Strange but True (5 page)

She's a minister's daughter, but I wouldn't put anything pastor
…

She's a minister's daughter, but she sure knows how to fleece her flock
…

Melissa is always tempted to respond:
You're not a minister's daughter, but you sure are an asshole
.

“Where's Ronnie?” Stacy asks, because Chaz has been standing in the driveway for almost a minute, yawning and stretching, adjusting the crotch of his pants.

Another thing Melissa hates about Chaz: he is
always
adjusting the crotch of his pants.

She feels a stab of worry that something has gone wrong, that perhaps Ronnie has changed his mind about tonight. But just then, the sunroof slides open and his six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered frame sprouts out of the car like a beautiful blond sunflower. He looks toward the bedroom window, and when his eyes meet Melissa's, Ronnie lifts his camera and snaps a picture. Then he smiles and extends his arm in mock-drama. “Juliet. Juliet. Wherefore art thou, Juliet?”

Melissa pushes the window up all the way. “You dork! You have it backward! Juliet is supposed to say the ‘wherefore art thou' part.”

“Oh,” Ronnie says. “Well, what does Romeo say?”

“I don't know. How about let down your hair, Rapunzel? I like that story better anyway.”

“How about you two get your butts down here?” Chaz says.

Stacy puts her finger to her mouth and shushes him. Then she points to the front door, indicating that he should shut up before their parents hear.

“Sorry,” Chaz says and makes the sign of the cross. “Well, are you guys coming down?”

“Not until you ring the doorbell and make a good impression on our mom and dad like proper gentlemen,” Stacy tells him.

Chaz picks at his crotch. “A first time for everything.”

With that, Ronnie drops back through the black rectangle of the sunroof, momentarily vanishing before reemerging from the side door, holding his camera and a clear plastic box with Melissa's red corsage inside. As the guys approach the house, Stacy turns away and squats to look under the bed in an effort to retrieve her hairbrush. Meanwhile, Melissa keeps her eyes on Ronnie. She can hardly believe that she found someone like him among all the jerks like Chaz at their school. Melissa loves everything about him. Everything. The sweaty smell of his skin after practice. The way his ass looks so tight and pinchable in his football uniform. The brilliant blue of his eyes. His beefy shoulders. His slight underbite. The fast, excited way he jumps from topic to topic whenever they are talking. Melissa loves him because he is unafraid to act goofy, like he did with that “wherefore art thou?” routine. She loves the way he keeps his sandy hair parted, not quite in the middle but not on the side either. A few loose strands are forever hanging down over his forehead, which he constantly pushes back to no avail. Melissa even loves his habit of licking his lips when he talks, because it makes her think about kissing him whenever he is in her sight. He is doing it now, in fact, flicking back his hair and licking his lips as they walk toward the front door of the Moodys' small cape.

Right on cue, Melissa's thoughts go to all the times after school when they sneak into the darkroom off the photography class. Since Ronnie is the yearbook photographer, he is the one and only student with a key. He always lays a blanket on the floor, and they make out in there for hours, pressing their bodies against each other in the dim red light of that room, the smell of the developing chemicals making her high. How many times have we forced ourselves to stop from going all the way? she wonders. Too many to count. But Melissa is glad they waited, because it will make tonight all the more special.

When the doorbell rings downstairs, it is as though someone comes up from behind her and dunks her head in one of those developing tubs in the darkroom, because she feels plunged suddenly into an intense, poisonous kind of nervousness. Melissa puts a hand to her roiling stomach and walks to her white wicker nightstand to take a sip of water. She squeezes her eyes shut in an effort to force out all thoughts of those times with Ronnie and what they've planned for tonight, at least until she gets through the next few minutes with her parents. Melissa straightens her dress, then looks out the window once more. The Rollerbladers have dragged their makeshift jump to the side of the road and left it there until tomorrow, when they'll try again—only Melissa doesn't plan to be around to see if they finally make it over.

“Girls,” their mother calls, in a voice so forced full of cheer that she sounds like a '50s mom on a Nick at Nite rerun. “Your dates are here.”

