Pride and Prep School

by Stephanie Wardrop

  “Cass! What’s going on?” I shut the door and sit down next to her.

  She says, “I’ve been throwing up a lot.”

  “Yeah?”

  I remember that she had stayed home from school once last week, before the photo exchange even started, but if she had really been vomiting constantly, she would have used it as an excuse to miss a lot more of school. Especially since it had to have been hell for her to walk those halls this week.

  “And I didn’t get my period last month.”

  It hits me squarely in the stomach.

  Still, I go for denial.

  I tell her, “You’re fifteen, you’re probably not regular yet anyway …” The weird thing is I am more upset than she is, but I decide that she’s just numb with shock and fear and shame.

  I put my hand on her shoulder and she leans on me a little. I have no idea what to do, except to go find Tori, but she’s somewhere with Trey, as usual.

  Cassie begins blubbering, “And he doesn’t even talk to me, not in school, not out of school, not when I call him!”

  “Who?”

  “Jeremy!”

  She’s now wailing like a dog chained in a backyard for too long and I shush her before Dad or Mom come by.

  “Jeremy,” I repeat and the name feels like acid in my mouth.

  “Why won’t he talk to me?” Cassie’s light blue eyes are round and I realize with horror that this is not because she might be carrying the embryo of another human being in her uterus. It’s because Jeremy has blown her off. This is her paramount concern.

  “Jeremy Wrentham isn’t taking your calls because Jeremy Wrentham is a dirtbag. Does he know about this?” I say, gesturing vaguely to the toilet. The seat is still up.

  “How can I tell him if he won’t talk to me? How can I make him talk to me?” She’s actually pleading with me now, as if I could make Jeremy care, as if Jeremy’s indifference were her biggest problem.

  “Forget Jeremy for now.” I sigh when she quiets down. I am no good at raw emotion. Her nose is running on my shoulder but at least she’s not screeching like an ambulance siren any more. “You think you’re pregnant? Did you take one of those tests?”

  She shakes her head.

  “No. I was waiting for Jeremy.”

  To share the magic moment with him? Even for Cassie this is dense, but I force myself to remain calm and say, “Well, you’ve got to do that. Maybe this is a false alarm.”

  “Will you go with me?”

  I sigh and rest my head on hers for a moment. I am sad and stunned and angry with her for getting herself into this mess, but I feel like I have to take charge. Someone has to. Otherwise Cassie will keep hitting Jeremy’s number on redial while the phantom fetus grows to human baby size. It will be in college before Cassie makes a rational decision.

  “So let’s go to CVS,” I declare. “Now.”

  “Not the one in town.”

  “No,” I agree. “Should we tell someone else?” I ask her as she wipes her face with a green gray washcloth.

  “Not Mom or Dad! No, no one … please!”

  “Of course.”

  I call Shondra back and tell her I can’t make it to the Blue Rooster and that I’ll explain why later. Then I tell Mom I need to borrow her car to take Cassie to the main library in Netherfield. She’s so touched by this unusual sisterly partnership that she’s not surprised by the destination, even though I don’t think Cassie’s set foot in a library since Mom took her and Leigh to Toddler Story Time.

  In East Longbourne I practically have to drag Cassie into the drugstore. She lags far behind me as we wind our way to the horribly euphemistically named “Family Planning” section and we stare at all the different boxes of creams and gels and tests for ovulation and pregnancy and urinary tract infections.

  “Which one?” I ask her and she just shakes her head.

  “I can’t do this,” she says stubbornly.

  “How much money do you have?” I ask her and she digs in her bag with shaking hands. Maybe the reality of seeing all the pregnancy test kits has made her realize that she has bigger problems than getting a return call from Jeremy.

  “Maybe we should get two, just to be sure,” I muse as I scan the shelves. “This one’s a double pack. And this one comes with a little heart-shaped card that you can keep the stick in, to remember—well, that’s not really appropriate, is it?” I cut myself off and just grab a box and start for the cash registers in the front of the store. I make it as far as a display of rubber balls and pasta makers for the microwave.

