The Mothers(28)

Nadia had read online about abortion pills, forty dollars and delivered to your door in a plain brown box. She would’ve ordered them herself if Luke hadn’t found her the money for the surgery. You didn’t know how desperate you could be until you were.

“Do you think it’s bad?” she asked Aubrey later. “What that girl did?”

“Of course. Mo said she almost died.”

“No, not like that. I mean, do you think it’s wrong?”

“Oh.” Aubrey flipped off the lights and the other half of the bed lowered beneath her weight. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Just asking.”

In the darkness of the room, she could barely make out Aubrey’s outline, let alone her face. In the darkness, talking felt safe. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling.

“Sometimes I wonder—” She paused. “If my mom had gotten rid of me, would she still be alive? Maybe she would’ve been happier. She could’ve had a life.”

Any of her other friends would have gasped, turning to her with wide eyes. “Why would you even think that?” they would say, chiding her for entertaining such darkness. But Aubrey just squeezed her hand because she too understood loss, how it drove you to imagine every possible scenario that might have prevented it. Nadia had invented versions of her mother’s life that did not end with a bullet shattering her brain. Her mother, no longer cradling a tiny, wrinkled body in a hospital bed, an exhausted smile on her face, but seventeen and scared, sitting inside an abortion clinic, waiting for her name to be called. Her mother, no longer her mother, graduating from high school, from college, from graduate school even. Her mother listening to lectures or delivering her own, stationed behind a podium, running a toe up the back of her calf. Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.

—

THAT SUMMER, the girls drove to Los Angeles to explore different beaches. Somehow, sun and sand and salt water seemed better, more glamorous even, in the shadows of Hollywood. They wandered down Venice Beach, past weight-lifting jocks and weed dispensaries, T-shirt shops and churro stands and bucket drummers. They swam at Santa Monica Beach and drove through the winding cliffs to Malibu. Other places they went: downtown San Diego, where they rode trolleys across the city, window-shopping at Horton Plaza and walking around Seaport Village and sneaking into nightclubs in the Gaslamp district. Nadia sweet-talked a bouncer who let them into an underground club where shot glasses glowed red over the bar, industrial fans spun lazily overhead, and she had to scream into Aubrey’s ear to talk. They met boys. Boys tossing footballs on the beach, boys hanging out of car windows, boys smoking cigarettes in front of water fountains, boys, barely still boys, offering to buy them drinks in clubs. Boys bunched around them at the bar, and while Nadia flirted, Aubrey seemed to shrink within herself, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She’d never had a boyfriend before but how did she expect to ever find one if she never loosened up? So on one of her last nights in Oceanside, Nadia knew exactly where she wanted to take Aubrey: Cody Richardson’s house. Aubrey had never been, and in her waning days at home, Nadia felt nostalgic enough to return. Besides, if she was honest with herself, she also hoped she might see Luke. She’d imagined their good-bye—not dramatic, they weren’t dramatic people, but some final conversation where she would see, in his eyes, the realization that he’d hurt her. She wanted to feel his regret, for leaving her, for not loving her like he was supposed to. For once in her life, she wanted an ended thing to end cleanly.

The night of the party, she sat on the edge of Aubrey’s bed, helping her friend with her makeup. She tilted Aubrey’s face toward her, gently sweeping gold eye shadow across her lids.

“You have to wear the dress,” she said.

“I told you, it’s too short.”

“Trust me,” she said. “Every guy’s gonna want to hook up with you tonight.”

Aubrey scoffed. “So? That doesn’t mean I want to hook up with them.”

“Don’t you at least want to know what it’s like?”

“What?”

“Sex.” She giggled. “Just don’t expect it to be all beautiful and romantic. It’s gonna be awkward as hell.”

“Why does it have to be awkward?”

“Because—look, has any guy ever seen you naked?”

Now Aubrey opened her eyes. “What?” she said.

“I mean, what’s the furthest you’ve ever gone?”

“I don’t know. Kissing, I guess.”

“Jesus Christ. You’ve never even let a guy feel you up?”

Aubrey shut her eyes again. “Please,” she said. “Can we talk about something else?”

Nadia laughed. “You’re so cute,” she said. “I was never like you. I lost my virginity and . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t even talk to him anymore.”

She’d never told Aubrey about Luke. She didn’t know how to explain their time together and she’d feel embarrassed trying to, because everything that had happened between them could be traced back to one of her own stupid choices. She was the one who’d gone to Fat Charlie’s day after day to see Luke. She had fallen in love with a boy who didn’t want anyone to know he was dating her. She’d started sleeping with him months before she was leaving for college and she hadn’t even insisted he wear a condom every time. She had been the type of foolish woman her mother had cautioned her never to be and she hated the idea of Aubrey knowing this about her.