Me, Him, Them, and It Read online

Page 4

Todd stops laughing instantly.

  “No.” A beat. Another one. I watch his eyes, which don’t move from my bedspread. “Whose is it?”

  This question should not be making my eyes sting. I’m ready for it. “It’s yours. It has to be.”

  He sighs. Several minutes go by and then he says, “Wow. This is heavy,” which is so boneheaded it makes me want to laugh again, but as soon as the first giggle escapes my lips he shoots me a look of stone and my mouth flattens straight.

  “Do you know what this means?”

  “Yes,” I say, because I know more than he does even though I don’t know anything.

  “I’m going to have to pay child support for the rest of my life.”

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  “Huh?” Like he really doesn’t know what’s wrong with what he just said. He puts his hands behind his head and lies back down on top of my bedspread, his ribs poking out above his hip bones, his penis, soft and ridiculous, disappearing between his legs. Then he does something surprising. He puts up his arms and reaches for me. I collapse onto his chest. I am so grateful for this one thing, this feeling of skin and muscle and silky body hair under my cheek, that I tell him, “I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.”

  “Oh,” is all he says, but I feel something in his chest release beneath my right ear.

  A long time passes. I keep waiting for the jerkface to ask me a question, to tell me what to do, or at least what not to do. Or maybe what he will do. He says jack. I mean, absolutely nothing. So finally I have to ask him.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever you want, I guess.”

  I sit up again. “Go home.”

  “What?”

  “I said, go home.” I’ve never kicked him out before.

  “What the hell?”

  “You’re worse than my parents right now. Go home.”

  “I … uh … what …” He bumbles for a few seconds more before he says, “Fine,” and pulls on his clothes like he’s yanking apart a knot in a whole pile of jump ropes. When the door slams behind him, loneliness surrounds me, a fog so dense I can’t see. I wish he hadn’t left. I’m sinking in a vat of oil. I don’t even hear the door swing back open, but I feel hands on either side of my shoulders where they lay on my bed. Todd’s face comes into focus above me. “E. Hey, E!” he is saying. “E, we just had sex. We just had sex, E.” What is he talking about?

  “Yeah …,” I say when my voice comes back into my throat. “So?”

  “So,” he says, “do you think it hurt the baby? I mean, what if my dick, like, poked it?”

  Suddenly I feel like smiling. “No.”

  “But what if I hurt it like … emotionally? Like, what if its first memory is its father’s junk flying at its face?”

  I laugh out loud. “It won’t remember,” I say, reaching up to touch his arms. “Besides, it’s not a baby yet. It’s a fetus. No face anyway.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” He lies down next to me again.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asks, and this time I don’t mind.

  “I really don’t know.” I search for my ceiling in the darkness. I can’t find it. When I was little I always wanted a pack of those glow-in-the-dark stars just so I would know the ceiling was still there when I woke up in the middle of the night, but my mom called them tacky. It’s so dark in my room. I know the ceiling is there now, obviously, but I wish I could see it.

  “Man,” Todd says. “How did this happen, anyway?”

  What a boneheaded question.

  How This Happened

  At first, we always used condoms. I took a handful from Lizzie before the crazy dance, and then Todd kept buying more. He always brought the condom over. He would just roll over and put it on after I pulled off his boxers. We didn’t even have to talk about it. It was almost freaking sweet or something.

  But one day, last spring, he forgot. It was a really bad day, one of the worst explosions in the history of parents.

  I came home and locked myself in my room with my homework as usual. Our house was so silent it was like no one was there, even though all of us were home. I took algebra 2 last year and I had this really rough teacher, Mr. Cattels. He made us do page after crazy-long page of problems every night. So there I am, sitting on my bed, still on the first page. To be honest, I didn’t mind how much homework he gave us. I complained like everyone else because I didn’t want them to think I was a freak, but all of that homework gave me an escape. And something else to think about since I quit running and painting.

