Something Right Behind Her (23 page)

I decided after
all that contemplation of contentment, I’d had enough, and I put the book on
the shelf. I’d have to decide whether or not to confess to Randy that I
couldn’t get through it, or to just lie. I’d see how I felt about that next
week. I had already determined that I was done with Randy, I just needed for
Mom and Dad to catch up with my thinking. For now, I felt alright. Things were
going pretty well, after all. I planned on seeing Eve later in the week, it was
fun to keep in touch with Carlos, and school was pretty manageable. I was
tired, though. Really tired, as though the trip had really taken a lot out of
me, even though I mostly just sat my ass on the beach down there!

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Later in the
week, Sharon and Jill and I went out to get something to eat after school. Jill
and Sharon wanted to go for pizza, but for some reason as soon as I walked into
the pizza place, the smell of Parmesan cheese grossed me out, so we went across
the street to the diner for a burger. I scarfed a whole cheeseburger and a milk
shake, even though I’d had lunch at school! I felt like I was having a growth
spurt again because this was how I felt freshman year when I grew five inches
in ten months.

Sharon and Jill
both saw Eve while I was down in the D.R. I saw her for a little bit earlier in
the week and I told her the whole story about Carlos, and she seemed happy for
me, but I could tell she was really tired, and wasn’t necessarily following
everything I said. Mrs. O’Meara told my Mom that they had increased Eve’s
medication to make her more comfortable. I wanted to ask comfortable how? But I
supposed it went without

saying.

The Carlos story
was a good story to tell Eve because it didn’t end up with me fucking up
somehow, and it didn’t have George the Dirtbag in it. I’d only seen George a
couple of times since I got back. He texted me to see where I was going after
school one day, but that was the day I went to see Eve, so I blew him off with
no guilt.

Jill and Sharon
told me that when they went over to Eve’s house, Douglas was home for break,
and he’d brought a girlfriend with him! So much for Douglas using his sister’s
illness to snare emotionally crippled high school girls. Jill said the girl was
super-cute, but Sharon rolled her eyes. “She looks like she’s frigid!” Sharon
said. “Seriously, she’s got this super-straightened blonde hair that she wears
in a perfect little pony-tail. And she’s all J.Crew’ed out - pink sweater,
flats with buckles - made me want to puke! And Douglas is Mr. Mature around
her.”

Hearing about
Douglas gave me a headache, especially coming from Sharon. It wasn’t hard to
imagine him playing the role of the perfect boyfriend, somehow. Of course he’d
dress the part. I could never picture him acting that way with me.

I started to
feel really dizzy thinking about Doug and all that had happened, and the smell
of that place was making me want to vomit.

Then, all of a
sudden, I had a thought just horrible enough to be true.

I had gotten my
period, right on time, back in the D.R. But it was a strange period, very
light, which I had attributed at the time to my body being messed up by the
traveling. And now I had this strange sensitivity to the smell of cheese. I
wondered whether that could be a sign of pregnancy? I’d heard somewhere, maybe
from Mom, of a pregnancy stinky smell link. Then there was that night with
George. He’d worn a condom, but there was a moment after it was all over, when
he looked scared, like there was some problem I was too big an idiot to notice.

“Are you ok,
Andy?” Sharon asked. “You look like you’re going to be sick!” Sharon was
talking really loud, as usual, and the few people in the place all turned
around to look our way.

“No, I just
realized I totally stuffed myself,” I said, trying to keep my cool. “This is
like my third lunch.”

The first thing
I did when I got home was Google “strong sense of smell.” Mom was still down at
the after school center and Milly was with her, so I had the house to myself.
Sure enough
The first sign of pregnancy for some women
was one of the
top results of my search. I read the whole article. It said that the hormone,
estrogen, can heighten a person’s sense of smell. It also said that feeling
tired and more hungry than usual - or feeling a little queasy - were also early
pregnancy signs. I could check off all three of those symptoms. I must have sat
there for about twenty minutes staring at the computer screen. I kept clicking
on different sites, but they all said pretty much the same thing.

