The Brittanys

by Brittany Ackerman

  We went to church the night before, where, even though I’m Jewish, I accepted Communion at the altar because I was hungry. It was Midnight Mass, and I was so bored. I didn’t understand anything the guy was saying, and Jensen looked just as unenthused. I wore a long-sleeve T-shirt and a long skirt, to look appropriate. After the service, in the parking lot, Jensen’s dad congratulated me on becoming a Christian. I stood there, stunned, until he slapped me on the shoulder and told me he was joking. When we got home, Jensen asked her mom to read us the Christmas story she read every year before bed, but she said we were too old. Jensen thought she was joking, but she never came into Jensen’s room to read to us. We fell asleep waiting for our story that never showed up.

  I start feeling sick the next morning as we’re finishing with the presents, and I realize no doctors’ offices are going to be open because of the holiday. My mom picks me up and says she’ll look in my throat when we get home. I fall asleep on the drive and wake up at the stoplight before the turn into our neighborhood. Mom follows me upstairs with a flashlight and says she sees white on my tonsils. I tell her I just want to sleep, my body hurts, and I’m out from 11:00 a.m. until the late afternoon. My parents order Chinese food, and I don’t want any, but Mom forces me to eat wonton soup. I fall asleep again shortly after, on the couch, while watching A Christmas Story. I hear my mom tell my brother to pick me up and carry me upstairs to my room, but he says I am too big.

  The next morning, we go to the doctor’s office where my cousin Liza works. I’m in and out of sleep on the drive, and when I’m not sleeping I’m complaining. I’m so tired, and my throat hurts. There are two sections in the office: Sick and Well. I’ve never had to come here and sit in the Sick section before. My mom was a nurse and thinks she can handle most of our ailments at home. I usually just eat a Get Better Bear and call it a day. But my mom says if I need antibiotics we have to go to the doctor for that.

  “Maybe it’s mono,” Liza says. She’s in scrubs with Winnie the Pooh chasing after a balloon on them. Her hair is in a braid, and her ears are pierced all the way up and down. I want that so bad, but it’ll never happen. I couldn’t even handle my tragus.

  “What’s mono?” I ask.

  “Don’t use your voice!” my mom yells.

  “Mononucleosis, sweetie. It’s the kissing disease.”

  Kissing disease? I assume it means you’ve kissed too many people, which isn’t really the case for me, but maybe I got it from Brody.

  “Is that a real thing?” I ask.

  “Stop talking!” my mom yells again.

  “It’s not really from kissing.” Liza laughs. “But it’s common among teenagers, because you guys are swapping spit all the time. It’s not a big deal if that’s what it is. Dr. Price will just do a blood test and find out. It’s like a virus—it goes away on its own. But you’ll be out of commission for a few weeks.”

  “Blood test?” I hate blood tests. I hate the idea that blood is leaving my body. It makes me feel weak and dizzy just thinking about it.

  I get called into a room and wait for Dr. Price. He’s not my usual doctor, who’s currently on vacation on some island, but he’s the only doctor here at the office over the holidays. He’s tall and tan and wears glasses and has a weird mustache. My mom sits in a chair while I’m up on the table. She takes off one of her flip-flops and scratches her leg with one toe. I’m so nervous I could die.

  “Liza thinks you have mono, but we need to test before we can call it that,” Dr. Price says, holding my file and perusing it.

  “How do you test for it?” I ask.

  “It depends on how many boys you’ve kissed,” Dr. Price says, not smiling.

  “I don’t. I haven’t.” I stick up for myself. I don’t want Dr. Price to think I’m some kind of ninth-grade slut. “I used to get strep a lot as a kid, and I think that’s what this is. Can’t you just test for that?”

  “You have all the symptoms of mononucleosis. Your glands are swollen, you’re running a high fever, you’re fatigued. I’m ordering a blood test.”

  “I’m not fatigued. I’m just tired. I was up past midnight on Christmas. I went to Midnight Mass.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Nervous? No. I just don’t think I have mono.”

