Scar Girl (10 page)

I guess that was Theresa's way of telling me everything was going to be okay. Pretty lame, right? Anyway, I just nodded and put my head back down.

I don't know if my sister heard or saw me crying—I tried to be quiet, and I figured that she had put the headphones back on—but I refused to open my eyes to find out. I fell back asleep.

When I finally got up, after my family got back from church, my mother scolded me for sleeping so late. “When the Lord made Sunday a day of rest, he didn't make it for you.” I was actually happy to hear it. It meant she didn't know anything about what had happened the day before.

I told her that I was sick and was going back to bed. She just snorted at me. I called Johnny and told him the same thing.

“I'm sorry about the other day,” he said. His voice sounded far away and sad, like that donkey from
Winnie-the-Pooh
.

I was confused and paranoid for a minute, and thought maybe he'd found out about Planned Parenthood and was apologizing for not being there.

“Yeah, you know, in my bedroom.”

Then it hit me. He was talking about falling on top of me on his bed. Did that happen only Friday? I was disoriented and freaked out. I told him not to worry about it, but that I really wasn't feeling well and that I needed to sleep.

“Okay, Pick,” he said. “Let me know if I can bring you anything.”

“Thanks,” I answered.

“I love you.” We'd been saying that to each other since the summer, and it had become our standard way of saying good-bye. When you say something over and over, it starts to lose its meaning. It doesn't carry any more weight than
adios,
ciao,
or
see you later
. It becomes a noise, a kind of emotional grunt, you know?

But this time it had all the meaning in the world, and I choked up. I pretended to cough, said, “I love you,” back, and hung up the phone, burying my face in my pillow when I did.

I knew then that I could never tell Johnny that I'd carried and lost his baby, our baby. He just wouldn't understand why I'd kept it from him in the first place. If I could go back in time and do one thing over, it would be that phone call. I would just tell Johnny everything.

“Smooth,” Theresa said from the doorway. That was the thing about my house. You never could get any privacy.

I gave her the finger and laid my head gently down on the pillow.

RICHIE MCGILL

Yeah, the band went on a minibreak when Chey “got the flu.” I knew she was pregnant, and I was worried something was going on. I kind of wanted to call and ask how she was doing, but that's not how we rolled.

I wound up spending a lot of that week just hanging around at home after school. The weather got way colder, and I wasn't really in the mood to take my board out, so I watched TV, drank iced tea and ate party pretzels, and practiced drumming on my pads.

And then Johnny called.

Johnny never called me. None of the guys in the band ever really called me. It's something about being a drummer. Guitar players and singers and bass players all think we're some sort of spare part: like we're spark plugs, easy to replace. That's why there are so many drummer jokes.

What happened when the bass player locked his keys in the car? It took him half an hour to get the drummer out. There's, like, a million of them, and they all pretty much make drummers out to be idiots. It doesn't really bug me, though. I mean, I notice, but I figure it's someone else's hang-up, not mine.

So anyways, Johnny calls and says that since the band isn't jamming, he wants to hang out, and can I come pick him up?

“Sure,” I say.

“Great,” he says, sounding really relieved or something. “Bring your skateboard.”

My board?
I think to myself, but I don't question it. Johnny'd seemed a bit, I don't know, out of tune, and I figured I should try to help him.

So fifteen minutes later I'm at his house, his mother showing me to his bedroom. I'd been before, but not that often, so I could feel his mom kind of checking me out. I don't mean checking me out 'cause she wanted to see my hot ass, I mean sizing me up. We all knew she hated Harry and Cheyenne—even Johnny said that was true—but she didn't really know me. I was pretty sure she didn't like me any better, because, you know, I was in the band.

When I walked into Johnny's room, he was downing a pill of some sort with a glass of water.

“What's that, for your leg?”

He looked at me for a long moment, embarrassed, I think, that I'd caught him taking meds.

