Me, Him, Them, and It Read online

  “Please. Let’s call this what it is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sex,” I said. “Will you take me home?”

  There was a long pause. Finally, he said, “Won’t your parents be suspicious? It’s only eight thirty.”

  We laughed. I didn’t want to be laughing, but when I looked at him, I laughed harder.

  “They won’t notice.”

  “Mine will.”

  “Okay. We can kill some time.” I slipped the rest of the way out of my bra and angled onto my elbow as best I could in the cramped backseat. I started to kiss him again and his pink penis peeked right up between the bottom wings of his button-down shirt. I started to giggle through the kisses. He started laugh-kissing too. I began unbuttoning all of his buttons, and he untied his tie and pulled his undershirt off. I pressed my pathetic chest to his. There was no way in hell I was going to have sex again, but Lizzie had taught me all about blow jobs. I reached for his thing between kisses, and my hand got sticky.

  “I—” He stared at me, turning red. “I’m sorry, babe. I just got too excited.” His stuff pasted his leg hair to his skin.

  He pulled his undershirt out from behind the spare tire and I watched him wipe himself off. He’d called me babe even though I just told him I wasn’t his girlfriend.

  I stuttered, tightening my grasp on the control I had felt all night. But in the moment I paused, he grabbed my hand and my knees and managed to roll me up into a little ball on my side, like a puppy. Then he fit himself around me, curved like a comma. I was naked, but he ignored all my girly parts and just flung his arm over my middle. Every once in a while he would stroke the inside of my elbow with his thumb.

  I told myself I was being dumb; I told myself to sit up and shift back into my clothes. This was the part where he spreads rumors about me. I wanted those rumors. Car-cuddling and laugh-kissing were not part of the plan. But my body kept listening to my elbow pit. Monday, the entire football team would know we did it in the Little League complex parking lot, but they wouldn’t know about this part. Locker-room talk does not involve thumbs caressing the inside of elbows. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck and I wondered how my frizz was not crawling into his throat and making him hack like a cat. We ended up falling asleep like that. When we woke up, we started making out again, but he glanced at his watch and freaked. I got home to a sleeping house at 1:22 a.m.

  The next morning my mother looked up from her BlackBerry and asked me if I had had a nice time. She doesn’t know. She can’t tell, I thought.

  Monday morning, I steeled myself for school. I limped out of bed, my vadge still feeling bruised like a black eye, and I wondered why anyone had sex ever. I pulled on my uniform and practiced walking straight in front of the mirror. I said the things I knew I would hear throughout the day out loud to myself: “Easy,” “Slut,” “Whore,” “Jersey chaser.”

  Then I said the things I knew I would hear in whispers, slithering up and down the hallway like serpents. I whispered into the mirror: “They did it in the Little League complex.” “I heard it was all her idea.” “She practically dragged him there.”

  I didn’t care. It was what I wanted. I went to school.

  But nothing happened. Other than the way I felt like hiding from the Crucifix in every classroom, nothing felt different. Not one nasty stare, not one ass slap by the other football players. Nothing. I heard plenty of lies about Lizzie, who told me that she’d actually just ditched the dance and gone home to stalk potential fathers online, but I was ghostly as always. When I got to practice, I was half disappointed. I trudged toward the track by myself, wearing my sneakers and a sports bra. I felt a hand on my ribs, and Todd said, “Hey, E!”

  I yanked his hand off my waist and spun around, whipping my ponytail across his face. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’ve been dying to see you all day.”

  “I don’t like PDA,” I said.

  He looked scorned but said, “Can you grab a coffee after practice?”

  Instead of coffee, we had sex in the school parking lot.

  As the months went by, when the rumors still didn’t start and silence stole away more and more of the rooms in my house, I realized I would need a new plan to be Bad. I wanted my parents to see it and feel it. I wanted them to be mad at me, not just each other. Lizzie said, “You have to do more than just fuck Todd on the DL. You have to look the part. You have to get in trouble. Be a badass. Stop studying so much. Stop going to church. You didn’t have to actually sleep with anyone, but I bet you’re glad you did,” and she nudged my ribs with her elbow. I followed all of her advice, except I kept studying.

  I painted my eyelashes with mascara every morning and lined my lips in dark red, even just for school. I took my uniform skirt to a tailor and had him measure my leg and make it the shortest length that wouldn’t land me in daily detention. I showed up in the locker room in my too-short skirt and told Coach I was quitting track. Her jaw dropped and emitted sounds about how I was throwing away a future and potential scholarships and all sorts of nonsense but I just spun around, hoping my skirt did not flare so much that she could see my panties, and walked out, ignoring the heaviness of tears that threatened to soak her words and my eyes. I hid my easel and paintbrushes in the very back of my closet and watched while the new paints the Stranger had bought for me streaked through the toilet water when I flushed them. I quit art club and French club and resigned as class treasurer. I got detention for chewing gum in class, for yanking my skirt too short, for talking back to the nuns, even for shouting at another girl in the hallway.

