Me, Him, Them, and It Read online

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  “I’ve … got to figure everything out.”

  “You don’t want to tell him? Is he your boyfriend? Do you love him?”

  “No!” I say. “He’s some guy from school I use for sex.”

  Mary’s tiny eyes and mouth form three wide Os like a bowling ball and I finally feel an ounce of success.

  “Well, if you decide to deliver, he is probably going to find out.”

  I nod. I know that. The truth is I’m dying to tell him. The truth is I have a secret that I’ve kept bubbling in my stomach for much longer than this stupid baby: I am in love with Todd.

  Somehow my tires roll me into Lizzie’s driveway instead of taking me home. It’s good though, I need to talk to someone who doesn’t speak in riddles and write in curlicues.

  In her house, my eardrums are immediately vibrating: Lizzie’s door up the stairs jumps in rhythm with the rap playing behind it, the housecleaner runs a vacuum in the living room, her little sister is shouting at some cartoon in the family room, and her mother is yapping a story riddled with curse words into the phone in the kitchen. She looks at me, smiles, and blows me a kiss. My cheeks glow pink because it’s embarrassing how mushy my heart gets from something so small. Mrs. Gates nods toward the stairs and I clomp up in my saddle shoes.

  Lizzie is sprawled on her stomach, still in her uniform, her skirt barely covering her ass in this position. Her music blasts so she doesn’t hear me open the door. In my house, you can hear someone open any door at any moment. She has her reading anthology open at the top of her head, but her face is buried in her plush carpet, her sleek hair spilling over the pages. I laugh. This is not how I study.

  We’ve been best friends since sixth grade and she always does the talking. I know as soon as the littlest thing happens to her—she broke a nail, she shorted her skirt an inch, the hot lifeguard brought sunblock to her station, she bought new lipstick. And she tells me the big stuff too—all the juicy details of her quest to find her dad. It’s not that I can’t sneak a word in; the minute I start to talk, she stops. But talking doesn’t come easily to me. I didn’t get to have Mrs. Gates for a mother.

  I pat Lizzie on the head and she jumps. I’m expecting her to laugh at the fact that she didn’t even hear me come in, but as soon as she sees me she leaps to her feet and wraps her arms around my shoulders. I stiffen. I love Lizzie, but hugging isn’t easy for me either.

  “Oh my God. What’s wrong?”

  Can she tell that quickly? Is my stomach already sticking out?

  I open my mouth to tell her. I came here to tell her. I came here because, even though she won’t give me the best advice, probably won’t even give me advice I would follow—when Bethany thought she was pregnant Lizzie told her to drink beer and eat sushi—she’ll give me some actual advice. Unlike Mary.

  But my words lock up. She sees the letters stuck in my eyes.

  “Tell me now.” She sits on her pink bedspread. I do too.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Lizzie. God.”

  She snaps her gum. “I’m not falling for that again. Tell me.”

  I want to, but I can’t. “Doesn’t it suck to be in school again?”

  She sighs. “Not for me. Not for all the people who aren’t Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”

  I scoff. She knows damn well I’m not anybody’s good girl anymore.

  She says, “School’s just a party you have to get up early for. I like seeing everyone again. I missed flirting.”

  “Everyone is boring.”

  “That’s because you’re a nerd,” she teases. “Hey, let’s start scoping outfits for Real Friday. Sean said his parents are getting three kegs this year.”

  We lose the afternoon in trying on clothes and switching our makeup. Normally I find this routine so boring that Lizzie has to physically put the clothes on my body after an outfit or two, but today I pull on ten different shirts. I stare at my stomach in the mirror, imagining it swelling to the size of a balloon wrapped in each one. Every time I pull a shirt off, I check my middle for a little pouch, but my skin is flat and tight and pale as ever.

  Finally, I say, “I have to go. Todd’s coming over tonight. I gotta make sure the silent parents are in bed.” Lizzie faces me wearing a pink skirt and a white bra. Her boobs perch on her tan chest, her stomach spreads into hips beneath her ribs. Her green eyes glow from within her heart-shaped face. I wish I looked like that.

  “Todd’s coming over?” Lizzie is the only one who knows about me and Todd.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I figured you guys were fighting.”

