by Anne Pfeffer
“Who means nothing to me. Emily, she could die. The baby could die. How can I walk away from that?” My hands clench and unclench themselves on the steering wheel.
“How are you going to help her? You’re not a doctor. You’re not her husband. You’re practically a stranger to her.” Emily shakes her head in frustration. “She should be asking her friends and family to help her—or a medical person. Not you.”
Chrissie’s other options don’t matter to me. I’m the bad karma guy. I’m the one with the debt to repay.
“What about us?” Emily asks again.
“It’s just for a few months. And then we have England.” I put my hand on her shoulder and then touch her hair, but she pulls away.
“You think this is going to end with the pregnancy? What’s she going to want from you next?”
I don’t know. I’m just trying to get the baby born. But I can see why Emily’s mad at me. I’m a bad friend. I failed Michael, and now, in trying to make it up to him, I’m failing Emily.
I’m a loser, a person who means well and tries hard, but who in the end messes up everything he touches. I’m bad news. No matter what I do, I hurt people.
I sit there, paralyzed, unable to speak.
“Ryan, say something!”
My whole life I’ve never been anything much. A guy with average talent who doesn’t work very hard. A person who slides by.
Emily’s voice continues, but only random phrases pierce through the fog around me. Nat and Yancy need to know. This girl’s manipulating you. Too much responsibility. You’re only sixteen.
Only one thing is clear to me. No one is ever again going to die because of me. This baby—and Chrissie—are going to live. Or if they don’t, it won’t be because of anything I did or didn’t do.
“I’m sorry,” I finally tell Emily. “I’m sorry for everything.”
Chapter 40
I’m driving with Emily after school, thinking how much it sucks that I have to take her home. When we pass the turn-off to go to my house, I can almost feel my steering wheel try to veer in that direction, as if my car wants to go to the guest house as badly as I do.
“So how was your day?” I ask.
“Fine.” She’s looking out the window.
“Did you see my note?” Since we have each other’s combinations, I’ve started leaving notes and cards in her locker, trying to cheer her up. Today I taped a hand printed piece of paper saying “I heart you” to the inside of the door.
A dimple shows in her cheek for a second then disappears. “Yes. It was sweet.”
Silence. A minute goes by.
“Oh, come on, Emily, talk to me!” I can’t stand feeling awkward and uncomfortable with her, when it used to be so easy.
She pushes out a sigh. “Okay. I was looking online. Didn’t you say Chrissie’s starting her third trimester? Of the pregnancy.”
“Yeah.”
“Well then she’s going to start seeing the doctor twice a month, instead of once.”
“Oh.” More bad news. Just what I need.
She looks at me sideways. “I’ll have to get Derek to cover those days, too.”
“Okay.” Does despair have a taste? There’s a bitter flavor in my mouth that’s new to me. Maybe it’s depression.
We reach her house, and I grab her hand before she can get out of the car. “Emily, come with me to Chrissie’s! You can bring your books, and we’ll study together.”
She pulls her hand back. “I don’t feel comfortable doing that! I don’t have the time. And I’ve got all these extra Songbirds rehearsals for the Nationals.”
“Maybe just once or twice? You could get to know Chrissie.”
“No! There’s no point, Ryan, and I feel really weird about it.”
“But Emily—”
“I need to go now.” She gets out of the car and leaves me there alone.
• • •
I bring my books and laptop to Chrissie’s every day.
“I have to study while I’m here,” I tell her, and she agrees.
So I do study, in between getting Chrissie snacks and glasses of water, doing her laundry, running to the post office, and keeping her entertained. The last thing is, for her anyway, the most important.
“I’m goin’ nuts, Ryan! If this abruption doesn’t kill me, the bed rest will!” She shifts around in her bed, stretching her arms and legs, and staring out the window to the sunny day outside.
“You can do it.” I try to sound soothing, but I know I’d be pathological if I were stuck in here every day, unable to move.
I try to find ways to make Chrissie less miserable. I bring her library books, as well as DVDs from my dad’s huge library containing almost every movie ever made. I download game software onto her laptop and help her find a cheap long-distance telephone package so she can call home to South Carolina as often as she wants. I bring her take-out food and play cards with her. I bring her jokes.
Just stay in bed and don’t die.
Then I arrive to find her climbing up on a step stool to catch a spider.
“You’ve got to stay in bed!”
“But the spider…!”
“I’ll get it for you.”
She doesn’t want to hurt it, so I have to capture it and put it outside. When I come back in, she says, “Ryan, do me a favor. Take a picture of me so I can send it to my momma and show her my bump.” She’s wearing her bed rest uniform—my extra-large Pacific Prep t-shirt, which used to be huge on her, but now grips her belly like sausage skin.
I use my cell phone to photograph Chrissie, standing sideways in my t-shirt, then take another shot of her from the front, and hand her the phone. She sends them off by email.
“There we go,” she says. “To Darnell Fellars in South Carolina!” Then, as the phone vibrates in her hand, “I’ll answer it for you!” She starts to punch the “Talk” button.
I dive at her and grab the phone away. Is she crazy? How does she expect me to keep her secret if she starts answering my phone? Scowling at her, I take the call.
