Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

CHAPTER 6

The morning after Dean’s party I climbed into his Range Rover with Liam and two sophomores from the soccer team. Dean’s license was suspended (there was a fat stack of unpaid parking tickets in the glove compartment), but that didn’t stop him from whipping around town, tires squealing, DMX warning joggers to leap into the brush if they didn’t want to be mowed down on their evening run. Nausea boiled in my stomach when Liam got into the car and blatantly ignored the empty spot right next to me, choosing instead to sit in the front seat next to Dean. I’d tried to talk to him in the kitchen before we left to get breakfast and it hadn’t gone well.

“I don’t really know how I ended up in Dean’s room and I feel like I should say I’m sorry or something because I didn’t want to hook up with—”

“Finny”—Liam laughed at me, my nickname just one more thing of Dean’s he’d co-opted in his effort to assimilate—“come on. You know I don’t care you hooked up with Dean too.”

Dean called to him then, and he brushed by me, and I was glad for the moment alone to collect myself, the tears I forced back finding another channel in my throat, dissolving into a thin salty drip that left me feeling raw and burned in the torturous days that followed. When that finally cleared up, I was left with something much worse. Something that to this day seems to lie in wait, pouncing right at a moment that joy or confidence dares to dance. The memory that I had apologized to my own rapist, and he had laughed at me. You think you’re happy? You think you have anything to be proud of?—it always taunts—Ha! Remember this? That usually sets me right. Reminds me what a piece of shit I am.

When we arrived at Minella’s Diner, Liam also made the point of sitting next to Dean, and not me. For forty-five minutes I feebly laughed at everything the boys said and did, yes, those two pancakes that got stuck together sort of do look like balls—swallowing and swallowing to keep from vomiting into my short stack. It felt like hours before we paid, before it was safe for me to call my parents and tell them, perkily, that I’d grabbed breakfast with Olivia and Hilary in Wayne, and could they come pick me up? Then I sat on the curb between Minella’s and the Chili’s next door, my head cradled between my knees. I could smell something sour in the narrow gap there, and that’s when the paranoia really started to set in. Did I have AIDS? Was I going to get pregnant? I was racked with this feeling like I needed water, only I wasn’t thirsty, had drank an entire pitcher of water at the diner trying to quench a thirst that wasn’t really physical. Years later, I still experience this same sensation. I’ll slam water, liters of it, my agitation swelling along with my bladder as relief isn’t found at the bottom of the Fiji bottle. I once asked a psychiatrist about it—I always volunteered for our monthly rape-scare story (“A man on the street offered to help me carry my groceries home and then he assaulted me!”), slipping in my own questions and concerns as though they were pertinent to the article, turning it into my own personal therapy session—and she pointed out that thirst is a basic, biological instinct. “If you feel thirsty when you’re not actually thirsty, it could indicate that an important need isn’t being met.”

Forty minutes passed before Mom’s car slowed in front of the Minella’s sign. I waited for her to circle the parking lot and settle to a stop next to me. When I finally opened the door, heard her Celine Dion CD whining and smelled her putrid Bath & Body Works vanilla lotion, I practically crumbled into the front seat. At least there was something comforting in this, her annoying choices in music and grooming, their safe familiarity.

“Is Olivia’s mother here?” Mom asked, and I actually looked at her and realized she was fully made up and ready to socialize.

“No.” I slammed the door shut.

Mom stuck out her lower lip. “How long ago did she leave?”

I put my seat belt on. “I don’t remember.”

“What do you mean you don’t—”

“Just drive!” The hot rage in my voice was as much a surprise to myself as it was to Mom. I covered my mouth with my hand, heaving one silent sob into it.

Mom wrenched the gearshift into reverse. “You’re grounded, TifAni.” She peeled out of the parking lot, her mouth set in that thin, hard line that always terrified me, that I would find myself mirroring in my fights with Luke, realizing I probably looked pretty scary too.

“Grounded?” I laughed sarcastically.

