Reconstructing Amelia

by Kimberly McCreight

  “I know—it’s crazy, isn’t it?” Sylvia nodded quickly, biting on her lip. She looked nervous now. “Except I don’t know what to do when I see him now. Do I just act like nothing happened? If I’m too nice, he’ll think I’m a loser. But I don’t want him to think I’m a bitch either.” She looked like she was in pain. “I know you’re basically totally clueless about this stuff, but do you think I should go up to him?”

  “Um, I don’t think you should, like, chase him down,” I said, trying to sound sure. “But don’t ignore him either. Ian’s the kind of guy who would think that was stupid, too.”

  “That’s totally not helpful at all, Amelia. I need specifics.” As she moved closer, I stepped back. I was worried she was going to yank one of my arms again. “You have to tell me exactly what to do.”

  “First of all, breathe,” I said. Whatever weird jealousy thing had popped up in me was gone just as fast as it had come. I was there to help Sylvia 100 percent now. I put my hands on her shoulders, holding them until she took one deep breath and then another. “This is good, remember? Ian wouldn’t have kissed you if he didn’t like you.”

  Sylvia looked down, shuffling her feet back and forth. It was getting late. There were only a few people left out on the sidewalk. Will was still standing next to the open front door, but he was going to let it drop shut any second. When he did, we’d officially be late. I could probably be late for six weeks straight before the school would even think about doing anything about it. So I tried not to care. But I totally did anyway. Especially because I wasn’t even actually late.

  “But what if I kissed him?” she asked. “I mean, he walked me home and we were talking about photography and then we sat down on my stoop and we were talking about music and fashion, of course, and then . . . I just—” She put a hand over her mouth again and turned to look at me with these crazy, bugged-out eyes. “Oh my God. I think I did. I kissed him.”

  “He kissed you back, right?”

  “What if he didn’t?” Sylvia’s voice was high and screechy.

  “Come on, you would have noticed if he wasn’t kissing you back.”

  “How would you know?” she snapped, then looked down. “Sorry, but it’s true. Anyway, even if he did kiss me back, maybe he was just being polite.”

  This was starting to get seriously painful. I knew the only surefire way out was to give Sylvia what she really wanted—to have her ego pumped up. It was pretty much what she always wanted in life, just in general.

  “Ian Greene seems pretty smart to me. I’m sure he sees how great you are. Now, all you have to do is not act like a freak around him.”

  I linked my arm through Sylvia’s, tugging her toward school. Will squinted in our direction. I waved, hoping he’d wait. He leaned forward and shielded his eyes with a hand. Then he shook his head and started talking to himself. I tugged Sylvia a little harder.

  “Sorry! We’re coming!” I called out, then snaked around to glare at Sylvia. “Come on, being late isn’t going to help anything.”

  “It’ll take a lot more than being tardy once to keep you out of Harvard.” Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Besides, weren’t you face painting kids or some shit at the Harvest Fest last weekend? I feel like that has got to earn you, like, a free pass for at least a week.”

  “I helped set up, that’s all,” I said, though I had painted one kid’s face. Turned out it was less fun than it looked. “And anyway, Harvard? Ick, who said anything about—”

  My phone pinged with a text message then. I tried to keep walking as I dug it out of my bag. It was from Ben.

  Forgot to tell you. I think u r awesome. Exactly the way you are.

  “Oh gross,” Sylvia said over my shoulder. She was looking down at my phone. “Are you seriously still talking to that freak?”

  I never should have told Sylvia about Ben in the first place. Actually, I hadn’t told her. Two weeks earlier, she’d picked up my phone—totally without asking me—and read a text I’d gotten from him while I was in the bathroom.

  “Oooh, keeping secrets, huh?” she’d asked, rolling onto my bed with my phone up above her head. “ ‘I feel like no one understands me the way you do?’ I have to say, I’m kind of personally insulted by that one, Amelia. Unless, of course, you’re getting laid by this Ben character, in which case kudos to you. But then, I’m offended you didn’t tell me.” I’d stood in the doorway with my arms crossed, squeezing my teeth together so hard it felt like they might crack. I hadn’t wanted to explain Ben to Sylvia. I knew she’d make me feel stupid. She bolted upright in my bed. “OMG! You did! You had sex with this guy!”

