Hold Me Close(62)

Outside the door, Mom knocks. She’s never accused Effie of bulimia, but she has a way of lurking around the bathroom door when Effie’s inside for any length of time. Effie pictures her now, ear pressed to the thin wood.

“I’m getting ready to go to the mall,” Mom calls out, all casual, as though she hasn’t been listening to the sound of Effie puking. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“I have homework.” She graduated on time, but barely, and has signed up for summer correspondence courses so she could forgo some of the lower level classes in college. Now, Effie thinks, she’ll never bother to finish a math problem again. It’s clear she already doesn’t know how to f*cking count.

“Effie.”

Effie sighs and pushes herself up and off the floor to run some water in the sink. She wraps the pregnancy test in some toilet paper and shoves it to the bottom of the garbage can, hiding it beneath used cotton balls and tissues. She brushes her teeth to cover up the taste of bile.

With a bright, fake grin, she opens the door so fast her mom has to step back out of the way. Mom has the grace to look a little embarrassed. In that moment, all Effie wants to do is collapse into her mom’s arms and be rocked like when she was young and had scraped her knee. She wants her mom to make her chicken soup and tuck her beneath a blanket and let her watch old episodes of The Patty Duke Show the way she had those first few weeks after Effie had come home.


Effie hadn’t appreciated that then, but she would trade anything to have that time back now.

Instead, she makes sure to look her mom right in the eyes, because the easiest way to tell a lie is to make sure you keep the eye contact. Totally throws the other person off. “I told you, I have homework.”

“I don’t want to leave you here by yourself. I wish you’d come with me.”

Effie keeps her expression neutral. All she can think about is those two pink lines making that plus sign. The rest of her life, summed up in the equation answered in that tiny little window.

“Mom. I really can’t.” Effie softens her tone. “But if I finish all my homework, maybe we can watch a movie when you get home? Make some popcorn? I’m craving some.”

It’s the promise of getting her to eat that persuades her mother to agree. Effie sees it on her face. A hint of relief, overlaid with a wariness Effie hates because it makes her feel so freaking guilty. Because she’s caused her mom so much grief and worry, and she can never, ever make it up to her, and because she’s about to cause her so much more.

Later, after a bowl of popcorn that Effie personally popped and inspected to make sure it didn’t contain anything hidden, and a chick flick they got from the video store, her mother comes into Effie’s room. She’s carrying the pregnancy test, the handle wrapped in layers of toilet paper but nothing at all hiding that glaring pink plus sign.

“It’s that boy. Isn’t it? You’ve been sneaking around behind my back, seeing that boy!” Mom throws the pregnancy test at Effie.

It hits her in the face. Cringing, Effie knocks it off the bed, where it falls onto the floor, facedown. Her mother is panting, short sharp and hysterical breaths. Her eyes are wild. Her hair looks as though she’s stood in front of a wind turbine.

Effie hasn’t seen Heath in almost a month. Hasn’t f*cked him for much, much longer than that. He wanted more from her than she could give him. He always does, most people do, but Heath is the only person Effie can’t bring herself to lie to. If anything, Heath is the only person to whom Effie can tell her every truth. He wants her to love him and only him, and she can’t do it. Every time she looks at him, she’s back in the basement. So they fight. They hurt each other over and over, and what Effie thinks is, she already knows that knife is sharp. Why does she have to keep slicing her fingers on it, just to be sure?

“Kill yourself for good this time if you have to,” she’d snapped at his threats. “Maybe you’ll be better off dead than always wanting what you can never have.”

It’s the cruelest thing she’s ever said to anyone. She still runs hot and cold with shame at the memory of it. Yet sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same. If you can’t give someone you love what they want, sometimes you give them what you need.

“It’s not Heath’s.”

Her mother’s face drains of all color. Her fists clench. Her mother has never, that Effie can remember, hit her, but it sure looks as if she’s about to now.

“Liar. I know you’ve been sneaking off to see him. I can smell it on you when you get home. You stink of it. You think I didn’t know?”

Effie’s lip curls. “I’m pregnant, Mother, but I’m not lying. It’s not Heath’s.”

“Whose is it, then? Oh God, Felicity, oh my God, oh my God...” Mom’s hands rake up her cheeks and anchor in her hair. Her mother stalks to the phone on Effie’s desk. “I’m calling the police.”

“For what?” Alarmed, Effie gets off the bed. Her toe nudges the pregnancy test. She scoops it up and tosses it into the garbage, and this time with no need to try to hide it, of course it sinks all on its own beneath the detritus of crumpled notebook paper and magazines.

“You were under eighteen! He’s twenty. That’s... It’s rape. Or something. It’s statutory rape, and I’m going to make sure he pays for it!”