All Adults Here(92)

The float started to move, and Cecelia stayed close to the side that Robin was on both for emotional support and physical support, just in case. She was the spotter. Sidney was facing forward and stumbled on her heels when the float started up—she didn’t have a spotter, not really, and for a split second, Cecelia felt bad for her. Sidney stared straight ahead like someone trying to drive through a thunderstorm. Cecelia wondered what Sidney was thinking—if she was angry that she had less room, or that her popularity contest wasn’t the only thing that mattered, or something else. You never really knew what someone else was thinking. Robin was waving, and the breeze blew her hair off her shoulders. Cecelia wondered where Robin’s parents were, but then she saw them, off to the left of the float, standing in the middle of the dead-end street that led from the roundabout to the river. Robin’s father had his hands over his mouth and he was crying, crying and smiling, crying and laughing and cheering all at once. Robin’s mother was pumping her fists in the air, and Cecelia felt so proud of her friend, and proud of herself at knowing the difference between privacy and secrecy, between being a support and an accessory. Cecelia waved at Robin’s parents, having forgotten, for the moment, that her own parents were also in the crowd somewhere.



* * *



—

Porter saw the CJHS float coming, the young girls standing on top in their seasonally inappropriate dresses, as if their youth made them impervious to weather. When she’d been the Harvest Queen, on the high school float, she’d felt like an adult. But she wasn’t, was she, no matter what she thought at the time. Her dress had been green, and flowy, made for disco. Astrid had hated it, had tried so hard—with bribery, with insults—to get her to wear something else. Bob Baker had driven the float. Porter couldn’t even remember who the other girls were. She’d known her parents were there somewhere, and Nicky, and Jeremy, and everyone, but she hadn’t wanted to see them. That just felt embarrassing. But then she’d heard her name and realized it was her parents, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hardware store, both of them waving. She had seen her mother more clearly than her father—years later, Porter would hate that this was true. She should have jumped down from the float like an action movie heroine and run up to him, putting her face just inches away from his and clicked her internal camera right then. She wanted to remember him better than she did. But that day she hadn’t minded the fuzziness—it had made things easier. And so she’d bared her teeth and laughed with her mouth open, genuinely happy.

When her period still hadn’t come that weekend, Porter told Jeremy to get a pregnancy test and bring it to school. The two pink lines didn’t even wait the full minute that the test said they might. Jeremy had thought she was being dramatic—he said he was good at pulling out. When they’d driven to the clinic in New Paltz, Porter had been too stunned to cry. No part of her had wanted a baby. That was never on the table. The way she’d seen it, the rest of her life was on the table—her entire future. This or that, this or that. She couldn’t have both. Every year there was at least one girl in school who got pregnant and got bigger and bigger as the year progressed, until one day she vanished, like a puff of smoke. Sometimes the girls came back and finished, but mostly they didn’t. You’d see them around town, pushing strollers, or playing with their babies on playgrounds, sometimes the same playgrounds where the high schoolers would meet at night to smoke joints and drink wine coolers.

“I think we should take a break,” she had said, looking out the window. “When this is done, I mean.” This was what she’d thought: that her parents were more likely to find out if she and Jeremy stayed together. She was giving him a present. Had he realized that? She’d given him the present of not thinking about it, of putting it out of his mind forever. It had just been an afternoon. That was how good her body was—she could hold it all, even the memory of the tiny cells she would get rid of. When Jeremy drove her home after, her parents had been out. Nicky had been in her room, smoking a joint out her window, and he was the only person she told. Next year, the Harvest would have a new queen. That was the way it went for girls.



* * *



—

“There they are, there they are,” Nicky said. He pointed to the float that was coming slowly down the street. Cecelia was wearing a long dress, and she walked awkwardly in it, her legs not able to go as far as they usually did in a stride. Instead of looking at the crowd and waving as the rest of the kids walking alongside the float were, she was staring up. Porter followed Cecelia’s gaze and saw Jeremy’s daughter, sullen and blue with cold, standing next to a radiant girl in yellow. Was that August? It was. Porter tried to think about the bravest thing she’d ever done, and after a few seconds of searching her brain, she put her hands on her belly.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Porter said to Nicky and Juliette, who were so transfixed by the sight of their daughter willingly participating in the town’s ritual that they both responded with barely audible grunts. The twins were the happiest Porter had ever seen, waving at everyone, and Wendy and Elliot both beamed, at each other and the world. It took so little, truly, to turn a parent’s frown upside down.

The municipal hall’s bathroom was in the same place as it always had been, and Porter squeaked her way down the hall. There were parents with children everywhere—dads unapologetically on their telephones, as if whatever they had to talk about couldn’t wait an hour, and moms chased smaller siblings up and down the hallway, backs hunched over and fingers reaching. There was a short line for the bathroom, and everyone amiably smiled and then ignored one another.