The One Thing (22 page)

I placed a hand on the doorknob but didn’t turn it. “Hello?” I called out, my voice shaking.

The whispering stopped. It was dead quiet. Too quiet.

“Hello?” I called out again.

Nothing.

Ben appeared beside me. I’d never been so relieved. “Ben,” I said in an exhale. “There’s somebody in my room.”

He shrugged. The motion caused his crutches to groan. It sounded off. Wrong. “Go see who it is, Thera.”

I bit my lip so hard that, though I was dreaming, I swore I could taste blood. Taking a deep breath, I slowly twisted the knob. The whispering started again. Louder.

My hand sprang away from the door. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, turning toward Ben. His facial features had changed. There were deep hollows beneath his
cheekbones, black smudges under his eyes. His lips were cracked, bleeding.

He sighed. His breath smelled rancid. Decayed. “I’ll open it,” he said. Balancing with one side of his body, he peeled off a crutch and reached for the doorknob.

“Wait!” I screamed, terrified.

But he’d already pushed open the door, taken a step into the doorway, jerked to a teetering, unstable stop at the entrance to my room.

I gasped. There was no room. No walls. No floor. Nothing but a massive, whispering void. And Ben was lurching forward, falling into it.

Screaming, I groped for him, narrowly missing his arm. Our eyes locked for a fraction of a second, his sending mine a silent plea:
Help me.

And then he plunged into the nothingness.

I jolted awake, my heart clubbing in my ears. Panic surged in my chest, sharp and visceral. Trying to quiet my gulping breaths, I listened for a sound that told me I wasn’t alone—my
parents chatting, the cat padding down the hallway, a rustle, a footstep...
anything
—but the house was horribly, desperately silent. Soaked in sweat, I slipped out of bed and into my
parents’ bedroom. From the doorway, I could just barely hear the TV. Turned almost all the way down, a familiar scene from
Romeo and Juliet
whispered into the room.

A closet sentimentalist, my mother had always been a sucker for heartbreaking romantic movies. I’d spent more nights than I could count curled up beside her on the couch while she sniffled
unabashedly over some on-screen heartbreak. It had made me feel special in some small way, like she was sharing a faraway part of herself that she’d never shared with anyone else.

Now, though, the only things she was sharing were her soft snores, deep in an Ambien stupor. I ghosted toward her and knelt beside the bed, my fingers walking across the sheets until I found the
curve of her spine. I laid my head carefully, silently on her back, wishing I could wake her, wishing I could fold into her lap like I used to when I was little. But instead, I just stayed on my
knees, listening to the steady thrum of her heartbeat and her soft inhalations until I felt steady enough to walk away.

T
he next morning I woke to the sounds of my parents getting ready for work: the shuffling of feet into the kitchen, the clinking of a spoon in a
coffee cup, the low-voiced chattering, the jingling of keys. After they left, I sprang out of bed.

I felt antsy, restless, like I’d been plugged into an electrical socket, so I paced the house: down the hallway, up the stairs, back down the stairs, and then down the hallway again. Rinse
and repeat. During one of my trips upstairs, I hitched to a stop in front of my old bedroom and just stood there in the silence, palm flat on the closed wooden door.

There were a thousand ghosts living in that room.

Outside, a car door slammed and a pitiful yowl sliced through the morning like a gunshot. Completely spooked now, I crept downstairs, pausing in the entryway. Someone pounded on the front door,
and I squawked and jumped out of my skin. “Who’s there?” I hollered.

“Maggie? It’s Lauren.”

Lauren?

I folded my arms across my chest.

“Maggie?” Lauren repeated.

I knuckled my forehead. “What’s going on, Lauren?” I said. I was aiming for snarky, but my mouth betrayed me. The words came out wobbly.

“Can you open up? I’m having a bit of a...situation with Sophie and I need your help.”

I crossed the entryway in three steps and flung open the door. “What’s wrong with her?” I practically yelled.

