In October, Ann was painting the homecoming window on a restaurant called Shahrazad on Oakland Avenue for the cross-country team. Their mascot was a tiger, and they were competing against the Whitefish Bay Blue Dukes. Ann was painting their tagline. It said, “It’s a bad day to be a Duke.” That was Nell Finch’s idea, and it was OK, but not great. Usually Ann would come up with something better, but she’d been distracted. David Simons, her homecoming date, was painting a crown on the tiger’s head. Keisha Brown drew the duke. She was a great artist, and had depicted a wimpy little duke standing in the middle of the field, looking terrified. “Do you like it?” she asked Ann and David. All Ann could do was nod. She was suddenly overcome with nausea and threw up right there, right in front of them. It splattered on David’s Adidas.
“Oh gross,” he said, while Keisha rubbed her back and pulled back her hair.
“You OK?”
“I drank too much at Evan’s last night,” Ann said, but that was a lie. She hadn’t even gone to Evan’s party. She’d been too tired. All she wanted to do lately was sleep. She wondered if she had mono.
But the next week, she threw up again when she ate one of the candy corns that Mrs. Brennan, her guidance counselor, kept in a bowl on her desk. They were talking about her college applications and SAT scores, and what a good shot Mrs. Brennan thought Ann had at getting into a good East Coast school, but Ann was calculating the best route to the bathroom, so overtaken with nausea she couldn’t focus.
She tried to convince herself she wasn’t pregnant. She went to the bathroom so often to see if she was bleeding that her classmates began to notice. She prayed she’d find blood in her underwear—God, she never thought she’d want a period this badly. She looked back through calendars and counted backward to that awful night. She couldn’t remember when she’d last used a tampon.
She’d thought about taking a test but put it off. It was just one time, the first time. What were the odds? Homecoming was next week. She couldn’t be pregnant on homecoming court—this sort of thing couldn’t happen to school royalty. It happened to other people.
NOT UNTIL AFTER THANKSGIVING did Ann finally muster the nerve to go to the Planned Parenthood next to Shank Hall, the place where she’d heard that the girls from her high school got their birth control and had their abortions, and where the glassy-eyed protesters held up giant signs of bloody fetuses. She filled out paperwork, peed in a cup, read brochures asking “Is a seed a tree?,” and looked around at the other girls in the waiting room. Were they also pregnant? Why did they all seem so calm?
The counselor confirmed her suspicion. “You’re pretty far along,” she said. “We need to perform an ultrasound to confirm the dates.”
Was she too far along for an abortion? Ann thought about her alternatives: Drinking bleach. Throwing herself down the stairs.
He put some cold jelly on her stomach, and there, on the black-and-white television screen, she saw it: a baby, not just the idea of a baby but a real, perfect little child. It seemed so alone inside her there, so vulnerable. So alive.
The pregnancy reminded her of something Michael had taught her about gardening: that if you want a ripe tomato early in the season you can slam a shovel into the roots and throw the plant into a shock, enough shock to produce fruit before the plant would otherwise be ready.
Shock was what she suffered from after that afternoon appointment. It made her blurry and distracted, unable to focus on school, much less her plans moving forward. She didn’t know how to process it all: the idea of this life inside her, and the end of the future she’d planned for herself. College out East. A great job. The kids at school would take gossipy delight in her situation. Now she was that girl: the one who got knocked up, the one who got in trouble. She was stupid and careless. She’d blown up her own bright future as if she’d dropped a hand grenade at her feet.
But that baby! That perfect baby. It was floating inside her, innocent. Her child, not Anthony’s. He’d already taken too much from her. This baby would never be his. She’d never think of it as the product of that awful night on Duck Pond. She’d think of it as fate.
She started to resign herself to her new situation. Not knowing was hard. Now that she knew, she felt strangely focused. Ann always preferred certainty over ambiguity. She was amazed to discover that she was capable of tapping into a deep inner calm.
Somewhere in all the fear and ambivalence, she realized that she could do this. It would suck. It would be hard. It would throw off all the plans she’d made for herself, but she would be fine.
She knew it.
What she wasn’t so sure about was Anthony.
She couldn’t tell him. His threats, his voice, his clammy skin, the smell of whiskey on his breath, the way he moaned, the fiery pain between her legs, how she’d tried to bite through his fingers …
And yet. As wrong as Anthony was to do what he did, she felt that telling him was the right thing to do. Strange as it might sound, she also wanted to talk to an adult, someone who could see their way through the situation. Why would she think Anthony could offer her any kind of assurance? Mostly, she knew she’d need him to help pay to raise the child. She didn’t make much money at Lisa’s Pizza. Her parents would help. They’d be disappointed, but she knew they’d be cool about it. Well, eventually.
