She had to pee all the time. There was a feverish itchy pressure on her bladder, revolting, more than a distraction; it was a chronic emergency signaling in a high whine behind her eyes. She would get up in class and take the laminated bathroom pass off the teacher’s desk twice, three times. Even the teachers who liked her most started glaring, rolled their eyes. Sometimes instead of going to class at all she sat on the toilet in the lavatory outside the studio art classroom, straining, crying with the effort of getting out a few drops. She drank no water for one whole day, rinsing and spitting at the sink when she got desperate, then she changed tacks and drank glass after glass of water, trying to “flush out her system,” which is something Mom always said to do whenever Lauren or her brothers got sick. She lowered herself into an ice-cold bath, cupping gasps of water from the tap. She got up three times when she and Paula went to see Howards End at the Eastern Hills Mall.
“You missed the best part—the poor bastard got murdered by a bookshelf,” Paula said after the movie. They were sitting in the food court having Icees.
“I’ll have to read the book,” Lauren said.
“I know what’s going on with you,” Paula said, wearing her satisfied-piggy smile. “I’ve had what you have.”
“That’s great,” Lauren said.
“I’ll tell you what you should do,” Paula said, “if you tell me how you got it.”
“Got what?” Lauren asked. Everything about her felt red and swollen and hostile.
“You should see a doctor,” Paula said.
“When you flare your nostrils like that you look like a pig,” Lauren said.
Los Angeles was burning on the TV in the Brunts’ kitchen when Lauren got up a second time from dinner, passing through the front room, where Los Angeles burned from another angle on another TV, upstairs to the bathroom. This time, Paula’s mother followed her and asked to come in. Mrs. Brunt opened the door on her, sitting on the toilet, jeans around her ankles, and Lauren didn’t even care. Mrs. Brunt rummaged in the bottom drawer, reached past the stash of birth control, and came up with a small bottle.
“Lauren, I want you to take one of these now and then one pill every morning until they’re all gone,” Mrs. Brunt said, filling a glass with water as Lauren buttoned her jeans. “They will turn your pee bright orange—don’t worry about that, it means they’re working. The pill will mask your symptoms, but it won’t make the infection go away—for that you need to see a doctor for an antibiotic. You will need a full checkup before they can prescribe you anything. Is your mom away?”
Lauren nodded, swallowing the pill with the water. They were sitting cross-legged on the bathroom floor together. Mrs. Brunt’s first name was Nicole. Her hair was a shining chestnut brown. She looked so young up close. Her skin was unlined, her cheeks downy like a cushion.
“Can I call your mom to talk to her about how you’re not feeling well?”
Lauren shook her head.
“If she were here, would this be something you could talk to your mom about?”
Lauren shook her head.
“It’s okay. It’s normal—well, it’s not normal, but it’s common. And, you know, there’s all sorts of reasons you can get one of these. It doesn’t mean anything all on its own. But you need to see somebody. Can you try to reach your mom in—where is she?”
“She’s in Colorado with my adopted sister.”
“Honey, listen, I want you to try to get hold of her tonight. It’s, what, a two-hour time difference? Tell her that Paula’s mom is going to make you an appointment. I’ll set it up through Rumson, where I work—”
“My mom takes us to Children’s Hospital,” Lauren mumbled.
“Okay, but you wouldn’t go there for this, sweetheart,” Mrs. Brunt said. “I’ll take care of the appointment. I could get you one on very short notice, but you just have to clear it with your mom. You can’t let this go—it won’t get better on its own. It’s nothing to worry about, so long as you get it checked out and treated. You have to do that.”
“Okay.”
“Lauren,” Mrs. Brunt said, “I need to ask you something. Is it possible you could be pregnant?”
Lauren’s vision smeared on the bathroom tiles. The husk. She couldn’t have told anyone how long she stared like that, she couldn’t have guessed.
“Oh,” Lauren whispered. “I just remembered something. Mrs. Brunt?”
“Yes.”
