Pride and Prep School (4 page)

She wrinkles her nose at the mention of urine and asks, “Why first thing? Why wait?”

“The hormone that indicates you’re pregnant is more concentrated in the morning since you haven’t peed it out. But I guess you
could
try now.”

“No,” she says quickly. “I’ll wait.”

“Okay.” I hand her her purchase, which she hastily hides in her knockoff Chanel hobo bag. We wait for a moment in front of the house and I remember sitting here listening to Bob Marley with Michael. What did he think when he saw me standing there stupid and speechless in a suburban CVS with a pregnancy test kit in my hand? I realize that the answer matters to me. A lot. But I don’t have the luxury of thinking about that now.

I ask Cassie, “Do you want to tell anyone else?”

“Not until I know for sure.”

“Are you going to tell Jeremy?”

“He’ll hate me!”

I’ve run out of patience with this, but I make myself hold on for a few more minutes and the scowl this effort produces is so deep that it actually hurts my face.

“I don’t think he’ll do you much good whether he knows or not,” I tell her.

“It’s not like he’s even talking to me, remember?” she snaps.

I reach my limits and open the car and go into the house. She follows and we try to spend the rest of the day as if everything were normal. Tori goes out with Trey that night and Mom and Dad go to a lecture at Meryton College, where he teaches, so it’s Leigh and Cassie and I watching TV together for a while until I go upstairs and check my email and Facebook. Soon an IM from Michael pops up.

Are you okay? it says.

I type back, “Yes.”

Surprised to see you in East Longbourne.

Surprised to see YOU. Slumming?

He ignores my sarcasm.

I was on my way back from the Y in Netherfield. I teach little kids to swim there.

So now I feel like a Grade-A asswaffle.

“That’s really cool,” I type.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he types back, “You seemed upset,” and then signs off just as Cassie comes in, leaving me no chance to worry what Michael thinks about me and the pregnancy test kit he’d seen in my hand.

“Will you watch the test with me?” she asks.

Despite everything, I almost smile at this.

“I don’t think we have to
watch
it. A pink line will pop up on it—or not. Hopefully not.” I force a supportive smile at her then. I cannot even imagine what she’s feeling, and not just because there is no way I could be in her position. That would involve the kind of miracle that God, if he exists, would not reserve for the likes of me. I would make a very poor Madonna. “But I’ll be there with you and time it.”

“Thanks,” she sniffles.

“No problem.”

She hangs out in my room for a while, looking at some of my books but not reading any of them. I think she just can’t stand holding it in anymore, acting normal around Leigh and everyone else, pretending that everything is fine. Or maybe she’s just mad that she had to call in sick for the away game tonight. Either way, she seems to need to be there but not to talk, so I let her.

***

She’s at the edge of my bed at 6:30 the next morning, bouncing from one foot to the other because she has to pee so badly. She does so on the Pee Stick of Fate and we stand there with it perched on the edge of the sink while I hold a wristwatch whose minute hands don’t seem to move.

She says, “I have to pee, like, all the time now.”

I figure that’s probably not a good sign given the outcome she’s hoping for so I just say, “Yeah?”

Finally, she asks, “It’s gotta be time, right?”

I nod.

“You look,” she says. Her face is very white and I’m not sure she can remember to breathe.

I look and see only one fuchsia line and practically yell, “It’s negative! There
is
a God.”

She sinks to the floor in a crouch, asking, “Could it be wrong?” She’s looking up at me and I have never seen her eyes so big and plaintive.

“Cassie?” I ask, and then it feels like a freight train has barreled into me. “Wait—are you disa
ppointed
?”

She nods guiltily.

“You realize how in
sane
that is, don’t you? Did you think that Jeremy was going to start returning your calls once he found out you were going to be the mother of his child? That was
never
going to happen.”

After what seems like a full minute she lets out her breath.

“I know,” she says in the quietest voice I have ever heard her use. “I know that.”

I sigh so mightily my bangs fly up over my head.