  And, okay, I actually like losing myself in math homework after bad days of school, and that day was the worst. Bethany had told me that Todd asked Amber Sallisbury to the prom in study hall. Bethany was chirping the news to all of us in that high, cutesy voice girls use to tell stories they wish were about themselves. I just smiled and awww-ed with the rest of the idiots at my lunch table, but for some reason the story made my stomach tie up in knots. Amber Sallisbury is one of those the perky, sweet, blond cheerleader types. I don’t really have anything against her, and I didn’t expect Todd to ask me or anything stupid like that, but I just kind of hoped he would blow it off like I was planning to and the two of us could go hide somewhere and screw until Sean’s after-party where we could show up separately and no one would even suspect we had been together. But he asked this girl Amber, which was worse than just some flake because she was in honors classes with me and I actually kind of liked her, and for some reason when I found out that he asked her out, I just freaking hated her and that sucks. There aren’t enough people I like for Todd to steal them away.

  So I totally lost myself in my algebra. I do that sometimes. I don’t know where the time goes or where my brain goes. It’s bad, honestly bad, because a hurricane alarm could be screaming outside my window and I wouldn’t notice or move out of the way. Eight o’clock, I’m still sitting on my bed surrounded by notebooks. Nine o’clock, I finally turn a page in the notebook and start the second set of problems. Nine fifteen: a dynamite explosion and I didn’t miss that.

  My brain was still flying through numbers when I heard my mother screaming shrilly in the kitchen. I tried to tune it out, but my dad was saying, “You know, Judy, she’s your daughter, too.”

  “I was working, I’ll have you know,” my mother shouted.

  “Yeah. And I was just twiddling my goddamn thumbs.”

  “Jim, you know perfectly well I ate with Evelyn last night, and you know I have a huge suit coming up, so of course I assumed you would take responsi—”

  “Well maybe next time, instead of assuming, you should actually talk to your daughter!”

  At that moment, divine providence, my stomach started to growl. It was 9:20 and I hadn’t eaten since my stupid 11:15 a.m. lunch at school. You can never really eat lunch at school anyway. There are too many anorexic girls walking around with their noses to the ceiling for you to feel comfortable actually consuming a balanced meal. I hate them even more because I look like one of them with my skin stuck to my bones and my tiny, tiny boobs and my frizzy hair and my face as pale as paper, but those are just the good looks God blessed me with. Unlike most girls, I actually eat. Unless I forget.

  And my parents are always arguing about who should be taking care of me—who should be feeding me, taking me to school, signing my report cards. It’s like it never occurred to them that it was my own fault I hadn’t eaten any dinner.

  “Will you just make her some food and bring it up to her and apologize?” My mom was crying now, which was worse.

  My dad sighed. “Of course I will bring her some dinner, Judy, but if I am apologizing, it is for your oversight.”

  “You jackass! You never take responsibility for anything! You are her father and you know that a father means something in this day and age. When will you learn—”

  The sound of pots slamming into the stove and kitchen cabinets banging open interrupted their words too much for me to follow the conversa
tion. I realized the Stranger was going to come up the stairs with some stupid home-cooked meal for me and pretend to be my father, and the last thing I wanted to see was his ugly face. So I snuck down the hallway, brushed my teeth, and padded back to my room. I shut off the lights just as I heard his loafers shifting up the stairs. He knocked on my door lightly, but I didn’t answer. I slipped under my covers and pulled them up to my chin so he wouldn’t be able to see that I was still wearing my peter-pan-collared uniform shirt.

  “Hey,” he called lightly at my door. I cringed. The door creaked open and I heard him put a tray on my desk. I kept my eyes shut, expecting to hear the door creak again, but it didn’t. Instead, I felt his hand tracing a path through the muddled frizz on top of my head. “I’m sorry if you’re hungry, Pumpkin baby,” he said, so lightly he sounded like someone else. “Sleep well.”

