Me, Him, Them, and It Read online

  Contents

  39 Days to Decide

  38 Days to Decide

  37 Days to Decide

  How Life Got Shitty

  Still 37 Days

  36 Days to Decide

  How This Happened

  Still 36 Days

  35 Days to Decide

  Decision

  28 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind

  27 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind

  26 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind

  25 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind

  21 Days Till It’s Too Late to Change My Mind

  7 Months, 2 Days

  7 Months, 1 Day

  What Aunt Linda Was to Me

  7 Months, Less Than 1 Day

  Last Day with the Stiff-Ass

  6 Months and 30 Days Left

  Pregnant and Parentless

  6 Months, 26 Days Left

  She Doesn’t

  Pregnancy Brain

  5 Months, 22 Days Left

  Talking

  Practice

  The Dumbass

  4 Months, 29 Days Left

  Dads

  3 Months, 23 Days Left

  Christmas Ev(i)e

  Making Plans

  3 Months, 1 Day Left

  Faking It

  Done Means Done

  All These Parents

  2 Months, 10 Days Till Normal

  1 Month, 17 Days Till Normal

  1 Month, 10 Days Till Normal

  1 Month Till Normal

  Waiting

  24 Days Till Normal

  The Next Day

  21 Days Till Normal

  Waiting for Normal

  Him

  Them

  Normal

  Empty

  1 Month Empty

  Maryellie

  2 Months Empty

  An Empty Senior

  Summer

  Good-bye

  Homecoming

  Single Dad

  Being a Mother

  Being a Teenager

  Moving Back, Moving On

  Acknowledgments

  For Mom and Dad

  39 Days to Decide

  This is a complete crock, but I shut my eyes like this squeaky counselor asked.

  “Imagine it’s just you. You are the only person in the universe. Now, what do you want to do?”

  She is a bonehead. My whole freaking life it has been only me. This is the first time that what I do will matter to someone else. I open my eyes and survey the brochures on the coffee table that separates me from the Planned Parenthood lackey: Choosing Abortion, The Biology of Abortion, Choosing Adoption, Teenaged Parenting. An endless list of bad ideas.

  “Anything?” she asks.

  I open my mouth, and she scoots her oval face onto her hands, her pointy elbows perched on her tiny knees.

  “I just want to disappear myself.”

  It’s true. I don’t want to have to make this decision. I don’t want to have to face my parents or the nuns or Todd or anyone. I want to abort myself.

  She sighs impatiently and tells me I am welcome to come back the next day. I walk out the door toward my Jeep, gripping The Biology of Abortion in one hand and Teenaged Parenting in the other. My hands are sweating like armpits. I won’t be able to read these things anyway because by the time I get home, the little glossy flaps will be all crinkled and stuck together.

  That night, I have a dream. I am standing, barefoot and naked, on my chemistry textbook, which is suspended in midair like a little space-aged platform. Everything is dark except an eerie blue ring that shines lengthwise around my body, head to toe. This is some kind of opposite halo; my chemistry book and I are both being flung into hell. Which seems fine, really. But then I hear the whoosh of a machine and I realize that I am standing in the middle of an enormous vacuum. The absence of air yanks my arms to their wingspan and my legs almost into a full split. My hair leaps to the top of my head like a troll’s. I feel nothing but relief: I will disappear; the baby will disappear; it will be over. My fingernails and toenails are the first to detach and fly into the fluorescent-blue vacuum. It doesn’t hurt. Instead, I feel strangely light, like I just had a back massage, or a painkiller, or an orgasm. When I am bald and nailless, the machine peels off my scalp and I feel it stealing each of the twenty-seven bones in my hand one by one. By the time my calf muscles skirt away and the blue light sucks up my brain like a long noodle of spaghetti, my heart feels like it must when you hear someone say “I love you.” And I don’t even care that it’s about to be splattered all over this blue machine.

  But then I wake up.

