Scar Girl (The Scar Boys #2)(19)

“No,” Agnes said. “My sister is—how pregnant are you?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. I think about four months.”

“My sister is four months pregnant, and she’s bleeding a lot. And her stomach hurts a lot.”

The woman, who had been calm, almost sleepy, sat up straight. She pushed a clipboard at Agnes through the glass window. “Fill this out for your sister. And you,” she said to me, “come with me.”

“Can one of my sisters come, too?” I asked, my voice a squeak as another wave of pain hit me. Theresa, who still had her arm locked through mine, gripped tighter.





HARBINGER JONES


An eighteen-year-old kid applying to college shouldn’t be a big deal, but for me, it was.

When the band was gearing up for our first tour, during my senior year of high school, I lied to my parents and told them I’d been accepted at the University of Scranton, that I would be attending in the fall. I hadn’t even applied. It was a pretty elaborate lie—I forged all the admission documents and pretended to mail my dad’s check to the school—and I rode it all the way to the end, until I got caught. My parents did not take it well. The idea of college now was, for me, like a career criminal deciding to go straight.

When I was leafing through the guide, I thought for a little while about applying to music colleges, like Berklee in Boston or Julliard in New York. But I wasn’t that kind of musician. I didn’t read music, didn’t really want to read music, and didn’t have any interest in a career playing wicked guitar solos on television commercials for deodorants and cat litter.

And because I didn’t have a backup plan, I didn’t have a clue as to what colleges to target. So I applied to the only school that made sense: the University of Scranton, my fake alma mater. Maybe this time I could get in for real. I still had a clean copy of their admissions package—once you’re on a school’s mailing list, they send you lots of the same stuff over and over again—so I took it out and went to work.

The application was pretty straightforward, and it only took an hour to complete, except for the essay. I can’t tell you how many times I started and stopped writing that stupid thing.

Each time my pencil hit the paper, the essay came out as really dry, boring crap about what a great student I’d be. I read and reread the instructions and kept getting hung up on the word count. I was supposed to tell them something interesting about me in two hundred and fifty words or less. Two hundred and fifty words!

I tried to take a fresh eye to the instructions and shifted my focus. This was what I landed on:

YOUR PERSONAL ESSAY WILL

HELP US BECOME

ACQUAINTED WITH YOU BEYOND YOUR COURSES, GRADES, AND TEST SCORES.


They wanted to know who I really was.

So who am I? I thought. I’m the guitar player in a thrashing, smashing, ass-kicking punk rock band, but I’m also a disfigured monster with all kinds of crazy social anxiety, and I’m an almost-twenty-year-old virgin who has kissed exactly one girl, and that kiss lasted for all of five seconds. But when I really thought about who I was, about what I could tell them to help them know me beyond my dismal grades and test scores, I kept coming back to the same thing.

I, Harbinger Robert Francis Jones, am a coward.





CHEYENNE BELLE


The doctor’s room was cold, not just the temperature, but the aura, too. Sometimes, a place can just give off waves of coldness, you know? I was told to take off my clothes, put on a paper-thin gown, and lie down on the examination table. I noticed that the cushion on the table was graying with age and cracking at the seams.

“I’m still bleeding,” I said, embarrassed that I was going to make a mess. The woman went into a closet and pulled out what looked like a giant maxipad, or maybe a maxipad for a giant. Almost like what you would use to house-train a puppy.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We’re a gynecological office. Lots of our patients bleed.”

I nodded and did what I was told.

The woman waited for Agnes to finish filling out the forms and took the clipboard back. “The doctor will be right in.” And she left.

“Are you doing okay?” Agnes asked while we waited for the doctor.

I wasn’t doing okay. I was still bleeding; my gut felt like someone was trying to wring it dry, like a washcloth after a shower; and I was suddenly hit with the thought that I had no idea how we were going to pay for any of this.

Agnes, who, like I said, is the most mature one of us, must’ve read my mind.

“Don’t worry about the money,” she said. “I have a lot saved. You can pay me back.”

“I can give you some, too,” Theresa said. I didn’t think Theresa had any money, and I didn’t think she really wanted to give it to me, but Agnes’s generosity had shamed her into making the offer.

It’s not that Agnes shamed her on purpose. It’s that girls like Theresa and me just sort of start out from a place of feeling shame. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s the truth.

Anyway, it didn’t matter. They had both offered, and it calmed me down, at least a little bit, and it made me love my sisters more than I ever had before.

Then a new woman came in, this one wearing a white lab coat.

“I’m Dr. McCartney,” she said. “You must be”—and she looked down at the clipboard—“Cheyenne.”