The Truth About Alice(29)

But the answer was me. Kelsie Sanders.

One Saturday afternoon while my dad was working and my mom was taking my sister shopping for shoes, I walked down to Seller Brothers and stole a pregnancy test. All the cashiers know my entire family, so there was no chance I could buy one. I figured I’d already fornicated, so what was stealing a home pregnancy test going to do to me?

The two blue lines stared up at me like they were proud of themselves. They were so blue. There was no doubt in their existence. They were just there, proving the worst possible thing in the world.

I was going to have a baby.

I told nobody. Nobody. When I did it with Tommy Cray, my entire body went numb. But this was like my body didn’t even exist anymore. It was just my brain and those two blue lines. I was a zombie. I wrapped the pregnancy test in some toilet paper and hid it in the drawer of my nightstand. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror just like I’d done after doing it with Tommy. I stared at my dark brown hair and my even darker brown eyes. At the freckles on my nose. At the gap between my front teeth.

I was going to have a baby.

I mean, I had to. There was nothing else that I could even picture happening. Ever since I’d been a kid, my mom had been dragging me to the Women’s Care Clinic and Planned Parenthood on Saturday mornings and making me hold up pictures of aborted fetuses. Ever since I’d been a kid, I’d been told to pray for the souls of the preborn. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been taught that having an abortion is pretty much basically the worst possible thing that any woman could ever do ever. Ever.

After all, wasn’t I, Kelsie Sanders, proof of the power of Choosing Life? Hadn’t I, Kelsie Sanders, been an unplanned pregnancy? A surprise from God, as my mother liked to put it? A surprise that got her to dye her hair back to a normal color and leave Chicago and stop listening to bands with weird names?

So now it was my turn. Only I hadn’t even had a chance to get my nose pierced.

But I was going to have a baby anyway.

It was like trying to picture myself making dinner on Mars or speaking fluent Chinese. It was impossible, but it was the only option.

I thought about living in my parents’ house for the rest of my life. Me and the baby. Me and the baby in the wood-paneled den and me and the baby in the kitchen with the refrigerator that never stops humming and me and the baby in my teeny pink bedroom in the middle of the night, staring out the window at the stars and planning our escape.

All I could think was, I’m sorry, baby.




So, abortion was out of the question, and I wasn’t going to be one of those girls who can hide her pregnancy under a sweater for nine months and then give birth at the prom. So I did what I had to do. I told my mother. She made me take three tests in front of her. I literally had to pee in front of my mother. In between tests I took big swallows from a can of Diet Coke balancing on the bathroom sink. Each test my mother grabbed the stick from my hands, and I think some of my pee actually got on her at one point. She didn’t seem to care. She just reached down between my legs and took the test and stared at it, and then she ripped open another package.

“All right,” she said to me. She was weirdly calm. My mom was just never that calm. She quotes Jesus constantly and everything, but even having the love of the Lord inside of her hasn’t made her very relaxed. She still manages to snap at me constantly and criticize me all the time and get all tense with my dad, and even if she does stop to close her eyes and quote some Bible verse, my mom just isn’t a naturally calm person.

Until I turned up pregnant.

“All right, Kelsie, I will take care of this,” my mother said, and all of a sudden I thought I was going to have to give this baby up for adoption. I put my arms around my stomach when I thought about it. I’m not going to sit here and lie and tell you I felt instant love for that baby. Mostly, I just felt sick all the time and so tired I could barely stay up past seven o’clock. I thought about handing the baby over to some nice couple from Louisiana or whatever, and it didn’t seem so bad. Maybe they’d send me Christmas pictures and let me come to his first birthday party. Maybe they’d let him have a dog, unlike my mother who thinks that animals in the house just make a gigantic mess.

I promised myself that if I got to choose the adoptive parents, I’d make sure they’d let him have a dog.




About a week after I took the tests, my mother woke me up at five in the morning on a Saturday. I didn’t know what was going on.

“Get dressed, Kelsie,” she said to me, whispering. She was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which was weird because my mom always wears makeup. And she almost always wears skirts and dresses and khaki slacks, not jeans.

“What’s going on?” I said. As soon as I sat up, a wave of nausea ran through me. I pressed my hands down on either side of my body, trying to steady myself, and I took a deep breath.

“Get dressed,” she said again, standing there next to my bed.

My dad and sister must have still been asleep. I pulled on some clothes and followed her out to the car. I kept asking her what was going on, but she just told me to hurry up. Usually, I don’t mind getting a little fresh with my mom no matter how many Bible verses she says I’m disobeying, but this morning my mom was being so weird, I was scared to say anything.

We pulled out onto the highway and headed for the city.