Outcast (17 page)

He moved closer to me and stared into my eyes. Then he slid his fingers to my face. Next thing I knew,
Chad
’s lips grazed mine. Gently at first, then alive with the pulse of passion. In the middle of the sidewalk, with all the passing traffic, he kissed me for a long time. I glimpsed around to make sure I was still a part of reality, not in a dream. Then I closed my eyes, let his lips fold over mine. I sank into the moment. Like releasing a balloon into the air, I let myself float in the feel of his mouth, the taste of his breath. The kiss lifted me into the clouds.

He pulled back and looked at me. “Does that answer your question?”

But I didn’t even know what the question was anymore.

I was unable to quell my euphoria. It lasted the rest of the day. Even while I washed dishes, even when my mother told me she wanted me to visit Celine or she’d cut my hair herself, I felt elated. I didn’t even get angry when Becca lagged behind in her clean-up duties. By the look on her face and her moping behavior, I knew her day was the antithesis of mine.

I had a hard time concentrating on my homework. As I tried to calculate the perimeter of a cube, all I thought about were
Chad
’s lips against mine. When I looked at the words written in the first chapter of
The Catcher in the Rye
, I only saw
he kissed me, he kissed me
. It took me twice as long to complete my homework as it should have. I toyed with the idea of calling Grace, but I wasn’t ready to confess everything to her yet.

I put on pajamas and went to the bathroom to wash my face, but Becca had already beaten me there. I decided to use my parents’ bathroom instead. They would be busy for hours looking at television.

I spent extra time in front of the vanity. I knew my mother had a jar of mud mask in the medicine cabinet. I plastered my face with it and sat on the toilet seat. It needed to stay on for ten minutes before I washed it off. I considered returning to my room, but I was afraid I might get caught.

I found clippers and cut my fingernails; I changed the empty roll of toilet paper. After I set the cardboard roll in the wastebasket, I lifted it back out. Something inside caught my eye. A box was disassembled, folded, and deliberately placed at the bottom of the garbage can. It wasn’t the box itself that caught my eye, but the word
pregnancy
  printed on it.

Like a garbage picker, I exhumed the box from the trash. An EPT Pregnancy Test stared back at me. My surprise cracked the mask that had dried on my face. Pregnancy test? In my mother’s garbage? I scrubbed off the mask and looked at the box again.
My mother took a pregnancy test?
 

It occurred to me that if the box was in the garbage, the test itself might be, too. I rummaged through makeup-blemished tissue, soiled Q-Tips, and used dental floss. An unidentified object was coiled in toilet paper like a mummy. I unwrapped it. Bingo. The pregnancy test itself. I looked at it. All I saw was a line and an X. What did that mean? Did a line and an X mean pregnant or not pregnant? The only thing that ran through my head was
I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies, Miss Scarlet
. Then I realized I had the box under my arm. The back of it showed two pictures. My mother was going to have a baby. How …
disgusting
! 

As I lay in bed, I tossed and turned considering the idea of a newborn in the house. So many times I wanted to run to Becca’s room and tell her, but she was in such a grouchy mood. It would have to wait. I wondered if my dad already knew and when my mother planned to share the news with us. I wanted to ask her about it, but I couldn’t confess to my mother that I’d been snooping in her bathroom. I thought about calling Aunt P. She would love to hear a tidbit like this one. But I remembered that she and I weren’t necessarily buddies at the moment. Oh my God. A baby.

Chad
cornered me at my locker after homeroom. My joy in seeing him brimmed over like boiling water in a saucepan.

“You busy this Saturday?” he asked.

“No, but…”

He waited. Embarrassed, I finished my sentence. “My mom.”

He waited some more.

“She doesn’t exactly let me date.”

Skepticism crossed his face; I could tell he thought I was lying. “What about the guy at the Spring Fling? He looked old enough to be your uncle. Wasn’t that a date?” I sensed a hint of jealousy in his voice.

“He was a friend of Grace’s brother. My mom only let me go because I was with a group.”

“Then let’s double with Grace and her boyfriend.”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you blowing me off again?” he jibed.

“No! It’s just that…well, Grace doesn’t know yet.”

“Then tell her.” He seemed defensive.

I wasn’t ready to tell Grace, but I
was
ready to go out with
Chad
. “You know what? Why don’t we meet somewhere? I can create a cover story, and my mother will never know.”

A smile crawled back onto his face. “All right. How about six o’clock, the AMC theater at the Pavilions?”

I nodded, smiled. I was unsure how I would get there, or what excuse I would give, but I’d go. No doubt about it.

Chad
pecked me on the cheek, defying the school’s strict policy about PDAs. I watched him saunter away. His waves of burnished hair, the fit of his pants, and the joy of knowing he was mine instead of Trina’s made me smile—inside and out.

I was so engrossed in my reverie that I didn’t notice Grace sneak up on me.

“I just saw
Chad
kiss you.” The blood appeared to leak out of her face. “What’s going on?” Tears washed over her eyes.

“I meant to tell you.”

She said nothing.

“I didn’t think you’d care anymore since you have Henry.”

“I don’t. Henry and I are really happy.” Her tone of voice betrayed her. She bolted, probably toward the girls’ bathroom again. This time I refused to go after her. I was finally happy, and I wanted her to be happy for me.

Cassie and I met in the cafeteria. For most of the semester we moved off campus for lunch. Because we had an important Chemistry project to work on, we decided to
get it out of the way
—in her words—while we ate lunch.