She still had the Shaws’ “backup” number at their house in Marblehead. Maureen had given it to her in case of an emergency. If only Maureen had known the full range of emergencies Ann might experience! She called a few times, using the star-key combination to suppress her number, and Maureen answered the phone in her singsong voice. Ann hung up.
Finally, the next day, Anthony answered with his usual distracted gruffness. “Hello?” His voice set something off in her; her body flushed with adrenaline the way it did when her car hit black ice last winter, and for a few seconds—seconds that might as well have stretched into days—she thought for sure she’d end up in a ditch.
“It’s Ann.” Her hand shook as she held the receiver.
He paused, as if he had to mentally scroll through all the possible women named Ann who might call him. “Ann,” he said. “Ann, Ann. How’s Wisconsin?”
What a stupid question. “I’m pregnant.” It was the first time she’d said those words out loud to another person. They sounded leaded. Permanent.
She could hear him breathing into the phone, saying nothing. His breath—she remembered the sound of it in her ear, heavy and wet. That night she’d tried so hard to forget might as well have been happening all over again.
“Are you waiting for me to congratulate you? It’s not mine,” he said. “If that’s what you’re getting at.”
“It could only be yours.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“You don’t have time? I told you I was a virgin. You are the only person I’ve—who’s—the only one. Believe me, if I thought it was someone else’s kid I wouldn’t contact you.”
“Oh, come on. You were no virgin.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “Besides, I had a vasectomy.”
“That’s a lie!” Ann wished she could kick him. She’d never felt such rage. “You are lying, but I don’t care. I know I can prove it.”
Was Maureen within hearing distance? The thought made Ann feel sick.
“What do you want?”
What did she want? She wanted to feel less alone, less scared. For Anthony to be the man she thought he was when she first met him. To go back in time and burn that babysitting ad she’d posted on the bulletin board. She was so low at that moment that she even wished he could make it so she’d never been born.
“How much does an abortion cost these days?”
Ann was shocked by the coldness in his voice.
“It’s too late.”
Ann banged the back of her head against the Third Eye Blind poster on her wall. She looked at the track trophies that lined her bookshelves, the framed corkboard pinned with ribbons and concert tickets and photos with her friends on hayrides and waterskiing and late nights at Ma Fischer’s. She looked at the pile of college brochures from Harvard and Boston College and Amherst, schools that wouldn’t want her now, and even if they did, how could she possibly make college work, or at least college so far from home?
“How far along?” he said.
“Can’t you do the math?” She’d been so angry since that night on Duck Pond that she felt she was manufacturing rage in her own body, when really, she was manufacturing his child; part of Anthony was inside of her, his cells wildly multiplying and dividing with her own. How could that be? She wished like hell that she’d never met him. She liked to think of Anthony as an apple core she could toss out of a car window, something that could be forgotten, left to rot into nothing.
“Do you show?”
“I’m starting to.” She used a large safety pin to extend the waist of her pants, and wore long flannel shirts to cover her belly.
“And does anyone know?”
“Just you. You and the doctor at Planned Parenthood.”
“Just keep it quiet. For now. Let me figure this out. I’ll come up with a plan. Does Michael know?”
“No,” Ann said. “Not yet.” She wanted to tell him, and came close a few times, but she knew he wouldn’t take it well. His feelings for her weren’t exclusively brotherly, a fact he couldn’t hide no matter how aloof he tried to act around her. She remembered Michael’s kiss as if it had been exchanged between two people totally different from who they were now. That one perfect moment of sweet adolescence she hadn’t known would, in a matter of weeks, dissolve into this shitty version of adulthood.
“I need to tell my parents,” she said. “I’m telling them tonight.”
“Not tonight. In a week. Give me a week to think.”
“They’re going to figure it out on their own.”
“Just give me a week, Ann.”
“I don’t have a lot of weeks to give.”
“Let me handle it. You’re confused, this is a hard time. Look, you can’t make good decisions right now. You normally can, I know, but you’re under a lot of stress. Everything is going to be OK. I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but I’ll make sure of it. Just hold tight.”
This sounded almost reassuring. She started to think she might hate Anthony just a little less until he said, “And don’t breathe a word of this to my wife.”
The line went dead.