by Alice Carina
"Katie..." he already knew what those words had come to mean to me.
He reached out for my cheek, there must've been a stray tear on there, but he changed his mind before touching me. Instead, he reached into his backpack and handed me a tissue. I wiped my face and blew my nose.
"You want to know what I want in return?" He asked, his tone suddenly cheerful. I nodded. "Come with me." He bounced off the bleacher and reached his hand out for me. I stared at it until he dropped it. "Come on, we won't go far," he assured me. I slowly got up to my feet on my own and followed him to his car.
He'd given me a ride home once before, and while I wasn't as giddy and excited as I'd been then, I wasn't as nervous and uncomfortable as I imagined the situation would have me be. He turned the radio on to fill the twenty-minute drive silence.
I didn't know we had reached our destination until he got out and opened my door. I had no idea where we were, but there was nothing out of the ordinary on the street.
"You'll love this, trust me," he smiled and I tried to trust him as I followed him into a grey, storage-like building.
"Chad!" A woman beamed when she saw us and pulled him in for a hug. "What are you doing here?"
"I want to show my friend something,"
"You know it's closing hou-" she stopped talking when her eyes found my baby bump.
"We won't be long," Chad quickly said and started walking again.
"O-okay," she stuttered, unable to take her eyes off my stomach. I lowered my head and followed him.
"I used to work here over the summer," Chad explained, but I didn't look up to know where here was, I kept my eyes on the blue-tiled floor until he stopped in front of a wide pool.
I looked up and was genuinely confused. The room was large, spacious and mostly empty. The glass ceiling let in the last sunrays of the day and they spread brightly over the motionless water. The pool looked like it was just randomly dug there as an afterthought, but Chad didn't seem stumped by it at all as he leaned over the pool and disturbed the still water with his hand.
I just stared at him as he patted the water with a smile on his face. Suddenly, a grey and fast shadow nudged his hand away and disappeared as quickly as it had come. I gasped, but Chad only chuckled.
"I guess they're not in the mood to come up, today." He wiped his hand on his pants.
"What's not?"
"You'll see," he winked at me and moved around the pool. I followed him.
He opened a black metal door to the side and gestured for me to go through. I looked at the dark stairs and couldn't move.
"Katie?"
I couldn't move.
"You won't fall," he remembered, "one step at a time."
He stepped in front of me and stood on the top stair patiently until I joined him. We went down one step at a time, but it was dark and I found myself stepping closer to him until I squeezed his arm for security. He didn't say anything. We eventually made it down the stairs and I quickly let go of him. He didn't make it awkward by saying anything, just moved ahead and I followed him until we were in front of a glass wall separating us from the floor-to-ceiling-and-beyond water on the other side.
I walked closer to my reflection and tried to see what he was smiling at, but there was nothing but water. I kept looking and, slowly, blurred circled started to form to my right. They grew larger and larger until they became clearer and right in front of me.
"You once told me they were your favorite animals and I noticed that they're still the screensaver on your phone."
Dolphins. I was looking at dolphins.
"This is..." I couldn't speak.
There were three dolphins; a big dolphin, a slightly smaller one, and a baby dolphin that came as close to the glass as possible and kept looking at me. It started turning its body in circles then pausing to look at me before doing them again.
"He likes it when people clap for him," Chad chuckled.
I instantly clapped and the baby dolphin started doing more swirls speedily.
"How do you know this?"
"I still come to help around over the weekends."
"What exactly is this place?" I turned to him, but my eyes quickly moved back to the dolphins as the other two started spinning.
"They don't really have a name, it's a small family thing and they all love the ocean. They take in injured sea creatures, treat them, then send them back to the sea."
The medium sized dolphin swam closer to me and bobbled its entire body up to my face and down till it was parallel with my stomach until the baby dolphin nudged its side so that it was again the center of my attention and resumed twirling for my entertainment, or its own.
"They found the baby trapped in a net close to shore. It had many cuts, but the mom wouldn't let it go, and her partner wouldn't let her go, so they brought them all together."
"That's so..." I still couldn't talk.
The biggest dolphin snuck up on the little one and nudged it slightly from behind, the baby dolphin gave a little squeal and spiraled out of control, and I burst into laughter. I hadn't laughed in so long the shaking of my body came as a surprise, but I couldn't stop laughing, and there was no one around to tell me to stop or to judge me or to shame me or tell me that I didn't deserve to laugh, and I laughed until I felt the dolphins' movements and sounds were joined, approved laughter.
We stayed there watching the dolphins for a very long time until the lady who'd met us at the front came down and told us they were closing, avoiding any eye-contact with me. Chad told her that we would follow her up in a bit.
Even the dolphins looked tired by then as they floated closer to each other, huddling in a picture of complete and harmonious unity that had me tearing up for no reason.
"They're so... I really don't know..."
Chad chuckled as he moved closer to me, his faint reflection joining mine against the glass.
"When you're ready to say bye just wave at them, they're trained to swim away when someone waves."