“Thanks,” she says, and then she shuffles away, just as Leigh knocks on the door and demands to use the toilet. I let her in and crawl back into bed, but I know I’m not getting back to sleep.

I tell Shondra about it later when I call to apologize for missing her and her friend yesterday. And she is really understanding about Cassie and what seems to be the biggest and saddest delusion I have ever heard of.

“I guess love makes you desperate sometimes,” she says. “I just hope no one else finds out. All she needs is for the rumors to kick up a notch. Before Winter Break, Willow and her crew will convince everyone that she’s having twins.”

“
Alien
twins. Illegitimate space babies,” I chuckle, but I’m thinking that while the rest of the world will never know about Cassie’s misadventure, Michael Endicott knows that I just bought a pregnancy test from a local CVS.

Still, no matter what I have ever thought about Michael—and most of it was bad at first, I admit—I think I know that he stands outside the gossip loop by choice and would never enter it, even with this primo bit of scuttlebutt. That sort of thing seems so far beneath him as to be subterranean.

Still, he has a surprise of a different sort for me the next day after school.

Even though Michael Endicott has shown up at my house twice now, it’s still a bit of a shock when I open the door the next day to find him on our front porch, trying to rehang the metal mailbox that the mailman keeps knocking off. He smiles when he sees me.

“Hey, Georgia! May I talk to you?”

“Um, sure,” I say and usher him in with the sweep of my hand. We stand in the entryway for a second of uncertainty, engulfed, practically, in the really loud floral wallpaper the previous owners had put up in the entry. It feels like we’re standing in some hideous, garish jungle in which all the plants grow in curlicues. I’m sure his house has nothing like this on the walls. “What’s up?” I ask as casually as I can, hoping he’s not carrying any pamphlets from one of those scam “pregnancy support” clinics. He saved me from disaster on New Year’s Eve; maybe now he’d come to save me and the fetus he imagined was swimming around inside me.

“Well, I’m not quite sure how to say this …” he says with uncharacteristic hesitation. He actually looks at me as if for help, and his eyes strike me as bigger than I had thought before, and dark, like melted chocolate chips. They are very nice eyes, actually, when he’s not scrunching them up with a scowl or a frown.

“Do you want a drink or something?” I offer; he nods gratefully and follows me into the kitchen, the site of some of our oddest conversations. “Something warm?” I ask and he nods again so I put on the teakettle. I sit down at the little table that has been cleared for once of photos of coveted décor my mom has ripped out of magazines. Michael sits and runs a finger along the bumpy surface of a blue and white woven placemat. He seems so characteristically rattled that I am getting worried.

“Hey, that was weird running into you in CVS Saturday, right?” I offer and force a smile that I hope looks worldly and assured, as if I often encounter men in the feminine hygiene aisle and handle them with aplomb each and every time.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Look,” I start as I jump up to grab the wailing teakettle and pour the hot water into two mugs. I hold up a box of British Breakfast tea and one of hot chocolate mix. Michael points to the tea and I plunk a bag into each mug and set them on the table. As I return from the fridge, I say, “Don’t worry, this is actual milk from cows, not almonds or soybeans or anything freaky. Don’t get your knickers in a bunch.” He smiles and pours some milk. “The sugar’s right there. So, um, the CVS …”

He stirs his tea with the spoon I had offered and nods.

“Yeah. I saw what you were buying.” He looks up at me from under the curls made even more frenzied than usual by static from his knit hat. “And I messaged you yesterday because I could tell you were embarrassed. So I wanted to tell you, since I didn’t yesterday, that I won’t tell anybody what I saw. What you were buying.”

“I know that.” Still, I can feel relief seep through my body the way the tea is suffusing the hot water in my chipped striped coffee mug. “I wasn’t buying it for me, you know.”

This actually produces a laugh. I mean it. Michael is practically shaking with the hilarity that I myself would have any need of a pregnancy test. “Of
course
not!” he chuckles, stirring his tea, and I can feel anger starting to prickle at my nerve endings.