  “No, I didn’t, Sylvia. Stop it, seriously.”

  “OMG, you totally did. Who is he? What does he look like? I can’t believe this: my little girl, all grown up, and you left me out of the entire thing.” But really she’d sounded mostly psyched for me. “Okay, I’ll be willing to forgive you for not telling me before, if you tell me everything, right now. Starting with a picture of this Ben person. You do have a picture of the boy who deflowered you, don’t you? It’s that kid from Packard you met at that field hockey game, isn’t it?”

  I marched over and snatched my phone out of her hand. “No, he isn’t that kid from Packard,” I said, stuffing the phone in my back pocket. “And he didn’t deflower me, which is, by the way, like, the grossest thing you’ve ever said.”

  “Gross?” Sylvia asked, putting her clasped hands to her chest and batting her eyes. “Losing your virginity is a beautiful thing. Oh, my little girl.”

  “Sylvia, stop it!” I yelled. “Just because you’re a slut doesn’t mean everybody else has to be.”

  I’d heard myself say it, but I kind of couldn’t believe I had.

  “A slut?” Sylvia looked like I’d slapped her. “Nice. Thanks, friend.”

  The worst part was that it was true—Sylvia had slept with nine guys since she’d lost her virginity in the seventh grade. Most of the time she acted like she didn’t care. But I knew better. I was her best friend. And Sylvia might have said mean things to me all the time, but that didn’t mean she could take what she dished out.

  “You know I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I just . . . I really don’t want you to make fun of me about this.”

  “I wasn’t making fun of you,” Sylvia said, crossing her arms in a huff. “But I can’t believe you have some whole thing going on with a guy and you didn’t even tell me. I tell you everything.”

  “He’s just a friend,” I said, and Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Seriously. I’ve never even met him in real life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He applied to that Princeton summer program, too.” I said, already bracing myself for how Sylvia was going to respond. “We e-mail and text and whatever. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?” Sylvia’s mouth was open. “Are you e-mailing other kids who applied to that geekfest?”

  “No.” I rolled my eyes. “Ben’s the only one who contacted me. I think he asked the program for the names of the other people who applied from New York.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sylvia said with a smirk. “And what do you want to bet he’s not e-mailing any of the boys on that list?”

  The worst part was that, at the beginning, I had actually kind of been hoping that Ben and I could maybe turn into a girlfriend-boyfriend thing. I’d never been able to talk to a boy the way I could talk to Ben, and I’d started thinking: Wow, this is finally it. I’m not a freak, after all. I just needed to meet the right guy. But it was almost like Ben knew exactly what I’d been thinking, because the very next day he told me he was gay.

  “Sylvia, stop it.” I was starting to get kind of mad. She could never leave anything alone. “Seriously.”

  I could have told Sylvia the part about Ben being gay, right then. It probably would have ended the whole conversation. But I kind of liked her thinking there was stuff about me she didn’t know.

  “Uh-huh. And where does this Ben person go to school?”


  She sounded like she might consider Ben being okay friend material for me, provided he met certain criteria. Like going to an acceptable school. To Sylvia, Packer, Trinity, and St. Anne’s got a thumbs-up. But everybody at Collegiate and Dalton were assholes—meaning that Sylvia had slept with more than one boy from those schools and had been blown off by them.

  “He goes to public school, in Albany.”

  “He lives in Albany?” Sylvia had said, like it was herpes. “You are joking? That basically doesn’t even count as New York. I can’t believe you’re going to have, like, a long-distance love affair with some dork from Albany.”

  “For the last time, Sylvia, we’re just friends!” I’d shouted. “Why can’t I just be friends with somebody and have that be that? Maybe I don’t even want a boyfriend.”

  It wasn’t until the words had come out of my mouth that I’d realized how very true they were.