  “Hi, Georgia, Cassie.”

  I turn around and there’s Michael, dressed in gray sweatpants and a faded hoodie with HARVARD emblazoned across his chest. He’s holding a bottle of purple Vitaminwater. Cassie flees down the aisle and Michael looks after her, puzzled.

  “Hi,” I croak at the exact moment his eyes hit the pregnancy test box.

  I see his face redden. He mumbles something along the lines of, “Oh. See ya,” and then he’s gone as quickly as he appeared.

  I want to escape, too, to bore right through the scuffed drugstore floor into another world. But that’s not an option. So when I am sure that Michael has paid for his drink and gone, I make myself go up to the cash register, where I find my cowardly sister pretending to examine the selection of sunglasses on sale as if the fate of the world depends on her finding the perfect pair of Panama Jack shades.

  “What was Michael doing in East Longbourne?” she asks when we’re back in the car.

  “I don’t know. We didn’t chat, really, not after he saw the First Response test in my hand.”

  She slumps into the passenger seat and says nothing until we’re parked in front of our house, I tell her, “It says you should take the test first thing tomorrow, with the ‘morning’s first urine.’

  She wrinkles her nose at the mention of urine and asks, “Why first thing? Why wait?”

  “The hormone that indicates you’re pregnant is more concentrated in the morning since you haven’t peed it out. But I guess you could try now.”

  “No,” she says quickly. “I’ll wait.”

  “Okay.” I hand her her purchase, which she hastily hides in her knockoff Chanel hobo bag. We wait for a moment in front of the house and I remember sitting here listening to Bob Marley with Michael. What did he think when he saw me standing there stupid and speechless in a suburban CVS with a pregnancy test kit in my hand? I realize that the answer matters to me. A lot. But I don’t have the luxury of thinking about that now.

  I ask Cassie, “Do you want to tell anyone else?”

  “Not until I know for sure.”

  “Are you going to tell Jeremy?”

  “He’ll hate me!”

  I’ve run out of patience with this, but I make myself hold on for a few more minutes and the scowl this effort produces is so deep that it actually hurts my face.

  “I don’t think he’ll do you much good whether he knows or not,” I tell her.

  “It’s not like he’s even talking to me, remember?” she snaps.

  I reach my limits and open the car and go into the house. She follows and we try to spend the rest of the day as if everything were normal. Tori goes out with Trey that night and Mom and Dad go to a lecture at Meryton College, where he teaches, so it’s Leigh and Cassie and I watching TV together for a while until I go upstairs and check my email and Facebook. Soon an IM from Michael pops up.

  Are you okay? it says.

  I type back, “Yes.”

  Surprised to see you in East Longbourne.

  Surprised to see YOU. Slumming?

  He ignores my sarcasm.

  I was on my way back from the Y in Netherfield. I teach little kids to swim there.

  So now I feel like a Grade-A asswaffle.

  “That’s really cool,” I type.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” he types back, “You seemed upset,” and then signs off just as Cassie comes in, leaving me no chance to worry what Michael thinks ab
out me and the pregnancy test kit he’d seen in my hand.

  “Will you watch the test with me?” she asks.

  Despite everything, I almost smile at this.

  “I don’t think we have to watch it. A pink line will pop up on it—or not. Hopefully not.” I force a supportive smile at her then. I cannot even imagine what she’s feeling, and not just because there is no way I could be in her position. That would involve the kind of miracle that God, if he exists, would not reserve for the likes of me. I would make a very poor Madonna. “But I’ll be there with you and time it.”

  “Thanks,” she sniffles.

  “No problem.”

  She hangs out in my room for a while, looking at some of my books but not reading any of them. I think she just can’t stand holding it in anymore, acting normal around Leigh and everyone else, pretending that everything is fine. Or maybe she’s just mad that she had to call in sick for the away game tonight. Either way, she seems to need to be there but not to talk, so I let her.

  ***

  She’s at the edge of my bed at 6:30 the next morning, bouncing from one foot to the other because she has to pee so badly. She does so on the Pee Stick of Fate and we stand there with it perched on the edge of the sink while I hold a wristwatch whose minute hands don’t seem to move.