“I took some of Paula’s birth control pills. I stole them. I’m sorry. The ones in there—I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Brunt pulled Lauren into her lap and hugged her. She rubbed her back. “It’s okay. Next time just ask.”
They heard Paula calling up the stairs. “You’re going to be okay,” Mrs. Brunt whispered to Lauren, kissing her cheek. She left the bathroom. Lauren heard her talking outside in low tones to Paula. She didn’t try to hear what they were saying.
“Lauren, is it okay if I come in for a second?” Paula asked from behind the door.
“Yes,” Lauren murmured from where she was sitting on the tile. Paula entered, knelt down, and hugged her.
“I’m sorry you’re not feeling well,” Paula whispered in her ear. “I love you.”
“I’m sorry, too, and I love you, too, Paula,” Lauren whispered back, her tears wetting Paula’s hair, and Paula turned to go.
Mrs. Brunt returned with a cordless phone. Everyone had them nowadays. She called information; she called the front desk of the hotel in Colorado; they were put through to Mom’s room. She handed Lauren the phone, winked, and closed the bathroom door behind her.
“Lauren, my love.” It was really Mom. “I miss you so much, but this call is going to cost a fortune.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I know, baby, but can we talk when I’m back? Mirela and I are flying home in a couple of hours. We’re gonna catch the red-eye. If they don’t run us out of town before then.”
“Mom, I need you to come home.”
“Lauren, I just told you—”
“No, you don’t—I need—”
She wanted Paula’s mom. She wanted Paula. She wanted to make Mom understand, because she needed Mom to come home to her, but she couldn’t, because she was someone else’s mom now, and this wasn’t her home, and she wasn’t herself.
The Rumson parking lot was three-quarters empty after Lauren’s appointment. The midafternoon sun was fat and congenial, lending a blood-orange glow to the interior of the dragon wagon. Lauren slumped in the back, behind the driver’s seat, her arms crossed, staring at nothing. Mirela beside her, slumped and staring, too, as Mom was strapping her into her car seat.
“Where are you? Where is Mirela?” Mom was asking. She tapped two fingers on Mirela’s cheek, tickled her ribs. Nothing. No-Mirela.
“Leave her alone,” Lauren murmured. “She’ll come out of it on her own.”
Mom did as she was told. Back in the driver’s seat, she put the key in the ignition without turning it. She folded her hands in her lap. “Lauren,” she said. “My darling girl. Why don’t you sit up here with me? I feel like a chauffeur. You’re right behind me but I can’t see you.”
Lauren said nothing.
“So. We have a big decision here.”
Lauren mumbled a response so that Mom couldn’t hear it.
“What did you say?” Mom’s eyes in the rearview, straining to see her.
“No ‘we.’ We don’t have a decision.”
“Okay. You have a big decision.”
Lauren mumbled.
“Lauren, I can’t—”
“There’s no decision!” Lauren yelled.
“Lauren, keep your voice down—”
“It’s not a yes-or-no, will-I-or-won’t-I situation. It’s happening.”
“But you have a—you have a choice.” It sounded like Mom was reading the words off a placard held aloft outside the clinic.
“That is hilarious coming from you,” Lauren said. “The hock—the hiccup—” She shook her head and flushed.
“Are you trying to say hypocrisy?” Mom asked.
“You are a joke,” Lauren said.
“I am a hypocrite, Lauren,” Mom said. “I confess to it. But right now, we’re not talking about all the craziness from before. We are talking about today. We are talking about you.” Mom looked away from the rearview and into the mostly empty parking lot. “I’m not proud of what I got caught up in,” she said. “With Father Steve and all of that. I made a mistake.”
Lauren pfffed a scoffing sound.
“You made a mistake, too—”
“You know nothing,” Lauren said, and Mom shut her eyes against the impact.
“Lauren,” Mom said, “who—who did this to you?”
“I did this to me,” Lauren said.
“Honey—was it the Rosen boy? Skip?”
Lauren threw her head back and gagged. “Yeah, Skippy Rosenboy. That’s the one. We’re getting a shotgun marriage, just like you and Dad did.”
