What Happens Next (27 page)

“But Sid, I’ve always—”

“I will walk right out of here, I swear to god, Mom. Right out the door.”

“Okay, fine. But I’m talking to Dr. Garritano when your exam is over.”

The nurse calls me into the exam room. When the doctor comes in, they weigh me, measure me, and take my blood pressure, and then begin to ask me a ton of questions. I answer most of the questions, no problem, but when he gets to the question about whether I’m sexually active, I freeze.

“How you answer that question will stay between us, Cassidy,” the doctor says.

I look over at the nurse. She nods a bit, trying to assure me that he’s telling the truth.

The doctor doesn’t look at me, he just scribbles what is surely nonsense on my chart.

My heart thumps. Because this is another chance that I have to tell.

God, I need to tell. I know I do. It is so inherently wrong, in so many god-awful ways, what happened to me. I look around the exam room, I look at the nurse and at the doctor. I think about my mother sitting out in the waiting room, flipping through a dog-eared copy of
Redbook
. She knows something is wrong, but she can’t put her finger on it.

I open my mouth…

I try to say it…

I try to tell…

but I can’t.

The doctor looks up from his chart. My mouth goes dry with thoughts of telling, and I can’t do it. So I answer the doctor’s question.

“Yes,” I respond. “Not now, though. About six months ago.”

And I hope like hell it will be left at that.

“Were you safe? Did you use protection?” he asks, looking at me dead-on this time.

No. I was not safe. No. I was not protected.

But that’s not what I say. What I say is the lie.

“Yes. I am always safe.”

After the exam, when my mom comes into the room, I am out of my napkin dress and fully clothed again. She asks the doctor, right in front of me, if I’m a healthy weight. He shows her on his growth chart where I fall. She is dying for it to be below the curve. But I fall right at the very low end of normal, just a hair above the little red line.

“Now get off my back already, Mom. God!” I say when we leave the office and head toward the car.

I turn on the radio so she won’t try to talk to me.

I look out the window and am thankful that they weighed me before I took off my clothes for the pelvic exam, which, by the way, is sheer torture, and don’t let anyone tell you any different. Anyhow, like I said, they weighed me before the exam. I have on multiple layers and put two crescent wrenches in the bottom pockets of my cargo pants before we left home. Clever, huh? Altogether, it added three extra pounds. I still gained the other five the hard way though, so I need to lose three pounds to be at my goal weight again.

I ate a lot to gain those five pounds in three days. And the Urge only broke me once. And it was brutal to cut out the running. I had nightmares every night. I felt guilty and good at the same time, all the time. It’s hard to explain—it was like this roller coaster. To eat as much as I did and to keep it down made me feel good in one way, because, physically, it tasted and felt good to my body, but I’d feel guilty at the same time because I knew it was a lot of calories and I shouldn’t be eating it. And also, I felt guilty because I knew I was only doing it because I had no choice. I had to do it or my mom might find out about me. But then I’d feel good because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I would be able to get rid of it again as soon as the appointment was over.

I felt like I was getting away with something.

I still do.

I don’t know.

It makes no sense.

I don’t even know what I’m saying now.

It’s three days after my doctor’s appointment when the nurse calls. I have no diseases, no HIV, no chlamydia, no gonorrhea, no syphilis, no nothing. These things have worried me for six months, and I’m glad I know for sure now. I’m glad my mom made me go, because now I know for sure. I can put it behind me for good. I don’t remember it, and I can pretend it never happened. I have no worries now.

And I got my period today.

It’s light, but it’s there.

So I’m fine. Really.

25

I’m in the truck
with Corey. He picked me up from work after the dinner shift. It’s about nine o’clock, and we’re headed back to my house to watch TV and hang out. He has a couple errands to run, so we hit the ATM drive-through first. He flips on the interior light and digs through his wallet for his card, and because I’m sitting right next to him, I’m able to sneak a quick peek at it. It’s his mom’s card, and her name is either Anne, Annie, or Anna Livingston. He takes a hefty sum of dough out of Anne/Annie/Anna’s account—three hundred bucks.

I guess it’s none of my business—we’ve only been dating about six weeks—but his evasiveness when it comes to the subject of his mother has my interest in the topic fully piqued. I hate that I’m nosy like this.

Then we head toward the pharmacy. Prescription drugs for Anne/Annie/Anna? I don’t know. Kirsten did say she has a drug problem of some kind. I tell him I want to wait in the truck. He leaves me the keys and I listen to the radio while I wait. I don’t want to go in, because I’m afraid I might run into the Drugstore Madonna. She might say something like, “Is this the son of a bitch who did it?” or “How’d that pregnancy test turn out?” In reality, I know she would never do that, but still, I’ll just stay out here where she can’t see me or even know I still exist.