“I’m so sick of this shit attitude! You are so ungrateful. Do you even know how much this school is costing me?” She slapped the steering wheel with an open hand on the word “know.” I began to gag. Mom’s head snapped in my direction. “Have you been drinking?” She took a hard right and swerved into an empty parking lot, slamming the brakes so hard the seat belt stabbed me in the stomach and I finally vomited in my hand. “Not in the BMW!” Mom shrieked, leaning across me and pushing my door open and me along with it. I emptied the contents of my stomach right there in the parking lot of Staples. The beer, the whiskey, Dean’s salty semen—I couldn’t get it out fast enough.

By Monday morning, there was nothing in my stomach but acid, scalding my innards like the surprise whiskey in that late-night round of quarters. I’d been up since 3:00 A.M., when my own heartbeat, pounding like an angry parent’s fist on his teenager’s locked door, woke me. A small, pathetic part of me hoped that what I’d done would just be dismissed as run-of-the-mill party antics. Mark ate a mayonnaise sandwich and TifAni made the rounds with the soccer team! But even then, I wasn’t that naive.

It was subtle—the crowds didn’t part and no one pinned a scarlet letter on the lapel of my shirt. Olivia saw me and pretended she didn’t, and some older girls flew past in a giggling huddle, laughing loudly once they were a safe enough distance away. Yes, they’d been talking about me.

When I walked into homeroom, the Shark clutched the edge of her desk and swung her round bottom out of the seat. She caught my neck in her arms before I could sit down. Everyone in the classroom pretended not to hear, even managed to carry on their conversations, as she said, “Tif, are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay!” It felt like there was dried clay on my face when I smiled.

The Shark squeezed my shoulder. “If you need to talk, I’m here.”

“Okay.” I rolled my eyes at her.

Once I was at my desk, in my seat, dutifully jotting down everything the teacher said in my notebook, I was fine. It was the moment the bell rang, when everyone scattered like bedbugs from the light, that the panic stretched its arms and yawned big, rousing from its fitful sleep. Because then I was roaming the hallways, a wounded soldier on enemy territory, aware of the red light between my eyes, that I was injured and slow, could do nothing but keep moving and pray they’d miss.

Mr. Larson’s classroom was like finding the trenches. Arthur had been salty with me lately, but surely given these extenuating circumstances, he would have some compassion for me. He had to.

Arthur nodded at me as I sat down. A solemn nod, an “I’ll talk to you about what you’ve done in a moment” nod. This somehow made me more nervous than lunch, which was next period. I’d been sitting with the HOs regularly for the last few weeks, and I couldn’t decide which would be worse—showing my face in the cafeteria and claiming my chair at their table only to have them refuse me, or chickening out and going to the library, sealing my expulsion from their company when there was the off chance that if I could prove I had a pair of balls, they might forgive me. Welcome me back, even.

But if Arthur thought this was bad, then it was far, far worse than I originally thought.

When the bell shrieked, I gathered my things slowly. Arthur paused by my side, but before he could say anything, Mr. Larson did. “Tif? Can you stick around a moment?”

“I’ll talk to you later?” I asked Arthur.

He nodded again. “Come over after practice.” Arthur’s mom was the art teacher at the middle school, and together they lived in a ramshackle old Victorian catty-corner to the squash courts, where the headmistress used to reside in the fifties.

I nodded back, even though I knew I couldn’t. I didn’t have time to explain that I was grounded.

The English and Humanities wing settled into its late-morning nap as the students stampeded to the cafeteria for lunch. Mr. Larson leaned against the edge of his desk, crossing one leg over the other, the cuff of his khakis hitching up, revealing one tan, fuzzy ankle.

“TifAni,” he said. “I don’t want to make you upset, but I’ve been hearing some things this morning.”

I waited. I understood, intuitively, not to speak until I knew what he knew.

“I’m on your side here,” he promised. “If you’ve been hurt you need to let someone know. That person doesn’t have to be me, by any means. But someone. An adult.”

I rubbed my palms on the underside of the desk, feeling the relief blossom like a budding flower, sped up to reveal the petals unfurling, multicolored, on a Discovery Channel commercial. He didn’t want to call my parents. He didn’t want to involve the administration. He was giving me the best gift a teenager could ever ask for: autonomy.

I chose my words carefully. “Can I think about it?”

I heard the Spanish teacher, Señora Murtez, in the hallway. “Yes, diet! If they don’t have Dr Pepper then Pepsi!”

Mr. Larson waited until she slammed her door shut. “Have you seen the nurse today?”