  I lay like that for a long time. I pulled my knees all the way up to my chin and wrapped my arms around them, picturing myself as small as a jelly bean or a piece of chocolate edamame that Aunt Linda likes so much. Why doesn’t he ever talk like that when I’m awake? How often does he come talk to me in my sleep? The words spun in my brain and I tried to sweep them out. I wished I could just go to bed for real, but it was only nine thirty and I wasn’t even sleepy. And I was hungry as a starved animal.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I saw Dad had taken the tray with him. I pulled my phone under my covers just in case one of my parents were standing at the door looking for ammo to judge the other one and noticed the eerie blue light filling my room when I opened my phone. So I texted Lizzie without really looking. “Parents exploded. Really bad. No dinner. Can you come with food?” I sent it to Lizzie. I really did. Like I said, I wasn’t looking. I lay on my back, under my bedspread, sweating my ass off and listening for more signs of unraveling in my house. Everyone was pretending to sleep in their separate rooms. It was dead silent.

  Lizzie has a key to my house, so I expected her to just come right in. Instead, I heard a tap at my window. Todd was throwing little pebbles like a scene out of some cheesy eighties movie. I looked down at him and he waved a brown paper bag.

  “What are you doing here?” I hissed when I let him into the kitchen.

  “I brought you food, like you said. Are you okay?”

  “What do you mean, like I said?”

  “You texted me and said your parents had some big fight and that you didn’t get dinner. What happened anyway? Are you okay?”

  “Oh my gosh.” I put my hand over his mouth and we tiptoed through the inky blackness toward my bedroom. “I didn’t mean to text you. I meant to text Lizzie.”

  A shadow crossed his face. I don’t know if it was that he didn’t believe me or that he wished he didn’t believe me. He said, “Oh. Well, I brought you food.”

  We sat, fully clothed, facing each other on my bed while he pulled stuff out of the bag. “A turkey sandwich on white with mustard. A roast beef sandwich on rye with mayo. A ham sandwich on wheat with both. A cold but cooked hot dog that my brother left in the fridge with some ketchup packets from McDonald’s. Some pasta salad my mom made. Some regular salad that I made myself. An apple. A banana. A bag of strawberries. And two brownies. One with nuts.”

  “Who do you think I am? The entire British army?”

  He shrugged and he looked so cute. That puppy look was in his eyes and he wasn’t even asking for sex, at least not right then. “I didn’t know what you liked. It sounded like you had a rough night.”

  If I were at school, if there were other girls around, if we were anywhere in public, or if I even just gave a damn, I would have eaten the salad and left it at that. But I was freaking starving. I ate the turkey sandwich, the ham sandwich, half the pasta salad, and the brownie without nuts. With the first bite I thought I could feel the vitamins and nutrients attaching themselves to my blood vessels like cellular Legos. The day faded into fogginess. I felt like smiling.

  “I was hungrier than I thought,” I told Todd. He reached for the roast beef and peeled off the plastic wrap. “Did you skip dinner too?”

  “No.” He laughed. “But you make eating look like the best thing on earth.”

  So we ate together and my parents left my brain. He talked about spring football and asked about Lizzie, but not my parents. I fed him the last bite of my brownie, and soon we were making out, his hands running up and down my ribs and over my boobs, pulling at the stupid buttons on the uniform shirt I was still wearing, hiking up my skirt even shorter. As he traced his lips down my neck, I relaxed and began enjoying it. He whipped his head up suddenly.

  “I forgot a condom.” By now we were both in just underwear.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know,” he said, sitting up. “I was so busy packing that food.” He gestured to the remains in a semicircle next to my bed. “I guess I wasn’t thinking about sex.”

  I was touched. It might be pathetic, but I was.

  “We should stop then.” I sat up next to him.

  “We should.” But his hand was still on my side, his thumb running over my hip bone and back in a goose-bump-producing rhythm. His eyes remained on the spot where my breasts should have been filling out my satin bra. So, in about a second, we were making out, devouring each other again. When he was on top of me, I said, “Screw it. One time won’t matter.” I said it. I am the idiot who said it. And we did.

  The problem wasn’t that one time, though. The problem was after that, every once in a while and then more and more he would put those pathetic droopy eyes on mine and say, “Can we do it without this time? Do you think it will be okay?” and I would usually, stupidly, say yes.

