Fingerprints of You (8 page)

“I think it’s perfect,” I told her, and then Dylan appeared at the window.

“Looks like trouble,” he said when he got the window opened. He smiled at Emmy, and she smiled back and told him she was leaving him a present in the mailbox.

“I’ll come down,” he said. “Don’t move.” But Emmy told
him we couldn’t stay and that we’d see him at school on Monday. And then she blew him a kiss.

I loved the way he looked at her when she did that, and I figured that was the kind of look I should have waited for before I gave myself over to the pothead in Virginia or to Johnny Drinko in the tattoo shop. I wondered if that was the way my father used to look at Stella.

On the walk back to my house I promised to start researching bus routes, and Emmy agreed to look up the place with the faces in the mountain just to be sure we knew where it was, and when we stopped in front of my front porch I told her, “Your dad’s going to be okay, Emmy. And screw Tony Adams anyway. Your dad’ll be back before you know it, and I bet he shows up with some kind of medal,” which she must have liked the sound of, because she told me I was beautiful all pregnant and glowy, and then she flicked me on the belly before we headed inside.

T
HE WEEK BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS BREAK
, someone called in a bomb threat after lunch, and we all got sent home from school. It turned out to be a prank call from some guys who had graduated the year before and were home from college for winter break, but at the time the school had to follow procedure and move all the students to the football field, where we stood for over an hour freezing our asses off. They literally went through the list of the entire student body and released us individually onto the buses, double-checking all the forms to see who was allowed to drive home and who needed to have their parents called.

“Everyone must be accounted for in an emergency,” they told us.

“I cannot wait to get out of this town,” Emmy said when she found me in the crowd. Her small shoulders were shaking,
and I could see her breath in the air when she spoke.

We were supposed to stand in groups based on the first letter of our last name, but the whole thing was a catastrophe, and kids were pretty much doing whatever they wanted while the vice principal stood in the announcers’ booth at the top of the bleachers and called our names out one by one, directing us to the parking lot, where the school buses were and the parent carpool line had started, or releasing us to drive ourselves home.

Dylan had left by then to spend the vacation in Asheville, North Carolina, with his grandparents, and she hadn’t told me yet, but I was pretty sure Emmy had slept with him before he took off. For me, sex was inadequate and ugly then, so I hadn’t asked her outright. I didn’t want to know if it had been better or worse for her than it had been for me. I knew she wanted it to be important, and I was worried that if they’d done it already, it might have been a disappointment.

I recognized some of Emmy’s old friends standing in a huddle near us, but she didn’t wave them over, so neither did I. There was a new girl with them I’d never seen with their crowd, so I asked Emmy who the brunette was.

“A robot,” she said. “Their new recruit. They won’t hang out with Emily Curtis anymore because rumor has it she had an abortion over Thanksgiving break,” she told me, and shrugged.

I was born just months after the Supreme Court affirmed its
Roe v. Wade
decision in the
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey
case. I only asked about it once, back in the eighth grade, when we were studying the justice system at school. We’d spent the week debating women’s rights, so it was on my mind. Stella and I lived in
the apartment in Philadelphia with Denny then, and there was meatloaf in the oven and a vodka tonic in her fist while she waited for him to come home. That day, a girlfriend from work announced she was pregnant, and Stella was reminiscing about what it was like when it happened to her, how frantic she was when she bought the pregnancy test and how scared she’d been when she decided to leave California and move back east to live with her mom.

“Did you ever think of getting rid of it?” I asked. I had wanted to know for a while, and it seemed as good a time as any to finally say it out loud.

She turned toward me, dropping the glass in her haste as her cocktail splashed across the cheap linoleum floor. Her eyes flashed like headlights, angry and spinning, and I wondered if she might have slapped me had she been standing closer.

“Don’t you ever talk to me like that,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”

I watched the Preps’ newest addition and wondered how they’d picked her. She was pretty enough, but she looked kind of blank faced and starstruck while she listened to the rest of them talk.

“She’s a freshman,” Emmy said, “but her dad works in TV. Used to write for the CW network or something awesome like that,” she said sarcastically, and rolled her eyes with a grunt.

Mr. Holton was only up to Sheri Anne Coleman, and I eyed the football equipment lying on the side of the field. “I’m pretty sure I might stab myself with one of those orange flags before he gets to Lemon Raine Williams,” I told Emmy.

“Hysteria?” she asked.

“Boredom,” I said. “Seriously, can’t they just let us all go?”

She bounced in place and blew into her hands. “Entertain me, Lemon Raine Williams,” she said. “Tell me about our trip.”