“Honey—”
“The abortionist’s son. That could be the title of a great romance novel, right?”
“Lauren, was it Skip?”
“His name is Stitch, and no. We’re friends. Is it so beyond you that a girl and a guy could just be friends?”
“Who is it, my love?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s my choice,” Lauren said, in a mocking whine. “Just like you said. That’s all you need to know. I decided.”
“Lauren—it’s so early. You understand me, yes? It’s so early. We wouldn’t have known for weeks, for months, maybe, if you hadn’t needed to see the doctor anyway.”
“So what?”
“It’s barely even—”
“It’s barely even what?”
“They could take care of it and it would be like it never happened. You’ve—it’s barely started.”
“It’s barely a baby?”
“It might—end on its own. It happens a lot.”
“It’s barely a baby? Is that what you mean?”
“This doesn’t have to define you for the rest of your life. You can decide something different for yourself.”
Lauren said nothing.
“You don’t have to go through—you can decide to end—”
She couldn’t say it. She was talking to no one. No-Lauren.
“We also have to consider the practical side of things. If this happens. How will I be able to help you and also care for Mirela?” Mom asked.
“I don’t need your help.”
“What help don’t you need, Lauren? Financial help? Help taking care of a baby?”
“Any of it. I can do it. I can decide for myself.”
“Oh, it’s that easy, is it, Lauren?”
“Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s hard. But that’s no reason for murder. Isn’t that your whole thing? That it’s murder?”
“I don’t know what my whole thing is anymore, honestly, Lauren.”
“Using Mirela as an excuse for murder is pretty gross, Mom.”
“Shush,” Mom said, eyeing Mirela in the rearview. No-Mirela was still staring, eyes filmy, lips parted.
“You want me to do it because you wish you’d done it,” Lauren said. “When you had the chance.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“It’s not true that you wish you’d done it? Admit it.”
“First of all, this isn’t about me. It’s about you and your future. And second—”
“I have a future because you had me. Because you didn’t do it. So I don’t want to do it, either. There. Done. End of story.”
“It’s different. It’s not the same thing. You are you, and I am me—”
“I am me because you didn’t do it!”
“—and our lives are different. Your life belongs to you.”
“What if this was me? What if it was me inside of me?”
“It’s not you. It’s not you! You are here.”
“But I wasn’t always! Not like this!”
“No—what—”
“You regret having me! Just admit it!”
“We’re not—Lauren, keep your voice down, remember Mirela—we’re not talking about me, we’re—”
“Yes, we are. If we are talking about you and the decision you made, we are talking about me. It is literally the exact same thing. You are—”
“Lauren, honey, listen to me. Your life has value—”
“I totally agree! Thank you for proving my point!”
“—your life has value independent of any other person or any other thing. Independent of me. No one’s mother can regret their—regret doesn’t work—it doesn’t work like that. A person is not someone else’s decision.”
Mirela was softly humming.
“You can’t regret a person,” Mom said. “That’s not a sentence that makes sense. I can’t—”
“You are the one who is not making sense,” Lauren said. “You are twisting things. I am here because of a decision you made. I would not be here if you had made a different decision.”
“And now you are here and you can make your own decision. Your life is not my life.”
“And clearly I ruined your life.”
“No. No.”
“Say it. Have the guts to say it. You regret that I was born.”
“I cannot say that.”
“You can’t, but that doesn’t mean—”
“I can’t because it’s a lie.”
“You would have gone to college. You would have left Buffalo and had a whole other life. You wouldn’t have gotten stuck with Dad.”
“Wait, what? What’s wrong with your dad?”
“He wouldn’t have been my dad, and you would have a whole other life.”
“I do not regret that you were born.”
“You do, you do, you do!”
The humming grew louder, as loud as Lauren’s voice, rhyming and dissonant.
“Lauren. You are my life’s treasure. You are the core of my being.”
