by Deena Lipomi
Before, Annie would’ve hurried into the crowd, squealing along with her friends over the total coincidence of running into each other.
Now, Annie’s face drops as she’s absorbed into the group.
“Coming through,” Kasey announces and weasels her way inside, throwing out elbows as necessary. I follow in her path, not wanting to be a part of whatever drama is about to take place. I glance over my shoulder, but I’ve already lost sight of my sister in the mix of bodies.
I have to trust her to take care of herself.
At the deli counter, Kasey orders for the two of us (mixed subs with the works) and I order a small turkey sub for Annie (no nitrates in the fresh turkey), her usual favorite. My stomach rumbles with the smell of warm bread, reminding me I need to perfect my dinner roll recipe in time for Thanksgiving.
“What’s up with all that?” Kasey asks with a nod to the crowd as we wait for our orders. “Aren’t they all BFFs and stuff?”
“Annie hasn’t been hanging around with them since...you know,” I say.
“So they don’t know?” she whispers.
I shake my head. “No one besides our family and you knows.”
Kasey shakes her head, probably a mix of confusion and disbelief.
“Subs up,” calls the sandwich maker.
Kasey and I take our bags outside and claim a table where we wait for Annie to join us. She’s visible now, the only girl with black hair amongst the six other blonds and brunettes.
“You sure you don’t wanna come with us?” Justine asks Annie, clutching her wrist. “We never see you anymore.”
“I can’t,” Annie says. Her hunched posture, her tentative tone, her everything is wrong and not Annie.
“Just for an hour?” Chloe asks.
“I, uh, told Melanie I’d have lunch with her,” Annie says, nodding in my direction.
“You’d rather hang out with Melanie?” Justine asks. “Since when?”
I take a huge bite of my sub so I won’t respond. Kasey glares at them but I send her a warning look not to start a war.
“Guys, let’s leave her alone,” says Samara, taking a step back.
I always did like her the best out of Annie’s friends.
Justine rolls her eyes. “Fine. Call me later, though, Annie. Promise?”
I guess she makes a promise she doesn’t intend to keep.
The group struts across the street to the park. “Bye, Annie!” “Call me!” “Love you!” they chirp over their shoulders.
“Dude, if you want them to leave you alone,” Kasey says to Annie when she sits with us, “you should tell them about the baby.”
“What?” Annie asks.
“Kasey!” I choke on my lunch.
“Sorry,” Kasey says in a tone that is definitely not sorry. “Look, you girls have too many secrets and I can’t sit here and pretend I don’t know.”
Ice sinks into my stomach.
Annie puffs up her chest, inhaling until she could float away. Finally, she speaks. “Who else knows?”
“No one,” I say. “I swear.”
“I haven’t told a soul,” Kasey says. “You don’t need to worry about that. But I knew something was up ‘cause Mel kept avoiding me.”
Annie balls up a napkin into her fist.
“She’s my best friend,” I say, remembering a time when that was Annie. “You might not want to talk to anyone about what’s going on, but you can’t expect me to do the exact same thing. Just because you are ashamed of the situation you got yourself into, it doesn’t mean I can’t talk to my best friend about it.”
“Fine then,” Annie says, nearly pouting, another look I haven’t seen on her face since junior high. “I’ll tell everyone.”
I sigh. “You don’t have to do that. I just can’t keep all these secrets. It’s not fair of you to expect me to manage both our lives.”
“Oh, so you think I need you to manage my life?” Annie asks.
“If you keep doing…the things you’re doing, then maybe you do,” I snap.
“OK, glad that’s all out in the open,” Kasey says, and then chugs her soda.
My sister and I turn to her with identical glares.
“Look, I didn’t mean to get all up in your sisterly business,” Kasey starts. “Well, maybe I did. But only because I wanted to point out that Annie, I know you’re pregnant and I don’t care. It doesn’t change anything between us. So you should just spill to your girls. If they aren’t OK with it, then it’ll be easy to ditch them for being insensitive. If they are, then they’ll respect the fact that you don’t want them spreading word until you’re ready for them to talk.”
