Tell Me a Secret (15 page)

“You sure you don’t want me to take you home?” Andre asked. His eyes penetrated the darkness, those eyes that had captivated the twelve-year-old me. I could see the kindness in them. We were both broken by the cross we shared.

“No,” I sniffed. “I’m not going back there.” Though technically, I supposed I could. The cracked dashboard clock said 8:39. Thirty-nine minutes past the premiere of the great Christmas montage, our house would be deserted. But after spending time with Andre, I knew where I had to go and what I had to do now.

He drove me to Elna Mead’s auditorium, decorated in the Winter Ball theme—Always Remember This Night, chosen by Miss Delaney “Always remember how fabulous I was on
this night” Pratt. A fluid arch of plum balloons blew in the crisp winter air, punctuated by the glow of silver-glittered stars dangling from the eaves.

As I watched Andre’s Impala drive away, my last chance to flee drove away with him. The swell of pain crashed again, and I forced it back down. I wasn’t sure I could stand this for fourteen more weeks.

Two teachers held the doors open, each giving me a quizzical look. But they smiled and grandly gestured me into the starry auditorium-
cum
-ballroom. A long line of couples snaked toward a plastic ivory tower gleaming against the plum background, white lights poking through like stars. Delaney and her minions had taken care of every last detail as if it were her wedding day. Black lights lit up tuxedo shirts, white dresses, and my maternity shirt in an eerie periwinkle glow.

Milo’s voice boomed out over the PA system onstage, where he paced back and forth wearing a tuxedo jacket with shorts and a Freezepop T-shirt. “And here she is, the most magnificent planner and—if I do say so myself—a shoo-in for the currently open position of Queen of the Winter Ball…let’s give a round of applause for the beautiful, the talented, the fabulous, the force to be reckoned with, Delaney Pratt!”

Delaney strode across the stage in a white column dress, poised with bashful humility. “Thanks, everyone,” she said as the crowd hooted and clapped—everyone but me.

Kamran waited next to Chloe on the other end of the stage, and the gravity of what I had to do spread out before
me. Tell him the truth. The whole truth. About Andre and Xanda. About Delaney. And most of all, about trying to make him into something he was not.

Milo broke into my thoughts with yet another enthusiastic announcement. “The voting will be revealed in a few short moments, folks. Don’t go away, ladies and gentle-germs, we’ll be right back atcha.”

An affectionate groan rose up from the audience as Delaney descended the stairs. Her eyes surveyed the landscape and landed on one person, a girl who stood out in the crowd like a glow-in-the-dark barn. My chance to talk to Kamran alone had come and gone in a blip.

When she reached me, she dug her nails into my arm as she steered me out of the ballroom and down the stairs. Every step thudded with heaviness and finally ended in the auditorium basement, an expanse of concrete studded with pillars. Fluorescent tubes cast a pallid light onto Delaney’s face. I forced the next wave of pain into a marble-sized ball.

“What are you doing here?” Upstairs, Milo once again reminded us from the podium that
the countdown has begun, ladies and gents
. “I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re trying to ruin this for me.”

“I didn’t come to talk to you. I came to talk to Kamran.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Because of all the lies you told him about me?”

Delaney looked scornful. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The marble grew to a tennis ball. “Why did you tell him I was sleeping around?”

She didn’t see Kamran follow us into the room a dozen feet behind her. How much had he heard already?

“Because he deserves to know the truth. Come on, Rand. I was at the same parties you were.”

Those days flashed by in a blur. How we would show up together and end up apart—Delaney disappearing with Milo or someone else while I let her think I had done the same. It was what I wanted, to be like Xanda. Be
wanted
. To paint myself so successfully that Delaney—and now Kamran—couldn’t tell the difference.

What had I done?

I shook my head. “But I didn’t. You were going off with Milo or whoever, and I waited for you.”

She looked confused. “You mean you never hooked up with any of those guys? How many guys have you been with?”

“Only Kamran.” I glanced at him. His eyes were saying something, but I didn’t know what.

“You’re lying.” Then she laughed. “That’s so pathetic. Why would you do that? Why would you pretend?”

The pain rippled through me, and I thought,
This is it.
I was going to have my baby in the basement of the auditorium, and Delaney was going to be lecturing me the whole time. I couldn’t wait for Kamran to chime in, asking me why, exactly, I couldn’t be more like her.