“What if you had aborted me? If you’d had an abortion, we wouldn’t be here right now having this stupid conversation!”
“Lauren, stop it, right now—”
Hmm-MMM, hmm-MMM, hmm-MMM
“You wish I wasn’t born, but you love me and you don’t want me to make the same mistake you did. Is that right?”
“That’s not what I think. How are you so sure of what I think?”
“I don’t know exactly what you think. I just know you are lying.”
“Mama lie,” Mirela said and kept humming.
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
Hmm-MMM, hmm-MMM, MMM-mm-MMM-mm-MMM-mm-MMM
“Then tell me something that’s true.”
“Mama lie,” Mirela said and kept humming.
“You seem to think only terrible things can be true.”
“Just be honest. Like that’s so hard.”
“Lauren. You are the love of my life and you have been from the moment you were born.”
“You want to know who did this to me,” Lauren said. The tears came all at once, fast and hot, spilling and sidling past one another. “You’re dying to know.”
“You can tell me if you want to. But I’m not going to ask again. It’s up to you.”
Mirela’s shoe thump-thump-thumped against the plastic bottom lip of the car seat, in rhythm with the hm-MM-hm-MM.
“You do want to know. Don’t lie.”
“Mama lie,” Mirela said and kept humming.
“It doesn’t matter to me. You can tell me or not tell me.”
“You can’t stand the idea of me having sex. Your daughter had sex. With a specific person. And not just once!”
“Lauren, please, Mirela is—be careful—”
“I chose it, and I liked it.”
“Lauren, my God, stop it, please stop—”
“I was inside you. Me. It was always me. I was there. I was there all the time. I was waiting. From the very first second.”
“Lauren, we’re not—”
“I was there! It was me!” Lauren was really crying now, sobbing, one fist pounding her own knee, and Mirela’s humming abruptly halted. “You can say all you want that we’re not talking about your situation, but that doesn’t change anything. It’s still a person, no matter who it is. You say I made a mistake—well, that makes sense, right? Because I’m a mistake?”
“No. Never.”
“It’s one of the few things Mirela and I have in common, right? We are your two big fat fuckups!”
Mom turned around in her seat, wrenching her head to meet Lauren’s eyes over the headrest. “Lauren, don’t you dare.”
Lauren pressed her head against her window, unable to speak. Mirela began hmming and kicking again, arching her back.
“I just wish . . .” Lauren inhaled. “I wish we could have an honest conversation about this.”
“Honest?” Mom turned back and stared at the dashboard. “Okay. I can be honest with you, Lauren. Do you know what I honestly wish? You said you were waiting for me? I wish I had waited for you. You were worth the wait.”
Lauren exhaled.
“You were worth the wait,” Mom repeated.
Mom thought it was over.
“But,” Lauren said, “I wouldn’t have been me.” She was newly in control of herself. “If you’d waited.” She paused. Slowly, slowly. “You would have waited for me all your sorry life, because I would have been dead before I was born. Your precious baby girl.”
“Baby!” Mirela said.
“Only God knows such things,” Mom said.
“And you think God—”
“Baby, baby, baby,” Mirela said. Each baby paired off with a kick to the back of the front passenger seat.
“I don’t think anything about what God thinks,” Mom said. “I don’t presume to know. Why do you?”
“Bay-bee! Bay-bee!” Mirela sang.
“All you do is think about God,” Lauren said. “You don’t do anything without thinking about God. You got Mirela because you thought it would make God happy.”
“Having faith in God is not the same as having understanding in all of his ways. I do know he loves you, and me, and Mirela.”
“He loved Mirela so much he dumped her in some shithole and fucked her up.”
“Lauren, you can’t—”
“Some shithole you can’t even bring yourself to talk about.”
“You can’t say something like that about God. You—you place your soul in such danger when you talk like that. Do you understand?”
“Mom?” Lauren asked.
“Lauren.”
“When I was a baby, didn’t you love me? Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“God in heaven, Lauren, what a question—”
“When I was baby?” Mirela asked. The kick to the back of the seat was punctuation, a question mark.
