“I’ll lose my job,” Isla said.
“You’re abetting in the sexual abuse of other women. Think about that.”
Sarah-Jane spun around from the mirror, her ponytail whipping after her.
“I... I uh… I’m…” Isla stuttered.
“Somebody needs to put a stop to this. This behavior can’t continue.”
“I... I don’t know what to―”
“Just do your fucking job, Isla. Dress the anchors before they go on air. Don’t dress them to go up to Walter Fellowes’s office so that he can take his little dick out and―”
“Hey,” Phil said, butting in. “Forty minutes.”
He reached his hand to cup Sarah-Jane’s chin and then winked at her.
“Okay,” she said, before exhaling slowly through her pressed lips. Then she spread her arms out wide. “Thank you for getting me dressed for tonight.”
Within seconds of Sarah-Jane and Phil stepping back outside, they were already lost in the maze of dimly lit hallways until they eventually overheard Howie’s camp voice barking out instructions.
He was gripping copies of the manifesto, handing them out to crew members and lecturing them that the subject was going to arise straight after the third commercial break.
“You look great,” he said as he watched Sarah-Jane approach, her high heels clicking. “Would have preferred you in the blown out, throwback hairdo, but...” He looked to Phil and when he noticed the stern look on the producer’s bullish face, the smile on his own faded sharply. “Here, you take one too,” Howie said, handing Phil a copy of the manifesto. Phil took it, folded it in four and then placed it inside the pocket of his double-breasted jacket. Howie nervously cleared his throat, then leaned into Sarah-Jane.
“Thirty-five minutes till we’re live,” he said. And as he said it, Sarah-Jane noticed that her hands were beginning to get clammy and her stomach was rolling. “You uh... wanna take up your position in the studio?”
She closed her eyes, did some meditative breathing exercises she had, a long time ago, learned in a class, and when her eyes eventually popped opened at the tail end of a long exhale, she nodded once.
“Yep,” she said.
So, Howie pulled the curtain aside and waved her and Phil through the gap where her studio was now a hive of activity; with cameramen all standing behind their large cameras, a floor manager with an overly large headset on holding a meeting with two junior producers, and all of the lights on the stage quite literally sizzling.
Then the door on the opposite side of the studio cranked open, and one-by-one, in shuffled each of tonight’s panel of guests. They all glanced at Sarah-Jane, some of them nodding at her, some of them pursing their lips at her, and then they all stood still in the shadows, behind camera number one.
“Holy shit,” Sarah-Jane whispered out of the side of her mouth. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
Then she spun around, whipped the curtain back open, and raced away as fast as she could toward a restroom.
JOHNNY EDWARDS
My hands are so sweaty. Must be twenty years since I last asked somebody to be my girlfriend. And even then I wasn’t so sure about it; not like I am now. I knew I was hot for Patricia when we started dating; knew that the gleam off her legs would make my dick twitch every time she wore a short skirt. But I also knew that I didn’t really like her; that I didn’t enjoy being in her company. It’s a miracle we lasted sixteen years. If it wasn’t for her ending up pregnant two months into us dating, I’m not sure we’d have made it to month three. But with Lucy, it seems to be the exact opposite. I’m actually not so physically attracted to her that I wanna tear her clothes off and screw her. I’m attracted to her mind; to how funny she is; to how smart she is. I love being in her company. I’ve actually been daydreaming of sitting down and just talking with her since the moment she waved goodbye to me outside The Shamrock bar last week.
I pause, holding in a deep breath and then, after I finally exhale, I rap my knuckles on the wood panel of her front door.
My heart flips when I hear her footsteps shuffling their way toward me, followed by the clunk-clunk of a chain being slid and released from its lock.
“Oh,” she says, looking surprised as soon as she pulls the door open. “It’s a Sunday morning. Shouldn’t a Republican be at church on a Sunday morning?”
I puff out a laugh. She’s so quick. So funny.
“Well, I thought I’d skip out on my slice of Holy Communion this morning just to come see you.”
She stands aside, inviting me in, and as I rub my hands together to get rid of the sweat, I glance at the two dark walls either side of me.
“Nice place,” I say.
“Yeah, right,” she replies. “So…” She places her hands on her hips. “What can I do you for?”
“You look nice,” I say. “Bright big smile you got there.”
She actually looks really cute in just a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Much cuter than she did on our dates. I think there’s an extra glow to her when she’s all natural. That’s certainly another opposite trait from Patricia.
“Well,” she says, “I got some really good news yesterday and I…” She swings her hips from side to side and then begins to nibble on her bottom lip instead of finishing her sentence.
“Let me guess… You realized you were in love with a Republican?”
She grunt laughs. And for some reason I produce the exact same laugh as if I’m copying her. I sound like a teenager again.
“Well, it’s a secret for now, but…”
She grins. A massive full-toothed grin. She really is glowing today. I’m not sure why I’ve never noticed she was this pretty.
“Wow, you really look great,” I say.
She drops her smile and then looks around, as if she isn’t familiar with her own home. This is getting awkward now. Really awkward. I need to get to the point.
