,” I said again, and I said this over and over during the whole entire thing. If I could keep on saying it, it would make everything okay. I was convinced of that.
“Of course, sweetheart,” the nurse said every single time, and her voice was so gentle, so soft. She kept answering me even as she stopped to tell me what was happening, step by step by step.
Thank you for being so nice.
Thank you for being so nice.
On the drive home I didn’t feel well. I guess she knew I might get sick, because my mother had come prepared with a plastic bag from Seller Brothers in the front seat, and she gave it to me when I told her I felt like throwing up.
“Can’t we pull over?” I asked her when I saw what she was handing me.
“No,” my mother said, never taking her eyes off the road. “Use the bag.”
* * *
I’ve made my mom look pretty evil, but I guess when we got home she wasn’t so bad. She helped me into bed, and she sat on the edge of the mattress reading the aftercare instructions on the paper the clinic gave her. She studied them like she was going to be quizzed on them later or something. I’m not sure what she told my dad or sister, but no one except for my mom came into my bedroom for the rest of the weekend. I just sat in my bed looking through magazines and ignoring all of Alice’s texts and calls and thinking about the nurse at the clinic and how I wished she could come and sit with me for a while and hold my hand.
* * *
Like I said, my mom and I never talked about The Really Awful Stuff again. Ever. She never even asked who got me pregnant. The only thing that changed was she stopped making me go to protests with her at the Women’s Care Clinic. She still goes though. I wonder what the clinic people think when they see her out there.
For a while after it all happened, for like a couple of weeks or so, I kept thinking I was still pregnant. I would wake up to the buzzing of my alarm, and for a second I’d think, “Oh my God, I’m pregnant.” Then I would remember that I wasn’t anymore. I kept waiting to feel something. Relief or sadness or anything. But mostly I just felt nothing. I didn’t tell anyone anything, either. Not even Alice. A couple of times I almost did, but just as I was about to open my mouth, the thought of going through everything all over again just seemed totally exhausting.
I’m a pretty good actress, though, because I wasn’t half bad at just going through the sophomore year motions and getting decent grades and being semi-popular and whatever. I could still gossip with Alice and I could still laugh at everything the cool girls said and I went to parties and drank and rolled my eyes at the stupid jokes the boys made, and in general I tried not to think about anything.
I saw Tommy Cray again. Of course I did. It’s Healy. You see everyone again. It was Christmas break of tenth grade, and I would have been like five months along if what happened hadn’t happened. Even though it eventually sank into my head that I wasn’t pregnant anymore, sometimes if no one was around I would get on the computer and read about what the baby would have been like: Your baby has eyebrows. Your baby will get startled at loud noises. You can feel your baby moving.
Right around when I saw Tommy Cray, the baby would have been the size of a banana. I would have started to feel him move. Tommy’s family was eating dinner at The Hot Biscuit and my family was eating there, too, and I saw him from across the dining room, and I just couldn’t eat. My dad was getting all upset because it’s not like we can afford to go out to eat all the time, and my little sister was all, “I’ll eat her share,” because she hates fights, especially fights between me and my parents. I was getting ready for my mom to say something about Jesus not liking us to waste good food when Tommy’s family got up to leave.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and I just stood up without waiting to be excused and walked across the room, heading right for Tommy.
“Kelsie?” Tommy said when he saw me, surprised.
“Can I talk to you a sec?” I said, totally ignoring the fact that we were in the middle of The Hot Biscuit and his mom and dad and brothers were staring at me wondering what the heck I was doing.
“Uh, now?” he said. “We’re getting ready to leave.”
“It’s really important,” I said, and I didn’t turn around to see if my family was looking at me.
“Tommy, we’re waiting outside,” Mrs. Cray said, looking confused but still trying to seem polite. She was wearing one of those hideous Christmas sweaters most people only wear as a joke, but I got the feeling she was serious about it. I felt like yelling out, “You were almost a grandma!” Maybe I was losing my mind.
Tommy and I moved toward the waiting area of The Hot Biscuit, right near “The Hostess Will Seat You” sign.
“So what’s up?” he said. I hadn’t seen him or talked to him since we did it. It was so weird.
“I just wanted you to know,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper, “that I got pregnant.” I can’t believe I admitted it there, like, right in the middle of The Hot Biscuit. But I guess in a way it was a relief that there was finally someone I could say that to out loud. Finally I wasn’t just saying it to myself in my own head.