“Didn’t you love me, Mommy?” Lauren asked. “You will love this baby, too. You will, Mommy. You will. You will.”
“Lauren, Lauren, my sweet girl, listen to me: I found Mirela too late, and I found you too soon.”
Mom bit down on the words like shards of glass.
“I’m so sorry,” Mom said. “Please, girls, I am sorry.”
Lauren listened as her mother gripped the car wheel and bumped her forehead against it—mumph-mumph-mumph.
“Oh God, forgive me,” Mom said, as if to herself. “God, please forgive me.”
“When I was baby!” Mirela said. Her voice was gaining in volume. She kicked harder and more. “When I was baby! When I was baby!”
Lauren felt the violence of what she had done, and a quickness and agility in herself—in the violence—that had otherwise completely abandoned her. Her pain was deep and honest and alive, and that meant she could sharpen it into the curve of a blade. She could make her pain into other people’s pain. There was a heinous beauty in it. It glinted in her eye. It was the violence of it that held her in place in the back seat, hidden from Mom’s eyes. It kept her from saying a gentle word to Mom, placing a hand on her shoulder. The slightest little thing. She had won, but one false move you lose.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get there eventually,” Rajiv said over his shoulder as he passed Lauren in the hallway between classes. Giggles from whoever was walking with him. It wasn’t worth the effort to register who they were. She could sit down right there in the stream between class periods without caring who saw her or what they thought. She was fumbling through a sandstorm.
“Can’t we all get alloooonng?” Rajiv was keening down the hallways. Mocking sobs. Even Stitch had told him how crazy-making it was.
She was encased in a suit of armor. Lifting and maneuvering her limbs took a great, crushing, cranking effort. All the passageways of her body constricting, her blood flow slowing, rerouting itself, turning on itself, jellifying. Hands and feet gone blue and cold. Her skull screwed on too tight—her bones had thickened, too, and they were expanding and contracting, and her brain jangled around inside. Sirening white streaks at the corners of her sight. She rattled and chanked around, most people too polite or dismayed to ask her what was wrong, her steel boots sliding deeper into the sand.
She could drop out of the musical. Even now. The day of. It could be done. Lauren’s understudy, Leslie Cochrane, attended every rehearsal, whether she was required to or not. Lauren’s stupid Pink Ladies jacket would fit Leslie just fine, even if her saddle shoes were a half size too small—Leslie would accept any hardship for the sake of the role. But dropping out meant drawing on empty reserves of energy. Finding an acceptable excuse for dropping out, finding the right time and words for telling Mr. Smith, finding the courage to say the words and deflect his reaction, having to tell Mom and her classmates and her teachers, having to tell Paula and Stitch, and the whispers and scoldings to follow, and worse, the clucks and warbles of sympathy—it was too much to bear, too much to think about, far more trouble than the drudgery of chank-chanking through her paces in the company renditions of “Shakin’ at the High School Hop,” dimly aware of the laughing boys and the squinting girls and Mr. Smith in the middle distance, arms crossed. If she dropped out, then there was officially, formally, something wrong.
She could not disappear completely, but oddly she could come closer to disappearing onstage than if she refused to go on it. Mindy had decided to turn “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” into an ensemble number for all the Pink Ladies, “addressing their shared insecurities as young women,” she explained, patting Lauren’s arm. They would sing and dance in unison, no solos. They’d gone to all that trouble just for her.
“Lauren can’t do anything by herself,” Brendan said. “Can’t sing by herself, can’t dance by herself, can’t sleep by herself . . .”
“You are so fucking stupid,” Deepa told him.
“Can’t we all get alloooonng?” Andy brayed at her. Rajiv’s disease was catching.
Leslie kept telling Lauren she could take over for her. “You know, if that works for you,” Leslie said. “Don’t think twice about it.” Like stealing from her would be doing her a favor, like Leslie’s greedy pity was a gift.
