Immaculate (11 page)

“Okay,” she said at last, her strawberry-blonde pigtails bobbing as she nodded at me, a very solemn look spreading over her rosy freckled face.

“Okay?” I asked, still waiting to take my next breath.

She stepped in closer to me, so close that the tips of our noses were practically touching. So close that I could see one small tear slowly rolling down her cheek.

“You're my big sister, Mina, and for you, I'll believe in miracles.”

chapter seven

“I think they
all know, Han, I really do,” I said under my breath after a few furtive glances behind me—just to be positive that no one was lurking around, eavesdropping. “I swear, I can just feel people staring at me. It's like little lasers pricking the back of my neck. They won't make eye contact when I pass them in the hall, and then they whisper as soon as I've walked by—as soon as they think that I can't hear them anymore.” I opened my mouth to take a bite of my peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't force myself to put food in my stomach. I had no appetite, not when I was sitting in the middle of a crowded cafeteria overflowing with all the people whom I was most afraid of at the moment.

Hannah noticed my resistance and gave me a pointed look, a look that she'd been perfecting over the last few weeks:
This isn't just about you. You have to think about the baby
.

“You're so controlling,” I muttered, shoving the sandwich in my mouth and flashing a sarcastic grin as I chewed.

“Good girl. Anyway, I think it's all in your head, Meen.” She lowered her voice and leaned in closer to me. “Besides, how would anyone else know? Even I can't see the bump you're talking about, though it would be hard to see much of anything under all the baggy mom shirts you've been wearing. So that leaves me, your family, Dr. Keller, Nate, and Izzy. Your family is automatically ruled out because they're your family, obviously. Dr. Keller would be breaking all sorts of doctor confidentiality rules if she told anyone, Nate would look too pathetic and bitter, and Izzy . . . Izzy would never do that. I don't care how upset she may be right now. She wouldn't ever be that disloyal to you.”

I hoped that she was right, of course, even if I wasn't nearly as confident about the last two suspects as she was. But I still couldn't shake it, the feeling of being watched that had followed me everywhere since the first day of school.

“And let's be real, Meen,” she said, popping a few red grapes into her mouth. “There are plenty of other reasons for people to be talking. You and Nate broke up out of absolutely nowhere, and neither of you will say why or how that happened, and Izzy hasn't so much as waved at you in the hallway since we got back. And, to top it off, you and I are sitting alone at lunch like some rejected, pathetic castaways. Everyone is obviously wondering what you did to annihilate two of the three closest relationships you had. And they're probably wondering about me, too, by association.” She paused, looking away from me to stare down at her plate. “Honestly, you know you'd be whispering about someone else, too, if their life took such a dramatic downhill turn.”

“Wow. Thank you, Hannah,” I said quietly, shoving the rest of my sandwich back into the brown paper bag and crumpling it up into a tight ball in my hands. “Thanks for putting my life so perfectly into perspective for me. I needed that.”

She winced and I looked away, frustrated with both of us. In a moment of weakness, I couldn't stop myself from peeking over at the exact spot that I so painstakingly avoided each lunch period, the big oval table closest to the counter where Hannah and I had sat every day for the last three years of high school. It was the traditional home table for the popular kids—not necessarily the trendiest or the most attractive or the most intimidating, but the kids who were the full package deal. The best athletes, the best students, the best of the best all around in everything there was to be best at, really. Smarts, talent, ambition, good looks—all wrapped up together, a killer combo. They were the people who most of the other tables aspired to be and aspired to be friends with. The people whom they wanted to be partnered up with for projects, wanted to hang out with on the weekends, wanted to be seen with in the hallways. I had always secretly questioned if I would ever have made it there on my own—my perfect grades alone weren't enough, not without other, cooler attributes to round me out, make me more of a Renaissance girl. Izzy had her dazzling athletic talents and Hannah was blonde and blue-eyed, but they were both so much more than that. They were intelligent and outgoing and confident. They lit up rooms. Between them and then Nate, I was carried along by association. And I had convinced myself that I belonged in that crowd, no matter how I'd landed there in the first place.

But now, after seeing how quickly and neatly I could be removed from the equation, I couldn't help but think I'd never belonged as much as I had let myself believe. They looked unchanged to me now, sitting there at our old table, as if nothing at all had shaken up the established equilibrium. Sasha, Molly, Quinn, Erin—we'd sat together in classes, cheered at Nate's soccer and basketball games, celebrated birthdays, primped for dances. But maybe I'd still been
Menius
to them all along, the nerdy good girl who probably thought that she was above everyone else. Only I had never thought that—I was just proud of my grades and proud of how hard I worked. Maybe I could have gone to more Friday night football games, said yes to more shopping trips to the mall, cared more about hair and makeup and girl talk with anyone besides Hannah and Izzy. But I'd stupidly felt secure about my place there. And even if I
had
tried harder to fit in, I'd still be sitting at a different table right now, wouldn't I? I'd still be the girl who used to date Nate, the girl who used to be friends with Izzy. I couldn't have altered the natural order of things, not permanently.

I watched Nate and Izzy, their chairs on opposite ends, as far apart as two people could be without sitting at two different tables. I could tell, even from my position halfway across the room, that they were carefully avoiding each other. They'd nod and laugh along with the group when the other talked, but they didn't go out of their way to say anything one-on-one—probably because the one thing and the one person they'd most like to talk about wouldn't make for appropriate lunchroom conversation. Otherwise, they looked entirely normal, happy, and at ease. No one would ever have guessed that either of them was secretly torn up on the inside, devastated with missing me. Maybe that was because they weren't. Maybe they'd both already moved on.