Cassie never ate any of the crap they served at school. She brought her own food. While I poked at a pile of thin spaghetti coated with unseasoned tomato paste, she indulged in a pastrami sandwich and tortellini pasta. I pushed my tray aside, and we went to work.

Mr. Wagner assigned each pairing of lab partners a household item to study as part of a project. We had to break it down into its components and explain the effects of the basic chemicals that made up the product. Ours was hair remover, the least exciting of all the options available to us. Comet cleanser sounded more appealing.

“I’m going to get rid of this lunch. I’ll be right back.”

I carried my tray down the center aisle to the trash can. Trina and Liana headed in my direction, their eyes glued to me. Fear surged, but I refused to let them get the best of me. I kept walking. But they didn’t let me pass. Trina pretended to trip, pushed her hand under my tray, and spaghetti noodles and tomato paste doused my white polo shirt and khakis.

“Oh my gosh, I am so clumsy,” Trina overacted. She and Liana buckled with laughter.

Everyone in the area stopped and focused on me, the center of attention. 

“We don’t mean to laugh.” They continued to anyway. “We know it’s not funny.” Another burst of cackling erupted from them.

“You better get to the bathroom before that stain sets,” Liana added, and Trina broke into another laughing fit.

The arteries in my head pounded with anger. I felt my face flush with hatred.

I lifted the tangled web of spaghetti noodles and placed them back on the plate and, as if nothing happened, continued toward the trash can.
Survival of the fittest
.

“You’re not going to let them get away with that, are you?” Cassie quizzed me as she lit her cigarette at the edge of the school parking lot. She was avoiding Father Timothy.

I touched my stained shirt. Cassie extended a lit Camel to me, and I shook my head. “Come on. It’ll calm your nerves.”

I studied her for a minute, wondering if a cigarette really would work that kind of miracle for me. Impatient, she forced it on me, lighting another one for herself. Like a good massage, the puffs of smoke seemed to instantly relax her.

I held the cigarette for awhile, then put it in my mouth and sucked in. A cough sputtered from me like the sound of a flooded car engine.

“You’ll get used to it,” she said.

Get used to it? This would be my one and only cigarette. There wouldn’t be anymore after this. It tasted as bitter as aspirin.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I told you, revenge.” Cassie looked inside the windows of a few of the surrounding cars. I wondered if she was planning to steal one.

“I don’t know anything about revenge.” The cigarette teetered between my fingers; I allowed it to burn down on its own. “I have thoughts about doing things to her, but I couldn’t.”

“Why not?” She motioned toward the Camel, prompting me to take another drag.

I choked on the smoke, which stifled my speech. “Because the things I come up with are unrealistic.”

“Like what?”

“Like shoving her in her locker or making her eat a maggot-infested hamburger.”

Cassie laughed. “I’ll help you.”

“Make her eat a maggot-infested hamburger?”

“No.” She took the final drag of her cigarette, threw it in the gravel, and stamped it out. I imitated her gesture, but not as elegantly. “Get revenge.”

“How?”

“There are lots of ways.”

“There are?”

“Oh sure.”

I studied her for a moment. She seemed to relish some upturned memory of her own.

“Why do you want to help me?”

“Let’s just say she reminds me of someone I used to know.”

I finished out the school day, humiliated. When
Chad
asked, I simply said
Trina
. I figured it would make him hate her even more. I went home, too exhausted to tell Becca about the pregnancy test. I needed to resolve things with Grace, so I figured the bit about the EPT test could serve as a peace offering between us. I called her and was surprised when she asked me over.

“You’re kidding? Your mom’s pregnant?”

“She hasn’t officially told us, so don’t say anything to anyone.”

“I won’t.”

We avoided the topic of
Chad
for a long time, concentrating on our homework. I looked up from my book, studying Grace. She and I were so different. We valued separate things. I wondered what actually held our friendship together.

“Remember how we met?” I asked.

“How can I forget?” She seemed to find the visual memory of it on the pages of her text book.

“You saved me that night,” I said.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” Grace said to me, sadness creeping in a bit. “Anyone would have done the same thing.”

“But it wasn’t just anyone,” I told her as I closed my place in the book. “It was you.”

A smile crept onto her face. “You know, I still have the pictures.”

“You do?”

She nodded, mischievously.

“You were amazing.”

“It was the blackmail photos. The one of him dressed in a lacy bra next to what’s his name.”

“It was more than that,” I said, trying not to cry. “It was you.”

There was a long pause as we both relived the moment back in junior high.

“What happened to the old Grace?” I finally asked. “The one from seventh grade?”

There was a long period of silence. “People change,” she said.

“Some do,” I said mostly to myself—thinking of Trina. “Some don’t.”

I felt Grace’s stare on me. I looked up and it felt like she was dying to ask me something. “Are you two a couple now? You and
Chad
?”

“I don’t know,” I said, scribbling partial answers in my notebook while half-watching
Sex in the City
reruns.

“Because I didn’t think you liked him.”

“I didn’t either, but he’s really…” I stopped myself. I wanted to share with her how great, how sweet, how beyond incredible he was. But I was afraid it would just make her all the more upset. “…nice,” I finished.

Grace doodled on a blank sheet of paper.

“How are things with Henry?” I asked, trying to redirect her thoughts.

“Great.” By the inflection in her voice, it would take a lifetime of acting classes for her to convince me that was true. I turned back to the TV.