"Oh," I really didn't want to leave them. "We have to go now," I addressed the dolphins. I blushed at Chad standing there watching me talk to them, but I couldn't just leave them without a proper goodbye. "You're so beautiful and great. I've never seen dolphins up close before, I hope I can see you again. I would stay here all night with you if I could, but we have to go, so um... Bye," I waved my hand and I knew that they knew it was over.
The baby dolphin came closer to the glass again, gave me a couple of goodbye swirls that had me laughing and clapping for it, before it just looked at me. I didn't know if dolphins could actually smile, but I swear it was smiling at me, and I smiled back. The bigger dolphins nuzzled closer together and started swimming away, the baby gave me one more swirl and a nod that I chose to believe was his version of goodbye before chasing after its parents and forcing its way between them as they began to shrink and blur until they disappeared.
"You see that?" Chad asked me when I kept looking after them.
"See what?" I struggled to look beyond my reflection now that there was nothing to look at. I kept looking in the direction they'd left, but they weren't coming back like I'd hoped.
"Your smile," my eyes dropped back to myreflection and there it was, my stretched smile that had been out of use for solong it slightly hurt, but I couldn't seem to drop it, not even when he pointedit out. "That's all I ever want in return."
Girl
"You're avoiding me," Chad was leaning against the wall outside the girls' restroom when I walked out.
"What are you doing here?" I put a hand to my heart.
"You're avoiding me," he repeated.
"No, I'm not," I denied as I looked around, making sure nobody else was around to see us together.
"Really? 'Cause I tried to talk to you before class, you wouldn't even look at me, and you keep turning around and running away every time I look at you."
"I just... I wasn't expecting you to want to talk to me."
"We talked for hours just yesterd
ay."
"Yeah," some people were pausing in the hall to look at us, probably waiting for some humiliation to laugh at. "But we were alone. You can't talk to me in school."
"Why not?"
"Because nobody talks to me in school,"
"I am," he shrugged and the bell rang.
I kept trying to avoid him for the rest of the day.
I was hiding in one of the stalls during Lunch, having my meal in privacy as usual when I heard someone call out my name.
"Katie?" It couldn't be. He couldn't have actually come inside. "Katie?"
I placed my tray over the seat and slowly opened the door to peek outside. Chad was there, inside the girls' restroom, holding his own tray of food and standing like he was used to being there all the time.
"What are you doing here?" My voice was a whisper, and I kept the door half-closed between us.
"Chelsea said you'd be here,"
"What are you doing here?"
"Having lunch with you," he slightly lifted his tray.
"You can't do that," I opened the door forcefully and walked out. "What if someone sees you here?"
"I don't care," he shrugged.
"But I do!" How could he not see how that could affect him? Nobody socialized with me for a reason. "Why are you here?"
"No one should eat alone." He looked me straight in the eyes and I couldn't breathe.
I went back to my stall and heard him go into the next one. There was nothing but the sound of spoons meeting plates and wrappers being torn; we didn't say anything to each other.
When we were done, he exited his stall and smiled at me; "Same time tomorrow?"
He must've gotten that I didn't want to talk to him around other people, because he stopped following me and calling out my name, but the next day, he walked into the girls' restroom with his tray. There was another girl in there who stared wide-eyed at him, but didn't say anything and left. We occupied the same stalls from the day before and didn't say anything.
I couldn't admit it to him, but it felt so good to have someone else there. I didn't need him to talk or to ask or to do anything, just having someone there with me, choosing to go through what I was forced into just so that I wouldn't have to go through it alone had me crying, but I tried my best not to let him hear which was why I didn't speak to him that day.
I figured he would get bored of sitting in the girls' restroom with someone who wouldn't talk or look at him and miss his friends and the nice smells and chatters in the cafeteria, and I was hoping that he would so that he would go back to his life of popularity and friendship instead of getting sucked into the loneliness in mine.
But he showed up the third day. And I knew, the moment I saw him, that if I ignored him or kept trying to push him away for one hundred more days, he would still show up just to sit with me while I did that.
"I can't sit in the cafeteria," I finally talked to him that day. I knew he would've preferred to be there, where it was normal to sit and eat and our silence would be filled by others' chatters.
"Why not?" He was sitting in the other stall and we couldn't see each other, and it sort of felt like texting.
"It's weird... Everyone looks at me and... I just can't... They don't just look, they talk and they do stuff and..." I sighed and shook my head at myself.
"Emmet won't do anything to you," he seemed to have read my mind.
"What?"
"I would've talked to him before, but I thought he was the dad and it felt weird to... I don't know, but I'm sorry. I talked to him now, he won't go near you."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him that if he didn't back off I would tell everyone that he's the father. Everyone would believe me sooner than they'd believe him and it would ruin his position with girls. It's one thing to bully someone for being pregnant; it's another to bully someone you got pregnant."
I blinked at my food with an open mouth. "Wha-what did he say?"
"He said he would tell everyone that I was the father,"
That was what I was scared of. If people saw us talking together, eating together, being friends, they would just assume that he was the father and he didn't deserve that, I couldn't do that to him.