  I never even knew what he meant. How am I supposed to know if it will be okay? What the hell does that even mean? But I always thought it would be okay. I know I’m a fool, but I never thought I could get pregnant. I’m a sack of bones with frizzy hair. I don’t look like anything that could get pregnant. And I’m even more of an idiot, as Mary so kindly pointed out, because it’s not like I knew for sure that Todd wasn’t giving it to the cheerleaders, the field hockey players, and all the other run-of-the-mill sluts at school, so he could have easily had AIDS or herpes or any other nasty disease and I just kept letting him stick his thing directly in me. So stupid.

  But it’s my fault. “Screw it. One time won’t matter.” That’s what I said. It’s my fault.

  Still 36 Days

  After a long time, I turn so my face is completely pointed away from him and say, “It’s my fault.”

  At first I’m pretty sure he doesn’t hear me because he doesn’t say anything. Finally, he buries his face in my neck and muffles the words into my skin so they tickle even in their nauseating truth. “It’s mine. My fault, too. I’m sorry, Evelyn. And I don’t mean to be a jerk or anything, but it is your problem. I can’t decide what to do with it.”

  That doesn’t make sense at all, but for some reason I’m nodding. I need a ginger ale.

  He stands up. “I gotta go now. My mom will be pissed.”

  He just made a baby and he’s still worried about his mommy grounding him. I’m laughing to myself as he walks out the door.

  35 Days to Decide

  “What does he want you to do?” Mary asks the next day.

  “He couldn’t care less.”

  I wait for her tiny eyes to twitch shock and judgment, but she stays calm. “So, what’s next?”

  “Can I have a ginger ale?”

  “Sure,” she says. She stands up and goes to the refrigerator. I shut my eyes tight, trying to erase the image that has begun to etch itself on the inside of my eyelids.

  “So are you back to square one? Back to just you?”

  Back to just me as in no more Todd? Or no more baby? I open my eyes to pop the top of my ginger ale. As it fizzes into my mouth, I squeeze them shut again. It does no good. My mother’s face appears inside my brain like a bad omen.

  “Do you feel ready to decide now?”

  I open my eyes. M
ary’s tiny fingers shuffle through her endless display of informative pamphlets featuring smiling babies or relieved-looking teens in all sorts of angles. I know Mary wants to hear me schedule the abortion. What would my mom want? Am I supposed to be the Catholic girl or the one who keeps up appearances? I shut them again.

  “Evelyn? You here?” she asks.

  I know she doesn’t have all day. I don’t know how she has fit in so much time with me to begin with. I have no idea what her life is like, but I’m sure I’m not the only girl in all of Jacksonville, Florida, who is knocked up and scared shitless.

  “Evelyn?”

  What is her life like anyway? She doesn’t wear a wedding band. I picture her coming home from her dismal day counseling teens and poor people on abortion and birth control options. I picture her kicking off the stupid heels she wears in some one-room apartment where the lights are too bright and the beige carpets are so old they look dirty even when they’re clean. She walks into the blindingly fluorescent bathroom and scrubs the sunny feelings off her face before microwaving Healthy Choice lasagna and sitting down in front of some small TV to watch reruns of Teen Mom. How depressing.

  “Evelyn?”

  I know I need to answer her. She doesn’t have all day. There have to be other people here asking to see the lady who stores the hope of the world in her tiny face.

  “Evelyn?”

  But I can’t even open my eyes. A stupid tear pinches the outer corner of my right eye. One dances in the well below my left. But I don’t cry, ever. Instead, I start to shake. I try to raise the ginger ale can to my mouth again, but my hand is shaking so much I spill drops all over my skirt.

  “Oh, Evelyn.” Her voice sounds so sympathetic I almost believe her. She stands up and scurries over to the couch. She puts tissues on my lap and her hand on my shoulder, even though I’m not crying. I wish she would go away. Every nice thing she does makes the hidden tears heavier. Part of me wants to cry. Part of me wants to wail that kind of crying that you only hear from hungry toddlers or newly widowed women on TV. My head wants to plunk right onto Mary’s shoulder and my back wants to sag into her arm and my huge hair wants to hide her entire face and I would let the tears stream down my cheeks until they spell out an answer on the floor. But I don’t deserve to cry like that.