A sudden thought banged against me like a fist to the gut. Had they been talking outside of school? Were they comparing notes about me? Going over all the reasons why I was a horrible best friend and a horrible girlfriend? The idea of the two of them bonding over some newly discovered mutual hate made me feel sick. And it also made me furious. I had done
nothing
wrong. Not a single thing. They just couldn't believe that—they couldn't believe
me
.

But I wouldn't cry. I wouldn't cry. I wouldn't cry.

“I'm sorry, Mina. I didn't mean for it to sound like that,” Hannah said.

I tore my eyes away from Nate, who was in the middle of telling a story that had the entire table in hysterics. But just as I was about to turn back to Hannah, I noticed that
I
was being watched, too, the target of a too-pretty girl with glossy black hair and red lips twisted up in a smirk. Arielle Fowler—I'd known who she was since the first day of kindergarten, but we'd never been friends, or anything close to friends. She hadn't sat at our lunch table before, though she moved in the same circles as most of the people who did. But there she was now, taking up a spot that would have belonged to me or Hannah before.

Arielle was the head cheer captain and the shoo-in lead for school plays, a blending of after-school worlds that usually didn't collide. But she was unnervingly beautiful—a real-life Snow White with her wavy raven hair and flawless porcelain skin—and so normal rules didn't apply to her. Though unlike Snow White, she had never been friendly, at least not to me. I had always gotten the feeling that she could see right through me with her dark-lashed doe eyes—that she knew I didn't really fit in. That she, too, wondered why Nate would choose someone like me, when she'd openly had a crush on him for as long as I had.

“Meen?” Hannah asked, forcing me to break away from Arielle's unsettling stare. “Are you listening to me? They have no clue what's really going on, so you need to just do your best to ignore them. You can't let them bother you and stress you out too much . . . It's not healthy.” There was the look. Again.

I took a deep breath to stop myself from exploding, to remind myself that her intentions were good, even if they weren't always spectacularly executed. She was trying her best; she genuinely was. She could have sat at our old table with all her other friends who didn't hate her, but she hadn't. I doubted that the idea had even crossed her mind. I exhaled and looked into her brilliant blue eyes.

“But it's not just how it looks from the outside, is it, Hannah? Nate really did break up with me, and one of my best friends really does hate me. My dad can't bring himself to look at me, let alone speak to me, and everywhere I turn, I find my mom hiding out somewhere and crying to herself. Last night I found her sitting on the washing machine in the basement and sobbing when she thought I was up in my room doing homework.”

“You have Gracie, though.”

She said that as if it made up for everything else—as if this one vote of support in my favor could make all the difference. And maybe it did, to be honest, because I don't know how I could have woken up every morning if Gracie had turned against me, too.

“Seriously, Meen, little kids are like a litmus test for right and wrong. She believes you because she knows that you're a good person and that you wouldn't lie to her. She's not old enough or jaded enough to question it.”

“And you're not old enough or jaded enough, either, I take it?”

“I have a uniquely optimistic sensibility. I like to hope for the best in people.” She smiled and squeezed my hand under the table.

I smiled back at her, a real smile, even though I still sensed her uncertainty. “I can live with that answer.”

And I meant that—for now, at least. I didn't know what she did or didn't believe, but as far as I could tell, she didn't know either. She may have still thought that I was repressing the real explanation, locking the traumatizing truth away so deep and dark in my mind somewhere even I wouldn't know where to find it again. But in that case, she wouldn't think I was straight out lying to her, or at least not any more than I was lying to myself. I wanted her to know as absolutely as I did that that was
not
what had happened, but I had no proof. I could accept whatever doubts she had, though, because she was still sitting there next to me. That mattered most.

“So your dad . . . He isn't budging at all, then?”

My smile evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. “Nope. Still a total stalemate. I don't think he's looked at me, not once. He won't even sit at the dinner table with us, just gets his food and goes straight to his office and shuts the door. My mom and Gracie both keep a straight face and chatter away while we eat as if everything's all normal, but I know they miss him, even if they're angry at him, too, for my sake.”

“I'm sorry, Meen . . .”

“Don't be. It'll be fine. He has to come around at some point.” I hoped that if I thought and said that out loud enough, it would inevitably become true. I could make it true; I just had to want it and will it with everything I had in me. But I couldn't know anything for sure, obviously. I couldn't predict how my dad or Nate or Izzy would ever come to terms with my pregnancy, or if they would ever come to terms with it at all. There wasn't exactly a precedent to guide me for this type of real-life drama. Except for the Bible, I suppose, but the people in my life didn't seem to swallow the magic miracle pill quite as easily as they did back in the day.

Go figure. Mary had it so easy.

Not that I thought that I was
actually
the next Mary. I didn't know what I was or what I was doing, but to even think for a second that I was carrying some world-altering gift from God—not just a gift, but the next
Jesus
, the next Messiah, the almighty savior of the whole damn universe—seemed like total blasphemy, a surefire way to send myself straight to the Devil's flaming lair of tortured souls. If I even believed there was a Hell to be sent to, anyway, let alone a God, or at least a God in the way that the Bible described.

I didn't know what I really thought or what I really believed about anything anymore. I couldn't separate absolutes from myths, facts from fiction. I couldn't say what was real and what wasn't real.

How could anything in the world ever be predictable after this?

How could there ever be any certainty? Any guarantees?

Maybe I'd wake up tomorrow and the sky would be tangerine orange and dotted with fluffy green clouds. Grass would be hot pink, puppies would be singing, kittens would be dancing with top hats and canes, and we'd all be soaring like eagles through the sky, flying with our arms fanned out behind us to catch the gusts of wind.