  38 Days to Decide

  After school, I trudge back to Planned Parenthood and barge into Mary’s office. She manages to look happy to see me. Faker.

  I start to tell her about my dream, but she shoves a Suicide Prevention pamphlet in my face, so she has me all wrong. I don’t want to kill myself; I want to be erased. If I kill myself there is a whole big mess, and everyone will find out my business. She looks so worried; her brown eyes are twitching, and that annoys me because, come on, she doesn’t even know me. She can’t care that much. Maybe she would get in big trouble if I killed myself, since she counseled me the past few days and all.

  But I’m not going to kill myself, so I say, “I think I need some more information.” I remember the reading that this Planned Parenthood minion gave me for “homework,” which is still buried in the back of my bathroom cabinets, hidden from my parents’ prying eyes—in case they decide to come out of their caves long enough to pry. “I’m not getting anything from those pamphlets,” I add, to cover my ass.

  “It’s okay if you didn’t read them, Evelyn.”

  I guess all girls who come here are too worked up to read about the various machines that will be shoved up their vaginas in the next few months, no matter which option they choose.

  “Let’s get the basics on the table, okay?”

  “Okay.” I use my palms to pull my red frizz into a ponytail.

  “You are sixteen, correct? Just beginning your junior year at St. Mary’s?”

  “Yeah.” I wonder how she knows what school I go to until I remember the pleated plaid skirt that is shifting around my mid-thigh—our whole city knows what that skirt means. Even though this building is only a few blocks from my school, maybe three miles from my house, it feels a million miles away.

  “So I imagine you have been taught by some pro-life folks in your school. Are you Catholic yourself?”

  “My parents are.” Here it comes. The nuns at school always paint Planned Parenthood as an abortion factory—taking in a girl and a baby, turning out a girl and a corpse. I didn’t think anyone here would be as monstrous as they say, but I thought Mary might push the agenda harder than she has. I guess she was just waiting for the right moment. But then, it’s hard to imagine this tiny woman with the twitching brown eyes and phony commiserating frown pushing me into anything.

  Here’s how I ended up on her dusty couch: a few weeks ago, I was at the beach with Lizzie complaining as usual about the cavernous gap below my shoulders where God forgot to put my boobs. Lizzie said, “Yeah, I would’ve thought you’d fill that bikini out a little better now that you’re on the pill,” and when I told her I wasn’t, she freaked. I wanted a chest, so when she said I could go to Planned Parenthood and get a prescription without telling my parents—and that it could move me up a full bra size—I did. I was having sex with Todd anyway, so it seemed like a good idea. On the way home from the first day of school, I just drove myself over here, whistling out the window of my car like a freaking idiot while visions of C-cups bounced in my brain. When I got here, they made me take a blood
test, and it said I was already pregnant. The thought had not even occurred to me. That’s how much of a dumbass I am.

  I got drunk later that night. Todd’s friend Sean was having some people over so I convinced Lizzie to go. We got shitfaced. We stripped down and went swimming in our underwear in Sean’s pool. Later, once everyone was too wasted to notice, Todd pulled me aside, whispered how beautiful I looked, wrapped me in a towel, and tugged me behind the row of hedges that separates Sean’s yard from the highway. We had sex right on the grass with the traffic swinging by. I wasn’t sure if sex would hurt the baby, but I knew drinking would, so I figured screw it, and tried to enjoy myself. But that was Friday. I haven’t drunk anything or smoked anything or even spoken to Todd since (not that he noticed) and now it’s Tuesday and I don’t know what to do.

  “I didn’t ask about your parents,” Mary is saying, “I asked about you. Are you Catholic?”

  I snap my gum and drum my sparkly blue fingernails on her coffee-table-slash-encyclopedia-of-teen-pregnancy. “Why does that matter?”

  “It matters because if you are Catholic, or if your religion in any way precludes you from considering abortion, we’ll skip talking about that option. But I want to know about your beliefs because, as I tried to emphasize to you yesterday, this is your decision. Not your parents’ decision.”