  “We’re not fighting. We never fight.”

  “I know.” She pauses. “But then, what’s bothering you? It’s more than school.”

  I feel the story fizzing, but it’s fizzing in the soles of my feet, and they are way too far away from my mouth for it to ever have a chance of escaping. I shrug.

  Lizzie says, “Did your dad leave again?”

  When my dad had an affair, I must have tried to tell her a dozen times. She would get mad at me over and over. She would yell about how I didn’t trust her and how I would never feel better if I didn’t just say something, but the words always got all locked in my lungs and when I tried to tell her, when I tried to say, “He fell in love with our slutty dentist and took off; he left me alone with the Ice Queen,” I couldn’t even breathe. Finally, she threatened never to talk to me again so I e-mailed her the story. By that point, he was back. Well, his body was back. But he wasn’t my dad anymore.

  “No,” I say. “I’m fine. Really.”

  She shakes her head at me and turns back to the closet. I take that as permission to leave.

  In our kitchen, chewing on their takeout, the Ice Queen and the Stranger sit across from me and the pack of cells inside me. The baby flips in circles in my brain and my abdomen. Will Chinese food somehow hurt the baby the way sushi does? Does that matter if I am going to kill it anyway? If I kill it by accident with Chinese food, is that still a sin?

  We listen to the clock tick over our heads, the neighbor kids scream in their pool, the crickets chirp in the grass, the geckos patter on the outside of the kitchen windows. The walls are bare and pale. Mom said she was going to repaint the whole house the day after Dad left. She took down everything but he was back before she lifted a brush.

  The Stranger’s voice pulls my brain out of my uterus. “How was your day, Pumpkin?” I glare at him until he corrects it to “How was your day?”

  I say, “Fine.”

  Not to be outdone, Mom says, “I trust you’ve gotten to your homework?”

  I hate this stupid parent charade. I hate how they only ask about school and not about friends or boys or how I’m feeling. I have a freaking 3.9 GPA; they don’t need to ask about homework. I hate that the ghost of the way we used to be hangs over this crazy table reminding us of everything we’ve lost. We used to play music during dinner. Dad used to pull me out of my seat for a dance. Dad used to laugh. Mom used to chuckle sometimes. But now they sit side by side like pillars, spitting out sitcom questions and competing to be parent of the year. I want to scream and rip the hair out of my dad’s face and run away.

  “I’ve started it. It’ll get done.”

  Mom pushes buttons on her BlackBerry.

  Wednesdays are the worst because they have their stupid marriage counseling meeting and the dumb shrink always says that we should all eat together afterward. Other days of the week, I eat with one of them while the other stays in its cave.

  If there were a screaming baby at this table, the Stranger would make me nauseated being all kissy and lovey-dovey, but he would also be incompetent, bumbling with bottles and bibs and baby food and whatever else the monster would need. Mom would be carrying her BlackBerry into another room because of how embarrassed she is to be a grandmother in her forties. That would not fit into the picture-perfect life of the Jacksonville Catholic family we pretend to be for her.

>   I can’t bring the baby here. I’ve got to get rid of it.

  I shovel fried rice into my mouth and swallow an egg roll in two bites. Then I mumble something about homework and get the hell out of there. I dash up the stairs—the walls are still beige and mostly bare—and swing open the door to my room, which is directly at the top. Someone needs to tell me what to do.

  I pick up my cell phone to call Aunt Linda. I trust her.

  But when she answers after the first ring, practically shouting with joy, “Hello, little niece!” I know I won’t tell her anything.

  She doesn’t know anything about me anymore: the mascara, the sex, the drinking, the weed, any of my new Bad Girl stuff. I can’t tell her this. I can’t stand to hear her voice fall with disappointment. She’s the one adult who always sounds happy to hear from me.

  “Hi, Aunt Linda,” I say.

  That’s all it takes for her to know something is wrong. “Oh, Evie, what happened? Are they fighting again?”

  I shrug. My parents aren’t fighting right now and I can’t lie to Aunt Linda, but I also can’t have her ask me what’s wrong again. Plus, somewhere in my brain and heart and reflexes, somewhere in both the past and future, Mom and Dad are always fighting.