“I don’t need to see the nurse,” I mumbled, too embarrassed to tell him about my plan. The R5 train barreled by a Planned Parenthood on my way to Bryn Mawr every day. I just had to get there after school and everything would be fine.

“Whatever you tell her will be confidential.” Mr. Larson jabbed his finger into his chest. “Whatever you tell me will be confidential.”

“I don’t have anything to tell you.” I strained to inject my words with attitude. With all the dark, tortured teenage angst that I actually had now.

Mr. Larson sighed. “TifAni, she can make sure you don’t get pregnant. Let her help you.”

It was like that time my dad came into my room and said he was doing laundry, reaching for a pile of dirty clothes in the corner. I was lying in bed, reading Jane, but when I saw what he was doing I shot upright. “Don’t!”

Too late, he was holding a pair of my underwear stained maroon with period blood. He froze like a bank robber holding a bag of bills and stuttered, “I’ll, uh, get your mother.” I don’t know what she was supposed to do. Dad never wanted a daughter, never really wanted kids I don’t think, but probably could have dealt with a boy. He married Mom five months after they met, a few weeks after she found out she was pregnant. “He was furious,” my aunt told me once, her lips purple with Merlot, “but he came from a traditional Italian family and his mother would have had his head if he didn’t do the honorable thing.” Apparently, he perked up when the doctor told them they were having a boy. Anthony, they wanted to name me. I don’t like to imagine the look on Dad’s face when I was actually born, when the doctor chuckled. “Whoops!”

“I’m taking care of it, don’t worry,” I told Mr. Larson. I pushed back my chair and slung my book bag over my shoulder.

Mr. Larson couldn’t even look at me. “TifAni, you are one of my most talented students. You have a very promising future. I would never want to see that compromised.”

“Can I go now?” I put my weight on one hip, and Mr. Larson nodded sadly.

The HOs and the Hairy Legs were piled up at their usual table, which had never been big enough for them. A few outliers always ended up at the adjoining table, their chairs angled at a sharp diagonal so that they could catch every word of the conversation they weren’t really a part of.

“Finny!” To my immense relief, Dean held up his hand up for a high five. “Where have you been?” Those four words—“where have you been?”—chased all but one fear out. Liam was sitting far too close to Olivia, the lunchtime sun brilliant on her slick nose, spotlighting the fray in her beer brown curls. She was someone who, years later, I could have seen as beautiful. A little oil control powder, regular keratin treatments, her whippet limbs made for loose, drapey, bra-adverse pieces by Helmut Lang. I would have hated myself next to her, come to think of it.

“Hey, guys.” I stood at the head of the table, clutching the straps of my book bag like it was a life jacket attached to my back, like I’d float away without it.

Olivia ignored me, but Hilary lifted one lazy corner of her mouth, lashless eyes regarding me with an amused glaze. I expected this when I agreed to Dean’s terms. It may seem like it wasn’t the smartest move to betray the HOs, but Dean was a powerful force. Get in with him and the rest of the guys, and it didn’t matter if Olivia and Hilary secretly hated me. They would hide it, and that was all that mattered.

Dean shifted left in his seat, patting the open sliver next to him. I sat down, my thigh pressing against his thigh. I swallowed a scorching mouthful of acid, wishing it was Liam’s leg next to mine.

Dean leaned in, his French fry breath in my ear. “So how you feeling, Finny?”

“Fine.” A film of sweat was collecting between our legs. I didn’t want Liam to see this, I didn’t want Liam to think that out of the three, I’d chosen Dean.

“What are you doing after practice?” Dean asked.

“Going right home,” I said. “I’m grounded.”

“Grounded?” Dean practically shouted. “What are you, like, twelve?”

I flushed when everyone laughed. “I know. I hate my parents.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with. . . .” Dean trailed off.

“Bad grades.”

“Phew.” Dean wiped his brow. “Because I mean, I like you, but if my parents find out about that party, well, I don’t like you that much.” He laughed aggressively.

The bell rang and everyone stood, leaving their greasy paper plates and candy wrappers on the table for the janitor to collect. Olivia made a beeline for the quad, which she would cut across to get to Algebra II before anyone else. She was a good student, a nervous student—breaking down in tears over a B+ on a pop quiz in Chem that pretty much everyone else failed. She didn’t notice when I hurried after Liam.