  “Oh.” Boy, do the nuns have these people wrong. “No. I’m not Catholic. I don’t believe in God.”

  It’s the truth. But every time I say it out loud, it has the metallic taste of a lie in my mouth.

  “Okay. Basically, you have three options: you could abort, you could parent, or you could go the adoption route. There are advantages and disadvantages to each choice. Does one of them appeal to you more than the others at this point?”

  “They all sound pretty shitty.”

  Mary laughs. I threw that curse in just to test her. She isn’t grading me, though, so I can just be honest.

  “And why is that?” she asks.

  “Well, adoption is … like being an anonymous kidney donor. I take something out of my body and just give it away. Why would I do that? I always thought those anonymous donor people were creeps. Not just creeps, lonely creeps.”

  “Okay …” Her tiny hand scribbles tinier curlicues while I speak. I don’t give a crap what she writes down, but I wonder what I could possibly be saying that merits notetaking. I imagine her writing her memoirs, not paying attention to me at all. She’s in her own world while pretending to be concerned that I might run home and off myself tonight.

  “And what makes the other options shitty, as you say?”

  I almost giggle. She has such a hard time saying shitty, like she’s trying to say it while simultaneously spitting gum out of her mouth.

  “I would be a crappy parent. And I don’t even like this thing,” I say, tapping my abdomen.

  “You don’t like what thing? The fetus?”

  “I don’t like the baby. I know it’s not the baby’s fault, but it showed up and everything sucks. Now, I can’t drink, I can’t smoke weed, I can’t have sex, I think there are kinds of food I’m not supposed to eat, and there must be other stuff. I can’t even think since this baby latched on. It doesn’t leave my head. Like some really annoying person at school that you just can’t avoid even though you don’t care about them at all. I didn’t even get my homework done this weekend. And I’m always on top of school stuff.”

  She interjects, “I’m sure you are.” Now I know she is lying. No one believes me when I say I work at school. Even the nuns look at me wide-eyed when they hand me my final grade, as if it never occurred to them that I was about to ace their class.

  “I just don’t like it. I don’t like most people; it’s a person. I don’t like it. It’s not Annie Maranski’s fault that her voice is too high and she walks with a permanent limp to the left for no apparent reason, but I don’t like her either. It’s like that. I don’t blame the baby, but I don’t like it.”

  “And abortion?” Now I know she isn’t listening. What kind of counselor, what kind of adult, would listen to that rant and just let it go? It’s the truth, but not the kind of truth you are supposed to say out loud.

  “Well …” It’s not just that I think the thing inside me might be a person. It’s not just that I don’t want a vacuum stuck up my nether regions. It’s not just that it’s kind of Todd inside of me … that’s not it at all. It’s not just that it would be very interesting to see my parents’ reaction to this little tidbit. It would be so easy to just get an abortion.

  Finally, I say, “I don’t want to kill Annie Maranski either.”

  When I leave that afternoon, I get a warning that soon there will only be two options.

  37 Days to Decide

  Before last period, I am crouching at my locker switching my chemistry book for my English anthology. Remarkably, the periodic table is running through my head like it’s a day from last year when I could actually focus on school. I shove my chemistry book into my hanging backpack and lean over to hoist the million-pound Anthology of British Literature onto my hip.

  When I am bent over, I feel a hand snake up my hamstring beneath my skirt and palm my butt cheek. I’m pissed. Not because he grabbed my ass; I live for that. Because he woke the baby that has been sleeping in my brain. I take the anthology and bash it into his forearm, knocking his hand off me and picturing his new bruise. “I told you not to be so grabby in school,” I snap.

  Todd tilts his head into my hair so he’s speaking into the crook of my neck instead of my face. “Woah, feisty,” he breathes. “I like it, E. You look so hot today. Can you hang out after school, before practice?” He licks my ear.

