As She Grows (13 page)

It’s a cold walk to the pool hall five long blocks away. The owner, Dan, will give us free drinks, “so long as the guys keep coming for you delicious young ladies.” Jasmyn complains the entire way, toes squished in her cousin’s high heels. She stops every few minutes to pull down the miniskirt that keeps creeping up into the warmth of her jacket. She asks me to fix her eyeliner smudge because her fake nails are too long—and as I’m doing it, she grumbles at my loose jeans and bulky sweatshirt, “Like my fucking grandmother,” she moans. I tell her they’re the tightest pants I have, which seems to be an acceptable response because she backs off.

When we arrive it’s as if Jasmyn suddenly has cozy sponges on her feet. She bounces in the door, flipping her head back and laughing hysterically as if I just told her the funniest joke. Everyone in the bar turns to look at us and she pretends she’s all embarrassed, puts her hand gracefully up to her mouth as if to cover her vulgarly exposed teeth. Her entrance is spectacular, and I don’t tell her I see her practising in the mirror late at night. “I’m gonna be an actress,” she says all the time, “a fuckin’ star.”

Dan gives us beers and a group of older regulars immediately call us over to the corner pool table. Most of the men are Italian, standing around smoking cigarettes, hairy stomachs popping through buttons sewed on again and again by dutiful fingers. Those same fingers that tap on the Virgin Mary’s porcelain head in the front window, waiting for their husbands to come home. The way I’ve seen Carla’s mom do. Jasmyn flirts, sticks her ass so high in the air you can see the edge of her underwear when she aims her cue. As she’s waiting her turn, I see her rub her fingers up and down the cue all erotic-like, then press it tight up against her crotch. I laugh and pretend I’m having a good time, but really all I’m thinking about is my pregnancy. And all I want to do is go home, go to bed, and stop my mind from thinking.

The men can’t take their eyes off Jasmyn. Within an hour, Jasmyn’s drinks line the bar ledge like trophies. She offers me one of her Singapore Slings, all proud as if I’m the ugly duckling under her wing. I take it and drink it like it’s a shot, slamming it down on the counter when I’m done, and the men around me cheer and buy me another. They start crowding around me, fat stomachs rubbing against me, thinking they’re going to get some action, but I tell most of them straight up I think they’re losers, so they back off. I feel sorry for one guy though, who seems pretty nice, so I don’t mind when he sits beside me at the bar, telling me about how bad his marriage is and how I remind him of his daughter, his sweet daughter. He says he hasn’t seen her in three years and tells me all the things he’d like to say to her. I start to pretend he really is my father, pretend the words are coming from my own dad’s lips. But then, just when I’m feeling close to it being real, he tries to slide his hand up my top. And I get so mad at him for ruining a good moment that I grab his fingers and snap them back until he falls off the bar stool, squatting and squirming and pleading for me to let go. “Fuckin’ pervert,” I mumble and then flick him away like an annoying insect.

But I am luckier than most. I know this. While Jasmyn spends her life trying to forget her father, I can create mine out of the infinity of things I don’t know. How he’s the kind of man who
plays football on Sunday afternoons with his buddies. Or that he’s a great cook and can make chocolate cake from scratch. Or how every now and then, he stops in the middle of an ordinary moment and senses something missing, as if a part of him were walking around out there, somewhere.

Jasmyn waves from across the bar. “I’m going for a walk,” she shouts, giggling and tripping over her stiletto heels. She trails behind the man who holds her hand as if she were a schoolgirl at the crosswalk. I wait about twenty minutes, till midnight, then Dan slips me five bucks and calls me a cab because I don’t want to be late for curfew.

Back at the group home I lie in bed with my clothes on, my belt buckle digging into my stomach. The ceiling spins and I happily get lost in its dizziness. I think about how much I love this feeling, this inability to focus. Conclude that if we all lost our bearings every once in a while, we could bear life a little longer.

I fall asleep with the light on, only to be woken by banging and screaming and things breaking apart downstairs. Jasmyn’s explosive words surface like air bubbles, popping when they reach my ears. I visualize the melting icebergs we saw in the documentary in class this week; the slow release of trapped air thousands of years old bubbling up through arctic waters. Something tells me Jasmyn’s words originate from a depth none of us can perceive.

Staff will stand in the centre of the room tomorrow, hands on hips, shaking heads and whispering things like
what a waste
. Before them will be overturned chairs, scattered board-game pieces, broken mugs, inverted coffee table, and an unscathed TV that always miraculously avoids the fury. They will
tsk-tsk
their way around the room, picking up chicken bones and toast crusts.
They do this every time someone trashes a room, as if they just can’t fathom such ingratitude for a home. They don’t realize that’s just it: we beat the walls to batter any lingering sense of home out of us. We all have this trapped urgency for release.

“Bitch!” Jasmyn yells downstairs and then slams the bedroom door behind her. Although I reached up to plug my ears before she even touched the doorknob, the noise still makes me jump. Jasmyn storms into the room, seemingly unconcerned that I am awake and fully clothed. “I hate this fuckin’ place,” she says as she rips off her jacket and whips it against the wall. “They think they’re my fuckin’ parents. They can’t tell me nothing.”

“What happened?”

“Fuckin’ cop throws me in the car, says I’m a frickin’ prostitute.” She sits on the end of her bed and hurls her shoe across the room. It hits the dresser and knocks over the hairsprays.

“Why didn’t you tell him you weren’t?”

“I did! We both did. We said we were just fooling around, but he don’t believe us. The prick gets up in my face and starts telling me how I’m gonna get killed. How just last week he had to spray down a sidewalk covered with the blood of some girl just like me.”