Annie’s chair grates across the concrete as she pushes away from the table. “They aren’t like you. If I tell them, they’ll gossip about it no matter what I say. And I’m not ready for everyone to know yet because I still might…not have it.”
My stomach churns at the possibility. And its opposite.
“The scary thing is it feels like…like they already know,” Annie says to her lap.
“What?” I say, an onion dangling from my mouth.
“Maybe you’re paranoid and feeling guilty ‘cause you haven’t told them?” Kasey says. “No offense.”
Annie slowly unwraps her sub.
“Why are you even friends with girls you don’t trust?” I ask.
“I just know how they are.” It’s the first time I’ve heard Annie say a bad word about Justine and her other friends, though she doesn’t answer my question. “They aren’t bad people. Justine, she has her own stuff going on in her life. Samara too.”
We’re all silent for a minute, chewing. I don’t know what “stuff” Justine and Samara are dealing with, but it doesn’t give them the right to be nasty to me, Annie, or anyone else.
Kasey checks her cell phone and breaks the quiet. “Where’s Devon?”
“Who knows,” I mumble. This trip was such a waste of time.
“Who knows what?” a voice behind me asks.
I jump.
“Devon, how are you? Have a seat.” Kasey leaps from her chair so he can sit next to me. “May I take your ice cream orders?”
“Uh, Kase, maybe Devon wants to sit with his friends?” I ask through my teeth. These guys Josh and Aiden are hanging back behind him.
“Devon wants to sit with us, don’t you?” Kasey practically tugs his arm down so he’ll join me.
“How could I pass up sitting with three ladies?” His friends find another table without so much as a nod to us. Guys are weird. “I’m buying.” Devon reaches into the pocket of his khaki shorts, removes his wallet, and hands a twenty to Kasey.
“You don’t have to do that.” I reach into my own pocket.
“Dude, let the man pay.” Kasey takes his money and our ice cream orders and dashes inside.
Annie clears her throat. Before she would’ve introduced herself and found something in common with Devon in two seconds. Now I think the throat clearing is actually to move a piece of turkey from her windpipe. Still, I introduce them.
“Devon, this is my sister Annie.”
“Nice to meet you,” Annie says, her smile dazzling despite everything.
“Same here,” Devon says. “So how did Kasey’s thing go with her dog?”
“Good. Barbie had four puppies. We just saw them.” I say.
Devon nods, though I’m not sure if he’s humoring me or really cares.
“You should visit them before they’re sold off.” Kasey pushes the door open with her hip, hands us our ice creams, then drags a chair over from an unoccupied table.
“They are super cute,” Annie agrees, stirring her chocolate scoop while her sandwiched sits mostly untouched.
I lick sprinkles from my spoon and watch Devon’s gaze. Is he paying Annie more attention than me? No, he’s leaning in my direction. I think. I push the fear down deep and try to relax.
While we eat Devon tells us about the pranks he and his coworkers at the garage play on each ot
her, like hiding their lunches, stealing their tools, and purposely ordering Chinese food from the place that never gets their orders right. He’s completely different than at school where he’s focused on fetal pig dissections and pop quizzes and his grades.
“My mom’s gonna need me home soon,” Kasey says after our ice cream is eaten.
“More puppy duty?” Devon asks.
I love that he asked.
“Don’t you know it.”
“That’s cool. I gotta get going, too. My dad’s waiting for me at the garage,” Devon says.
“Thanks for the ice cream,” Kasey says. “We should do it again some time.”
“Yeah, thanks.” I turn away from the table – and smack right into Devon. Full body contact. “Oh, sorry.” My face gets redder under yesterday’s sunburn.
“No problem.” He gives me a half hug and I am stiff under his warmth and musky boy smell. I don’t even hug him back. God, I am such a novice.
