Z is going to be a dad.
Zim. My brother. The twenty-four-year-old record-store clerk. Roommate of Swirly/Kevin-Mike-Mark. Gatekeeper of the pepperoni/toxic waste dump.
Holy wow.
I went to bed early because I didn’t know how to face Mom and Dad after their little meeting.
Were they going to try to act all normal around me?
Should I tell them that I’d heard what they said?
My nervous stomach gave me a definite answer to that question: N-O.
I lay face-down on my bed with a pillow under my stomach and another one under my head. I turned off all my lights so that they’d think I was sleeping.
Much later, after I’d heard Z leave and my mom and dad go to sleep (Mom poked her head in, but I fake-snored and she left me alone), I snuck out of my room and down the hall to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth and washed my face. I examined my pimply skin from a dozen different angles — my face only inches from the mirror — popping a few of the juicier zits on my cheeks and my forehead, and wiping the nastiness they left behind on the mirror away with a piece of toilet paper. I couldn’t stop picking at my face. I knew it was late and that I was only making my skin more red by touching and squeezing every ugly bump, but I couldn’t stop. My face and my fingers itched, and my stomach made loud, anxious noises.
When I was finally able to stop my hands, I smeared benzoyl peroxide cream all over my face. Dad had picked this tube of goo up at the pharmacy after I told him about the horrors of the Oxy pads — he said the pharmacist told him that this space-alien-sounding stuff is supposed to be the best thing for zits. So far all it seems to be good for is making my skin dry and flaky. When I was finished rubbing the stuff all over my face, I recapped the tube and washed my hands. I looked at myself in the mirror with my hands over my stomach, trying to keep calm the storm.
I thought about saying something to myself, standing there like the way people do in the movies. Something to calm myself down and make me feel better. Like a mantra or something. I didn’t, though. I didn’t want to wake my parents up.
Back in my room, I turned my iPod speakers on, low enough so Mom and Dad couldn’t hear me. I scrolled through my music, finally choosing Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and tried my best to fall asleep. And not to think about J’s belly.
Getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger. With a baby in it.
And that Z was going to have a kid.
And that I was going to be an aunt, I guess.
Weird.
Wow.
Whoa.
Six
Sexual intercourse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sexual intercourse, also known as copulation or coitus (ugh), commonly refers to the insertion of a male’s penis into a female’s vagina for the purposes of sexual pleasure or reproduction giving your parents and your sister fifteen heart attacks each. Thanks, Zim.
Sexual intercourse can play a strong role in human bonding — yeah, and so can playing video games and going on bike rides and making cookies and watching movies and not making babies often being used solely for pleasure and leading to stronger emotional bonds.
Sexual intercourse is apparently what Z and J have been having in his gross apartment in Parkdale.
Do they do it while Swirly/K-M-M is home?
No wonder Z never wants to invite me over.
My mom and I never had “the talk.” You know, the whole facts-of-life/birds-and-the-bees squirm-fest? We never exactly got around to it.
Which was totally fine with me. Stacey told me how mushy her mom got the first time she got her period, and it sounded pretty embarrassing. Chloe got a book, Trisha and her mom looked at some website together.
I got nothing.
I was actually pretty glad that we’d skipped that whole step at the time, but now I’m not so sure. It seems wrong, kind of. I’m not sure how to explain it.
When I got my period for the first time — the morning after my eleventh birthday, like my body had some kind of switch that got flipped when I blew out the candles on my cake the night before — she still hadn’t explained the whole deal to me. Not that she needed to; between the videos they showed us in health class at school, and stuff I’d seen on TV and the Internet, not to mention the fact that Stacey beat me to it, I wasn’t exactly surprised when I bled for the first time.
I didn’t even tell Mom for a while because I thought she wouldn’t want to know. I kept hoping she’d ask me if it had happened so I wouldn’t have to just tell her. Or maybe she’d get the hint from one of my friend’s moms or something.
I managed okay with toilet paper in my underwear the first time it happened, but eventually I had to ask her to buy me some pads. She drove right out to the store and came home with a package filled with things the size of a Barbie inflatable raft (for fun in her dream house’s pool, of course). When I finally used them all up I had to ask her to buy the thin ones, the ones Stacey has, that don’t feel like you’re wearing a diaper.
Anyway, my point is that my family doesn’t talk about sex.
We don’t.
So how are we supposed to deal with this?
Stacey just left.
I called her house first thing this morning — at seven-thirty, even though she hates getting up early on Saturday — after I woke up to a giant bleach stain on my pillow from that ghastly (old-school word, I know. But look it up, it fits perfectly) cream that Dad bought. I pretty much forced her to come over immediately. Not because of the stain, I mean. Because of the Holy-Wow thing.
It’s a little after ten-thirty now.
At night.
I couldn’t face my family without reinforcement today, and Stacey knows me better than anyone. Still, I guess it was kind of a long day for her to be running interference. I could tell she was starting to droop after dinner (we ordered pizza with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes, our favourite, and ate it in my room) when she started talking about how she should probably go home so she could get her schoolwork finished for Monday. She explained that she wasn’t going to be able to do any work tomorrow because Becca just signed some major modelling contract and their whole family was going to go up to Collingwood for a ski trip to celebrate. Ski Slope Sunday definitely sounds better than Serious Family Discussion Sunday.