“Hey.” My head lined up perfectly with Liam’s shoulder. Dean was too tall, too big, a circus gorilla who would rip you limb from limb if you didn’t hug him back.

Liam looked at me and laughed.

“What?” I laughed back, uneasily.

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and, for just a brief moment, I entertained the relief. Maybe he hadn’t been acting aloof, maybe it really was all in my head.

“You’re crazy, girl.”

The cafeteria had emptied out. I paused in front of the door, anchoring Liam to me. “Can I ask you something?”

Liam tilted his head back and groaned. The way he said “Whaaaat?” was how I imagined he spoke to his mother, when he sensed the thing she had to ask him about was when he would ever get around to cleaning his filthy room.

I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. We were in this together. “Did you use a condom?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” His bright eyes rolled in a complete circle, like a ventriloquist had given him a stern shake. For a moment, his eyelids hooding the blue, he wasn’t nearly as attractive as I’d thought he was. There was something about his eyes, you could have named a Crayola crayon after them, that made him extraordinary.

“Should I be?”

Liam put his hands on my shoulders and brought his face close to mine, our foreheads almost grazing. “Tif, you only have a twenty-three percent chance of getting pregnant.”

Oh, how this random number has stuck with me through the years. The stodgy old head of the fact-checking department at The Women’s Magazine won’t even accept stats lifted from an article in The New York Times. “YOU MUST PROVIDE ORIGINAL SOURCE,” her all-staff e-mails remind us, at least once a month. Yet I was willing to accept this number, espoused by the person who I later learned found me on the floor of the guest bedroom, the square of my body from my belly button to my upper thighs naked (Peyton made a halfhearted attempt to pull my pants up for me). He dragged me into bed, wrestled my pants off my dead weight legs, and plunged inside of me without even bothering to take the rest of my clothes off. He said I woke up and moaned when he did that, and that’s how he knew I was okay with it. I lost my virginity to someone who’s never seen my breasts.

“Well.” I shuffled my feet. “I was thinking maybe I should go to Planned Parenthood. Get the morning-after pill.”

“But”—Liam grinned at me, his sweet little idiot—“it’s not the morning after.”

“It works for up to seventy-two hours.” This is how I’d spent the rest of my weekend, researching the morning-after pill on the family computer in the basement, then researching how to hide my search history.

Liam read the clock on the wall above my head. “We had sex around midnight.” He closed his eyes, his lips moving as he did the math. “So you can still make it.”

“Right. I was going to get it after school. There’s a Planned Parenthood in St. Davids.” I held my breath as I waited for his reaction. To my great surprise he said, “I’ll figure out a way to get us there.”

Liam secured us a ride with Dave, Bradley’s very own personal chauffeur, even though we could have easily taken the train, could have avoided one more person knowing about the humiliating turn my life had taken in the last sixty-four hours. Sixty-four hours—I still had eight hours left.

The trees were just starting to shed, and through their spare limbs I caught a glimpse of Arthur’s house as the car hiccuped over speed bumps, before making a right onto Montgomery Ave. I wasn’t so desperate for him now, not with Liam glancing back at me from the front seat, asking not once but twice how I was doing. Some very small, frenzied part of me wished that we were too late, that my period wouldn’t come next month, that the drama, the “What should we do?” that connected us now could last a little bit longer. I understood that, when it was gone, Liam would be too.

We maneuvered onto Lancaster Ave, and from there it was a straight shot. Dave made a right into the parking lot, but, instead of finding a spot, he just pulled up to the entrance of the clinic and unlocked the doors.

“I’m going to drive around for a bit,” Dave said as I climbed out of the backseat.

“No, man,” Liam said, nervously, stepping onto the pavement and next to me. “Just wait.”

“No way.” Dave pulled the gear stick into drive. “Crazy people always want to bomb this place.”

Liam slammed the car door shut much harder than he meant to, I’m sure.

The waiting room was mostly empty, save for a few sets of women scattered among the chairs along the walls. Liam found a seat furthest away from the nearest occupant, wiping his palms on his khakis and glancing around, accusingly.