“Ryanito?”
“Oh, hi, Ro.” I hate lying to my family, but I have to if I want to keep the news of the baby from Nat and Yancy. “It’s gonna be another late night. This project’s a bear.”
“Mmm.” She clearly doesn’t believe me.
“I wanna talk to him!” It’s Maddy in the background. A few seconds later, she’s on the line. “You’re copying Mom and Dad now,” she says. “When are you gonna be home for dinner?”
“One of these days soon,” I promise and sign off.
Chrissie’s still standing next to me. Why won’t she just do what the doctor says?
“Get back into bed! Chrissie, you’re totally freaking me out.”
“I don’t know why y’all are making such a fuss,” she says, settling herself against her pillows, “I’m gonna start gettin’ up. I don’t care what those doctors say.”
A slow burn starts in my chest. I’m losing my girlfriend over this. And not just any girlfriend – it’s The Only Girl I Will Ever Love. I haven’t had sex for three weeks, which bothers me ten times more than all those years of virginity ever did. It’s amazing how fast I got used to having regular sex. For a while there, I was ranking it right up there with oxygen.
Not only that, but I’m busting my tail to earn the A’s I need to qualify for the Senior Honors Project. I stay up until one and two in the morning studying, and it’s harder and harder to concentrate. I missed a math assignment yesterday and will have to do double work tonight to make it up.
And now Chrissie’s being a pain in the ass. The slow burn speeds up.
“Hey,” I demand. “How come your mom or one of your sisters can’t jet out here and help a little?”
Chrissie’s eyes get big and round. “For your information,” she says, “Poor people don’t jet around much. My sisters have more children and more problems than they know what to do with. My momma has a good job, which she needs, because she’s h
elping the other girls right now. I’ve always been the one who didn’t need help.”
“But now you do.”
“I know, and she will help me. But not right now. She knows I can manage for a while without her. I always do.”
“Yeah, you’re managing because I’m giving up my life to help you!” I’m standing in the middle of her one and only room, towering over her as she sits on her low bed.
She launches a volley up in my direction. “Well, don’t do it if you don’t want to!”
“You asked for my help!”
“Just drivin’ me to the doctor. I didn’t ask you to come here every day.”
“But you needed the help.”
“True. But I only want help from people who wanna give it. If y’all are gonna start fussin’ with me, forget it. I don’t need that negativity in my life!”
We glare at each other.
“So, go!” she says. “Go to your girlfriend!”
I can’t. I’m tied to her by Michael’s death and by this little unborn kid.
“I mean it! Go on!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re way over-reacting.” I sit down on the edge of the bed. “I brought you a new mix,” I say, handing her a CD. “Country western.”
I stay at Chrissie’s that night until eight o’clock and study until two in the morning. Emily calls me, but we only talk for a minute. I’ve got two missed assignments to make up and a test to study for, when all I want to do is fall into a coma and sleep for twenty-four hours straight.
Chapter 41
Emily and I still have lunch, but not every day. “I need to see my girlfriends, too, sometimes,” she says. We are mainly silent during our rides home in the afternoon.
On Friday I leave a card in her locker that says “I love you this much” over a picture of the Grand Canyon.
A lot of good it does me. She cancels our date Saturday night, because she has a headache.
Then, going home Monday in my car, she lobs a grenade at me. “My carpool will let me rejoin,” she tells me. “They had replaced me, but the VanderBergs just bought a seven-seater, so there’s room for one more.”
“You don’t want to ride with me anymore?” My whole face is numb, which is good, because otherwise I’d cry and make an ass out of myself.
She smooths her hands down her skirt, as if she’s smoothing out wrinkles, although I don’t see any. “It’s just that they have an opening now, and who knows what else Chrissie’s going to ask for? Maybe next week you’ll tell me you can’t take me home at all anymore, and then I really be stuck.”
“I’ll keep taking you home,” I say, but then I think, what if Emily’s right? What if things get even worse?
“Also,” she says, “This makes no sense. You’re driving an hour out of your way every day to take me home.”
“I want to spend that time with you! I love you!” Then, I wait, hoping. A long moment passes until….
“I love you, too,” she says.
In a rush of emotion, I jerk my steering wheel and pull over to the curb, almost clipping a pickup truck in the lane next to me. The truck fishtails as the driver punches his brake to the floor, trying to avoid me.
“Sorry!” I call out.
The truck, which has slid by my parked car, starts to back up. Fast.
Crap.
The driver pulls parallel to me, screaming in a voice straight from a horror movie. “You cut me off, freak!”
“I’m really sorry, man!” I know better than to mess with a guy in full-blown road rage. If I antagonize him, he could pull out a machete and slice me in half.
He’s still screaming, spit flying from his mouth, while his face turns the color of a ripe tomato. He claws for his door handle.
Emily and I sit there, not moving so much as an eyelash. With cars on three sides of us, we can’t drive away. That’s one thing about convertibles. When you’ve got the top down, it’s hard to escape a guy like this.
Fortunately, rage seems to have reduced his fine motor abilities. He still hasn’t gotten his car door open.