To take my mind off the pregnancy, Stacey offered to give me a makeover, something she’s been dying to do ever since my face started seriously breaking out. She said it would help with my look.
What look — pimple princess? Somehow I don’t think a makeover is going to get me runway-ready.
Stacey jokes around a lot about clothes and makeup like she doesn’t care about them. She says that’s Becca’s thing. But she definitely knows how to turn it on when she wants to, that glamour/style thing that I have absolutely no sense of. I think I was born without that particular button.
To be completely honest, I think Stacey dresses kind of boring. I mean I know I don’t look pretty or popular or even cute most of the time, but I think that dressing a little bit differently is sort of cool. I mean, not cool cool, but, I don’t know … unique?
Z used to have lots of friends over to the house when he was in high school. I don’t remember too much from back then, but I sometimes used to sneak down to the basement to spy on Z and his friends, teenagers who looked like giants. They were a totally different species — talking about bands and movies I’d never heard of, wearing bright, wild clothes, laughing hysterically at jokes I knew I’d never understand — and I was so afraid they’d catch me looking at them and think I was a creep.
But I wanted to look at them.
All I wanted to do was look at them.
I was fascinated. Maybe a little obsessed. Probably a creep.
They just all seemed to be perfectly themselves and not afraid of anything. And that’s what I wanted to be.
When Z moved out for university, he left a lot of his old high-school stuff at home, like those Saved by th
e Bell tapes. I found his old T-shirts and baseball caps, and I started wearing them as soon as I was big enough, even though most of his shirts looked like dresses on me. They were mostly band T-shirts and some shirts with slogans on them. Jokes I didn’t really get, though I pretended I understood.
I’ve never really gotten to know my brother that well, but I guess I’ve always sort of looked up to him. I know I should want to wear girly stuff and makeup and be more like Stacey and the rest of the girls at school, but mostly I just don’t care. I used to wish I had a big sister to teach me all about this stuff, or wish that Mom cared more about stupid things like hair and clothes. I guess I do still wish for those things sometimes. Or maybe it’s just that I know I’m supposed to want them. But most of the time I just don’t care that much about being a girl. A girl like Stacey, anyway. But I sometimes wonder if there’s something wrong with me for not caring about that stuff. For not bothering to make myself pretty if I want someone — read: boys — to like me.
Boys definitely like Stacey, there’s no question. At least three guys in our class have crushes on her, but Stacey doesn’t like any of them back. I don’t get that. If I knew someone had a crush on me, I think I’d pretty much automatically like them back. As long as they weren’t totally weird. Does that make me desperate or something? It’s kind of hard to say since the whole thing is a non-issue. I am totally unlikeable. Or at least I am as long as my face keeps looking like the surface of Mars.
(Which it seriously does. I looked it up on wonderful Wiki: bright red, and covered in bumps and craters.)
But sometime between now and when I get old and die, I’ll probably find someone who wants to kiss me. Or do whatever it is that people who like each other do together.
Not what Z and J did, though.
Ew.
I had my first serious crush last summer, on Declan Walsh. I met him at the overnight arts camp my parents made me go to. He was in the music group, he played guitar, and I was in creative writing. But apart from doing sessions where we worked on whatever our art was, everyone at camp had do other activities, too, like arts and crafts, and we had that session at the same time.
I remember when I first saw him across the table in the arts and crafts hut, fiddling with an orange guitar pick and looking totally bored. I’d heard him singing as I walked past the music hall earlier that afternoon — I was heading back to my cabin to look for my lucky pen and strategically avoid having to write an acrostic poem for the millionth time. He was sitting near the open back door, away from the group, where I’m sure he thought no one else could hear him. His voice was beautiful and soft, and I walked up closer so I could see him. His left hand slid effortlessly up and down the fretboard of his guitar, forming chords that made his fingers look like spider legs that I could just barely see from where I stood. He was amazing. And, fortunately, too wrapped up in the music to notice me staring at him.
Seeing him in the craft hut, it was hard to believe he was real. I kept trying to work up the nerve to tell him how good he was while I sat there gluing pompoms onto popsicle sticks because I hadn’t been paying attention to what the day’s craft was actually supposed to be. The crafts counsellor gave both Declan and me disappointed looks at the end of the hour when it was clear that neither of us had made any effort to build a birdhouse, the assigned project. I thought maybe Declan would see what a(n accidental) rebel I was and start to notice me, but he got up and left without even looking my way.
I used to watch Declan from across the dining hall during meals, too. He was always really quiet, unlike the rest of his cabin, who pretty much never stopped yelling and singing and flinging their fish sticks around. I liked that about him; that he wasn’t like everybody else. He seemed so mysterious, plus he was incredibly talented. He mostly wore band shirts, bands that had broken up before we were born. The Beatles and Pink Floyd and the Ramones. You could tell his shirts weren’t really old, though. He must’ve bought them at a store in the mall. Hot Topic, probably. I guess not everyone’s lucky enough to have hand-me-downs from a cool older brother.