“Honestly, Lauren, Ted wouldn’t be so hard on you if you didn’t have such an attitude,” Claire said on the afternoon of opening night, during pizza break in Tedquarters. Lauren sat in the saggy center of one of the sad couches, a paper plate of pizza on her lap, Claire on one side of her and Stitch on the other. Lauren shifted positions constantly and winced as she did it. She didn’t try not to wince; perhaps she winced more than was strictly necessary. Her hip touched Claire’s hip, her knee touched Stitch’s knee, and she felt the space she took up in their imaginations. They wondered what was going on with her but wouldn’t ask, not directly. Or they knew and didn’t need to ask. She would remain in the room with them after she’d left it. Maybe they talked about her the way Paula talked about her rock stars.
Abby drew up a chair to the couch. She had a Pyrex full of salad. “Do you want some, Lauren?” she asked. The voice of a cool cloth on a feverish forehead. Abby crammed a lettuce leaf into her mouth, as if to demonstrate. Lauren shook her head and lifted her slice of pizza off the paper plate almost to her lips. Her stomach hitched forward, and she put the slice down again. The cheese was congealing; the oil dotting the pepperoni slices was changing from translucent to a lurid orange. The paper plate was starting to sweat into her jeans.
“Here, Lauren, I can hold that for you,” Stitch said, and Lauren nodded. He took the plate and set it down on the table.
The object with pizza break, as with any other unit of time—a class, a rehearsal, the gap between class periods—was to wait it out. Not only make it to the end but stretch it out long enough to delay the transition to the next task, and perhaps through this delay she could eliminate a few of the other tasks that the day demanded of her, like when she would be so late to class that it would be disruptive and quite frankly unfair to the teacher and other students to show up at all, like if she lay on the bathroom floor with her face on the cool tile long enough it would be too late for Mom to bother kicking up much of a fuss about whether or not Lauren came to dinner, that is, assuming Mom had noticed whether or not Lauren came to dinner and was not instead focused on the proven fact that Mirela had dumped her own dinner into a basket of freshly folded linens.
“Save it for later,” Mirela would say. One of her first sentences in English. That’s right, Mirela. There would always be a better time than now.
“Lauren,” Abby was saying. “Honey. What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
Lauren tried for what felt like a long time to respond, staring at the slice on the table as it succumbed to a yeasty rigor mortis, the greasy edges of the paper plate starting to curl around it like a carnivorous flower, her lips opening and closing around the thing she couldn’t say.
A voice was calling in the distance. They were needed onstage. Claire and Stitch got up from the couch but Abby stayed in her chair beside Lauren. Someone standing behind Abby asked her to come, or told her—a surprise and affront in the request—and still Abby stayed. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap.
Abby never did things like this. She was orderly, rational. She didn’t keep other people waiting.
“Lauren,” Abby said. “Please. Tell me what is going on.”
Abby stayed there so long the light started to change. When she finally got up and left the room, with a parting squeeze of Lauren’s shoulder, Abby crossed in front of one of the halogen lamps and Lauren felt her friend’s shadow alight briefly on her skin and lift again, and she closed her eyes against this bleak triumph, that she had not only outlasted her friend, exhausted her sympathy, but she had outlasted the whole day, she had starved and killed it, she had forced the earth to turn away from the sun. She didn’t feel happy, but she did feel like she’d won.
When she thinks back to that night, her skin ripples and hardens into scales, ticklish and tender. Moths and dragonflies beating their wings inside her rib cage. Open her mouth and a wasp would fly out. She felt a queasy excitement, an exhilaration in destruction, to realize again the earthquake that swallows up and spits out your whole life could be ecstatic, could have ever been anything other than ecstatic. Like seeing the blood on the floor and realizing the blood was her. As if the four walls of the redbrick house had fallen down to reveal a theater-in-the-round, an audience in semi-darkness, and Lauren in her tight skirt and satin Pink Ladies windbreaker and hair that Abby had teased big with hot irons and hairspray, standing head-to-head with Stitch, in his painted-on jeans and black leather jacket and sparkling-wet swirly pompadour, and he snapped his next line through a big wad of gum—“Whaddya tryin’ to do, Rizzo?”—and she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say.