  She says, “I have to pee, like, all the time now.”

  I figure that’s probably not a good sign given the outcome she’s hoping for so I just say, “Yeah?”

  Finally, she asks, “It’s gotta be time, right?”

  I nod.

  “You look,” she says. Her face is very white and I’m not sure she can remember to breathe.

  I look and see only one fuchsia line and practically yell, “It’s negative! There is a God.”

  She sinks to the floor in a crouch, asking, “Could it be wrong?” She’s looking up at me and I have never seen her eyes so big and plaintive.

  “Cassie?” I ask, and then it feels like a freight train has barreled into me. “Wait—are you disappointed?”

  She nods guiltily.

  “You realize how insane that is, don’t you? Did you think that Jeremy was going to start returning your calls once he found out you were going to be the mother of his child? That was never going to happen.”

  After what seems like a full minute she lets out her breath.

  “I know,” she says in the quietest voice I have ever heard her use. “I know that.”

  I sigh so mightily my bangs fly up over my head.

  “Thanks,” she says, and then she shuffles away, just as Leigh knocks on the door and demands to use the toilet. I let her in and crawl back into bed, but I know I’m not getting back to sleep.

  I tell Shondra about it later when I call to apologize for missing her and her friend yesterday. And she is really understanding about Cassie and what seems to be the biggest and saddest delusion I have ever heard of.

  “I guess love makes you desperate sometimes,” she says. “I just hope no one else finds out. All she needs is for the rumors to kick up a notch. Before Winter Break, Willow and her crew will convince everyone that she’s having twins.”

  “Alien twins. Illegitimate space babies,” I chuckle, but I’m thinking that while the rest of the world will never know about Cassie’s misadventure, Michael Endicott knows that I just bought a pregnancy test from a local CVS.

  Still, no matter what I have ever thought about Michael—and most of it was bad at first, I admit—I think I know that he stands outside the gossip loop by choice and would never enter it, even with this primo bit of scuttlebutt. That sort of thing seems so far beneath him as to be subterranean.

  Still, he has a surprise of a different sort for me the next day after school.

  Even though Michael Endicott has shown up at my house twice now, it’s still a bit of a shock when I open the door the next day to find him on our front porch, trying to rehang the metal mailbox that the mailman keeps knocking off. He smiles when he sees me.

  “Hey, Georgia! May I talk to you?”

  “Um, sure,” I say and usher him in with the sweep of my hand. We stand in the entryway for a second of uncertainty, engulfed, practically, in the really loud floral wallpaper the previous owners had put up in the entry. It feels like we’re standing in some hideous, garish jungle in which all the plants grow in curlicues. I’m sure his house has nothing like this on the walls. “What’s up?” I ask as casually as I can, hoping he’s not carrying any pamphlets from one of those scam “pregnancy support” clinics. He saved me from disaster on New Year’s Eve; maybe now he’d come to save me and the fetus he imagined was swimming around inside me.

  “Well, I’m not quite sure how to say this …” he says with uncharacteristic hesitation. He actually looks at me as if for help, and his eyes strike me as bigger than I had thought before, and dark, like melted chocolate chips. They are very nice eyes, actually, when he’s not scrunching them up with a scowl or a frown.

  “Do you want a drink or something?” I offer; he nods gratefully and follows me into the kitchen, the site of some of our oddest conversations. “Something warm?” I ask and he nods again so I put on the teakettle. I sit down at the little table that has been cleared for once of photos of coveted décor my mom has ripped out of magazines. Michael sits and runs a finger along the bumpy surface of a blue and white woven placemat. He seems so characteristically rattled that I am getting worried.