  She takes my pause as a yes. “I don’t know why they do this to you, Evie. But remember they love you. We all love you, okay? Even when they’re fighting about you and hurting you and they’re being so dumb, they love you.”

  I love that she gets mad at them for me. Just for hurting me.

  “Okay,” I say. There’s no way I can tell her about it. She’s the only person who ever talks to me like this. If I told her, she’d still love me. She’s the one person I know would love me no matter what I do. I can’t stand to disappoint her.

  “Tell me what I can do for you,” she says.

  I suck in a shaky breath. “Tell me a story about my cousins.”

  A year ago my aunt and her girlfriend or wife or whatever adopted two little black girls. I still haven’t met them because Aunt Linda moved all the way to Chicago when she left, but she tells great stories about them. She calls me at least once a week to tell me about something cute they said or did. And to tell me how much they want to meet me. If I could just get them to visit, if she could see what a mess everything is, then maybe I could tell her without shattering her image of me, her little niece. But Aunt Linda has her own life in Chicago, and she has Nora, and kids, and a social-worker job where she probably has her own pregnant teenagers to deal with. I can’t tell her or anyone.

  It’s ten o’clock when I hang up, bedtime for the parents. A field of hardwood floor, beige walls, and silence stretches out on either side of me. I tiptoe down Dad’s side first, past the Crucifix—one of two items that survived Mom’s “cleansing” when he left—and check under his bedroom door to ensure that it’s dark. I have to walk back past Jesus, and even though I don’t believe in him, I hate crossing his path all pregnant and nonvirginal. I turn, stumbling over my socks, and pad back past my bedroom door, past the family picture where we three smile and pretend. I hate that picture. It’s a reminder of why my mother even opened the door when the Stranger showed up again: so no one would know we had any problems. Two years later, no one does. Except Lizzie and Aunt Linda, both of whom I had to tell myself. We are like a happy, quiet, rich family and no one knows there’s a war inside. Mom’s bedroom is dark too.

  I grab a highlighter, open my anthology to The Canterbury Tales, and sit by the window to wait for Todd to roll his bike into the yard. Usually, waiting like this, my blood is rushing with excitement. Today, my heart is pumping concrete.

  How Life Got Shitty

  Todd loved me first. Two years ago, in ninth grade, I used to catch him ogling me when I ran past the football field at the end of cross-country practice in a neon sports bra and gym shorts. We had art class together that year, and his knees knocked whenever he took the seat next to me. I found it entertaining, but I didn’t really have an opinion about him. All of that was when I was just some goody-two-shoe, brainiac, string-bean virgin of a teenager. I was a kid. I was different back then, I really was. I was naive and callow, and the heaviest thing I had to carry around was my algebra book. I was stupid. I was happy.

  By the time Todd asked me to be his date to the sophomore Christmas dance, the Stranger had left and come back with his eyes on his shoelaces, shivering in our kitchen, and Mom just let him in without a sound. I had been planning to go to the dance with Lizzie, and at this point I didn’t want to go to some boring school dance at all, but I knew that sleeping with a football player was the fastest way to strip off the goody shoes and fulfill my goal. My goal was Bad Evelyn. Bad Evelyn would show my parents.

  In the week Dad was gone, when I was still planning to go with Lizzie, Mom had taken me dress shopping and acted like everything was a big deal. I figured I would spend the night watching Lizzie grind with most of the male members of our class and sneaking cigarettes with her by the Dumpster while she debated which of them to hook up with next weekend. Of course, back then I didn’t actually smoke cigarettes. Oh no, I was an athlete: the only sophomore on the varsity cross-country team; the top 800 runner in winter track. Mom took me to the mall and dragged me from store to store, practically pulling my wrist while I feigned disinterest. I should have cherished every second.

  Even before, my mother was always busy, squeezing the moments with me in between clients, and rushing dinners before going back to work. She was busy, and she was stiff—she was no Dad—but she talked. That day, she had put me in her date book, scheduled me in on a Tuesday evening. I loved seeing my name in there, ever since I was a little kid and she would block out afternoons for Mommy/Evie days. I was embarrassed at how much it still touched me to see my name in her book like that, her time blocked out for me. Of course, there haven’t been any Evie blocks since that day.