  Dr. Price leans out the doorway and calls for a nurse.

  “We have a reluctant mono test in room four,” he shouts. I begin to cry. My tears are hot on my face, and I try to wipe them off quickly, but they keep coming. I don’t want a blood test. I’m not a slut. This is Brody’s fault. Well, it’s my fault. I can’t have mono. It’s not right.

  “It’s just a blood test,” my mom offers from her chair. “I’ve had much worse.”

  “Like what?”

  “I once had a root canal with no anesthesia. Oh, and my migraine headaches, those are worse than any pain on Earth.” Mom always offers these tales of woe, and I wonder if she’s actually trying to comfort me or just make me feel bad for being such a baby when it comes to modern medicine.

  “I don’t like blood tests,” I say, still crying.

  “It takes two seconds,” my mom says. Dr. Price enters the room again, and Liza is with him.

  “Don’t cry, sweetie,” Liza says, and begins cleaning my arm with alcohol solution so she can take blood.

  “There’s really no need to cry. It’s just a simple test,” Dr. Price offers, and I won’t look at him.

  Liza pricks me with the needle, and I watch the dark purple blood drain from my arm into a glass tube. I feel myself get weak, but I know I have to be an adult about this or else Dr. Price will only have more ammunition against me. He leaves the room again, and I’m alone with my mom and Liza.

  “Dr. Price called me a whore,” I say to the room.

  “No, he did not!” my mom says. Liza laughs.

  “He implied it. He was trying to say I kiss everyone, and I don’t.”

  “He’s much better with little kids,” Liza offers. “He might not know how to handle teenagers. You’ll be too old to come here soon anyway.”

  Liza leaves to get the test results. I slide off the table and sit on my mom’s lap; she doesn’t expect me there and is surprised by my weight on her. She laughs a little at first, and then pets my hair and gives me a kiss on the head.

  “You’re my baby,” she says.

  “I’m not a baby anymore,” I say.

  “Then stop crying.”

  “He shouldn’t have said those things. Just because I’m tired…”

  “He’s an idiot, okay? He doesn’t have bedside manners with girls your age, you heard Liza.”

  Liza walks back into the room, and apparently I don’t have mono. I’m too upset to gloat, and she has to swab my throat to test for strep, which I do end up having. She gives me a shot in my lower back. She grabs as hard as she can so I don’t feel the needle. I feel it, though, and it hurts, worse than the blood test. I get a prescription for a bottle of pink liquid antibiotics that I have to drink two teaspoons of twice a day for a week. I don’t get pills because I can’t swallow pills yet, an adult skill my brother and I both lack.

  We stop at the supermarket on the way home to pick up my prescription and some snacks that I’ll be able to eat for the next few days. I get Jell-O and Cool Whip, chocolate pudding, and Campbell’s Chicken & Stars soup. But I don’t really end up eating any of it. I mostly sleep and watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon, floating in and out of consciousness. I dream of being underwater, hot water that burns when I try to breathe in, and of Krabby Patties that taste like pink gummies.

  I know I’ll have to call Jensen and tell her I can’t come over for New Year’s Eve, but for now I live in my room in layers of clothing, trying to sweat out the sickness, starve the infection, and sleep away the tiredness.

  * * *

  —

&nbs
p; There is a hiatus from phone calls with Max Green. I haven’t heard from him all break, and I’ve been too sick to notice, too self-involved to care. But now that I’m feeling better, I wonder where he went. I call him on New Year’s Eve. I’m still considered contagious and can’t go out, but nothing can be caught over the phone, except feelings, I suppose.