“Antidepressant,” he said, and then added, “Don't tell Chey or Harry, okay? It's not a big deal, and I know both of them would make it a big deal.”

He was right about that; they would. So I agreed.

“How long you supposed to take them for?”

“I don't know. Until I'm not depressed, I guess.”

“Why are you depressed?” He looked at me, looked at his leg, and held out his arms as if to say, “Why the fuck do you think I'm depressed, numb nuts?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I get it. But, John, when you think about it, things could be a lot worse.”

He just rolled his eyes and asked, “Did you bring your board?”

“Yeah, it's in the car.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

“I want you to teach me to ride.”

“Say what?”

“Look, I need to do something to push myself harder. I see how much you love it, and figure it's a good way to test the boundaries of my leg.”

“I don't know, John. . . .”

“C'mon, I'll be fine. It'll be fun.”

“It's a little cold for skateboarding.” I thought this was a bad idea, and I was trying to make any excuse to get out of it.

“We have coats. Let's go.”

That was Johnny at his best. The case was closed, and we were going. He had this weird voodoo shit that made you go along. It's how I joined the band in the first place.

I was in the seventh grade and had just gotten this used, piece-of-crap, three-piece drum set for my birthday. I couldn't play for shit. Anyway, Johnny, who was a year older than me, had somehow heard about it. He found me at my locker.

I knew who Johnny was. Everyone in our school did. He was one of those dudes who seemed to be at the center of things.

“You're Richie,” he said to me. “You play drums.”

“Yeah,” I answered, not sure what to make of the fact that Johnny McKenna had singled me out.

“I'm starting a band, and we need a drummer. You're it. I'll let you know when and where our first practice is.”

That was it. No invitation to join, just an order to follow. And like everyone else who dealt with Johnny, I just went along. Best thing that ever happened to me.

Anyways, back to the day he called me. A few minutes later, we were on the playground at our old elementary school and Johnny was using his good leg to push my skateboard while he stood on it with his fake leg. But here's the thing about skateboarding that most people don't realize: it's as much about your feet and ankles as it is about your legs. You make a million little adjustments every second just to stay on the board. I'm not saying someone with a fake leg can't learn to skateboard, but it would take time and maybe something better than the uneven elementary school blacktop on a cold November day.

Johnny kept falling off. Or the board would slide out from under his feet. Or it would flip up in the air and nail him in the crotch. (I laughed pretty hard when that happened.) But he kept at it. I tried to give him pointers, and at first he listened, but then he tuned me out. His face was getting redder and redder, and his muscles were getting all stiff, which is the worst thing for skateboarding.

Finally, after he'd fallen, like, twenty times, I knew I needed to pull the plug.

“John, I'm freezing my fucking ass off out here. Can we try this again in the spring?”

His face was a blank wall. He looked at me from the ground and just nodded. I went to help him up, but he batted my hand away.

I took him home, and that was that.

CHEYENNE BELLE

The experience of losing the baby—I can say those words now, but I couldn't back then—tore me up inside, both physically and mentally. I felt like someone had taken a razor blade and made tiny cuts all over my heart and all over my gut. I couldn't talk to anyone about it except for my sisters, and because of all the shit Theresa had said to me, I couldn't really even talk to them.

Every time I thought of the baby, of what he would have looked like (in my mind it was a boy), of how much I would've loved him, every time I wondered if the baby suffered when he died, I would start to unravel. I was like a cassette where the tape pulls loose, and the more you pull on it, the harder it gets to put back together.

Not sure of where else to turn, two days after the miscarriage and a week before we jammed again, I found myself back in the confessional.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Confess your sins to me, my child.” I recognized the voice right away. This was the same priest I'd talked to last time.

“I gave confession a few weeks ago, Father, and told you about a friend of mine, who had gotten pregnant.”

There was a long pause before he answered. “I remember, my child. What did your friend decide to do?”