I approached the receptionist and spoke through the opening in the glass divider. “Hi. I don’t have an appointment or anything, but is there someone here I could see?”

The woman pushed a clipboard through the opening. “Fill this out. Indicate the reason for your visit.”

I plucked a pen from an old 76ers McDonald’s cup and settled into the seat next to Liam, who peered over my shoulder at the form.

“What did she say?”

“I’m just supposed to write down the reason I’m here.”

I started to fill in the boxes. Name, age, DOB, sex, address, and signature. In the space next to the words “Reason for your visit today,” I scrawled, “Morning-after pill.”

When I got to the part that asked me for my emergency contact, I looked at Liam.

He shrugged. “Sure.” He removed the clipboard from my lap and settled it in his. Next to “Relationship to the patient,” he wrote, “Friend.”

I got up and passed the clipboard back to the woman at the front desk, now blurry behind the filmy pane of tears. The word “friend” was lodged in my stomach like a knife, like the paper-thin Shun I’d envision splicing my fiancé’s kidneys one day.

Fifteen minutes passed before the white door opened and I heard my name. Liam crossed his eyes at me and gave me a thumbs-up, a goofy expression, like he was distracting a small child from the tetanus shot she was about to get. I managed a brave smile for him.

I followed the nurse into an examining room and scooted onto the table. Another ten minutes passed before the door opened and a woman entered, blond hair fine and cropped close to her neck, a stethoscope draped leisurely around her neck. She frowned at me. “TifAni?”

I nodded and the doctor placed my file on the counter and paused over it, her eyes walking back and forth across my information.

“When did you have sex?”

“Friday.”

She looked at me. “Friday when?”

“Some time around midnight.” Apparently.

She nodded, lifting the stethoscope off her shoulders and pressing it to my chest. While she examined me, she explained what the morning-after pill was. “Not an abortion,” she reminded me, twice. “If the sperm has already implanted the egg, it won’t do anything.”

“Do you think it has?” I asked, my heart pumping harder for her to hear.

“There is no way for me to know that,” she apologized. “We do know that it’s most effective when taken as close to the intimate encounter as possible.” She glanced at the clock above my head. “You are on the cusp of the cutoff, but you did make it.” She slipped the stethoscope underneath my shirt and pressed it into my back. With a soothing sigh, she said, “Deep breath.” In another life, she could have been a hipster yoga instructor in Brooklyn.

She finished examining me, told me to hang tight. There had been a question burning in my throat for the last ten minutes, but it was her reaching for the handle of the door that forced me to say it.

“Is it rape if you can’t remember what happened?”

The doctor opened her mouth, as though she was about to gasp “Oh no.” Instead she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it, “I’m not qualified to answer that question.” She slipped out of the room soundlessly.

Several more minutes ticked by before the nurse, her peppiness especially noticeable in the wake of her cool, serene superior, returned, a brown paper lunch bag full of brightly colored condoms bunched underneath her arm, a prescription bottle in one hand and a glass of water in the other.

“Take six right now.” She shook six pills into my clammy palm and watched me chase them down with water. “And six twelve hours from now.” She looked at her watch. “So set your alarm for four A.M.” She shook the paper bag at me, teasingly. “And being careful can be fun! Some of these even glow in the dark.” I took the bag from her, all that careful fun rattling around inside, mocking me with its fluorescent futility.

Liam wasn’t in the waiting room when I returned, and the paper bag went damp and flimsy in my hand as it occurred to me that he might have taken off.

“I was here with someone,” I said to the woman at the front desk. “Did you see where he went?”

“I think he stepped outside,” she replied. I caught a glimpse of the doctor behind her, the blond hairs gnarled around her neck like a claw.

Liam was outside, sitting on the curb.

“What are you doing?” It came out shrill. I heard Mom in it.

“I couldn’t be in there any longer. I felt like they thought I was gay or something.” He stood and brushed dirt off his butt. “You get what you need?”

I would have welcomed some crazy’s bomb going off in that moment. One last tragedy that would anchor Liam to me. I pictured him rushing me, covering my body with his as fiery shards of building sphered through the air. No screams at first, everyone too stunned, too singularly focused on just surviving. That would be the most surprising lesson I’d learn at Bradley: You only scream when you’re finally safe.