  His mom answers, and it sounds like they’re having a party. When I ask if I can speak with her son, she tells me to hold on and I wait. A few minutes later she comes back on the line and says he’s not able to talk, but he says Happy New Year. It sounds like a lot of crap, and she wishes me well, and we hang up. Your son is an asshole, I want to say. What’s he so busy doing that he can’t talk to me? Wouldn’t he care that I almost died of strep throat? I was so sick and he didn’t even know. I imagine him drinking with his dad outside, by his pool, in West Palm Beach. Kids from the neighborhood he doesn’t usually hang out with, girls in silver sequined dresses and boys in shirts and ties, all crowded around the pool and drinking alcohol, but it’s okay because they’re with family, because it’s New Year’s Eve. I imagine his mother looking out at the scene, how she doesn’t want to take her son away from such a good time, or maybe she did tell him and he waved me away, the girl from school who was popular but not popular enough. I start to think maybe Gottlieb was actually right for once. I wonder what Jensen would say.

  My parents are downstairs, waiting for the ball to drop on TV. They said not to come down but to call for them if I need anything. My brother is at his friend’s house for the night. I never really know what he’s up to when he goes out, but he’s a senior and can pretty much do whatever he wants. When he first got his license, my mom would wait in Dad’s den and sit by the window until he came home. He was never once late for curfew, but she didn’t understand why he wanted to be gone in the first place. I think it’s about not having to ask: you just go, you just go and do what you want, because you can, because you have a car and a piece of plastic that says it’s legal for you to be out there on the road. I used to worry, though. What if something bad did happen to him? What if he didn’t come home and no one knew where he was? I still wait up for him in my room and listen for him coming up the stairs, shutting his door behind him. Sometimes I’ll go into his room and play Mario Kart with him or just sit while he plays a game I don’t understand. I just want to be with him, and since he got that plastic card he’s been gone so much. It’s not his fault, though; he’s just growing up, and someday I’ll have that freedom, too. My mom has since stopped waiting for him by the window in the den, but I know she’s relieved to hear the garage door open late at night when he comes back to us.

  When I check my tonsils in the mirror, they’re still white and patchy. I’ve been confined to my room, and I’m starting to go stir-crazy. The house phone rings, and I run to get it, but my mom’s already picked up downstairs.

  “You shouldn’t be using your voice,” my mom says on the line, and I’m not sure who’s calling yet, so it’s embarrassing.

  “I’m fine!” I whisper-yell. “Hang up.”

  She hangs up and I wait.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” Jensen says, doing her best Fat Albert impression. I laugh.

  “I can’t do that right now ’cause of my throat!”

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “I just looked at my tonsils in the mirror.”

  “What do they look like now?”

  “Partly cloudy.”

  “Ew.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m at Thea and Christos’s. They’re banging pots and pans. It’s awful.”

  I look at my alarm clock, next to my bed, and it reads 11:30 p.m. “It’s not midnight yet,” I say.

  “They’re old. They want to go to bed soon. And they keep telling me to get in bed if I won’t grab a sauté pan to bang on.”

  “I saw them up late one time when we slept over there. It was pretty wild.”

  “They’re a rowdy pair indeed.”

  “True. What are your parents doing tonight?”

  “They went to some party in the neighborhood. I didn’t want to go, so they dropped me off here. I didn’t want to put on a dumb dress and talk to fancy people.”

  “The fancy people—sounds like a good book.”

  “Yeah, you should write it. What are your parents doing?”

  “They’re watching the ball drop. I don’t get it. What’s so great about a ball? What does it even mean?”

  “It’s, like, the ball of time, like Father Time’s balls dropping.”

  “I hope my mom lets me do something for my birthday.”

  “She will. You always worry and then nothing happens.”

  “Sometimes bad things happen.”

  “Yeah, but they’re never really that bad.”

  We stay on the phone until midnight, and after the magic of the New Year subsides, we continue to talk about absolutely nothing for a while. I don’t tell her about Max, and she doesn’t tell me about how much she hates her parents. We don’t talk about the other girls or the many boys who have disappointed us. We don’t talk about love or sex or how bad it hurts to feel such a gaping void in our teenage hearts, one that hungers for love and sex, to be loved, to be sexed, to feel something real and not imagined, to be outside of ourselves, or to truly come into who we’re supposed to be. For this short time on the phone, Jensen fills the void. She’s my best friend and I am hers and we have each other, without doubt, without the slightest feeling that something bad might happen.