“Let's go,” Stacy says from over by the dresser mirror, where she is brushing her hair.

“I need to pee,” Melissa tells her. “Go ahead. I'll be there in a second.”

When her sister is gone, Melissa unzips the large purse she is taking with her despite Stacy's jabs over the last few days about its size. Melissa does one last check of its contents: a rolled-up pair of khakis, a plain white T-shirt, flip-flops, a change of underwear, and a toothbrush. Cushioned inside it all, is a red forty-watt lightbulb she bought at CVS a few days before as a small surprise for Ronnie. If she can manage to get through the night without breaking it, she plans to screw the bulb into the lamp beside the bed at the inn where they are going to stay, as a funny reminder of all those times in the darkroom. There is more she would like to take along, but that's all that will fit, and she doesn't want her parents or Stacy to become suspicious. Besides, she and Ronnie plan to be gone just a few days. Even though the trip will get her grounded for the entire summer and punished more than she can ever imagine, Melissa tells herself that it will be worth it. She wants their first time to be special. Unlike those slutty girls in her class who gave it up long ago in their bedrooms after school while their parents were at work, Melissa wants to remember this night forever.

Before leaving, she opens her top drawer and unlocks her diary to read over what she wrote inside a few hours ago. In a perfect girlie script she crafted just for this book, it says:

I am so excited for the prom tonight! Jesus has blessed me with the most amazing mother and father, and I am grateful to them for letting me have this special opportunity. I am also blessed to have found a good Christian boy like Ronnie, who shares my same beliefs about the Lord
.

Melissa knows she is laying it on thicker than usual, but she doesn't want to take any chances. And for some superstitious reason, she kisses the page before closing and locking the book, then burying it back beneath her underwear and socks. When she leaves the bedroom and goes to the top of the stairs, Melissa pauses and looks down. Ronnie, Chaz, and Stacy are on the other side of the living room, so she can't see them from here. Only the full moon of her father's bald spot and the yellow puff of her mother's hair are in view. Something about their waxy, creaseless faces and neat clothing has been bugging Melissa lately. She wishes they'd get a few more wrinkles on their faces
and
their clothes, the way normal parents do. Her mother is quiet, like she always is around her father. His deep, dry voice drones on as he lectures about the rules of the evening while jangling the change in his pocket, fishing up the coins, then sifting them between his fingers.

At first, it is hard for her to make out the words. She hears him say the obvious things: “no alcohol … home before midnight…” Then something, something, something, and the subject changes. “… track meets before graduation … you think you'll be able to break your shot put record?”

“I intend to, sir,” Chaz says in response, pulling off the gentleman routine better than Melissa would have guessed.

“Chaz is the only one in the history of Radnor High School ever to throw more than nineteen meters,” Stacy says.

Melissa knows Ronnie must be bored out of his skull by this discussion, since they've already been subjected to Stacy and Chaz's verbal diarrhea about his dumb shot put record. When Melissa descends the staircase to save him, Ronnie looks so good standing there in his tuxedo over by the white brick fireplace that a new kind of aching fills her. It feels as though someone has pumped too much blood into her body and it is seeping out her pores into the air, making everything around her glow red just like in the darkroom.

“You look lovely, dear,” her mother says, lifting her disposable camera to snap a picture.

“Just gorgeous,” her father tells her in the fake, jovial voice he puts on in front of company or in the reception area at church.

Melissa glances at the weapon of his thin brown belt, then looks away toward Ronnie to stop the roiling in her stomach. “So what do you think?” she asks, looking down at her dress. “Do you like it?”

Ronnie licks his lips and smiles. “Like it? I love it. You look beautiful.”

Even though she tries not to, all Melissa can think about is kissing him, pressing her body to him, feeling him go hard in his pants as he pushes and pushes and pushes against her … until, for the first time tonight, he will push himself
inside
of her.

“Why don't you put the corsage on Missy before we take a picture of the two of you over by the fireplace?” her mother says.