“She decided to keep the baby, Father.” It was somehow easier talking about this like it had happened to someone else. It put distance between me and the reality of what I was going through.

“That's good, that's good.” I could hear the relief in his voice.

“And then she had a miscarriage. In her sixteenth week of pregnancy.”

There was absolute silence on the other side of the little booth, not even breathing. That, more than anything, pissed me off.

“Really, Father? Nothing? No words of calming wisdom? No explanation for why, when this girl followed your advice, God swooped in and killed the baby in her uterus?” I used the word
uterus
on purpose, thinking it would make him uncomfortable.

“It is not for us to understand the ways of the Lor—”

I cut him off. “Is that really the best you've got? That ‘whole-mystery-of-the-Lord' shit?” I don't think I'd ever cursed at, in front of, or even near a priest before, but I was too far gone to care. I think I might have been crying or screaming or both. “If this God of yours is so merciful and loving, why would he kill this girl's baby? Was it some kind of holy abortion? How do you explain this? Tell me!”

Again, he was quiet for a long moment before he whispered more than spoke, “I can't. It's a tragedy.”

That jolted me back to the moment. I was bracing for more of the “God is mysterious” mumbo jumbo, and I hadn't expected him to say anything so honest. I lost it for real. I started crying and couldn't stop. Everything hurt so bad.

After a few minutes of me sitting there, blubbering, the door to the confessional opened, making me jump. And there he was, a short, fat priest with a ring of sandy-colored hair around his bald head. He was crying, too. He took my hand, led me out of the booth, and hugged me.

It was a long hug, and it was filled with sympathy and love. For a minute it even made me feel better. I think that priest violated every church rule to break down the wall of anonymity that was supposed to be between us, and I loved him for it.

I pulled myself together, backed away, and ran out of the church.

As surprising and tender as that moment was, and as good as crying and being hugged made me feel, it didn't fix me. And that's the problem with religion. A quick fix never works.

HARBINGER JONES

Chey's flu lasted a whole week. It was the longest we'd gone without rehearsing since we all reconnected after Georgia. It was also the longest we'd gone without seeing each other.

Something wasn't right about Cheyenne. She was, and I can't believe I'm going to use this word, boring. Cheyenne's always been an enthusiastic person—or wait, maybe that's not the right word, maybe
passionate
is better, passionate with an edge. When we got back to rehearsal, Cheyenne was morose. I chalked it up to a remnant of her being sick.

RICHIE MCGILL

Soon as I saw Chey at that rehearsal, I knew she wasn't pregnant anymore. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. She looked a little sad or something and like maybe she was a little stoned. I figured she'd had an abortion. That's what most girls our age would've done.

I caught her eye when she was walking in, and she gave me this little nod, like, “Yeah, it's done, and I'm all right.” I let it go, but I kind of kept an eye on her during the rehearsal. She was quiet but okay, so I didn't push it.

HARBINGER JONES

“Feeling better?” I asked Chey as she plugged into her amp.

“Yeah, and sorry again about your car.”

“What happened to your car?” Johnny looked at the two of us, confused. That took me by surprise. It was like Johnny and Cheyenne hadn't seen each other or even talked since the day I'd played “Pleasant Sounds” in Johnny's room, more than a week earlier. If that was true, it was unprecedented.

I was deep into writing my essay at that point and had detached myself from the rest of the world. I probably needed to be a better friend to Johnny, but I don't think I knew how. He hadn't been himself since the accident, but he'd settled into a predictable kind of pattern. He was quieter, maybe a bit depressed, but still even-keeled and in control. That first rehearsal back after Chey's flu bug, he looked like he was going to cry. It was noticeable enough that I asked him to come outside with me while I had a cigarette.

“You okay?”

“Me? Yeah, why?”

“I don't know. You just don't seem yourself.”

“I think I'm just tired is all,” he answered. I couldn't tell if he was hiding something or if he was really just tired. “Hey,” he added, “did you talk to Chey during this past week?”