Scar Girl (The Scar Boys #2)(17)
It’s not an exaggeration to say that those lists saved my life. Without them, I would’ve spun out of control and broken down more than once. But now, sitting there on that wall, the massive stone dam looming over me like the personification of my fate, enough was enough.
No more lists. Something in my life needed to change.
PART FOUR,
NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER 1986
Being in Fleetwood Mac is more like being in group therapy.
—Mick Fleetwood
Who do you really admire and/or want to emulate?
HARBINGER JONES
The answer for me has always been Lucky Strike the Lightning Man. He’s this guy who was struck by lightning—unlike me, he was actually struck by lightning instead of almost struck by lightning—but rather than letting it ruin his life, he turned it into something positive. He became an expert in meteorology, and he helped other lightning-strike victims. He really helped me when I was a little kid, and I’m forever in his debt.
CHEYENNE BELLE
Johnny McKenna.
RICHIE MCGILL
The Bay City Rollers.
Just kidding.
My dad.
CHEYENNE BELLE
I woke up the next morning with a sharp pain in my gut and I was clammy and sweating. Throwing the covers off my body made the pain even more intense, and I moaned.
It was Saturday morning, and Theresa and Agnes were both still in bed.
Right away, Theresa could see something was wrong.
“Chey?” she asked, propping herself up.
“I don’t feel good.” I clutched my stomach and moaned again. I stayed on my bed, curled up on my side like a fetus. And, yeah, I get the irony. I guess it’s what all people do when the world—because of pain or sadness or something else—becomes too much to bear; we try our hardest to find a way to crawl back into the womb.
“Cheyenne, I think you need a tampon.” Agnes was very matter-of-fact.
“Huh?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Shit,” Theresa said, rushing over to me.
I think I yelped or cried out, I’m not sure.
“What’s going on?” Agnes had only just turned sixteen, but somehow she seemed older than Theresa and me. She was a straight-A student, treasurer of the sophomore class at Our Lady of the Perpetual Adoration Academy—the same high school I’d barely graduated from a few months before—and she played, well, I don’t know how many sports. I lost count. Agnes even had a job as a cashier at Wanamaker’s.
She was confident, tender, and funny, and she was my favorite Belle girl. I was the bigger sister, but, really, I looked up to Agnes.
Theresa tensed up and looked at me. Agnes must’ve sensed it, because she looked at both of us and said, “Seriously, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I answered. “It’s just my period. Can we let it go?” But I was feeling too crappy and was too freaked out for Agnes to buy my excuse. In that moment I don’t think I could’ve convinced a three-year-old that Santa Claus was real.
Agnes waited a beat, looking from me to Theresa and back again. Theresa was staring at the floor, which was a pretty obvious sign that something was wrong.
“Wait, are you pregnant?” Agnes didn’t know how loud her voice was.
Theresa and I both shushed her.
“If Mom and Dad find out, they’re going to kill you!”
“I know,” Theresa said, shushing her again, “which is why we need you to keep it down.”
Agnes nodded and then looked at me. “But why are you bleeding if you’re pregnant?”
I started crying.
“C’mon,” Theresa said, taking charge. “We’re getting you to an emergency room. Now.”
“But Mom and Dad can’t find out,” I blubbered.
“Fine. We can go to Planned Parenthood. It’s cheaper, and they won’t call home.”
They helped me up and got my clothes off. There was a lot of blood. Well, not all blood. I don’t really know what you’d call it. It was a brownish, reddish, stickyish fluid, and it smelled awful. It smelled like death. I thought I was going to throw up again.
My two sisters—my two younger sisters, both still teenagers and both still in high school—helped clean me up. They loaded a fresh pair of panties with so many pads that I could barely walk. Agnes gave me a pair of her sweatpants and a loose-fitting shirt, and we left.
HARBINGER JONES
When I finally got up the next day, it was almost 11:00 a.m. I’d stayed up late the night before, leafing through this thick paperback guide to colleges that had been lying around my house since I’d been a sophomore in high school. My dad had given it to me in this big show of what he thought was moral support. Where my mom always surprised me with fun presents, like a new comic book or a package of blank cassette tapes, my dad would lie in wait with college guides and articles from the New England Journal of Medicine on the latest advances in plastic surgery, like that was supposed to make me feel better.
But the more I looked at that guide, the more I liked the idea of college. I don’t know if college was exactly what I had in mind when I started thinking about a life change, but it made sense. Applying would make my parents happy, and like it was for so many other people, attending would be the path of least resistance.