Tommy’s eyes opened really big and he glanced down at my stomach, which was as flat as a pancake, of course.
“What?” he said, all confused.
“I’m not pregnant now,” I told him, hoping he would figure it out.
“Um,” Tommy said, scratching the back of his neck. “Can I, like, call you tonight? I really can’t do this right now.”
“Okay, but you’d better actually call me,” I said, shocking even myself as I slowly gave Tommy my number and he punched it into his phone.
When I got back to our table, no one said anything about why I got up. I acted like I just went to the bathroom. My mom looked at me and then glanced toward the front door where Tommy had just walked out. Maybe she put
it together and maybe she didn’t. Who knows?
“How’s your meal?” our waitress asked, coming over.
“Everything’s just lovely,” my mother said, giving her a smile only I knew was fake.
* * *
This is shocking, but Tommy actually did call me. Late, after 10:00 p.m., but he called. At first he did all that stuff, like are you sure it was mine, but we only did it once, and blah blah blah. I guess the fact that I wasn’t still pregnant made it less scary for him to talk about it with me. My brain kept going back to that summer afternoon in his messy bedroom and the moldy sandwich and the Jimi Hendrix poster.
Three minutes in that room and everything changed forever.
“Man, Kelsie, I’m sorry,” Tommy said, and I think maybe he actually was a little. “I can’t believe it.”
“Why didn’t you use anything?” I asked, digging my fingernails into my palm, working up the nerve it took to ask that question.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I thought since you didn’t say anything, you were on the Pill or something.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, well. Obviously.”
We didn’t say anything for a while because really we had nothing to say to each other. We’d made small talk at the pool and had sex once. That was it.
“So how’s sophomore year other than that?” Tommy asked, and I wanted to smack him through the phone. I guess he meant it in a friendly way and everything, but come on. How’s tenth grade other than your abortion?
“Oh, it’s been awesome. It’s been totally amazing, actually,” I said, my voice tense with sarcasm.
“Come on, Kelsie, I’m just trying to be nice. I’m sorry. I really am, but I’m not sure exactly what I should be saying here. I mean, it wasn’t like you and me were girlfriend and boyfriend,” he said.
Somehow, hearing him say that hurt more than I expected it to.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, and all of a sudden I just wanted to get off the phone.
“Come on, I didn’t mean it like that,” Tommy said, and I just said, “Okay,” and I hung up on him. I wondered for a second if he was going to try and call me back, but he didn’t.
Just before midnight as I was about to go to sleep, he texted me.
don’t be mad we can still be friends I’m sorry about everything
Like we were ever friends. Like we were ever anything at all.
* * *
Later on, when it first came out about Alice (probably/maybe) sleeping with Tommy and Brandon at the party, I wasn’t jealous. Not really. Even as she swore up and down that nothing had happened, all I could think about was how crazy it was that it had been Alice’s words that had kind of talked me into sleeping with Tommy in the first place.
And then she went and slept with him, too. I mean probably.
Maybe.
Every time I thought about those words coming out of Alice’s mouth—those sort of gentle, pitying words—I thought about walking into Tommy’s bedroom that summer afternoon. I thought about the cool dampness of my bathing suit on my suntanned skin, of the softness of the carpet as I slipped off my candy cane–striped flip-flops and sank down onto Tommy’s unmade bed, knowing there wasn’t any turning back.
I wondered if my life would have been different if maybe Alice Franklin had never said those words to me.
I’d told myself I’d give myself a year to feel sad about The Really Awful Stuff and then I wouldn’t think about it anymore. And then so much happened in that one year. Elaine’s party. The car accident. Alice getting blamed for Brandon’s death. Alice not being my friend anymore.
And then one night, just about a year to the day of that miserable morning at the clinic, I had a dream that I was dancing on our back deck holding a baby boy with blond hair and blue eyes bluer than the water at Healy Pool North. And I had this sick, scary feeling like even though the next day was the deadline for not being sad anymore, just naming a date wasn’t going to work.
And then the next day I found myself with Elaine and Maggie and all the other girls in the bathroom. I still felt like I needed to prove to them that I was on their side and not Alice’s. Like I really needed them to know I wanted to stay friends with them, not anyone else. And my head kept getting filled up with snatches of that dream of the baby and also little snippets of the Jimi Hendrix poster and the nice nurse holding my hand and my scary mom and Tommy never calling me and Alice’s words. Alice’s words.