Ronnie steps closer, bringing a wave of body heat as he does. His thick fingers pull the roses out of the plastic box, and she holds her wrist in front of her rapidly beating heart. As he slips the lace band over her hand, Melissa hears the sound of her father fishing up the contents of his pockets and sifting it through his fingers. Although she can't see it there among the quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, she knows he is carrying the spare silver key to her diary—the one that went missing months ago. She knows too that he will unlock it and read her most recent entry not long after they leave this house tonight. But by the time he begins to suspect that everything she has written inside is a lie, Melissa will be miles away from Radnor, on her way to someplace secret, where he won't be able to find her until she is ready to come home.

When Ronnie finishes securing the tight fist of roses to her wrist, he gives her hand a gentle squeeze and asks, “Are you ready?”

“I'm ready all right,” she tells him. “Ready as I'll ever be.”

“ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY?” CHARLENE CHASE SHOUTS AT MELISSA
from the passenger seat. “Is that it? Are you some kind of a nut job?”

Melissa knew Ronnie's family would have a hard time believing what she just told them. Even she had a hard time believing it … at first. But now that the baby has grown full-term inside of her, there is no denying that this is the miracle she has prayed for all these years. Night after night after night, on her knees, beside her bed, in the run-down cottage she rents from sweet old Mr. and Mrs. Erwin, Melissa has sent up an endless stream of desperate, drunken cries from her lips, as they say, to God's ears.
Please… If I could just have Ronnie back… If you could just give me another chance like I almost got that summer
… And now, somehow, those prayers have been answered. Melissa's fate, which had been snatched away from her, has been returned. She sees herself as a modern-day rendering of those stories her father preached from the pulpit every Sunday morning throughout her childhood as she squished between Stacy and her mother, absently kicking the heels of her white buckle shoes against the front pew while she listened to him prattle on.

There was a woman in the crowd who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years. She had spent everything she had on doctors and still could find no cure. She came up behind Jesus and touched the fringe of his robe. Immediately, the bleeding stopped
.

“Who touched me?” Jesus asked
.

Everyone denied it, and Peter said, “Master, this whole crowd is pressing up against you.”

But Jesus told him, “No, someone deliberately touched me, for I felt healing power go out from me.”

When the woman realized that Jesus knew, she began to tremble and fell to her knees before him. The whole crowd heard her explain why she had touched him and that she had been immediately healed. “Daughter,” he said to her, “your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”

Melissa sees herself as that bleeding woman whose bleeding has finally stopped.

This baby is her healing. Ronnie's healing too.

Yes, of course, she is afraid. And yes, of course, she had expected shock from the Chases, along with all the rest: confusion, bewilderment, a neverending parade of unanswerable questions. But somehow she had allowed herself to imagine an edge of excitement and anticipation beneath it all, because that is the way she feels. If anyone might share those feelings, it would be Ronnie's family—or so she thought before tonight. The last thing Melissa anticipated was this venomous reaction from his mother. As a result, she feels blindsided by her own disappointment, knocked offkilter by Charlene's relentless verbal pummeling. Melissa tries hard to get hold of herself and stop crying as she fixes her eyes on the woman's creased, mole-speckled face, on the ringed flab of skin that shakes above the folds of her beige cowl-neck sweater while she rages on and on.

“How dare you come here in the middle of the night and deliver this line of horseshit! My son is dead, and you're fucking with my emotions! What is this, your idea of a joke? Well, let me tell you, it's a pretty sick joke at that.”

“Calm down, M,” Philip says from the backseat, for what must be the tenth time tonight. “Why don't you forget this ever happened and go on inside?”

“Don't tell me to calm down, and don't tell me to forget anything! My son is dead and this … this … this nobody who dated him for one lousy year of his life shows up in the middle of the night and claims she is carrying his baby.” She thrusts her finger forward and this time does more than point; she jabs it with such force into Melissa's shoulder that it stings. “Don't you have anything to say for yourself? Huh? Don't you? Answer me!”