  “Do you think we’ll be friends forever?” I ask.

  “I hope we don’t end up like two old ladies at the supermarket who meet in the dairy aisle. ‘Agnes, is that you?’ And then the other is all, ‘Debra, I haven’t seen you in ages!’ ”

  “Right there next to the milk.”

  “And the cheese.”

  “I wish I had some cheese.”

  “You shouldn’t eat dairy when you’re sick.”

  “I don’t give a tiny rat’s ass!” We laugh; it hurts my throat. “Anyway, it’s on the up-and-up.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad.”

  I hear the commotion of pots and pans and her grandparents arguing. I wonder where we’ll be next year for New Year’s, if we’ll celebrate together. I decide that maybe it’s better if Max and I don’t talk anymore. When he switched schools the following year, it was nice not to have to see him anymore, to wonder why I wasn’t good enough, why it hadn’t worked out. He married a thin Jewish girl he met in college, and they look more like brother and sister than lovers. I wonder if he breathes in her ear at night while they sleep. I wonder if he realizes I was the one who first gave him a chance.

  It’s a new year, and I can leave him, among other things, behind.

  • TEN •

  We attempt to savor the last few days of winter break. Jensen invites me over for a barbecue that her parents are hosting. I have one more day of bubblegum-flavored antibiotics, so it takes some convincing for my mom to let me go.

  Everyone’s out back when I arrive at Jensen’s house. Her parents spent all of last summer remodeling their backyard so it would be perfect for parties, and it is. They have an outdoor tiki bar, a grill, and a huge, restaurant-regulation refrigerator for entertaining. Jensen is drinking something with a yellow umbrella sticking out of it.

  “Try it,” she says.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Amaretto sour. It’s delicious.”

  “I think I’ll have to pass. I don’t want to infect you, as a courtesy.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot you were plagued. Also, my mom’s on her, like, tenth glass of wine, so just don’t indulge her, ya know?”

  “How’s your dad?”

  “Right behind her, at glass number nine. But he made Key lime pie, so there’s that.”
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  Jensen’s mom is grilling her famous barbecued chicken. We sit outside, in the backyard, even though it’s a little too cold for a barbecue, but I’m still happy, sitting there on the lounge chair, watching Jensen feed scraps to Lucky, who’s doing fine. She isn’t jumping on me; she knows better.

  “Fifteen is right around the corner,” Jensen’s mom says to me. She has a glass of red wine in her hand. It’s only just after noon.

  “Yep,” I say trying to take Jensen’s advice and be short with her parents. I see her eyeing me while she bites into another chicken wing covered in sweet barbecue sauce.

  “There’s Key lime pie for dessert, if you girls are interested.”

  “Yes!” Jensen says, not even finished with her lunch yet.

  “Would you like some, too, honey?” Jensen’s mom asks.

  “No, thank you,” I say. “I’m kind of full right now.”

  “That’s why you look like you do, and why my daughter has a big ass!” She laughs.

  There’s a pause. Then Jensen gets up and storms into the house. I’m frozen on the lounge chair, Lucky panting next to me, but there’s no chance I’ll muster up the courage to feed her another scrap. Jensen’s mom is already back at the tiki bar, refilling her glass. Eventually I get up and go to find Jensen inside. She’s upstairs, in her room, setting a volleyball to herself over and over again.

  “I thought you wanted pie,” I say, flipping my head over and putting my hair into a messy bun, trying to be casual, even though I know how bad what her mom said was, how cruel. I try to push away my thoughts that maybe this is about me somehow.

  Jensen doesn’t answer. I’ve never seen her like this before. She keeps playing with the stupid ball, setting it higher and higher. All of a sudden, she spikes the ball down and at me, and it hits me in the head, hard. She laughs. I run to the bathroom mirror and already see a bump forming.

  “Why did you do that?” I yell.

  “Oh my God, it’s a ball, you’re not going to die.”