Stitch snapped his fingers. “Whaddya tryin’ to do, there, Rizzo?” he asked again.
She could only remember what she wasn’t supposed to say, so she said it.
“I feel like a broken typewriter,” she said.
Stitch’s mouth dropped open. He might have been startled, or letting himself in on Lauren’s joke, or preparing to speak his next line. Lauren would never know. Such was the charisma of Stitch.
“You know, like a broken typewriter—because I skipped a period,” Lauren said, enunciating, smacking the pee, eyes sliding meaningfully toward the audience, and then Stitch said something about Rizzo always flapping her gums and Andy said his next line and Lauren felt herself altered, bewitched, the abracadabra of the forbidden line unlocking all her dialogue and marks and dance steps, which she could perform as if remote-controlled.
When she came offstage, she felt him before she could see him. Not physical touch but the weight and pressure of his body shifting the air near her. Grunting through gritted teeth. Then he grabbed her roughly by the arm, and she wanted to laugh it felt so good.
“Lauren, how could you do this. How could you do this to me.”
Matter changing states in the wrong space. The person from the wood-paneled living room colliding with the person from school. Ardor then anger, anger substituted for ardor.
Andy stepping forward, his body poised to come between them, ready to launch into gangly action. Andy Figueroa, Lauren’s mind typed out, not so bad after all. Claire and Stitch round-eyed, staring, but not at Lauren.
Changing states into an animal. What kind? Barking, snarling, foaming. All instincts and reflexes and endocrine receptors. Nothing to argue with. She wasn’t an animal, and so she must have been the one who made him do it. She decided to. And she was glad. When she smiled, she bared her teeth, too.
“Ted,” Andy was saying, “let go of her.”
“Let go of her!” everyone was shouting, and still Lauren bared her teeth.
The funny thing was that nobody in the audience seemed to have caught on. Even a few people in the play, like Brendan, had no idea, although Brendan was an idiot. Mr. Smith left during curtain call, and after the players left the stage, some of them changing out of their costumes and storing them for the next night’s performance, none of them gathered in Tedquarters as they normally would. As if by mutual unspoken agreement, they filtered out down the hall from the auditorium toward the front entryway, their parents and siblings gathering in the sunken cafeteria. The faces of their families were shining and unconflicted; their arms were open. Mrs. Figueroa scooped Andy off his feet and swung him around, and he looked so happy. They spoke to each other in Spanish. Qué maravilloso, qué estupendo.
“Vee yo so!” Mirela told Stitch, then wrapped her arms around Mrs. Kornbluth’s legs.
The families mingled in one loose embrace among the long tables with the chairs stacked atop them. The overhead fluorescent lights took on a fireside warmth.
Stitch in his pompadour moved beside Lauren, close enough that their arms were touching.
“If someone asks me,” Stitch mumbled, “what do you want me to say?”
“Nothing,” Lauren said.
“I’ll have to say something.”
“No, I mean there’s nothing I want you to say—say what you want.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
Lauren laughed. “Too late. Probably.”
“I think it will be okay.”
“Thank you for being nice,” she said. “Thank you for making me tapes.”
The warm pooling feeling in her chest, the pleasurable sadness. Stitch was standing close enough to her that she could smell his pomade and hairspray but also his twigs-and-burlap Stitch smell, the smell of a kid air-guitaring in a big cold pile of autumn leaves.
“No one seems to have noticed,” Stitch said, scanning the crowd. “Everyone looks happy.”
“He totally blew up at me,” Lauren said.
“Well, but I think that was a good thing,” said Andy, all at once in front of them.
“What do I care what you think?” she said to Andy.
“No—listen—” Andy said.
“We all saw what happened, right?” Stitch said to Andy, nodding, eyes big and meaningful.
“He can’t do that,” Andy said, nodding back. “He can’t act like that, no matter what.”