“And the very idea is comedy gold because—” I prompt.

He looks at me uncomprehendingly for a second, as if I have suddenly broken into Swahili, and says, “Because it was so obviously not a purchase for you!”

“Because…” I can feel the resentment coloring me inside, a dark bitter brown like my tea. I can’t help it. I’m insulted that he thinks it is so preposterous that I would find myself in need of such a purchase.

“Because you’re not that stupid,” he blurts out, then ducks his head for a second because he can sense that that was the wrong thing to say and I am going to blow like Vesuvius.

“Stupid?” I practically shout. “Only
stupid
people get pregnant?”

“Nooooo,” he says slowly, looking me in the eye. “Plenty of intelligent women get pregnant, too, but they
plan
it. They don’t find themselves … ‘knocked up’ or whatever.”

I almost spit out my tea with a guffaw at how ridiculous the phrase “knocked up” sounds coming out of his mouth.

“So it is inconceivable that the test kit is mine because I am too intelligent to get ‘knocked up’? Or because it is inconceivable that I would
get
knocked up, that someone would, in fact, knock me up? Because who would find
me
attractive enough to sleep with?” I sound shrill, and for some stupid reason I can feel that warning tingling in my nose and the stinging of tears behind my eyelids. Maybe it’s because I am actually angry that Michael did
not
misconstrue the situation, which makes no sense, really, even to me.

He’s obviously surprised, too, because he looks at me in amazement, then grins crookedly. “Georgia, if you recall, on New Year’s Eve, I witnessed you come perilously close to sleeping with someone.”

“‘Perilously close’?” I repeat, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from crying and hating myself for feeling like I’m going to. But I feel so humiliated, so insulted that he could think that no sober male could ever want me. “Thank God you saved me from disaster!”

“Getting involved with Jeremy would have been a disaster. Trust me on this,” he says, and he leans forward across the table slightly. “But I also know that, even as drunk as you were, you aren’t stupid enough to have gotten in serious trouble.”

“There’s that word again. ‘Stupid’ enough?”

“Okay.” He pauses and frowns, trying to get his words right. “I am assuming that you, like any student in any high school in any enlightened state in the union, has managed to pick up enough information in Sex Ed to know that you need to use protection to prevent pregnancy and disease. Yes?”

“Yes. So you know it’s Cassie who needed the test kit, Cassie who is too stupid to have picked up anything in Sex Ed class.
That’s
what you’re saying? Well, now I’m relieved. You’re insulting my
sis
ter, not me. Big,
big
relief here!”

“No. I wasn’t thinking about your sister at all, though it wasn’t hard to figure out that she’s the one who needed to take the test.” He smirks and removes the teabag from his cup, wrapping the string around the bag in the cradle of the spoon to squeeze out all of the liquid.

I flinch. “How do you know Cassie had sex with Jeremy Wrentham?” He looks at me with eyebrows raised and I feel my cheeks get hot. “Oh. Yeah. I forget
ev
erybody knows.”

He stands, takes his tea bag over to the trashcan, and disposes it. He admits, “I was going to talk to you about her and Jeremy, yeah, but that’s not the
main
reason I came.”

I frown and dip my teabag up and down in my cup. “So you had another reason besides lecturing me and my sister on the use of prophylactics and insulting us?”

He leans against the counter and sighs. “How, exactly, am I insulting you? All I’ve said is that I feel I know you well enough to know that you’re not like your sister, to know that you were not really going to do anything with Jeremy, no matter how messed up you were that night. You’re still, basically, a rational person—despite how you’re acting right now.”

“Okay, so I’m not a skank like my sister. I’m a
rat
ional creature. What a relief that
I
remain in your good graces!”

Michael’s jaw tightens and his brow darkens. “Georgia, you don’t belong with a guy like Jeremy.”

“Tell me, O wise one. What sort of guy
do
I belong with, since I’m smarter than my slut sister Cassie, who did fall for the wicked Jeremy Wrentham?”