Seeing the fear on Emily’s face, I think fast.
“You got any bags?” I say. “My girlfriend’s about to throw up!”
His rant comes to a stop as his eyebrows knot together in confusion. “Bags?”
“Yeah. Or like maybe a bucket?”
He peers over at Emily, who claps a hand over her mouth. That decides him.
“Learn how to drive, dude!” He floors it, peeling out of there with a squeal of tires.
Emily and I sit there for a long moment, treasuring the fact that we’re still alive. Finally I turn to her. “What a prick.”
She starts to laugh, and so do I. “I can’t believe you asked him for a bucket!” She wipes her eyes.
“It was all I could think of.” I put my hand on her knee and lean toward her, and for a couple of seconds we’re happy again, but then both of us remember, and now neither of us is laughing.
Desperation sets in. “Emily, don’t go back to the car pool. Please?”
Her eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry, Ryan. I have to.”
“Why?”
She just shakes her head again. “I’m really sorry.”
After a minute, I start the car and drive her home. I feel as if that Road Rage Guy had in fact taken out a machete and run it right straight through my heart.
• • •
Today Chrissie’s reading a book called The Complete Book of Pregnancy From A to Z.
“Jay and Spencer got it for me,” she announces. “They’re such worry warts.”
“Can I see it?” I take the book and open it. I talk and move on autopilot, as I’ve been doing ever since Emily stopped letting me take her home. I look and act normal. No one knows that I’m really the walking dead. A zombie, smothered under an avalanche of grief.
“Do you think Mitzi will wait for me?” Chrissie asks. “I’ll be able to audition soon, if she doesn’t cast the role first.”
“I’ll talk to her,” I say, paging through the book. It is almost five hundred pages long. In careful, alphabetical detail, it explains The Things You May be Worried About in Pregnancy.
“Look at all these things you’re supposed to be worried about!” I point to the Table of Contents, which runs for several pages.
Chrissie peers at it. “It doesn’t say I’m supposed to be worried. It says I may be worried.” She tosses her hair. “Or, I may not!”
“Look at all this stuff.” I point to the book. “Morning sickness. Swollen ankles. The pain of childbirth.”
“You’re a pain,” she says, throwing a box of tissues at me.
I catch it. Too depressed to do anything else, I stand up and walk over to the bedside table, putting the box back in its place. I sit down again. “Just take care of yourself, okay?”
She gets a soft look in her eyes. “You’re a sweet guy, you know that?”
I give her a mock sneer and put the book up in front of my face.
She reaches over and pulls it down. “Listen. Nothin’ bad’s gonna happen to this baby. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because this baby was put on earth for a reason, Ryan.”
When I don’t respond she says, “Think about it. I’d finally gotten a good job in Los Angeles. It was my first week workin’ at the tennis club.” She waves a hair clip at me, nodding in a knowing way.
“So it’s nine o’clock, and just as I’m closin’ up the Pro Shop, this beautiful boy walks in. And he persuades me to stay open so he can buy some racket strings.”
I’ll bet he did. I can see Michael flashing the old grin at Chrissie and making her feel like she was the hottest woman on the planet, because at that exact moment in time, he really thought that way himself.
“So then, he says, ‘You gonna lock the place up?” And I do, except now he’s convinced me to stay inside the shop, and then, well, we have a moment,” she says, her eyes widening.
“And I knew, rig
ht then, that there was something special about it. And after that, I knew I was pregnant.” She gives me a wide, open smile. “And I was happy. I knew this baby was given to me for a reason.”
Her smile fades. “And then he died. But he had left a baby behind. It was all meant to be.”
“What do you mean, meant to be?”
“I mean,” Chrissie says, after a pause, “that Michael was destined to die young, and I was destined to have his baby. And this baby is destined to do something important in the world. Like maybe …. run a bank.” Chrissie nods at me as if to say “See?” and sips her water.
I feel a weight lift itself off my shoulders, floating in the air above me, as I consider her words. “You think Michael was destined to die young?”
“Absolutely.”
It feels incredible, to let myself off the hook, to believe that Michael was supposed to die now, and that what happened had nothing to do with me and was just part of some larger plan. For a minute, I feel great again. But it’s too easy. It’s too convenient a way for me to sluff off the responsibility for what I’ve done. As I put my books into a pile and start to gather up my papers, I feel the weight of guilt and blame slowly settle back onto my shoulders.
Chapter 42
Jonathan and Calvin are standing on the golf course in day-glow golf shirts, plaid pants, and white shoes. To say they are giving me suspicious looks would be an understatement. Calvin keeps glancing around. He knows people at this golf club.
Sweat trickles down my back as my stars look to me, waiting for direction.
It has turned out that my “Physics Nerds Go Golfing” script sucks a big one. Lines that I thought were killingly funny when I wrote them now lie dead on the page. Not only that, my two actors cannot act.
A cold wave of terror runs over me. What made me think I could do this?
I force myself to sound cool and confident. “Let’s improvise!”
“We have to make up our own lines, too? This is stupid!” Calvin frowns and looks over his shoulder for twentieth time, afraid of being spotted in orange and brown polyester.