  Half of my heart is melting into a pathetic mush, and the other half is growing digits and making a fist so it can punch Todd in the groin and not have to wait for my body to listen. “I have something to do after school today.”

  I slam my locker and book it down the hallway, but he follows like a puppy. Sometimes I deny sex just to watch him follow me. It’s funny: his green eyes sad, his broad shoulders slumped, his crew-cutted head hanging to the side. But I don’t do it too much or for too long; if I do, he’ll just find it somewhere else.

  He puts his fingers on my hip, swinging me around. “Come on, E! It’s been, like, five days.” It’s been five days since we talked, too, jerkface.

  “I can’t after school, sorry.” But I can’t lose him. Now more than ever. “Sneak over after dinner tonight?”

  The boys’ bathroom door swings open and the sound of his last name—“Arnold!”—blasts us apart. Two of Todd’s football cronies start to shake his shoulders, and he averts his eyes from my body.

  “Yo,” says Sean, “we’re blowing off last period and going to Mickey D’s since practice is late today and we are staaarving. You in?” He glances at me. “What up, Ev?” Sean offers his hand for a high five. I slap it and Greg’s as well, as Todd says, “I’m in.”

  I watch the back of Todd’s head as the three of them disappear down the hallway. He turns and winks at me. He’ll come over tonight. What the hell do I do?

  “I don’t mean to pressure you,” Mary is saying after school. “I truly don’t. But your body is pressuring you. There is an urgency to this decision. While the law does allow for some wiggle room beyond the forty-day deadline I gave you for your decision, the sooner you decide, the more smoothly either option will proceed.”

  “Yeah, I know. But right now I have a more urgent question.” I swing the sterling silver ring my mom gave me for my fifteenth birthday around my left index finger.

  “Oh. Well, certainly, go ahead.”

  How do you have so much time for me? “Can I have sex?” I blurt.

  I wait for the satisfaction I feel when shocking adults, but Mary’s eyes fix themselves steadily on my face. “You mean, if you go ahead and decide to deliver the fetus, but you have sex in the meantime, will it hurt the child in the long run?”

  “Kind of. I also mean, lik
e, biologically. Can I have sex?”

  “Well, no and yes.” Mary sighs. “Married people have sex while they are pregnant all the time.”

  “Really?” I screech. It’s hard to imagine. Then again, all the married people I know are adults, and I don’t really believe adults have sex at all.

  “Yes. But I would urge you to be very careful.”

  “What do you mean? Is there like … a bad position?” I mean, is there a place his thing isn’t supposed to go, but I don’t know how to ask that.

  “No. Are we talking about the father, or another young man, or multiple partners?”

  “The father,” I say, wondering how much of a slut she thinks I am. “So that’s okay? It won’t hurt it?”

  She pauses. “Well, although certain sexually transmitted diseases could factor into birth conditions, in general safe sex is not tremendously risky. However, you need to be careful. You need to protect your heart as well as your fetus.”

  “My heart?” I snort.

  “If you are upset and become stressed or more emotionally strained than you already are, that could directly hurt the fetus through high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, and so on. Also, it could interrupt your decision-making process, which needs to be at the forefront of your mind right now. If you are going to abort, you need to decide that very soon or it will be too late. If you are going to go ahead and deliver, you need to start taking care of yourself.”

  “Oh. I haven’t been drinking.”

  “That’s good but not what I mean. You’ll need prenatal vitamins, a specialist, regular checkups and ultrasounds, a very nutritional diet.” This is the kind of list my mom leaves for me when she goes out of town for some conference and expects me to run the household. I ignore Mary too.

  “So … I can have sex?”

  “I’d advise against it. Let’s talk about the father. What does he know?”

  I laugh. “He’s kind of a dumbass.”

  Mary laughs too, that fake little squeak. “I mean, does he know you are pregnant? Does he know the baby is his?”

  When it’s mine, it’s a fetus. When it’s his, it’s a baby. “No.”