“Who were you with?”

“This guy,” she says dismissively.

“From the bar?”

“No, another guy.” And we both know she didn’t know him. It occurs to me in this moment that I know nothing about Jasmyn.

She throws some scrunched-up money from her pocket onto the dresser.“Not fuckin’worth it, man.” And I can’t figure out why she’s so angry if everyone is right. And then I realize that’s exactly why she’s so angry.

I used to call Carla every day. At the beginning, three times a day. But after a while we keep having the same conversation over and over again, talking about people neither of us knew or cared about. I find myself thinking of homework or my cleaning chore for the week while she is talking. Only her “are you there’s” bring me back to her words. And it’s depressing because our conversations used to be dizzy overlaps of listening and talking, but now we speak like old people, taking turns and pausing between sentences.

I tell Carla I’m pregnant. I tell her because I have no one else to tell, but part of me wants her to be the last person to know because of how she’s always judging people, as if she were some perfect saint. For once, I have silenced her. “Well, say something.”

“Oh my God. Holy shit. Oh my God,” she finally says. And after another long pause, “What are you going to do?”

“Well, I don’t have many options. I have to have it.”

“Ya, right,” she affirms, and I know she’s interpreting my lack of options as a moral choice not to have an abortion because Carla is Catholic and I’ve seen the pro-life pamphlets her mother keeps in her kitchen drawer. “I’m so so sorry, Snow,” she says in the most caring way, as if I just told her I had cancer or something. She is being so serious it starts to scare me and my eyes start to well. “What does Mark say?”

I don’t answer. Feel my lip quivering and bite down hard.

“What did he say?” she repeats.

“He thinks I’m having an abortion.”

“Figures,” she says. “God, Snow. I don’t know what to say. How pregnant are you?” I don’t answer. My mouth pulls outward and I try to hold it closed. And then the tears come out, all messy and slobbery and I start to gasp for air, tugging at my knotted breath. “Snow?”

“I don’t know, maybe three, maybe four months?” I say.

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t know.”

“I can’t believe you wouldn’t tell me.”

“I said I didn’t know!”

“How could you not know? It’s called a period.”

“Ya, well, I sort of bled. And I’m still not big. And my tits hurt, but they always hurt.” Saying it aloud makes me realize how dumb I must sound. Saying it aloud doesn’t even convince me anymore.

“Well, I suppose you’re not the first. I know a ton of people who’ve had them. Even Mary had Jesus when she was just twelve.”

“Jesus? What the hell are you talking about?” For someone who says she hates religion, Carla manages to slip it into a lot of conversations.

“I’m saying if Mary had a baby when she was twelve, then maybe it’s not so bad.”

“Twelve? That’s young. But she was a virgin.”

“Nuh-uh,” Carla says and explains it all to me. She tells me that Mary probably wasn’t a virgin. That people only interpret it that way, but really, the word
virgin
at the time meant feisty and independent woman. And it only got to mean no sex when monks hundreds of years later valued chastity. Carla says Mary was probably some young girl impregnated at some high religious ceremony.

“Feisty and independent. I like the sound of that. How do you know all this?”

“Dinner conversation. My mother is a religious freak, remember?” And it’s funny that Carla hates her mom so much because the only time she actually sounds intelligent is when she talks about religion.

I imagine Mary as if she were alive today, claiming Immaculate Conception. I imagine her in a social worker’s office, heads peeking through the doorway to get a good look at the twelve-year-old pregnant girl. Mary sits there, blue-hooded sweatshirt framing her pale face, brown stringy hair parted in the middle, eyes the colour of turquoise truth. Her hands are folded gracefully in her lap as the social worker with chipped nails passes her a juice and with a raw voice attempts to coax the truth out of her. “Come on now, sweetheart. Tell me who
really
is the father?”

And then there would be Joseph, with jittery eyes and nervous hands rolling into a fist. All worked up by his boys who slap their knees in hysterical laughter at their gullible friend. “Immaculate, my ass,” he says to Mary. “Who’d you sleep with?” And Mary would just sit silently like this pillar of purity. Surrounded by unending yapping, while heaven brews in her belly like a swelling ocean.

“Don’t tell anyone,” I say to Carla before I hang up the phone.

“God, no,” she says. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

But Carla doesn’t call me the next day. Or the next day. Or the next day after that. And at first I think it’s just because she has forgotten, because she’s like that, but then I get to thinking that maybe she’s not calling on purpose. She is probably disgusted that I’m pregnant. Thinks I asked for it. And there’s probably a part of her that just can’t stand being friends with me now, as much as she won’t want to admit it. It’s all that Catholic stuff she constantly runs from but will never escape. It’s as if she was poured into this religious mould that framed her as a kid, and now, she will never be able to truly move beyond its edges.

It starts slowly, like a cold. That slight feeling of being “off.” And each day it gets worse. The world outside my body begins to fade farther and farther away till objects in my vision are closer than they appear. I bump into things. I forget things. I cry because I can’t remember my locker combination. I feel like I’m wrapped in this thick misty cloud and I can’t breathe right and I can’t see clearly through the fog in front of me. And I feel so small.

I go to school almost every day, but only because I don’t have the energy to make a decision to do anything else. In class, my head is all hazy and I can’t focus on anything, and when I talk, words become like cold porridge stuck to the roof of my mouth. I rest my forehead on the desk, for just a second, and the teacher whips some chalk at me. She tells me to not waste her time and to go find a bed somewhere.