Positively Mine (17 page)

“Would you like me to grab your things?” There is such kindness in her voice, I can’t help feeling pangs of guilt.

“If you don’t mind. Thanks.”

She begins to walk out of the bathroom.

But, instead of me leaving well enough alone and allowing her to return upstairs satisfied with my story, I blurt out, “What do I do about the final? I’m not going to be able to do the lab.” It comes out in a nervous, high-pitched squeal and she twists to look at me. The concerned expression that was just there is now changed to quizzical, her eyebrows raised. It’s like she’s had an “Aha” moment.

She continues to observe me so I switch on the faucet and lather my hands, just to do something. Then she finally answers, “Don’t worry about the lab.”

I grab for a paper towel in the dispenser but it’s empty. “Are you sure?” I gulp.

“It’s fine. I’ll come up with a make-up assignment and email it to you. You can get it to me when you feel better.”

There’s something in her voice, on her face…
is she onto me?

She pushes the door. “I’ll send Bryn down with your book bag.”

The loss of wheels in the dead of winter turns out to be paralyzing. I’d gotten used to getting in my grandmother’s truck for anything from a trip to the pharmacy, to finding a decent cup of decaf, to my regular visits with Dr. Adler. As a result, I’ve skipped a couple prenatal visits and my pregnancy support meetings.

Dr. Adler’s office has left several messages, including a few from the doctor himself. He’s concerned. I only have ten weeks to go, and I haven’t been in to see him. I should have had a glucose screening test two weeks ago. Am I getting prenatal care elsewhere? Please call the office to let them know if I am no longer a patient.

Alison has reached out to me also. She knows I no longer have the truck, and she’s offered to help find me rides to meetings. She, too, wants to know what I’m doing about my prenatal care.

I don’t call either of them back.

The bookstore has become my source for clothing since I’ve outgrown every slouchy sweater, all the things I bought with Tara in the city, and even my magical red vest. I thought about ordering more maternity clothes online but with my bank account dwindling on the brink of being totally depleted, my only means of paying would be my father’s Visa card. It’s not an option. So now, as I grow bigger, I purchase larger and larger Colman sweatshirts and drawstring pants. I’ve moved into the men’s department now, and I have to say, they’re doing a decent job covering me up. My face and butt are even rounder now, off-setting my basketball of a stomach. In these baggy clothes, I just look fat – twenty-five pounds fatter to be precise. I’ve stopped looking at myself naked in the mirror.

The clothing department is upstairs with one lone dressing room, and the clerks behind the registers downstairs leave me to try on whatever I want. I think they are beginning to talk about me, though. I heard some whispering that sounded like “she should lay off the all-you-can-eat cafeteria food” one evening when I was in here.

I don’t care. It’s an easy place for me to pick stuff up, and my father doesn’t seem to notice when the bills reach him that I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on sweats this winter alone. If he has, he hasn’t said anything.

As I stand at the counter with yet another pile of clothes, I wait for the clerk to run everything through. It’s 8:50pm on Friday, and the bookstore is empty with the exception of me and this pimply-faced high school kid who doesn’t seem to know how to work the register. It’s not like I’m in a rush or anything. I have nowhere I need to be. I’ve declined every social invite I’ve received since J-term ended: first by feigning the flu; then blaming homework overload. Finally, people stopped bothering to include me at all which makes it really easy, although kind of depressing at the same time.

While I wait, I can hear throngs of students clambering past the door, noisy with the enthusiasm of a Friday night. There’s only a week until midterms, so this is the last party weekend before everyone has to buckle down. There is an unusually loud energy in the air tonight.

Now the cashier can’t seem to get the scanner gun to work, and there is no supervisor around to help him, so he starts to manually type in every bar code number. My eyes wander over to the Colman school spirit table, and out of boredom I start riffling through the hats, scarves, mugs and magnets all adorned with Colman’s signature blue and green “C.”

Bells jingle as someone enters the store, and I am hopeful a manager has returned who can show this kid how to check me out; otherwise I’ll be here ’til midnight. Instead, when I turn to look, it’s Liz appearing just as surprised to see me as I am her.