“Well, obviously there’ll be superheroes and time traveling machines and gruesome battles where we’re the only ones with the magic powers to survive,” I told her, and then immediately wished I had left out the part about battles and survival, thinking of her dad, but it didn’t trip her up a bit.

“And don’t forget the rock stars that are actually vampires who suck our blood and talk us into riding on their wings all the way to Paris.”

“Naturally,” I said.

Next to us, Jenny Myers and the new robot were whispering. Some of the boys had sat down on the grass, lined up their textbooks in a square, and begun playing football with a folded piece of paper they flicked back and forth. Jenny and Allyson Cooper stood behind them, watching.

“Hey, Emmy,” I said.

“Let me guess.” She shifted her eyes away from them and back to me. “You’re starving. Jesus, Lemon, I know you’ve got a kid in there, but it’s only a few inches long. It can’t eat
that
much.”

Mr. Holton was up to Andrew Lynn Dexter, and a low hum of laughter erupted throughout the football field when someone yelled, “Homo.” Evidently, Andrew Lynn had never told anyone his middle name.

“I’m not hungry,” I lied. “I’ve got a new idea for our trip,” I said, and she said, “Mermaids in Mexico?” but I shook my head.

“It might be a little expensive, but I’ve been doing some thinking, and I figured I might as well throw it out there, just
in case,” I rambled, and she said, “Jesus, out with it already,” and flicked me on the belly, her newest habit I’d fallen in love with.

“I think we should go to San Francisco,” I told her.

My mother lived in California when she got pregnant, and according to her, my biological father worked in a movie theater on Fillmore Street and won her over with free films and supersize boxes of Milk Duds. For a long time this was the only story I knew about her life before me, and later, when I was old enough to ask questions, she said her years in San Francisco were pretty hard to remember.

“It was a different life, baby,” she told me once. “If it weren’t for you looking back at me the way you do, sometimes I would think I imagined the whole thing.”

Emmy’s face was hard to read since her lips were turning purple and she was shivering so hard, so I kept talking. “It’ll take forever and the ticket’s more expensive, but Greyhound goes from Wheeling to San Francisco in about three days.” We’d talked about spending a week at the beach in Corpus Christi or at the mountains in Fort Collins, but she didn’t know anything about Stella’s life before me, and I figured she was wondering why I’d picked a place so far away. “But it is San Francisco,” I said. “A real city. West coast.”

The Preps were all crouched on the grass by then and laughing as if everything they said to one another was the most magnificent and hilarious thing they’d ever heard, begging us to watch them. It was like a car crash. Something about them made it hard to look away.

“That is a brilliant idea,” Emmy said, and moved her eyes to mine. And then she smiled bigger than I’d seen her smile since her dad left town on that bus.

I didn’t tell Emmy right away that the Greyhound route wouldn’t take us by Mount Rushmore, and I also didn’t tell her about knowing my dad lived in San Francisco, because I wasn’t sure she’d want to be part of a trip that might get me closer to my father while hers just kept getting farther away. None of it really mattered, though, because once we decided to go she couldn’t stop talking about the snow on the Colorado Mountains or the view of the Pacific Ocean, or how big and hopeful the Golden Gate Bridge was going to look when we pulled onto it. We each bought our tickets that night. Emmy used her sister’s credit card and gave the cash to Margie, and I used cash to get a money order at the grocery store and bought my ticket by mail. We’d depart December 27, and even though we agreed to leave California on January 3, I bought a one-way ticket. I didn’t know how long it would take to find my father, and I decided nothing could limit my trip. Not school or Stella, not even Emmy. It was the most impulsive thing I’d ever done, but once I made the purchase I realized I’d been planning it ever since Emmy and I first started talking about going away, maybe even before that, weeks or months or years earlier even, maybe since I first found out Stella had left my dad back in California before I was born.

I’d been hoarding details about my father for as long as I could remember, though the information came in clips and fragments.

“He hated getting haircuts,” Stella whispered once as if offering up an essential piece of information. “He was allergic to mangos and strawberries,” she told me. We were curled on the couch watching
Full House
reruns together when she said, “He used to say we’d move to Mexico. He used to say
he’d buy me a hundred striped bikinis,” and then she put her mug of chamomile down on the carpet. I was nine and wondered why my father had a preference for stripes and if she could remember his favorite color, or whether he preferred stripes that ran from head to toe or side to side, but Stella’s eyes were closed before I had the chance to ask.

I kept each detail planted in my head, hoping one day she might slip and say something monumental, might confess he sent me letters when I was a kid or might tell me he had, in fact, called on each of my birthdays. But of all the things my mother was, she never was a liar. She may have left things out when she wanted, but she never made them up.