  It works on Todd too. The badder I get, the more it drives him crazy. He finds me hotter by the second, but he also concedes that we have to keep everything secret. “If my friends found out about you, they’d warn me about diseases,” he says sometimes. “If my parents find out, they’ll ground me for a month.” I ignore the way my heart bruises from banging into my rib cage when he says stuff like that.

  Also, somehow I started liking sex. When I would lie down at night after suffering through another evening in household hell, sometimes hearing the shouts ricocheting down the hallway, and other times being obliterated by silence—which was worse—I would crave his attention. I would picture Todd propped on his elbows leaning over me, whispering questions about my life into my hair and chuckling and smiling and my elbow and stomach would get goose bumpy from memories of his flesh on mine, and I would literally shake with wanting him to show up.

  So one night, I just called him.

  “Come over?” I said.

  He hesitated. “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He sounded excited, which made me happy.

  “Bring a condom.”

  “Oh … we can do that? What if your parents catch us?”

  I laughed. I mean, really laughed. I knew it wasn’t a joke but when you have just gone twenty-four hours without either of your parents, who are the only people you live with, saying a word to you, it sounds like a joke.

  “Believe me. That won’t be an issue.”

  He hesitated again. I don’t know why. But he said, “Sweet.” And hung up.

  The problem with sex is the moment after. Your body is still buzzing with closeness and physical intimacy, and your mind gets all screwed up and forgets that it wasn’t actual love that happened, just sex. So when Todd nuzzled into me like a hibernating bear and said, “So what’s with your parents?” I stupidly answered.

  “My mom is an idiot for being with my dad. He cheated on her. Now they both want to avoid each other, so they end up avoiding me.”

  He squeezed me and his head shot up so his eyes could meet mine. They are green with these gold flecks. And he has impossibly long, dark eyelashes. He looked like I’d just told him my parents were dead.

  “Are you serious?” he said, his eyes steady on mine. When I didn’t say anything else, he let his head fall and buried his nose next to my collarbone. “That s
ucks.”

  Gradually, after sex, he pulled the whole story out of me. He joked with me. He tickled and teased me. He asked my opinion on things like whoever Lizzie was sleeping with at the moment or school lunch that day, and he listened to my answers. He started to hang out in my room with me for hours at a time, several days a week. We would have sex, but we would also talk. And joke. And sometimes even play games. But still, it was all about sex. In the part of my imagination that I store in the middle of my brain—farthest from my skull—I could see us holding hands, him putting his arms around me at parties. But it was too late for that. Plus, if I was his girlfriend, there’s no way I could have held on to him for this long.

  We run with the same crowd since I still hang out with some of the athletes at school, but he doesn’t tell anyone about me, and I don’t either. Except Lizzie, who keeps her mouth shut tight. We have sex in our cars after school, in the school bathroom, under the football bleachers. We sneak off from parties together, but we never get caught. Then we go back to the party and not exactly ignore each other, but just act like casual acquaintances. We are damn good. At school they started calling me slut anyway, because of how I dressed and talked and acted with the teachers. So it worked out okay.

  I never did it with anyone else, but I let Todd think I might. And I don’t think about him when he’s not with me.

  Still 37 Days

  I’m almost finished with chapter three of The Canterbury Tales when my cell buzzes with a message that Todd can’t get out of his house. I groan and grab my belly. “How the hell am I going to figure out what to do with you?” I put my fist directly on my uterus and shake it back and forth. I’m pretty sure that didn’t hurt the thing—that it can’t even feel yet—but my skin still tingles with guilt and I stop.

  36 Days to Decide

  “I just want you to think about why you are telling him,” Mary says.

  “Just to see what he says. What he would do.”

  “Are you sure you want to?”

  “Yeah.” I find a confidence that must have been buried someplace small, like my right pinky toe, because I can only find it when I am making ridiculous statements like this one. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “That’s a good question. What is the worst that could happen?”

  I swallow. It was rhetorical, damn it. Something about Mary and her fake smile makes me say things I never say. “He could stop having sex with me.” The worst thing that could happen.

  “Okay, true,” Mary says. “There might be some other consequences. Are you sure you can’t think of any more?”

  “We would stop hanging out.” I almost choke on the words.

  “Or,” Mary says, with that annoying air of I-am-the-adult-and-therefore-know-more-than-you-do-even-though-this-is-about-your-own-life. “He might convince you to have the baby when you really don’t want to.”

  I laugh. “I really don’t think so.”

  “He could tell your parents. Or his parents. He could tell his buddies at school and suddenly everyone will know.”

  I shake my head to each one of these as if none of them fazes me. I smile. I am a stupid fake just like Mary.

  “Why do you want to tell him, anyway?” Mary asks. “I thought you didn’t even like this guy.”

  “I don’t dislike him,” I qualify, and Mary gives this halfhearted little giggle. She actually laughs. What the hell? She’s a freaking counselor; she’s not supposed to laugh at me. That has to be seriously against her honor code or whatever. She has faked everything else; can’t she just fake a stupid straight face?

  But as I’m thinking this, my lips abandon me. Forcing myself not to smile is as strenuous as bench-pressing. I hate my mouth. Mary is still smiling. Like she thinks we are friends now or something.