My head hurt. Elaine looked bored. No one was saying anything. I wondered if it was because I was there. They didn’t really like me. They could smell my old middle school nerdiness on me like it was some kind of disease. They were this close to getting rid of me, I just knew it.
So I got all dramatic and said to the other girls, “Okay, so I have to tell you something. About Alice.”
Lying about Alice and starting the Slut Stall was something Kelsie from Flint wouldn’t have ever done.
So I guess that’s why I did it.
Josh
I hate school. I’m not good at it and I don’t get the point. I have no idea what I’m going to do once I graduate Healy High, but I can tell you that it sure as hell isn’t going to involve Algebra or Chemistry or the Gettysburg Address.
But I still try to do good. I mean, I don’t want to end up in summer school. It wasn’t so bad when I would go with Brandon. We would sit in the back row and make stupid jokes. But this summer Brandon won’t be around to make summer school less painful. He won’t be around to make Two-A-Days less painful.
He just won’t be around.
The other day I had to research this history paper that was already late, so I went down to the library during study hall to mess around on one of the computers. I have a computer at home and everything, but my brother is always screwing around on it or my mom is on it or whatever, so I figured I would just go down to the Healy High library and do my research there.
I was hoping someone from my class would be in there so we could joke around and make the whole research thing not so painful, even though most kids spend Study Hall in the auditorium where they let you talk. Maybe if there was some girl I knew in the library I could even get her to help me do the work. I’m always looking for someone to help me do the work.
But when I walked into the library, the only person in the whole entire place was Alice Franklin.
I didn’t see her when I walked in because she was sort of hidden in the back at a table behind some reference books no one hardly even uses anymore. I just saw her because I was walking around in that part of the library. She had some math homework in front of her.
It was weird because I just turned the corner and there she was. Sitting all alone at this table, her book open and this spiral notebook full of problems. She heard me come up, I guess, because she looked up and there we were, staring at each other.
She looked shocked to see me for a second, but that only lasted for a second. She mostly just stared at me. At first it was like she was just looking me over, and then maybe I think I saw her eyebrows sort of come together a little, like she was mad. But maybe almost like she was scared to get mad.
She knew I’d said she’d been texting Brandon. She knew everyone blamed Brandon’s death on her because of me. I mean, I don’t know who exactly told her I’d said anything, but it took about twenty seconds for everyone in Healy to find out about that, so it doesn’t really matter anyway.
I can’t believe I just stood there, looking at Alice like some big dummy. I don’t know what my face looked like. Alice took a deep breath and then when it came out it sounded all shaky. Real fast she stood up and slammed her books and held them across her chest and just walked past me. Real quickly, and she didn’t look at me either when she walked by.
I stood there for a second watching her go. Then Mrs. Long, the librarian, came up to me.
“Josh, honey, do you need some assistance?”
I nodded yes and told her about the pap
er, and then I followed her to the computers so she could look stuff up for me. I knew if I smiled and was real sweet, she would really help me out. It’s one of the perks of being me, I guess.
As Mrs. Long was typing stuff into one of the databases, my brain remembered this one time in middle school when Alice and me had been assigned to be partners for this autobiography project. By this time I was cool enough not to throw paper wads in her hair anymore, and we were sort of even friends.
“I really want to do our project on Vince Young,” I remembered telling her.
“Who is Vince Young?” Alice asked, and she wrinkled up her nose.
“Oh my God, Alice, how do you not know who Vince Young is?” I remembered how I pretended to pass out from the shock, and Alice had laughed that loud funny laugh she has.
But she gave in, and we did do our project on Vince Young. She even did almost all the work anyway and she wasn’t even nasty about it.
As Mrs. Long hummed and typed and talked, I just kept remembering that project. I kept thinking about how I made Alice laugh and how nice she had been about the whole thing.
The deal is, I know I’m dumb sometimes, but I try real hard most of the time not to be an asshole. And I guess that day in the library, I just felt like an asshole.
Kurt
Shortly after sharing Christmas pizza and beer with Alice Franklin, we reached the end of the first semester at Healy High. It’s always a half day before Winter Break, and there’s no real purpose in even going to school that day. It’s merely an excuse to eat candy and watch movies in class. On most days I feel the work at Healy High is much too easy for me, but on days like the half day before Winter Break, I feel insulted that I’m even expected to show up for school.
The Truth About Alice Page 10