“I wanted to be more like you. More like…”

“Xanda. Of course. It’s always about Xanda. I’m so sick of hearing about your dead sister. More like Xanda. More like me. Why can’t you just be real?”

“Okay,” I said, too weary to argue. “Let’s be real. Why did you get kicked out of View Ridge?”

Delaney went pale.

I don’t worry too much if I only miss one,
she had said.

It was as if she was no longer skin and makeup but a sliver of glass, hard and dazzling and clear—so clear I could see right through her.

“You were pregnant,” I whispered.

Delaney said nothing, but her eyes told me the truth.

“And you came here to start over.”

In that moment I saw that Xanda and Delaney were nothing alike at all, just as Kamran could never become the Andre of my memories. It wasn’t fair to try to force him. Where Xanda felt bound, Delaney struggled to find something—anything—to tether her to the ground. Parties. Attention. And now Kamran—earthy, strong, and true. All this time, I thought Delaney had what I wanted. Now I saw it was just the opposite. She wanted what I had, and she took it.

Maybe Essence saw a piece of this when she tried to enlighten me. Enlightenment wasn’t exactly right, but there was something religious about how I felt, peering through the worst pain I had ever experienced and for once in my life being entirely present, the moment wrapping around me like a cloak. Music echoed from the upstairs dance floor, punctuated
by Kamran’s steps as he walked up behind Delaney and didn’t speak. My mother would call it an epiphany. Maybe Xanda would have called it a moment of perfection.

Milo’s announcement boomed upstairs, a call to the Winter Ball royalty to take the stage. Delaney’s face was wet, but I could no longer make out why. I was about to tell her to go back upstairs when the rush of sound in my ears enfolded me into a warm, dark cloud. Kamran stood behind her, sideways, and I wondered from the look on his face why he was still here—here, in this tunnel of darkness while Xanda smiled at me, a baby in her arms.

This must have been what Xanda wanted when she ran away with Andre. One luminous instant of perfect understanding and perfect peace, marred only by the icy concrete floating up to the side of my cheek.

The darkness gathering around me and Xanda felt close, warm, like we were wrapped up together in our plaid sleeping bags when Dad took us on his annual camping trip. I don’t know what happened to those sleeping bags after Xanda died. We never went camping again.

Being alone with her, in that warm, flannely memory, was like recapturing the Dad we lost, too. Except that we were in a tunnel, the darkness smeared by Xanda’s faint glow and the glow of the bundle she held as she stayed several paces ahead.

As I followed her, groping and struggling to catch up, I passed darker places, places that looked like if I stepped into them they would swallow me up like one of Kamran’s wormholes and deposit me into some other space and time.
Kamran’s voice broke through one of the walls, like a claw reaching out to pull me in. Xanda and the baby slipped around a corner. I plunged into darkness.

“What is her name again?”

“Miranda. Miranda Mathison.” Kamran’s voice again. And someone else—Delaney?—saying, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod…”

A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Hold her.” Arms gripped me, light pierced me, pain enveloped me. Metal on metal, clanking. A woman with pale red hair hovered over me. Xanda was gone.

I couldn’t breathe because of the cup over my mouth. I reached up to rip it off, sucking in air. Everything was so white, except for the two square, black eyes staring down at me from the wall, lights tearing through them at a furious angle. We were moving. But I couldn’t move the cup off of my mouth.

“Miranda, listen to me,” said the red-haired voice. “You have to relax. You have to keep the mask on. You have to breathe.” She had no eyebrows. Or they were so pale they disappeared on her white, white face. “Do you understand me?”

There was so much pressure on my chest, pounding from deep inside my body. “Lexi.” I didn’t know if the words came out of my mouth or not because of the pounding in my ears. But the woman seemed to hear.

“The baby is going to be all right, Miranda. But you have to relax. If you don’t relax, it’s going to be very difficult. Very
difficult for the baby.” Her hot breath on my face was making my heart race faster. “Back,” I said, or tried to say.