“Jeremy
is
wicked, Georgia. You don’t know. And I never called your sister that name.”

“No, maybe not. But you called her stupid.”

His eyes are huge with shock and fury now as he moves back over to the table.

“When? When did I say that?”

“You said that she was among the few who are too dumb to benefit from Sex Ed class. And that she is attracted to Jeremy
because
she’s that stupid. But Michael, I was attracted to Jeremy, too, so what does that say about me, in your estimation?” We glower at each other for a moment and I can practically see frustration radiating like waves off of his body. But as usual, my mouth is at least three seconds behind my brain and it goes off again. “Jeremy Wrentham is a human sewer pipe. I get that. But at least he is funny. And fun. He’s not smug and stiff and so
ra
tional all the time. So I guess if you think Cassie is stupid and beneath you for feeling that way, then I am, too.”

He drops a palm on the wobbly table so hard that tea spills out of both of our cups, staining the placemats. He looks down at me with one eyebrow cocked and a smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. As he pulls his tan barn jacket off the back of his chair and looks at me under furrowed brows, he says, “It seems this time
you’ve
rescued
me
from making a fool of myself. So I guess we’re even.”

“Rescued you from what? I don’t understand.” I’ve never seen him look like this, not angry or superior, but … sad. Crushed, even.

“I don’t understand either. That’s what makes this
really
funny.” He looks down at a loose thread on the cuff of his jacket sleeve and pulls at it gently. “I haven’t understood one word of our conversation today, and that’s what’s really funny, actually, because I came here to tell you … I came here because I wanted to talk to you so much …” He looks at me for a second with a sorrowful smile on his face. “I was going to ask you out, Georgia. I was irrational enough to think that
I
am the kind of guy you should go out with. Me. Not Jeremy.”

“Really?” I am so stunned, I just say lamely, “You come in here, insult me, insult my sister—”

“Again, how have I insulted you?” he demands. “I’m suggesting that you are an attractive and smart and you deserve better than to sleep with Jeremy and have him ignore you in the cafeteria the next day. Unless that’s what you want..”

I stand up and place my fists on the table as I struggle for control.

“You insulted
me
by insulting my
fam
ily! By saying, basically, that my sister Cassie is a pathetic, dimwitted little skank who got what she deserved when she became the school’s favorite topic of conversation, the town pariah. Was I supposed to be flattered by that? I know we’re no match for the illustrious Endicotts of Longbourne—”

“Oh, don’t start with that,” he groans as he wraps his Burberry scarf around his neck, twisting so tight that I’m afraid he’ll strangle himself. “I never said your sister was a skank and I never said my family was better than yours.”

“You don’t have to
say
it!” I cry. “It’s so freaking obvious by the way you carry yourself.”

He picks up his leather gloves and holds them between his hands for a second like he’s meditating or seeking divine intervention.

“At least we both enjoy irony, right? And this whole afternoon has been nothing if not ironic. I actually wanted to be with you. ” He chuckles a bit and his eyes are calm again now, with no more dark flashes of anger and irritation. I feel my whole body grow very cold suddenly. “Well. I’m sure you’ll make it hilarious in the retelling.”

He takes a few steps toward the back door and I say, still stunned, “I’m not going to tell anybody anything.”

He stops and turns. “Just tell me one thing,” he says. “Where did your sister and Jeremy … Where were they when they, you know …” He actually blushes slightly.

“When they did the nasty?” I snort. “How would
I
know? I don’t have a prurient interest in her sex life like you and everyone else.”

He looks at me impatiently. “
Really
, Georgia? You think
that’s
what all this has been about? Look, do you think they were here? At your house?”

“I’m pretty sure I would have noticed that, Michael.”

He sighs. “So they were most likely at Jeremy’s?”

I sigh, too, frustrated enough to throw the sugar bowl at the wall but I keep my voice as calm as I can.

“Yeah, I guess so. Unless Jeremy has a volcano lair somewhere, like all good super-villains.”

He smirks and says, “Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know, really.”