There was a long pause in which I wondered whether Lauren was still there. Then she said, “Um, I think Sophie should be the one to tell you.” Lauren led me to her car, where Sophie
was having some sort of wild breakdown. As we came to a stop by the open driver’s side door, Lauren said, “I thought maybe since you...um...have been through some difficult times, you
could help her.”

What I really wanted to ask Lauren was how she’d known I’d even gone through difficult times. I wanted to ask her why she thought I’d actually
made it through
those
difficult times. I wanted to inform her that if Sophie weren’t bawling in my driveway, I wouldn’t have bothered to open my front door for her. But I didn’t have time to give
Lauren a speech on loyalties, because she half pushed, half guided me into the driver’s seat.

I fell into Lauren’s car with an
oomph
and then sat there for a moment, chewing on my bottom lip. I’d always been a little awkward with this sort of thing. The rough waters
of the Estrogen Ocean were not easily navigable. Besides, the last time Sophie and I had spoken had been miserably uncomfortable. Finally, and so Sophie could hear me over her crying, I basically
shouted, “So. Having a crappy day?”

“Shut. Up.” The words sounded odd coming from her mouth—about as natural as Mother Teresa calling Gandhi a dumbass—and I couldn’t take them seriously.

“I don’t shut up well,” I informed her. “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

She just sobbed harder.

“Aw, come on, Soph. It can’t be all that bad.”

I could hear her breathing, all quick and jerky, like hysterical people in the movies. I tried to reach for her hand, to pat it or something—or whatever girls do in situations like
these—but when I finally found her fingers, she flinched away from me and basically yelled, “Remember the other day? When I came to your house?”

How could I forget? “Yes,” I said.

“And you asked if I had a cold?” she went on, her voice screechy. “Because I sounded stuffy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d been crying all morning. My period had been two and a half months late and I’d just taken a pregnancy test.”

Given everything that had been happening in my life lately, I thought nothing could shock me. But when I realized what she was saying? I was shocked. “You’re...” I began, but
then stopped. The two words I was going to end my sentence with were
knocked up
, but I figured they were probably a little inappropriate. Nevertheless, they were the only words that seemed
to fit. Forty-year-old schoolmarms could be “expecting,” and thirty-five-year-old women could be “pregnant,” but high school girls? Well. They were “knocked up.”
Which was something I’d expect from Lauren, not Sophie.

“WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?” Sophie wailed.

I jerked out of the car, slamming immediately into Lauren. “She’s knocked up,” I said brilliantly.

“Yeah,” Lauren whispered, “and I just...I mean, I’m supposed to be at practice in, like, fifteen minutes and I don’t know what to do. Could you...?”

“Could I
what
, Lauren?” I hissed.

“I don’t know. Keep her here with you for a while? Talk to her? I mean, this is just...I don’t really know what to
say
.”

I stood there for a moment, trying to process her words. Trying to process the fact that she’d brought Sophie here just to get rid of her. Then I pursed my lips together and made a little
gesture in the air, like,
Just go
.

Sophie and I went to the backyard and sat side by side on a pair of cracked plastic seats that dangled from an old swing set, stiff grass poking at our ankles. When we were little, we used to
spend hours upon hours out here, just dreaming and talking and hanging upside down. Back then I never would’ve imagined we’d be sitting here like this. Different in so many ways.

We didn’t talk at first. Not because we had nothing to say, but because we had so much to say. So for the longest time, we stayed there and sorted through our thoughts—Sophie’s
tears drying and my shock ebbing. I curled my little finger around the warm metal chain, listening to a pair of blue jays squawk at each other in the far corner of the yard, listening to Gramps
bang around in his apartment, listening to my neighbor’s sprinkler. Finally Sophie took a shuddering breath and said, “I never told you this before. I just didn’t know how to
bring it up, and I didn’t want it to change the way you saw me, but...” She stopped, cleared her throat, and started again. “I was adopted. My birth mother was sixteen when she
had me, Maggie.
Sixteen.
I wouldn’t be here if she’d, you know...”