  As of two weeks later, I still did not want a boyfriend. And there was nothing wrong with a fifteen-year-old girl not wanting a boyfriend. Like Ben had said, there was nothing wrong with me. Sylvia being boy crazy didn’t change that. She had the problem. Not me.

  “Ben is my friend, Sylvia, for the three hundredth time,” I said as I paused at the base of Grace Hall’s steps to write back to him. “And like I’ve also told you three hundred times, he’s gay, remember?”

  Because by then, I had told her. She’d been driving me too crazy about the whole thing not to.

  “I’m gonna shut this door in thirty seconds!” Will yelled then.

  But I could be late, Sylvia was right. And if I didn’t answer Ben now, I wouldn’t be able to all day. As I typed, Sylvia snorted, then started up the school steps. She was jealous. And kind of for good reason. It wasn’t that I liked Ben better than her—Sylvia would always be my best friend—but sometimes he was a lot easier to be friends with.

  “Him you’ll be late for, huh? And you think I put boys ahead of you.” Sylvia shook her head as she marched on. “Catch you later, I guess. Maybe then you’ll have more time for me and my boring Ian drama. And BTW, there’s no way that Ben kid is gay. I don’t care if he sends you a picture of him doing it with a dude.”

  Sylvia slid inside just as Will dropped the door. I watched it click shut. There wasn’t any rush now. I was already officially late, which was kind of liberating in a weird way.

  Thx, I wrote back to Ben. Idk what I’d do w/o u.

  I hit Send, then waited.

  When my phone pinged again, I looked down to see what Ben had written back. But the text wasn’t from him. It was from a blocked number.

  Prospect Park Long Meadow, 3:00 p.m. Be there. But only birds of a feather can flock together—come solo, or don’t come at all.

  Kate

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

  I took eight tests in all.

  But the little plus sign in the window never changed. It didn’t matter if I took them late at night. Or early in the morning. Or after three glasses of wine. Every single test was still positive.

  Today, the on-campus doctor confirmed the pee tests with another pee test. Part of me—the ridiculous part that made all the choices that got me here—thought maybe number nine might do the trick. It didn’t. Campus doctors referred me to an OB.

  The OB confirmed “the pregnancy” with an ultrasound. They don’t say “baby” when they think you might not want to be pregnant. Might decide not to stay that way.

  I’m nine weeks, approximately. They can’t say for sure, and neither can I.

  Because it wasn’t just one mistake, one time. It was a summer of bad decisions, brought on by a lifetime of too many of the right ones. Apparently, I know only one way to screw up: royally.

  As a little girl, I practiced piano without being told and always did the extra credit. I was class valedictorian at my fancy Chicago prep school. I graduated with honors from Duke and went on to Columbia Law School. I’m an assistant editor of the Columbia Law Review for Christ’s sake.

  Of course, that’s a résumé, not a person. A person is what’s growing inside me. And that tiny, little germ of a he or a she won’t care about any of that. They’ll just want me to love them.

  And how can I not, when that’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted, too? Of course, at twenty-four years old, love is the one thing I’ve never come close to succeeding at.

  So maybe I can’t promise to love this baby right. But I can promise to try.

  Kate

  NOVEMBER 26

  It was only eight thirty a.m. when Kate stepped off the elevator on her office floor. Most of the lights were off, and it was utterly still. A single overhead light shone down on top of the empty receptionist’s desk, casting an eerie spotlight on the huge vase of lilies sitting there. It was an awful joke, those flowers being the first thing Kate saw on her first day back at the office. Her mother, Gretchen—in her sole and largely token effort to be helpful—had selected lilies for Amelia’s funeral. They were lovely and tasteful. And terrible.

  Looking at them, that familiar burn flared up in the back of Kate’s throat. The one that was always followed these days by a mad dash to the bathroom where Kate would spend the next ten minutes huddled over the toilet, vomiting, or, more often, dry heaving. The bouts of nausea could be triggered by almost anything, too—the sight of Amelia’s favorite cereal in the grocery store, a catalogue for field hockey gear arriving in the mail, a teenage girl’s boots. Avoiding food entirely was the only thing that seemed to help at all. In the month since Amelia had died, Kate had lost fourteen pounds. She’d taken to wearing baggy clothes to hide her skeletal frame.