  “Hey, that was weird running into you in CVS Saturday, right?” I offer and force a smile that I hope looks worldly and assured, as if I often encounter men in the feminine hygiene aisle and handle them with aplomb each and every time.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Look,” I start as I jump up to grab the wailing teakettle and pour the hot water into two mugs. I hold up a box of British Breakfast tea and one of hot chocolate mix. Michael points to the tea and I plunk a bag into each mug and set them on the table. As I return from the fridge, I say, “Don’t worry, this is actual milk from cows, not almonds or soybeans or anything freaky. Don’t get your knickers in a bunch.” He smiles and pours some milk. “The sugar’s right there. So, um, the CVS …”

  He stirs his tea with the spoon I had offered and nods.

  “Yeah. I saw what you were buying.” He looks up at me from under the curls made even more frenzied than usual by static from his knit hat. “And I messaged you yesterday because I could tell you were embarrassed. So I wanted to tell you, since I didn’t yesterday, that I won’t tell anybody what I saw. What you were buying.”

  “I know that.” Still, I can feel relief seep through my body the way the tea is suffusing the hot water in my chipped striped coffee mug. “I wasn’t buying it for me, you know.”

  This actually produces a laugh. I mean it. Michael is practically shaking with the hilarity that I myself would have any need of a pregnancy test. “Of course not!” he chuckles, stirring his tea, and I can feel anger starting to prickle at my nerve endings.

  “And the very idea is comedy gold because—” I prompt.

  He looks at me uncomprehendingly for a second, as if I have suddenly broken into Swahili, and says, “Because it was so obviously not a purchase for you!”

  “Because…” I can feel the resentment coloring me inside, a dark bitter brown like my tea. I can’t help it. I’m insulted that he thinks it is so preposterous that I would find myself in need of such a purchase.

  “Because you’re not that stupid,” he blurts out, then ducks his head for a second because he can sense that that was the wrong thing to say and I am going to blow like Vesuvius.

  “Stupid?” I practically shout. “Only stupid people get pregnant?”

  “Nooooo,” he says slowly, looking me in the eye. “Plenty of intelligent women get pregnant, too, but they plan it. They don’t find themselves … ‘knocked up’ or whatever.”

  I almost spit out my tea with a guffaw at how ridiculous the phrase “knocked up” sounds coming out of his mo
uth.

  “So it is inconceivable that the test kit is mine because I am too intelligent to get ‘knocked up’? Or because it is inconceivable that I would get knocked up, that someone would, in fact, knock me up? Because who would find me attractive enough to sleep with?” I sound shrill, and for some stupid reason I can feel that warning tingling in my nose and the stinging of tears behind my eyelids. Maybe it’s because I am actually angry that Michael did not misconstrue the situation, which makes no sense, really, even to me.

  He’s obviously surprised, too, because he looks at me in amazement, then grins crookedly. “Georgia, if you recall, on New Year’s Eve, I witnessed you come perilously close to sleeping with someone.”

  “‘Perilously close’?” I repeat, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from crying and hating myself for feeling like I’m going to. But I feel so humiliated, so insulted that he could think that no sober male could ever want me. “Thank God you saved me from disaster!”

  “Getting involved with Jeremy would have been a disaster. Trust me on this,” he says, and he leans forward across the table slightly. “But I also know that, even as drunk as you were, you aren’t stupid enough to have gotten in serious trouble.”

  “There’s that word again. ‘Stupid’ enough?”

  “Okay.” He pauses and frowns, trying to get his words right. “I am assuming that you, like any student in any high school in any enlightened state in the union, has managed to pick up enough information in Sex Ed to know that you need to use protection to prevent pregnancy and disease. Yes?”

  “Yes. So you know it’s Cassie who needed the test kit, Cassie who is too stupid to have picked up anything in Sex Ed class. That’s what you’re saying? Well, now I’m relieved. You’re insulting my sister, not me. Big, big relief here!”

  “No. I wasn’t thinking about your sister at all, though it wasn’t hard to figure out that she’s the one who needed to take the test.” He smirks and removes the teabag from his cup, wrapping the string around the bag in the cradle of the spoon to squeeze out all of the liquid.

  I flinch. “How do you know Cassie had sex with Jeremy Wrentham?” He looks at me with eyebrows raised and I feel my cheeks get hot. “Oh. Yeah. I forget everybody knows.”