I nodded, understanding the subtext. “How does Jason feel about you not having an abortion?”

“I haven’t told him that I’m pregnant yet,” she admitted quietly, “haven’t even told my parents. I—I guess I kept hoping that maybe it would all go away
if I ignored it. I guess I’m just terrified, you know? I mean, I have to tell my
dad
.”

I nodded. Sophie’s dad was a hardass, had been for all her life. Sophie had forever been the one with the early curfew, the one not allowed to wear miniskirts, the one with all the
rules.

Sophie went on. “And besides that, things are already stressed at home.”

“What do you mean?”

She paused for several beats. There was still this hesitation between us—this sharp, broken shard of glass that neither of us knew how to touch without getting sliced open. Finally she
said, “My parents have been fighting a lot.”

“Sophie, I’m so sorry,” I breathed. “You should’ve told me.”

“Yeah. Well, the arguments didn’t get really bad until right around the time you lost your eyesight. I figured you had enough going on.”

“I wouldn’t have minded. It’s not like my family is perfect,” I muttered. “Do you think they’ll work it out? Your parents?”

A little bit of air shot out of Sophie’s nose, and she said, “Well, I can tell Mom is trying, but Dad has been so distant. I’m terrified that this will be the thing that
finally breaks them up.”

“Sophie, you can’t worry about that right now. Like it or not, this is happening. You have to tell them.”

“I know,” she murmured. “I just don’t know if I can do it.”

“Sure you can,” I said. “When you get home, just barrel in and tell them—before you can talk yourself out of it. You know, tear off the Band-Aid as fast as
possible.”

She sniffled. “That’s not me, Maggie. That’s you. I wish you could just...do it for me.”

My response was timid and weak and flimsy, but it was a response all the same. “Why don’t I go with you?”

The night was properly silent by the time Gramps dropped us off at Sophie’s, too silent for the two of us to be walking knowingly into a shitstorm. I took her porch steps slowly,
soundlessly, and when I stepped into the house, I paused. I’d spent half my life bursting through these doors. I’d enjoyed Fourth of Julys eating watermelon on Sophie’s back
porch, banked hundreds of hours under blanket forts in her mother’s sewing room. I knew the squeaky spots on their floor, the garlicky scent in the kitchen. Now, though, the house seemed
different. It smelled like too much take-out food and caked-up dust. And as we walked into the living room and sat on the couch, I turned to Sophie, cleared my throat, and whispered, “Where
is everyone?”

Beside me, Sophie unloaded a sigh. “Mom is probably upstairs reading. And I guess Dad is working late, as usual.”

“Ah.” I pianoed the Chopin-Clarissa jig on my leg for a couple minutes. Which, I came to find out, is a really long time when nobody’s talking.

“Distract me,” Sophie blurted suddenly. “Tell me something unrelated to parents and babies. Please.”

I didn’t even hesitate. “Well, I went to a Loose Cannons concert a few days ago.”

For a moment I got the impression that she was gaping at me. “Are you freaking kidding me?” she said in a choked whisper. “Did you just...stumble on it? The concert?”

“Something like that,” I muttered, not wanting to get into the specifics. “Anyway, it was amazing.”

“I’m sure it was,” Sophie said. “I mean, Mason Milton’s voice is like...”

I swallowed. “Yeah. It’s perfect.” And it was.
He
was. And now he hated me.

Sophie went on. “I heard he started dating Hannah Jorgensen, like, a couple months ago.”

“Who’s Hannah Jorgensen?” I asked, my voice an octave or two higher than normal.

“Mags. What rock have you been living under? The model? From New York City?”

My mouth formed the word
oh
but I didn’t actually say it. I just tried it out on my lips. Not liking the way it felt, I left it somewhere in the middle of my throat.

I wrapped my arms over my stomach and sank into the couch. Had I imagined the sparks between Mason and me the night of the Dead Eddies concert? Yes. I must have, yes. I’d been drunk. He
was dating a model. End of story.