  “How do you manage to stay so trim, dear?” a sweet old lady had asked her the other day in Rite Aid.

  Simple, Kate had wanted to say. I’m already dead.

  Instead, she’d pressed her lips together so hard it had made her eyes water as she’d grabbed her prescriptions. The ones her therapist had assured her would help with the nausea and the insomnia. In reality, they’d done nothing except make her feel as if she were underwater. Kate kept taking them in the hope she might eventually drown.

  Coming back to work had been a bad idea. At a minimum, Kate needed to get out of the vestibule and into her office. But she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the flowers. Frozen there in the elevator bank, she was glad at least that she’d decided to come in early. That way, if she vomited on the floor, there would be time to clean it up. And perhaps she wouldn’t actually have to see anyone. That had been her plan: to stay inside her office all day, comforted by the knowledge that there were people—living, breathing people—safely secured on the other side of her locked office door.

  Certainly she could never have exchanged pleasantries with anyone. What would there be for them to say to her anyway? Sorry? Sorry your daughter is dead. Sorry your daughter jumped off the roof of her school when you were on your way to pick her up. Sorry you were late. Too bad you’ll be reliving that failure for the rest of your miserable life.

  As much as Kate didn’t want to have small talk with anyone, surely people wanted to avoid her, too. No one wanted to talk to a mother whose only child had just killed herself. Kate could have spared everyone the discomfort by staying home for much longer.

  “Take three months at least, then work a couple more from home,” Jeremy had said at the funeral. His eyes had been damp and red-rimmed, and for the first time Kate had felt sure that all of his caring overtures over the years had not been an act. No one was that good an actor. His beautiful, teary-eyed wife, Vera, and his three tall sons, all staring at their shoes, had flanked him. The sight of them together like that—handsome, well matched, complete—had almost brought Kate to her knees. “You know how much everyone at the firm loves you, Kate. But we can hold down the fort without you for as long as we need to.”

  When Vera had stepped forward to hug her, Kate had clutched her back, burying her face into Vera’s long, sweet-smelling hair. It had been too much, inappropriate even, given how little t
he two women actually knew each other. But there was so much life around Vera. Kate had been terrified of what would happen when she let go.

  Staying home ended up being easier said than done. Kate had spent the first days after Amelia’s death surrounded by her three closest friends from college. They’d swooped in and propped her upright, had seen to it that she ate and bathed and breathed. But they all had families of their own whom they’d had to return to shortly after the funeral. Even Seth—Kate’s onetime law school boyfriend, now de facto best friend, who had been so sweet and wonderful—had eventually come round less and less. Kate had insisted. Their days of comfortably impossible, pseudomarital status had long since passed. Seth had a husband now, Thomas, and a daughter of his own who needed him.

  Kate’s mom and dad had been there, too. Strategically, they had arrived somewhat later, not until the eve of the funeral. Allowing, conveniently, for the messiest of Kate’s grief to subside. Her parents had always disdained big displays of any kind of emotion—anger, despair, joy, love—from anyone. But especially their only child. Kate had learned early on the value of swallowing her feelings whole. With Amelia’s death, though, her parents must have suspected that there would be no controlling anything this time, and they’d wisely waited a couple of days before arriving in Brooklyn. So they’d missed the part where Kate had scratched her arms until they bled and sobbed so hard that she had broken capillaries in her face. They had quickly departed, too, probably once it became apparent that Kate would not be pulling it together anytime soon.

  After her parents had gone and her friends had all returned to their very full lives, Kate was alone. Again. As she always had been before Amelia.

  For two weeks, she’d sat in her deathly quiet brownstone sheathed in her guilt and grief, feeling like her skin was being sloughed off in strips and discarded like sheets of cellophane. She’d stared at the ceiling and sobbed until her insides were a burned-out hull. She’d thought about how her life without Amelia would be nothing but an inexplicable void. Nothing but her. Alone. Forever.