My heart pounds and keeps pounding after he walks away, Josh and Aiden joining him.
“Dude, he so likes you.”
I can only hope Kasey’s right and that I didn’t just botch the whole thing with my body of awkwardness.
We walk to Kasey’s house, say goodbye, and then Annie and I continue on to our house. I listen to the rhythm of her flip-flops.
“Hey, Mel?” Annie says when we’re alone. “Do you think we would’ve been friends if we weren’t sisters? Like, say a different family from Ridgecrest adopted me and we went to the same school and all that. Do you think we would’ve become friends?”
“Everything would be different,” I say, wondering how long she’s been thinking about this. “We’d both be different people because we wouldn’t have had each other growing up. You can’t tell.”
The hiss of spinning sprinklers and shouts of kids playing tag in their front yards fill the air between us.
“I can’t talk to Justine and them anymore,” Annie says.
“What do you mean?”
“Justine knows that I met up with Harris over the summer. She’s always looking for distractions from her own problems and this could be it,” Annie says. “If she and Chloe find out I’m pregnant, they’ll guess it’s Harris’s baby and make a big deal out of it. I don’t want him to get in trouble.”
I don’t care if Harris gets in trouble. In fact, I want him to get in trouble. But if Annie knows her friends well enough to guess that they’d publicize all the drama about the Mainer family to the entire town, I’m with Annie.
So I say, “Then we won’t let them find out.”
Chapter 10
On Sunday morning I’m halfway downstairs before I realize I have a missed call on my cell phone. It’s only 10:30. Devon wouldn’t call this early, would he? I brace myself against the kitchen counter and punch in my code to listen to my voicemails.
“Hey Melanie, it’s Devon. Hope I didn’t wake you. Um, call me back on my cell. 555-3570. Later.”
My pulse races as fast as he talks and I listen to the message again to make sure I heard him right, as if there was a way to misinterpret a request to call him back. I take laps around the kitchen to burn off nervous energy.
“Hey, Devon, got your message. What’s up?” I practice. “Hey, Devon. Thanks for calling. What’s going on?” Ugh, that sounds lame, but there’s no way I can wait for Kasey to advise me on my tone and word choice. I need to call him now before my heart explodes into a bundle of nerves. I take a deep breath and am just about to hit his number when the house phone rings.
Could Devon have gotten my home phone number somehow? I guess it is listed in the white pages. I lift the receiver. “Hello?”
“Hi. May I please speak to Annie?” says a guy with a southern drawl. Not Devon’s deep voice. My stomach somersaults but in a different way from only moments ago.
“Um, she’s in bed?” I say, then kick myself for giving a strange guy that visual.
“Oh. Could you please tell her Harris called?” he asks quickly. “She has my number.”
Heat floods my body.
Red floods my vision.
How can he talk to me all cool, like we’re friends passing on phone messages, when he’s a twenty-year-old man having sex with my fifteen-year-old sister? God, what is wrong with him?
The saliva in my mouth boils and I want to spit and scream and swear and slam the phone down so hard that it ruptures his eardrum.
I hate him.
I want to call the cops and tell them he statutory raped Annie.
I want to tell him the cops are on their way to arrest his rapist ass.
But what would that do to Annie? What would that do to all of us when word got out?
So all I do is hang up.
I can’t call Devon back now. I’m shaking too hard now that Harris is real, a voice in my head that I can’t get out.
Should I tell Annie that he called? It might do her well to know the asshole is harassing her family and word about his identity could get out at any time. It might prompt her to take care of the baby.
To get an abortion.
Shit. Do I want that? It doesn’t matter. It isn’t my decision to make.
I write Harris called on a piece of junk mail next to the phone, my writing jagged and hard to read, and then run upstairs to slip it under her door. My teeth chatter as I race back down.
I must focus on Devon: Devon buying me ice cream. Devon calling me this morning. Devon not caring that I didn’t hug him back even though all I’ve done since then is relive the feel of his arm around my back. Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts.