Mom tried to take me shopping at Hot Topic once, right after it opened in the Eaton Centre last year. It was pretty weird, like someone had raided a thousand cool older brothers’ closets and put all their stuff up for sale at the mall. Mom couldn’t get over how much everything cost, and I couldn’t get over how much older and cooler and not-with-their-mothers every other kid in the store looked, so we left without actually buying anything.
Later, when we stopped for lunch in the food court — Mom had a salad, while I had poutine — I just sat there shovelling fries into my mouth barely looking at Mom and wishing I was there with Z instead.
My cool older brother.
A cool older brother who’s going to be a dad and whose life is about to change completely.
Can you still be cool if you’re a dad?
As it turned out, Stacey’s makeover was a pretty good distraction from all these awful daddy-brother thoughts. She put my hair up in Mom’s old curlers, and used what makeup she could find — mostly cheap stuff that Uncle Tim had given me in our family’s Secret Santa gift exchange two Christmases ago. I was ten then, did he really think I’d use that stuff? I’m pretty sure he picked it up at a dollar store and that he didn’t remember which of his nieces I was because my dad’s family is pretty big.
It took Stacey ten minutes just to wash my face (she says you have to be extra gentle with zits, as if she’s ever had one) and put cover-up on before she even started on the rest of my face. I have to admit it, though, I looked pretty good when she finished. Normal, almost. But there is no way I could spend half an hour washing my face and doing my makeup every day. Maybe just for special occasions.
Stacey’s mom came to pick her up a little while after dinner, and she and my mom talked while Stacey put her coat and boots on. Mom wrapped her arms around me from behind as she talked, hugging me to her, which she used to do all the time when I was little, but hasn’t in forever. It was kind of embarrassing and I squirmed a whole bunch. She wouldn’t let go, though.
“I hear you guys are going up to Collingwood tomorrow?” Mom asked. I’d told her about Becca’s big contract when she called us down to the kitchen for dinner. But Stacey’s mom looked confused.
“That’s news to me,” she said.
“Aren’t you guys all going to celebrate?” I asked.
“Celebrate? Stacey, I thought you were having Chloe over to the house tomorrow,” her mom said.
“Oh, yeah, right,” Stacey said, “I forgot. Chloe’s coming over.” She looked guilty; her eyebrows were practically sitting on top of her head.
After that she waved goodbye and the two of them got into their car and drove off.
“What was that about, kiddo?” Mom asked, releasing me.
“I hate it when you call me that,” I said. “It’s fine. I was just confused. My stomach hurts. I’m going to go upstairs and lie down.”
“Everything okay? Want me come up and rub your tummy? Or make you some tea?”
“No. It’s fine. And can you please not call my stomach my ‘tummy’? Like, ever again?”
“Okay, Sweets. But maybe when you’re feeling a bit better we can sit down and talk?”
“Sure,” I said. “I just need to be alone.”
Up in my room, my stomach really did hurt, so I lay down. There’s nothing crazy about Stacey and Chloe hanging out alone, but why would Stacey lie about it? I closed my eyes and tried to shut off my brain, but it didn’t work.
Z rang the doorbell not long after that. I guess because he works nights at the record store he can only come and visit really late — it was almost eleven. He must have come by to talk to Mom and Dad again. From the scraping of chairs across the floor downstairs, I knew that they were talking in the kitchen. I faded in and out of light sleep for about an hour, and then I heard a faint knock on my bedroom door.
“Who is it?” I asked, my mouth slow with sleepiness.
“Zim,” he said. “You awake?”
“Sure.” I got out of bed, put on my slippers, and padded over to the door, opening it halfway. Zim looked the same as always — his hair was messy, and there was a stain on his shirt — but he looked different, too; he looked tired.
“Hey,” he said, playing nervously with the hair on the back of his head.
“Hi.”
I waited for him to tell me about the baby. About his impending parenthood and the end of his life as a cool older brother as he knew it.
We stood there for a minute, just looking at each other. I was in my pajamas, black-and-white-checked with little fortune cookies all over them, and all of a sudden Z looked so much older than he really was. Maybe it was just the light (one of the bulbs in the landing did burn out a couple of days ago).
“Zim?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine. How ’bout you?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, “I’m okay.”
“Middle school’s not killing you?”
“It’s all right. Not great.”
“Yup,” he said, “that sounds about right.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He paused and gave me a little sympathy smile. “Jo, I don’t want to scare you or anything. I know Mom and Dad aren’t wild about me telling you like this, but I think you need to know.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“I’m moving back in,” Z said.
I braced myself for the rest of the news.
When he saw I wasn’t saying anything, Z kept talking. “I’m moving back in with you and Mom and Dad. And Jen’s coming with me. We’re moving in.”
He looked at me like it was my turn to talk.
“Oh,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“What?”
“I just thought you might be, I don’t know, a bit more excited or something.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I am. I’m just, you know, tired.”
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