Corey comes out of the store looking pissed about something. He’s talking on his cell phone, but stops short of the truck. I crane my neck casually but still can’t hear what he’s saying. He snaps his phone shut, gets in, and slams the door harder than usual.

“Everything okay?” I ask him.

“Yeah, it’s just—there’s this new pharmacist and he won’t give me—”

My head and ears are perked up like a deer’s at hunting season.
Yessss
…?
He won’t give you what? What won’t evil Mr. Pharmacist give you, Corey, darling?

“It’s nothing,” he says. “I’ll come back later. No biggie.”

Fack.

We are coming up on Lighthouse Road and I see a for sale sign on the corner, pointing left toward that waterfront Tudor that is still sitting empty and unsold.

“Hey, turn down Lighthouse. I want to show you something really cool,” I say, and I tell him about the painted ceiling and how it fools you into thinking it’s real. When we get to the front door, I punch in the alarm code:4321.

“God, are they dumb?” Corey says.

“I know, right?”

“This can’t be legal,” he mutters, taking off his shoes.

“We’re not stealing anything,” I say. “Besides, it’s been empty for almost two years, and the owners adore my mom. She’s brought more people to look at it in six months than everyone else combined.”

We go in and I take him to the conservatory first. We look out at the darkening horizon, at the boat lights far in the distance. Then we go to the room with the painted ceiling and flip on the light.

“Wow, that’s cool. Someone painted that?” Corey says, turning in a circle, looking up and around.

“Yeah, but you have to lie down and stare up at it to get the full effect.”

I stretch out on the floor to stare up at it. He looks down at me like I’m nuts.

“Really, it’s cool. Come on,” I tell him, patting the floor next to me. He rolls his eyes and stretches out next to me and looks up at the ceiling. After two seconds he says, “I don’t feel it. It looks the same.”

“Give it a second. You have to relax, lose yourself a little.”

Two more seconds go by.

“I still don’t feel it.”

I laugh and give him a shove. “You’re not trying—you’re distracted with thoughts of making out.”

He laughs, still looking up at the ceiling. “This is true. The smell of your shampoo is killing me.”

He sits up and pulls his cell and earbuds out of his pocket, “Maybe some music will help.”

He unwinds the cord and sticks one end in his ear and hands me the other. Then he starts scanning files, looking for a good song.

“Something slow and trippy. Heartbreaking, maybe,” I say.

“I know just the song,” he says. “The guitar is killer. And her voice, the lyrics…”

He puts on a song by Aimee Mann and lies back down next to me, holding my hand, our fingers laced. The song is called “Save Me.” We lie flat and relaxed, holding hands like paper cutout people. We look up at the mural and listen. As the song plays, I start to see and feel the painted light shining down on me. I look up at the sky, the trees, and the streaming light, and I get that feeling again, that feeling of being carried off into it.

About halfway through, I can tell that Corey’s not looking at the painting anymore; he’s looking at me. But I can’t move. I’m transfixed by the light and sky above me and the beauty of the song and I feel like Corey can see right through me. I feel like he knows everything about me right at this moment, so I can’t look at him.

But he can’t possibly know. No one knows the secrets I keep.

Still, the song and the painting and Corey’s eyes on me, and his hand on mine, it all touches me so deeply that I have tears sliding down my face and into my hair. My uneven lock is completely soaked with them.

“I think that bordered on a religious experience,” he says to me on the way home.

He’s staring at the road in a trancelike state, trying to take it all in. I didn’t expect this night to go like this, either. Our little breaking-and-entering detour has knocked something loose in me. I can’t put my finger on it, though. I smile and nod, chewing on a thumbnail.

“For real,” he says. “It may sound kinda, I dunno, girly…” His face twists, like he’s embarrassed to even go on. “But seriously, it was like… a moment. You know?”

He looks over at me to see if I agree. I nod my head. Then I look out the window because I don’t want him to see my face when I talk.

“I know,” I say. “I don’t think anything bad could ever happen in a place like that, with a song like that, with someone like you. I think the earth could break apart and fall away but we’d still be there, floating in that room, listening to that song and looking up at that painting.”

And I know what’s been knocked loose in me now. I want to add: I LOVE YOU, COREY LIVINGSTON, but I don’t dare.

We both go quiet.

“Thank you, Sid,” he says, and I look at him. He blinks away the shining in his eyes and glances out his window.

“You’re welcome.”

After a second, he reaches over and rubs my head playfully, and then pulls me into him. “Come here,” he says gently. I unbuckle and scoot in close to him. I don’t care if this truck full of dials has no airbags and I get killed in a wreck. I’ll die happy. He drives slow and careful and we kiss at every stop sign and red light the whole way back to my house.