“Laurel?”

I instinctively pull the two sides of my coat together and fake a smile. “Hey. What are you doing here?”

“Ran out of tampons.” The clerk blushes and coughs at this information. She doesn’t seem to notice and treads across the room to stand right in front of me, too close, and with the eight inches she has on me, I am forced to crick my neck to look up at her.

“Where’ve you been, Laurel?”

“What do you mean?”

“You, like, disappeared entirely.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Uh, yeah, you have.” She walks down the aisle with the toothpaste, toothbrushes, soaps, shampoos, razors, a collage of condoms and any other self-maintenance item a college student might need in a pinch and grabs a box of Tampax. Then she plops it on the counter. I don’t answer, but it doesn’t seem to matter. “You should come out tonight.”

She’s chirpy and bubbly, maybe even a little bit buzzed already. And though my first thought is to say no, I’ve been so isolated for so long, “Okay,” comes out of my mouth instead.

Soon, the two of us are standing in the crowded kitchen of an off-campus house that belongs to four junior guys Liz has become friends with. She is right at home, and I can tell she’s been here a lot based on how she helps herself to beers in their fridge and snacks in the pantry, not to mention how two of them slap her on the ass as they walk by and she giggles. I take a beer from her when she offers me one, though I don’t take a sip.

“So how do you know these guys?”

“ Parties.” She shrugs. “Aren’t you dying? Why don’t you take off your coat?”

“I’m okay.”

Liz continues, “Yeah, so Nick, that guy over there, organized a big ski trip to Tahoe for spring break. There’s like twenty of us going.” She points to a good-looking, muscly blonde with his back up against the wall. He winks at her when he sees her pointing. I have to hand it to her, she is in her element.

Looking around the room filled with students from all classes and how friendly and familiar everyone is with each other; I realize what I’ve missed out on. I’m like a stranger on this campus. Even June from across the hall, who was so shy in September, is here laughing with a group of girls in the living room. Mikayla and Olivia barely acknowledge me.

“So, seriously, Laurel, where’ve you been?” Liz interrupts my revelation.

I bite my lip, contemplating how to answer. “I think this year just kind of overwhelmed me. The heavy course work plus some personal stuff…”

I worry that she’s going to press for more, but she doesn’t seem to have the attention span for anything too deep, and she quickly changes topic. “So what happened between you and Mike?”

“What do you mean?” My voice cracks a little.

She bites on the bottle top of her beer, eyes sideways with suspicion. “Something happened between you two.”

“What makes you say that?”

“’Cause every time he has more than a couple shots of Jagermeister, you’re all he talks about.”

“Really?” I feel the color burning my cheeks.

“Uh-huh.”

I play dumb. “What does he say?”

“What doesn’t he say?” She smirks.

The muscles in my jaw tense up. “Like what?”

“Stuff. I don’t know. I’ve started tuning him out.” She seems to be getting bored as her eyes are now scanning the room. She smiles when muscle man Nick meets her gaze.

When she remembers I’m standing in front of her, she says, “You’ve gotten under his skin. That’s all.”

Nick comes over and grabs her by the waist.

“Maybe you should make a move on him,” she says as she gets pulled into the dining room, now the dance room. “He’s supposed to be stopping by tonight,” she calls as she disappears into the crowd.

That’s my cue to duck out.

Prof. Stoker passed me with a C- in Plant Biology after I turned in a pretty lousy essay on the evolutionary similarities of various plant DNA. I managed to get out of Intro to Biology 2, which I had registered for back in October and what would have been the logical follow-up to the class I took in the fall. But, with the threat of potential lab chemicals harming my baby, I switched to a course called Biology Theory. The joke in the science department is that it is the biology class for biology-challenged students, taken to satisfy Colman’s science requirement and it doesn’t involve a lab. The one problem is that Prof. Stoker teaches it. She’s a great teacher and all but she makes me uncomfortable every time she looks my way these days.

After class one icy morning, she calls to me, “Do you have some time to talk?”