It reminded me
of when my Mom first told me that what Eve had was called ALS. It was about a
month before school let out last spring. Eve’s mom had called my Mom, and then
Mom and I went straight to the computer. Mrs. O’Meara had told my Mom not to
let me search about ALS by myself.

We didn’t cry at
first. We just went from one reputable-sounding site to the next, always
clicking on anything that sounded like a cure, that contained the word hope.
What they all had said, though, was that hope was far away. That wasn’t true of
the pregnancy sites. These all had banner ads and pop-ups for midwives,
pregnancy tests, and, of course, abortion services.

I contemplated
getting back in the car right then and going to buy a pregnancy test. I could
get downtown and back before Mom even got home if I left right away. Then
again, I couldn’t just pop into King’s pharmacy and buy one of those tests.
Half the time I went in there I saw someone I knew, or someone who knew my Mom.
No, I’d have to go someplace out of town, somewhere no one would see me, to
make the purchase. That would take a bit of planning. I had to calm down and
think the whole thing through. Maybe the weird smell thing would just go away
on its own.

I checked my
e-mail and saw I’d gotten a message on Facebook from Carlos. He’d taken a
picture of himself in his red bathing trunks at night. There were
mosquito-repelling torches in the background and he was holding a kayak paddle.
The message said “No cute girls ever go on this bioluminescence tour. Just
kidding, Andy!” Carlos is smiling his big goofy smile in the picture. I
responded right away with “That’s because those things are so freaking slimy -
I mean the microorganisms, not the guides…” It was fun to have this back and
forth with Carlos. It made me think what if we’d done it that last night. What
kind of situation would I be in now? The thought made my head kind of reel,
because the idea of being pregnant by George was bad enough, the thought of
involving Carlos in the whole thing was an even bigger disaster. This Andy, I
told myself, is why you do not have what it takes to be a slut. I could not get
my head around the consequences. My mind white-screened.

Dad wasn’t home
for dinner that night and Mom, Milly and I ate all the leftovers in the fridge
and then Milly and I pigged out on ice cream. Nothing smelled weird to me, and
everything tasted good, so I decided to put my worries aside for the time
being. Only the next morning, when I woke up, the weird smell thing was back.
Mom and Dad were downstairs making coffee, and the smell from that coffee was
so bad for a second I thought about screaming down at them to ask what the heck
the stink was. Instead, I opened my bedroom window and pressed my face against
the screen, trying to get some air. There was no way I could hang out down
there without gagging so I played for time and acted like I couldn’t find
anything to wear. Finally, I went down in a hoody, with the hood practically
pulled down over my face, grabbed my coat and got out of there. I wasn’t even
sure whether or not Mom or Dad saw me.

I kept a low
profile all day. I saw George on my way to English, but we only talked for a
second. I made a gesture that I would call him, and then went on my way. I had
to find some way to make a plan to get a pregnancy test. I really wanted to
know what was what before I had to actually talk to George.

I was so zoned
out during English, Mr. Doyle called on me out of the blue, like he usually
does with kids who aren’t A-students. I had no idea what was going on and he
furrowed his brows in the retarded way he has and said, “Miss Andy must be contemplating
the meaning of life on our time, class,” and then he went back to whatever
discussion it was they were having.

What I was
really thinking about while the class was discussing Shakespeare, was
drugstores. It finally occurred to me that there was a Rite Aid down near the
Indian-run Deli where Jill always bought beer with her fake I.D. Most store
owners actually look at the picture on the card, but that guy is like whatever.
Anyway, it was a dumpy part of town and people only went there for the beer-store.

As soon as last
period ended, I headed for the junior parking lot. I knew Jill would be looking
for me to go to the Clarion office and hang out and get everything organized
for the end-of-the-year-issue of the literary magazine, so I took the long way
around the math building to avoid her.