After one more shuddery breath, I pick up my phone and press his number. My mouth dries out more and more with each ring. I think about how I should’ve brushed my teeth first until I realize there is no smell-o-phoning happening here.
“You’ve reached Devon. Leave a message.”
“Hey, it’s Melanie. I got your message…um…I should be around this morning. I don’t have to work ‘til tomorrow. So, yeah, call me.” I press END and pinch my eyes shut. What kind of dork message was that? I replay it over and over in my head (revising as I go) many more times than is healthy. I can practically hear Kasey laughing when I tell her what I said.
This, right here, is the extent of my experience with guys.
That’s what I get for wasting the last three years of my life obsessing over Sal Malone.
My body is twitching too much to eat breakfast. I don’t know what to do with myself besides pace, and that’s getting old. I aim my feet toward Dad’s office and figure I’ll check my email on his PC until my body crashes from overstimulation. Or Devon calls me back.
I wake up the communal family computer. Sharing it with three other people is a pain, but a car is my first financial priority, even over a laptop or smart phone. When I wake up the PC’s screen, it’s on Annie’s email homepage. She’s logged out, but the cursor blinks seductively in her PASSWORD field.
No. No I shouldn’t try to log in as her and check her email.
On the other hand, my morning is already hosed because of her, not to mention my blood pressure has got to be nearing cardiac arrest levels.
My fingers twitch. I glance over my shoulder. The door’s open an inch so I roll my chair back and nudge it all the way closed. Then I type Annie’s predictable password into the field, the same one she’s been using since we got our own logins in junior high: AnnieTuyenMainer.
And like that I’m in. On her home page the NEW MAIL icon is lit up. Annie and I couldn’t have much more of a messed up sisterly relationship than we already do so what have I got to lose if I click open?
Oh yeah, my moral code or something. Whatever, that got lost somewhere in Buffalo with Annie’s virginity.
Baby Growth Report: Day 36.
Ugh. It’s from one of those sites that updates the subscriber on how many new fingernails and eyelashes the baby has each day for nine months. The image attachment assures me I want no part of the details. I aim the
mouse for Log Out until the Sent Mail folder calls me. It couldn’t hurt to take a peek – just a quick look to see if she’s set up an appointment for an abortion, or if she’s had any communication with Justine. Or Harris.
I must’ve been meant to see it. Fate, that’s what I’ll call it. Not spying. Simply learning the secrets of my family that they don’t see fit to share even though they should.
Dear Harris,
I haven’t heard from you in a few weeks and wanted to say hi. Also there’s something I need to tell you…
I'm pregnant. I took the home test and went to the dr. Both tests are +.
I don’t know what to do. I can’t be a mom but I can’t have an abortion. Can I?
Don’t worry, no one knows about you.
Love,
Annie
The sent day is today, July 6th, at 3:49 AM.
Holy crap. She told him.
As I stare at message the screensaver slideshow flashes on, a montage of Dad’s photos. First a black sky filled with stars, next a close-up of Annie and I with our arms around each other at age seven or eight. I can tell because of our missing front teeth behind our huge grins. At one time we grew up with each other.
I log out of Annie’s account as the doorbell rings again. Who stops over without calling first? I scurry out of the office and rush to the front hallway.
No way.
Devon ducks his head and waves shyly through the window beside the door. I have to greet him, even with my morning breath and bed-head. Why didn’t I run a brush through both?
“Hey,” I say, trying to look casual rather than panicked. I also try to keep my breath directed away from his face.
He smiles, taking in my pajama ensemble. My braless pajama ensemble. I pull my arms across my chest, leaving my mouth fully exposed. At least he has the decency to blush right along with me.
“Uh, hey. I got your message but was on the road and thought it might be OK to stop by?” He shuffles on the front stoop.
“So, you’re a morning person?” I ask.
He smiles. “Hazard of working in a car shop. But it also means I’m done for the day and was wondering if you wanted to maybe go to the movies?”