I nod and swallow back the saliva pooling in my mouth.
What now?

We walk the three arctic blocks to her office, battling the heavy wind blowing off the lake. Once we’re in her office and thawed out, she asks me to close the door.

“Is everything okay?” I ask. “Did I screw something up?”

“Your grades are fine.” She lets out a deep breath. “I’m not entirely sure how to bridge this with you.”

“What?”

“Well, you and I have been working closely together now for months. And I can’t help noticing how…you’re changing.”

“Changing?”

“Your body. Look, I’ve got three children. I know what pregnancy looks like even if it’s strategically hidden under sweatshirts.”

I swallow hard and pull my backpack onto my lap.

“I just want to make sure that you are okay.”

I don’t answer.

She continues. “It’s the reason you ran out of the lab in January, isn’t it?”

I have no words.

“I’m not passing judgment on you.” She sighs. “When are you due?”

“May 4
^th
,” I whisper.

“Do you have a doctor?”

“I did, in Canandaigua, but I have no way to get there anymore, so I haven’t been in a couple months. I missed my glucose test, too.”

“Oh, Laurel.” She rubs her eyes. “You should have come to me. I can drive you.”

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“Why not? I drive my kids over to Canandaigua all the time for sports anyway. Prenatal care is very important.”

I feel my eyes beginning to well up. “I was going every month in the beginning. But then my grandmother’s truck broke down and that was that.”

“Call and schedule your next appointment. You can check my calendar online to see where I have openings.”

I force back the burning tears. “Thank you.”

She continues. “Do you have any help? The baby’s father? Friends? Family?”

“A couple friends and a support group in Rochester, although I haven’t been there in months either. The baby’s father doesn’t know.” I whisper. “Or my dad.”

“So since you’re being so secretive, if you don’t mind my asking, are you planning to keep this baby?”

“I’m hoping to. Although, with everything that’s happened sometimes I wonder how.”

She lets the morning slip by while I tell her my story. When I’m done, she doesn’t say anything.

“Am I crazy to try this?” I ask.

“I don’t know, Laurel. I can’t answer that for you. But I will say this, and it sounds like you’ve heard it before, if that is what you think you want to do, you need to come out of hiding. You can’t have a baby in the dorms, you can’t conceal a child when you go home to visit your father and his new wife, and in all fairness to the baby’s father, you’ve got to tell him. It’s the decent thing to do.”

“I know.”

I pass my glucose test with flying colors. I can’t say the same about my midterms. I’m a lot more distracted this semester – maybe it’s the hormones - but it’s not as easy to throw myself into work to get my mind off things as it was in the fall. I did fine in biology, but the test for my freshman seminar, Understanding Cultural Diversity, turned out to be much harder than I ever thought. And why I decided to take up French this semester for the first time, I can’t answer. Maybe I just needed to torture myself more with Madame Beurnier, who teaches it. And Sociology 101 is a crapshoot. I guess I’ll find out after spring break, which brings me to my other dilemma.

Since my conversation with Prof. Stoker, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to finally tell my father. With spring break coming up, I decided that the best thing would be for me to go home and just do it already. I’m so big now, even if I can’t find the words, my belly can do the talking. But the other day when I tried to use my voucher to make a reservation, I found out that the airlines won’t let you fly once you are more than thirty-two weeks pregnant. The last thing I need is to be singled-out and booted off a crowded plane. So I put my name on the rideshare board and then called my father to let him know I’d be coming home.

But based on how this year has gone, shouldn’t I have known that something else would get in the way? After three phone calls, two voicemails and a couple texts that he didn’t respond to, I knew something was up. So finally, I called his secretary, who informed me he and Sheryl had gone to Paris. They wanted some time alone before the baby arrived.

“They didn’t tell you?” she asked.

“I just forgot,” I lied.

Funny thing is, a few months back I would have been incensed that he didn’t bother to let me know he was traveling – especially with my spring break coming up. But mostly what I feel is disappointment for yet another missed opportunity.

I text Tara to see what she’s up to. She calls me back, and I can hear the waves breaking in the background.