“I’m going to count, and I want you to breathe along with my counting. Can you do that for me? Raise a finger if you think you can do that for me.” Instructions from my brain fired off toward my finger, but I wasn’t sure if they got there. “Good,” she breathed. “One…” Deep breath. “Two…” My heart was slowing down. “Three…” And I was starting to feel my body return to normal, the muscles wrapped around me finally releasing their cast-iron grip.

“Good,” she said, and kept counting while I kept breathing, my heart rate slowing as I breathed, breathed, not daring to look at those two black eyes hovering in front of me or toward the voices—whether or not one of them would be Kamran or worse, Delaney.

My body felt warm and wet, like I was sleeping in a pool of sticky liquid. I tried to sit up and see what was happening. If Kamran was standing over me, I didn’t want him to see me wet myself.

The redhead was watching a monitor, a green blip that seemed to be steadily going downhill. But her attention, for the moment, was away from me as I struggled to peek over the oxygen mask. We were alone in a small, white, moving room.

Then I saw the blood. A dark pool.

And I heard the cry.

The cry that was mine.

And the downward whine of the monitor as the sharp point pricked my skin and the liquid pool filled the room, up and over my head.

When I woke again, it was chaos around me.

The redhead and black-eyed windows were gone, and I could no longer feel the rumble of the road. Instead, I was in a cavernous hall with blinding lights overhead and the murmur of people walking every which way—coming in close for a look at my body, my shirt stripped upward and away from my stomach—now dotted with round, white monitors—and then rushing away, clipboards or instruments in hand. No one stopped moving. I no longer had an oxygen mask, but when I reached up to touch my face, I felt the pull of a tube inserted into the back of my hand. Clear liquid loomed over me in a bag dangling from a metal hanger.

Another frightening cramp gripped me, and I cried out, only this time it was my stomach, whose contents were threatening to spill onto the clean white sheet.

The threat became a quick, horrifying reality before I could do anything to stop it. Hot acid filled my mouth and nose while tears streamed down my face. If I hadn’t been tangled up in tubes and wires, I would have lunged for the sheet to cover my humiliation. Instead, I threw up in front of a throng of scrubbed onlookers. But as another wave of nausea gripped me, I realized I didn’t care. I only wanted it to stop. I was sobbing for it to stop. I buried my face in my arm until the
IV split open a crack and a tiny ribbon of blood branched out through the crevices in my skin.

“What is happening?” I cried, and a curvy, dark-haired nurse in scrubs rushed toward me with a towel.

“It’s the magnesium sulfate,” she muttered in my direction, giving the monitors a more critical eye than she gave me. “Some people don’t react well.”

A very great relief,
I wanted to say, but I was feeling too nauseous to be a smartass. Instead, I zeroed in on the footsteps, the curious faces, the bright liquid stain.

“There’s a boy in the waiting room who says he’s the father. If he is, he can come—”

“No,” I said. I couldn’t forget the way he just stood there, watching. “I don’t want to see anybody.”

In a quick movement, she gathered the damp sheet and towel and whisked them off. My parts were all exposed except for a tiny towel the nurse tossed on her way out. Another towel was balled up, pink with blood.

“Wait,” I called to her, and I realized I was crying. “What is happening to me? What is happening to Lexi?”

She stopped for a moment, her arms full and her face softening. “I’ll try to send the doctor in soon. She can tell you what’s happening. Just rest. We’re doing everything we can to save it.”

To save it
. The words stuck in my head. But I couldn’t speak, because the real me—not the me who was sitting half-naked in the ER attached to six monitors and a bag of magnesium
whatever
, but the me of my mind and heart—had floated away from my body like I was watching myself in one of my mother’s plays, separated. On a stage, I would have screamed. First a whimper, then building into a wail, then a scream commanding every doctor in the building. To save her. To stop whatever they were doing and save her.

But this wasn’t a play. No one was paying any attention to me, and I barely had the strength to move the towel to cover myself when someone wheeled in what looked like a very ancient ultrasound machine hooked to a monitor. I hardly noted his face, only the way he squirted the jelly onto my stomach in one quick, cold spurt and looked at the fuzzy image projected by the ultrasound wand. I had no voice to stop him when he rolled the machine away.

I had no strength at all to stop the new tears rolling down my face. I tried to sit up, to call to someone, when a spiral of dizziness captured me in its undertow. My eyes closed to keep the world from spinning apart.