  She shakes her head at me and gets off the couch, moving toward the minifridge. “I know your life isn’t funny right now, Evelyn, but I’ve just never met anyone who could sleep with someone with the frequency you describe for close to a year and still not feel some overwhelming emotion—love, hate, annoyance.” She hands me a can of ginger ale without even asking me if I want it. I do want it, but she could have asked me, so I just pass it back from my left hand to my right and concentrate on keeping my lips in a straight line. “You talk about Todd like he’s an old couch in your living room or something.”

  Now, I actually let out a laugh. I hate myself sometimes.

  Since I already hate myself, and Mary, I open the ginger ale. With the first sip, my stomach settles like a dog that has been running around the park, leaping with all four feet off the ground, and then just lies down to take a nap. I wonder how long the knots in my abdomen have been writhing and tightening.

  Mary is saying something about Todd again, about why I want to tell him. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to her, even though she is crazy annoying today. I just don’t really know.

  “Aren’t you the one who called it his baby?” I ask.

  “It’s only his baby if you decide to have it.” She turns her head to peer at me out of the tiny corner of her minuscule eye because she thinks she just said something extremely wise.

  “Says who?”

  “The law.”

  I smile on purpose this time. “I actually break the law a lot. I’m not going to start following it as soon as it’s on my side.”

  She squeaks that little laugh and I feel like talking, so I continue. “Besides, I just don’t think I can really, fully decide until he knows. Until I know what he would say.”

  “In some ways you are very mature, Evelyn,” Mary peeps. “It sounds like you have your mind made up about talking to him, though. So why are you here today? Do you want to practice?”

  “Practice what?”

  “Practice what you will say to him. Pretend I am him.”

  “No!”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Then why are you here?”

  “I want to know if I have sex with him before I tell him, will it hurt the baby?” I’ve already had sex with him twice. I’ve already asked this idiotic question too. But I didn’t understand her cryptic answer.

  “I’m more worried about it hurting you, Evelyn,” Mary coos her pretend concern.

  “Will you just answer my question straight for once?” I shouldn’t yell, but I don’t want to hear about all the ways I’m hurting myself. I’ve been hurting myself one way or another my whole life and look at me, I’m still here, right? So I shouted at her. Whatever.

  “No, Evelyn. Sex will not hurt the fetus. Just like I told you a few days ago.” Even though she didn’t actually say that.

  “Thanks.” I grab my bags in a huff.

  “Will you come back tomorrow and let me know how it goes?”

  “If I feel like it.” I storm out of her office and leave my half-empty ginger ale can fizzing on her overly informative coffee table. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have taken it with me and recycled it.

  After dinner—chewing take-out tacos and answering the Stranger’s questions monosyllabically while Mom eats in her office—I text Todd to come over. I say, I’m horny. Come over. But I’m not. Sex sounds less appealing to me right now than Chinese water torture, or a family vacation, or giving birth, even. But he responds with a smiley face, so when he gets here I lie on my back and let him do his thing. He brought a condom this time. Hilarious.

  When it’s over he holds me like always, and I try to just relax and enjoy it a little, but I can’t because his hand is, like, directly on my uterus and I imagine that thing in there curling up into the crease of his palm the way I curl up into his body. And even though I know it’s just a ball of nerves and cells right now, just a little blob—and even though I hate it—I kind of feel sorry for it, the way it’s nudged between its father’s fingers, and I’m about to kill it, maybe.

  I sit up and look at him. I’m naked, but I don’t really care. I’ve been naked so much with Todd, it almost feels weird to wear clothes around him.


  “We need to talk.” My words fall like bricks into the peaceful room.

  “Uh-oh,” he says. “Look, Evelyn—”

  “No, Todd—” I cut him off but then he interrupts me again.

  “Look, Evelyn, we always said this was just going to be about sex.”

  He swings an ax and hits my stomach.

  “I mean, it’s not that I don’t like you.” Thunk. “It’s just, I mean, my friends.” Thunk. “And my parents.” Thunk.

  “Stop!” I shout, too loudly. I never used to care if we got caught, but now I really don’t want to. I lower my voice. “It’s not about that.”

  “Oh … sorry. What then?”

  “I’m pregnant.” I said it. I swear I did. I just said it. But nothing came out of my mouth. My voice just ran away.

  “What?” says Todd.

  My lips move, but nothing happens.

  “C’mon, what is it, Evelyn?”

  “I’m—” There it goes again. No voice. Completely mute. I start to giggle. So does Todd. “I can’t say it.”

  “So … act it out.” He laughs.

  “No, no.” I take a deep breath to stop the laughing. “No. I’ll just say it.”

  “Okay,” he says, waiting.

  “I’m—” Suddenly we are doubled over laughing again, but I can feel that it’s almost over, that I am almost to the line where laughing at yourself morphs into stupid baby tears that leak all over your face.

  So I take my hands and put them in front of my belly button, about a foot away from my actual stomach and make a convex motion. Damn, I hope I don’t get this big.