"What did you say?" I swallowed painfully.
"I told him I didn't care," he truly didn't, because he didn't know what it would feel like, but I did and I couldn't put him through that. "But he does, so he won't go near you."
"He's not the only one..."
"No one will do anything, I promise."
He couldn't promise that, he didn't know what they were like; he'd never been disliked or looked down on by anyone. Maybe if he got a little, harmless taste, maybe if he saw them for their truth just once, maybe then he'd run back to their side and leave mine before they closed in on the both of us.
The next day, when he approached me after class, I told him I would eat in the cafeteria.
We walked together down the hall, all eyes turning to us. I kept my gaze on my feet, but Chad didn't seem to even notice them.
Nobody pushed me out of line. We got our trays and I followed him into an empty table. Nobody tried to trip me or told me that I shouldn't eat so that I would die faster like I deserved to. I made it to the table without anyone saying anything to me or touching me, even by accident. I sat at the table and nobody pulled out my chair.
I finally looked up. They were looking, but they didn't say or do anything. When I met Emmet's eyes, he quickly averted them, just like everybody else did in time.
I couldn't believe it.
Had it always been that simple?
It suddenly hit me that no one had bothered me for the past couple of days, not since Emmet stopped. And then it hit me that nobody had before him. Every day, he started the chain; he would do something and everybody else would follow simply because he'd done it. Nobody else had vindictiveness fueling his or her courage other than Emmet, and nobody had his courage to fuel theirs. Had they ever wanted to do it or just did it because everybody else was? Because nobody seemed to want to anymore...
Josslyn went to parties because everybody else did, I slept with someone because everybody else did, they bullied me because everybody else did. If no one had thrown a party, would Josslyn have planned one herself? If my sister and friends weren't always bragging about their relationships, would I have caved in for the first guy to call me pretty when I didn't even look like myself? If Emmet hadn't been holding a grudge, would people have actually asked or pitied or helped?
Chad was the only one who was nice to me. When Emmet wasn't setting the chain-action of cruelty, Chad set a new one of kindness and compassion. One of my class mates held the door open for me that day, a girl helped me pick up my book when it slipped from me, another moved to the other side of the mirror so I could reach the sinks in the restroom.
Were we really that gullible, that dependent on what other people were doing?
"I've been begging you forever to eat here, how did he do it?" Chelsea nodded at Chad as she sat next to us.
She wasn't ashamed of me? She'd actually meant it when she used to invite me? Had I let people who didn't even know me or like me get into my head so deep that I no longer liked myself and then proceeded to project my dislike on those few who still did?
I stopped trying to push him away after that. It was selfish and unappreciative of me, but I just felt so safe and comfortable around him. He was the only person who still treated me exactly the same and looked at my face before my bulging stomach, and that was all I needed at the time for my health to start improving.
*
"It's official," Patty beamed at me. "Everything is perfectly normal and healthy. You keep taking good care of yourself and your baby is going to come into the world healthy and on time." There'd been some problems since my incident on the streets and Patty had been worried that I would give birth prematurely. I'd been checking with the doctor she transferred me to regularly and that was the first time she told me that everything
was okay.
I started to cry. She was used to my emotionalism by then and just laughed and handed me some tissues.
"Do you want to know what you're having?" She asked.
I had refused to know what my baby's gender was. I didn't want to get even more attached to it then lose it. But everything was okay, so I nodded.
"You're having a healthy, on-time, baby girl."
I called Chad as soon as I left Patty's office because he'd repeatedly asked me to.
"It's a girl," I told him.
"Congratulations!" I could feel his smile. "That's great! I'm sure she'll be as beautiful as her mom."
"Maybe..." There were too many things on my mind for me to blush at his comment.
"What's wrong?"
"I was sort of hoping it would be a boy..." I confessed.
"Why?"
"Because a boy would never have to go through what I am," I sighed. "Even if a boy got a girl pregnant and everybody knew, they would still pretty much treat him the same because they won't be reminded of it every time they looked at him. And if he wanted it to be a secret or if he wanted to get up and start somewhere else fresh? He can. A girl can't do that. Is it weird that I'm already so worried about her? She could get pregnant, she could get used, she could be peer pressured and have to deal with more consequences than any boy ever would, she could get hurt, she might look up to me and end up in the same mess I'm in, or she might be ashamed of me and hate me and never take my advice and still end up in the same mess, she could be bullied, she could be lonely, she could get beaten or abused, she could be tricked, she could have her heart broken... There are just so many things that can go terribly, dangerously wrong in a girl's life."
"You're thinking too much about this," he spoke from the other end when I finished. "You'll raise her and warn her as best as you can and she'll still make lots of mistakes. Whether similar to yours, less severe, or more frightening, she'll definitely make some mistakes, because that's what we all do. You'll guide her through them and support her and love her, no matter what, because that's what we all need. And everything will eventually be okay."
There was no proof to his words, but they made me feel better.