“I really like you, Lucy,” I say. I clap my hands together once as I say that and it creates an echo in her hallway. Then I find myself guffaw-laughing like a teenager again.
“Oookaaay,” she says, stretching out the vowels as long as she can.
“As in, I like you so much that I would like to ask you... to…”
“To?” she squints at me while shaking her head.
“To be my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?”
She holds her hand to her neck. Holy shit! Have I just made a fool of myself?
“Is that not the next step?” I ask.
A cringe rolls down my back because I’ve just realized I’ve played this way too forward, and so I find myself stabbing my fingernails into the palms of my hands.
“We’re not teenagers, Johnny,” she says.“ We don’t have to label our relationship.”
“Relationship?” I say, eyeballing her. “So there is…”
“No, listen,” she says, taking a step toward me and pressing her hand to my chest. “You and I… we can’t... it wouldn’t work.”
“I’ve never bonded with any woman the way I’ve bonded with you,” I say. “Not even my ex-wife.”
She makes a sorrowful face; so sorrowful that the cringing ignites again inside of me and then intensifies.
“I know we bonded a little,” she says, bringing her hand up to cup my cheek. “And I really like you, too. But we can’t be in a relationship together. We don’t even share that much in common.”
“We share sooo much in common. It doesn’t matter that I’m a Republican and you’re a Democrat. It’s bullshit to think we couldn’t be together because of that―”
I’m silenced by her hand moving around to my mouth, where she presses a stretched index finger to my lips.
“I’m not turning you down because you are a Republican, Johnny. I like you as much as you like me. I think we get along great. It’s just… we’re in different places in our lives. Tomorrow,” she says, her finger still pressed against my lips, her eyes, large and beautiful, staring up at me, “I’m unde
rgoing IVF. I’m trying to get pregnant.”
My stomach churns and a bubble of air catches in my throat.
“Pregnant?”
“It’s all I’ve wanted… for years, Johnny. A child of my own. I’ve just never met anybody… and now I’m forty-one it’s just the wrong time for me to be getting into a relationship. And this is the best chance I’ll ever have to get pregnant. I need to do this… I need to do it alone.”
I try to swallow down the ball of air in my throat. But it’s not moving.
“You don’t need to explain,” I say to her, mirroring her by pressing my index finger to her lips.
Then we both just stand there, inside her narrow, dark hallway, staring at each other. Then I begin to wonder if she is thinking what I’m thinking: that our lives would have been so different if we had met when we were younger.
After producing a long, silent sigh through my nostrils, I bend forward a little and kiss her forehead, before moving to her front door.
“You’d better get your ass back to that church quick so you can get your slice of Holy Communion!” she says.
I smile back at her. And then I pull her door closed with my heart bubbling and cracking, as if it’s just been tossed onto a barbecue grill.
“Oh hey,” I say, pushing the door back open and beaming a great big, fat, fake grin at her. “I hope the IVF works for you.”
LUCY DECKER
“Oh, I don’t know the father,” I say to the nurse, who immediately scrunches up her face in both apology and embarrassment. “It’s okay. I’m doing this alone. I like that I’m doing it alone.”
I feel bad that she feels embarrassed, so I squeeze her shoulder as I sit up in the bed before getting to my feet.
“Well, it’s all done. It’s just a waiting game now,” she says.
“So, ah… how long is it until I could find out if the sperm caught?”
“As in, when can you take a pregnancy test?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Well, realistically, you can conceivably get detection as early as seventy-two hours from now, but it’s probably best to wait two to three weeks to get a more definitive answer. The longer, the better.”
“Seventy-two hours it is,” I say, grinning. She grins back at me.
“I’m gonna keep my fingers crossed for you,” she says. She crosses her fingers in front of me before I step toward her to hold her in an embrace.
“Thank you,” I say. Then I step back and cross my fingers, too.
I can’t believe I was seen so quickly. Though I guess that’s what private health care can do for you. If you’ve got the money in this country, all you have to do is make an appointment. I only phoned yesterday and when, by chance, the man on the other end of the line asked when I was next due to ovulate, I did a quick calculation inside my head before spitting out, “Tomorrow, actually. You don’t have a space for me tomorrow, do you?”
“Can you pay all of the money tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, it’s all paid up,” I replied.
“Perfect… how does ten a.m. work for you?”
It actually didn’t work for me. I should be in school today. But I called Principal Klay’s assistant first thing this morning as I was driving to the health clinic and told her I wasn’t feeling too well. She did what she usually does when staff call in sick, she scoffed audibly down the line. So I fake coughed as loud as I could and then said, “So if you can just pass on the message please,” before I hung up.
It feels so surreal that there is sperm headed to my eggs right now. I’m so excited, so elated. As if I’m a totally different person to the one who was making a mini mountain out of wet tissues in my living room just a few nights ago. I owe all of this excitement to Zachary. And Mia. They’re my superheroes. I made my mind up as I was tossing and turning in bed last night that if I get pregnant — and there is a big chance I will; much, much bigger than when I was inserting the sperm myself — I will name the baby after them. If he’s a boy, he’s going to be Zachary. If she’s a girl, I’ll call her Mia—after my twin. It’s the least I can do.