  We finally found this red dress. It stretched across my pitiful chest, strapless, but it was bright enough that it didn’t make me look like a total ghost and it cinched at the waist, creating the illusion that I had one. It made me look like a girl at least, and when I stepped out of the Macy’s dressing room, it made Mom suck in her breath and her brown eyes got all wide and motherly. She talked about putting a straightener and then a hot iron through my awful hair and how she would give me these big, sleek curls. I’ve thought about that straightener every morning since while I wrestle a brush through the bush on my head, even after he got back.

  When he got back, he was a stranger who wouldn’t shut up: all these words filling up the whole empty house with nonsense, making every room crowded and claustrophobic, but in all those words, he only really talked to me once. “Mom’s not the woman I married anymore. Of course I still love her, but you see her, Pumpkin … she’s empty. And then when Dr. Alvarez smiled, it was just so hard to ignore.” My jaw dropped but my tongue stayed still. Dr. Alvarez was our dentist. What kind of father runs away with the family dentist? He went on, “I just can’t stand to be away from you.” Like he could still be my dad after he left me. Really, he is a pair of handcuffs locking us all to my mom’s crazy vision of the perfect family.

  The night of the actual dance, I stood naked and freshly showered in front of the bathroom mirror and wondered what Todd would think when he saw the tiny swollen lumps of skin I called boobs and the spiderweb of pale-blue veins impossibly close to the surface right next to my peach nipples. I turned around and focused on my naked butt, or really, the place where my skinny back morphed into skinny legs. I didn’t see what anyone would find attractive about all this paperwhite flesh. Todd could probably count my bones after I took my clothes off. I stood there until goose bumps cropped up across my stomach and chest. Then I counted to one hundred, just seeing if by some miracle she would remember and knock on the door armed with hair supplies.

  In the end, I went to the dance with frizzy hair.

  After about fifteen minutes of watching the drooling disgustingness of our classmat
es falling all over each other with their tongues hanging out, Todd reached for my hand and began to walk toward the dismal disco ball. I dropped his arm and held my breath. When he turned to face me, I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him on the ear. I’d never kissed anyone before, except in middle-school spin the bottle. He gasped.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, like they do in stupid movies.

  “Huh? Where?” He was still startled by the kiss. I didn’t care. I ran through all the movie sex scenes I’d been watching in order to study up. I stretched again and pressed my half-open mouth into the space right behind his ear, running my fingers through his crew cut.

  “The park? The Little League complex?” I suggested, reciting a few of the locations from Lizzie’s list of conquests.

  Todd’s mouth dropped open like a dead fish. “Like, seriously?”

  I just walked out of the school with him trailing a pace behind, puppy dog eyes blooming for the first time.

  We went to the Little League complex and I sat in the corner of the back of his mom’s old-school station wagon, shivering and watching him unwrap and break three of the condoms I stole from Lizzie. They snapped right over his junk. I felt ridiculously naked in the matching strapless and panties Lizzie had forced me to buy, and I didn’t think he had noticed my underwear or even my skin in all his fumbling. The fourth one finally stayed on and I peeled my underwear down to my ankles. I had to lie on my back to try to tug my left foot out of them, and suddenly all of his football-player weight smashed into me. His thing tugged around down there while he tried to get it in and the condom pulled and yanked my skin in places it didn’t want to go. His chest crushed into my shoulder and his chin kept banging my temple. Finally, he used his hand to push it in and it felt like an entire fist had forced its way into me, intent on stretching me out, filling me with solid parts from the inside. It hurt. Tears stung my eyes and I thought I would have to tell him to stop but then, suddenly, it was over.

  Afterward, we were lying on our backs, side by side, as best we could. My feet were thrown over the bench backseat. Half of his back was pressed to the spare tire. My dress lay balled up by his left elbow. My panties hung from my right heel, and my bra was still on. He had on only a shirt and tie. He looked ridiculous. He asked, “So, does this mean that you’re, like, my girlfriend?” He was nervous, but hopeful nervous, not uh-oh nervous. I told the butterfly flapping around in my throat to shut up.