Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Brian SweanyЧитать онлайн книгу.
out in the clinic.
“Thanks.” I make a cautionary descent to a sitting position beside her, leaning in for a kiss. She turns, offering me her cheek.
“Still pissed about the election?” Her voice is aspirated, her complexion pale.
“I’m over it. How you feeling?”
“Horrible.”
“Eat anything today?”
“Not today, not yesterday.” She closes her eyes, wincing. “What is it?”
“Stomach…out of my way.” Laura pushes me aside and rushes to the bathroom.
She shuts the door behind her. I can hear her dry-heaving through the door. A flushed toilet. The sound of running water as she washes her hands and then brushes her teeth. The door opens. Laura emerges wet-faced and weary. She doesn’t even try to make eye contact.
“Laura, at least look at me.”
“I can’t.”
She tries to crawl back into bed, but I block her path and grab her by the arms. “Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”
“Don’t have to. I’m sure I look exactly like how I feel.”
“You’re well into your first trimester, and you look as if you’ve actually lost twenty-five pounds.”
This is not an exaggeration. Laura’s eyes are sunken into her face. Her cheeks, once round and close to plump, are little more than skin-hued cheekbones. I can see the skeletal outline of her ribcage through her T-shirt. Her shorts hang from her now-boney hips. Her ankles, knees, and elbows are all swollen and disproportionate to her legs and arms, the fatty tissue they once rested in sucked dry by weeks of near-starvation.
Laura hazards a quick glance at me. The disconnect between us is palpable. Laura doesn’t feel like my girlfriend. She feels like that girl. That varsity cheerleader we all felt sorry for last year who couldn’t do cartwheels because of a “bruised abdomen” and spent half a semester hounding three guys for paternity tests. That classmate Mom used to tell me about from her high school days, the one who would disappear from St. Mary’s Academy, existing only in the hushed whispers of her peers and the stern countenances of a cadre of nuns. That hussy left to her own anguish, a scarlet letter pinned to her left breast, wandering without rule or guidance into a moral wilderness…where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude!
“Hank.” Laura collapses in my arms, crying. “I just want my life back. I want us back.”
I want us back. That’s all it takes. As my shirt soaks through to the skin with the sobs of a broken girl not yet ready to be a broken woman, my choice becomes that simple.
I lay Laura down in the bed, pulling the blankets back up around her face. She isn’t that girl. She isn’t an afterschool special or one of those stupid fucking PSAs. She’s not Nancy McKeon, telling me in the middle of my Saturday cartoons, “Hi, I’m Nancy McKeon, and I’ll be right back with One to Grow On.” Laura is my girlfriend. She is real. And I love her.
“Laura.” I kiss her full on the lips, my thumb and index finger grasping her chin. “I’m driving you to the clinic next week, and I’m paying for it.”
“W-what? But I—”
“Shhh…” I put my hand on her lips. “Let me do this one thing for you.”
“Hank, it’s not that simple.”
“Let me be the man in the relationship I should have been when you first told me.”
“You don’t understand.”
“My mind is made up.” I pull the sheets up, tucking her in. “I’ll show myself out. Get some rest, and try to eat something, anything.”
Laura sits up. She throws her covers off. “For God’s sake, would you stop and listen to me?”
“But I thought this is what you wanted.”
She stands up, folds her hands in front of her chin, measuring her words. “Last week…you told me…not to do it.”
“I was being selfish. You took me by surprise, and I didn’t know what to say.”
“So you said exactly the opposite of what I wanted to hear?”
“Well, yeah I guess. I’m sorry. I should—”
“You should have said something, something before now.”
“What difference does it make? The point is I came around.”
“No, that’s not the point.”
“Laura, please.” I grab her by the arms. “I’m confused here. Just tell me what you need me to do. I have the money.”
“It’s taken care of.”
“I want to help. It’s my responsibility.”
“It’s done.”
“‘It’s’ done. What’s done?”
“The abortion,” Laura says. “I went to the clinic two days ago.”
Chapter nineteen
Laura’s calendar in her room is covered in black Xs. They’re counting down to today, August twentieth, which she’s circled in bright red permanent marker.
I walked out on her when she told me about the abortion. I managed to hold out for all of twenty-four hours. Like a moth to a flame, like Kenickie jumping right back on that Ferris wheel with Rizzo as if nothing happened, I drove back to her house the very next day and told her we’d get past this.
To be sure, “this” isn’t worth much. Our relationship is falling apart. Experiencing the unintended consequences of sex firsthand with a healthy second course of deceit makes for a great chastity belt, and Laura is doing her best to pull that belt in a few more notches. This last month she’s been withholding even token affections—the touch of her hand, a kiss, even something as small as a compliment or a wink. She returns maybe every other phone call, if I’m lucky. Wrestling team conditioning has started up and is taking up a lot of my time, but I still try to make time for dates or even to just hang out. And yet, each and every one of these encounters ends with a door in my face, a turned back, a brush-off.
She had an abortion. I fucking get it!
As I look back on these last few weeks, I rationalize that Laura has only herself to blame for my late-night phone calls to Beth.
On the bright side, Bucknell called three days ago. And Laura got in.
She leans up against her bursting-at-the-seams Calais. “This time apart will be good for us, Hank.”
“I agree.”
Our goodbye kiss is short, choreographed. Laura drives away. I don’t even cry.
We haven’t officially broken up. But I can’t shake the feeling that somewhere in the trunk of Laura’s silver Oldsmobile Calais with the Fitzpatrick license plate frame, in a box labeled toiletries, tucked in between her disposable contacts and disposable tampons, is our disposable love for one other.
Chapter twenty
Prep beat the Ridge tonight in football 35–0, so Hatch and I have decided to get shitfaced. Truth is, we’d be getting shitfaced even if the Ridge had won 35–0—I’m a wrestler and Hatch is a golfer, so it’s not like we really care—but a belligerent drinking binge is always preferable to a melancholy one.
We get to the party at Claire’s house just past ten o’clock. The beer and the shots are flowing. I don’t see Claire or Beth. Hatch heads straight to the bar.
“Undefeated against Prep for three years,” I say. “We had never lost