When I got
downtown, I parked behind the Barnes and Noble, in the big parking lot, then
walked through town the back way, behind all the stores, instead of down Main
Street where someone would see me. When I got to the right block, I started to
relax, since I knew no one would be all the way down there. Inside the
drugstore, it was kind of dark and dusty. At first, I wondered how well stocked
they were, but then when I got to the feminine hygiene products aisle, there
were lots of tests to choose from. Probably anyone in town, grown up or kid,
went there for their damn tests.

I chose one of
the tests that said “accurate after first day of a missed period,” since I was
now counting my “mini-period” I had during vacation as a missed period. Walking
up to pay for the thing, my heart was in my throat. The woman at the register was
sort of old, with little reading glasses and pale lips. I put a pack of gum on
top of the pregnancy test, and stood there waiting for her to look up at me.
She didn’t, though. She just took the stuff, rang it up and stuck it in a bag
with a receipt. I stuffed the bag into my purse and headed back to the car. Mom
and Milly would be home at about six, so I had time to get home, do my thing,
and either breathe a sigh of relief, or start to really freak out.

At first, I
couldn’t find my house keys in my book bag, which I thought would be typical,
since I only ever lose things at the worst possible time, but then I found them
wedged inside my giant history text book. I was really quiet letting myself in,
as if there were actually somebody home I was trying to avoid.

I went straight
to the upstairs bathroom and read the instructions on the test. It was pretty
straightforward, just pee on the thing and wait two minutes. Since I had downed
a diet orange soda from the machine before last class the peeing part was not a
problem; I was about to burst.

I couldn’t
decide if two minutes was a long time to wait, or too short, so I decided to
take a shower. I was finding it difficult to breathe, and I thought if I stood
there staring at that peed-on plastic stick I might have a full-on cardiac
arrest.

I put the water
on, stepped into the shower, and stood there, not even using soap or anything.
I let the water run down my face. Pretty soon I started to cry, not silent
either, but until I had a water-mixed-with-mucus sob-fest going on in there.

I kept picturing
George’s face, but then I kept picturing Eve and Carlos, too. I wanted to say I
was sorry, that I wasn’t good enough for any of them. With George, I let him
believe I might be his girlfriend. With Carlos, I never let on how out of
control I felt, how I was basically bouncing from one guy to the next. I wasn’t
sure how I had wronged Eve, but I knew, somehow, it was her I’d let down the
most, even if she never knew it. I knew if I was pregnant, and it was the old
days and Eve weren’t sick, she’d have been there for me. I sort of owed it to
her not to need her now. I owed it to her not to have problems of my own.

I knew I’d been
in the shower a pretty long time, and the test was probably done, but I
couldn’t bring myself to reach up and turn the water off. I thought about
George and what I might say to him. I thought how weird it would be to walk
into some clinic with George, how George would seem like my boyfriend.

Then I started
to think about Eve again, how if I told her I was pregnant, how she’d look at
me. How I’d see that huge question in her eyes.

How could you?

Maybe I
couldn’t.

It was a
terrifying line of thought, one that made me more nauseous than I’d been all
day. I turned the water off, and grabbed a towel. I sat down on the toilet, and
took the test stick off the counter. My hands were wet and shaky.

I stared. It was
negative.

I was relieved,
of course, but I couldn’t get the energy to move off the toilet. I must have
sat there for ten minutes, holding the thing. When I finally stood up, picked
up the plastic pregnancy test and stuffed it back in the box it came in, I
started to wobble a little on my feet. Then I turned and puked into the toilet.

I must have
puked eight times during the night. In the morning, I no longer felt nauseous,
just weak and disoriented. Mom made me drink some foul yellow stuff that was
supposed to replace my lost electrolytes. When she leaned over my bed, her
eyebrows furrowed, worried about leaving me alone while she left to do her
errands, I tried to explain what I thought was happening.