“I’m sure this is all okay, but just thought I’d ask to reassure myself,” I say to the nurse as I am pulling my jeans up. “I’m supposed to fly on a couple of long-haul flights to Europe at the end of next week, that’s okay given that I could be in the early throes of pregnancy, right?”
“I saw that on your notes… you have nothing to worry about, Lucy,” she says. Then she crosses her fingers again, before turning to the TV hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the ward.
“So tune in on Thursday night when I will reveal exactly who the interviewees will be,” Sarah-Jane Zdanski says, flashing both her perfect teeth and her enviable cleavage at us.
“Wonder who she’s interviewing,” the nurse mumbles, nodding up at the TV.
“Oh, I think I know who it is.”
“You do?” she says, turning to me as I bend down to tie my sneaker laces. “Who?”
“Ah… trust me, she’s building something up that isn’t that special at all,” I say.
Then I stand back upright, hug the lovely nurse again while I whisper another “Thank you” into her ear, then I throw my purse strap over my shoulder and leave the clinic ward, a smile spread wide across my face, my fingers firmly and painfully crossed, and healthy sperm swimming towards my eggs.
MERIC MILLER
I sit staring at the blank page in front of me cos I can’t think what this week’s newspaper should be about. I keep getting distracted by nothing, staring at the door of my office hoping that she’ll walk through it any second.
She said nothing to me yesterday. Not a word. Though we didn’t have American History, so we weren’t sitting beside each other at any point. But even at lunchtime her and Wendy just sat with their backs up against the fence, talkin’ and talkin’. At least Brody and Stevie weren’t with them. That hurt me the other night when I was riding back from Esbon after paying Madam Aspectu that hundurd bucks and I saw the five of ’em sitting around by the monument, laughin’ and jokin’. None of it made sense. I hope she’s not gonna become all friendly with them. I ain’t never been friendly with them. Any of them.
I slam my fist to the desk. Damn it! It’s fucking Tuesday already and she hasn’t said one word to me about the psychic reading she had on Saturday night. She’s supposed to have realized that I am the one by now. Aspectu told me she would make sure it happened.
Maybe Caoimhe will open up to me on Thursday... when we sit together in American History. She’ll prolly hold my hand, tell me that she wants to be my girlfriend. She prolly needs time coming around to what Apsectu told her. S’why her and Wendy were talking while they were sitting with their backs to the fence at lunchtime yesterday. They musta been talking all ’bout me.
I look at the digits in the bottom corner of my computer screen and decide it’s time to leave. Caoimhe’s clearly not gonna come down to chat today. She’s likely left the school already. It’s almost four p.m.
I race out the back door, to where my bike is resting against a wall, and then hop on it and begin pedaling as fast as I can to nowhere in particular. I never quite know where I’m riding to in the evenings. I just keep pedaling and pedaling to fill in the time. S’not much else to do around here. S’pecially if you’ve got no friends.
Then a thought pops into my head. I keep hearin’ her high-pitched voice over and over as if she’s screeching right next to my ears.
“Fuck it,” I say as I begin to pedal faster and the wind picks up, blowing my hair away from my eyes.
I leave my bike resting against the wall before I bend over in two, with my hands on my knees, as I try to catch my breath.
“Sorry,” I say to a man passing me. “Do you know what time it is?”
He looks kinda funny at me, then hooks the sleeve of his jacket to one side and stares at his watch.
“Five ten,” he says.
Then he walks off as I remain bent over, st
ill trying to try to catch my breath.
Five ten. That means it took me over an hour to ride here. I’ll be exhausted by the time I get home tonight. This better be worth it.
Bloom Avenue is a busy street, with a big bar that is blasting out a Bon Jovi song, and a casino with bright lights blinking on and off next to it. I take my bike from the wall and wheel it down the sidewalk, past a group of adults who stare at me before they begin to laugh. I hope they aren’t laughing at me.
I cross over to the quieter side of the street, to where the walls are sprayed with bad graffiti. And that’s when my heart stops.
“What the fuck?” I say to myself.
Mom. Standing on the corner of the street with another woman, dressed like I ain’t never see her dressed before. A skirt so short you can almost see her thong, her oversized pink purse tucked under her arm.
I stand against the wall, staring at the two of them as they share a cigarette, until a car pulls up to the curb next to them.
Mom points her thumb at her own chest then at the woman beside her before walking over to the car and bending down to talk into the driver’s side window.
Then she waves back at the woman she was talking to, flicks the butt of her cigarette to the sidewalk and gets into the car.
BRODY EDWARDS
I keep tapping my pen against the desk while Stevie chokes into his elbow beside me. Again.
“Jesus, dude, you got AIDs or something?” I say.
He looks up at me, his eyes all red, and then he blows out his cheeks.
When Decker walks in, I instantly remember how all up in my face she was last Friday, spitting and yelling at me, and so I immediately sit up more straight. But I don’t know why I do that. Cos I’m not afraid of her. She doesn’t frighten me, even if she thinks she does. Sad thing is, I used to like Decker. She was prolly my favorite teacher until she got all pissed with me for no reason.
In The Middle of Middle America Page 22
