The Almost Sisters(17)
“Just get some pink or this turquoise up around your face,” she’d told me, and the enraging thing was, with Spring colors by my face, damn it all if I did not look fresher and bright-eyed. Less broken anyway. Twenty years later I was still winding a funky scarf in the correct colors around my neck, elevating my uniform—black top, boot-cut jeans, and Chucks—into an actual outfit. Her genuinely good intentions coupled with her self-assured rightness made the helping both exasperating and impossible to turn down.
What had I done to help her back? Nothing. She never let anybody help her. Even on those rare occasions when Rachel allowed a virus to get through her cloud of vitamins, she kept her freezer stocked with frozen quarts of homemade chicken soup she made out of organic bone broth and whatever root vegetables had the most antioxidants.
“Well, there’s no harm in finding places for Birchie to tour, but only if they have two-bedroom units. Wattie and Birchie will likely want to stay together. I have to give them the option,” I told her, digging out my AmEx. Rachel was on the payment page already. “And fly us coach. Those seats are big enough to hold two Lavenders.”
She hesitated, eyeing my Digby-inspired larger ass. She noticed whenever I put on a few pounds and would gift me with fruit baskets and yoga-class cards until my jeans got roomy again. She reached for her purse, and I knew this move as well. She was about to get out her own credit card and pay to put me where she wanted me.
“Do you want me to take Lav or not?” I asked.
“Fine. I’ll put you back in steerage,” she said, and she even used my card.
Now here we were, Lavender and me, both under different kinds of Rachel-fueled duress. Me with only a best guess idea of what had happened between her parents.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lavender said. “No one ever talks to me about anything, so why should I talk to you? You’re as bad as them, running around all secret pregnant, and I’m this dumb kid who gets to find out last. Or never.”
Her hands were shaking, she was that angry, that helpless in the face of whatever was happening to her family.
“Lav,” I said softly, “you’re not the last to know, okay? You’re first. Unless you count doctors, I haven’t told a living soul I’m pregnant.”
That gave her pause, and she asked, “Gramma and Grampa don’t know?” I shook my head. “Mom doesn’t know?”
“Nope. And I would like to be the one to tell her. Them. Everyone—in my own time, if you don’t mind,” I said, and looked over to meet her eyes, so she would know how serious I was. She nodded, solemn, and I looked back to the road.
After a minute Lavender asked, “What about, like, the dad? The dad of the baby? Does he know?” She was calmer, and that was good, but oh, what a complicated question.
Instead of answering directly, I told her, “The father is not going to be involved.”
“But does he know?” Lavender asked, as persistent as her mother.
I shook my head, wishing I could be thirteen and stick my lip out and say, I don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to explain drunk and sketchy sexual decisions to a middle-schooler who had yet to kiss a boy. I could feel Rachel as a sudden, looming presence in the car, wanting me to tread very, very carefully here. Lavender looked up to me. It didn’t help that she was full of brand-new estrogen and had just watched her own father storm out the front door with a Whole Foods bag full of socks and underpants. Hormones and daddy issues, the classic recipe for pushing girls way too early into boy arms. “What does your mother tell you about sex?” I asked.
“Oh my God, like, nothing,” Lavender said, flushing. “I mean, she gave me a book about it. And she told me not to have it.”
“That’s excellent advice,” I said. “Reproduction works, Lav. It only takes once, and it can happen even if you think you’re being careful.”
“So you went on, like, one date?” Lavender asked.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing was it?”
A no-date thing, actually, and I could not remember his real name. I had a flash of Batman, that cocky grin under the cowl, his surprisingly well-muscled arms and shoulders—I’d assumed that definition had been drawn onto the costume—and now I thought, A really, really hot thing. The thought came so fast I was already saying it. At the last second, I replaced the word “hot” in the out-loud version.
“A really, really stupid thing.”
I didn’t even cross my fingers on the steering wheel. I wasn’t lying. It had been stupid. But also, I couldn’t help remembering, plenty hot.
“I want to know what happened,” Lavender insisted.
Nothing about this story was particularly thirteen-year-old-appropriate, but sometimes the world wasn’t. Thirteen-year-olds still had to live in it and not be lied to. Even so, the spirit of Rachel was practically a force now; there was honest, and then there was too honest. If I would not lie, Rachel expected me to at least be a good object lesson.
“I was at FanCon in Atlanta, and I had an awful day. So I went down to the bar, which was a bad idea. This guy came up and asked if he could buy me a drink.”
“What was his name?” Lavender asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.