“Andy just means it’s good that everyone saw what he did,” Stitch said.
“Oh,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood.”
“It’s okay,” Andy said.
“Just say you were confused,” Abby was saying.
“You didn’t know what you were supposed to say,” Stitch said.
“You were nervous—” Abby was saying.
“—because Mr. Smith was acting so weird,” Andy finished.
“Everyone knows how weird he is,” Claire was saying.
“You did what he wanted,” Andy said.
“He made you do it,” Abby said. “It was his stupid joke and he should have known better. He’s the adult. Okay?”
Lauren felt conscious of herself as part of a branching, respiring system of affinities, loyalties, tribal urges. Breathing in time with it, assimilated. And she felt conscious, too, that she had been part of this system all along, although she struggled to dance in its formation or sing in its same key. An opinion or a set of beliefs could shape itself around the tiniest gesture of a single figure, the leading bird of an echelon nudging the vortex this way or that, according to the particular aerodynamics of that moment, the direction and speed of the wind. One arm swung forward and the other swung back, one voice began a sentence and another ended it, not out of coercion or conscious choice or preference, but because all the parts of the body needed to work together, according to their present circumstances.
“Okay,” Lauren said.
Her mother was standing in front of her. Mom looked stricken, stunned. Just like her to overcompensate, just like Mom to watch a crappy high school play and fake it afterward like everyone was about to win Oscars.
Mom’s arms were wrapped around her. Mom’s face was in her neck, breathing her in.
“I love you so much, baby,” Mom said.
Lauren was onstage again. She thought she could feel everybody watching, or trying not to watch. Crazy Mom again. This embrace was too somber and melodramatic for a high school play. Lauren waited for Mirela to pop up beside them, pressing her skinny arms together in a sword to cleave them apart. “Cut da cheese!” she’d always say. Mirela hated it when they hugged or got anywhere near each other. Or maybe Mirela didn’t mind so much now—maybe the trip to Colorado had done some good. Lauren had meant to ask Mom how it went, but she hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
“Mom?” Lauren said.
“That’s me,” Mom said, her voice wet and snagged.
“Mom, where’s Mirela?”
Of course she’d run away. Running away had become Mirela’s job. She had played a runaway on local TV. Lauren understood why she did it. Mirela could find the aloneness she craved and at the same time remain the center of attention; she could have her cake and hoard it, too. Lauren found a bitter entertainment in watching a search party form on the spot in the cafeteria and fan out into all points of the radius: front lawn, soccer and football fields, auditorium, second floor. She’d seen it all before. She’d seen it on the news. It was as horrifying and tedious as those buffalo galloping off the cliff.
She walked out the side entrance of Bethune, still in her Pink Ladies jacket and saddle shoes. The moon was full, clouded over by the lakes. It had been drizzling on and off all day, and now the air was misty and raindrops clung to the grass. She half expected to hear Stitch’s skateboard on the asphalt. She spotted him then, with his dad, already halfway across the football field in search of Mirela, Dr. Rosen’s hand on Stitch’s back.
Lauren’s eyes fell on the opening in the chain-link fence. It occurred to her, in an impossible flash, that Mirela had seen her go through the gap every day, had learned it from her. The gap in the fence was about as tall as Mirela. Lauren crouched to get her sight lines level with Mirela’s. If you were the size of a high school student, you had to squint at the overgrown grass and weeds that grew just past the school’s property line to find the gap in the fence. But at Mirela’s height, it would more likely present itself as a ragged doorway cut just for her.
Lauren walked toward the fence, her shoes squelch-squelching in the wet grass. She squeezed through the gap, the split end of one link catching on the pink satin of her jacket, and stood at the edge of the open lot on Fox Hollow. “Mirela?” she called.
A rustle of a squirrel, a bird. The crackle of twigs and branches beneath her shoes in the open lot. She reached the sidewalk and stood beneath a streetlight, looking up and down. Fox Hollow was so narrow, more like a wood path than a street. “Mirela?”
She crossed Fox Hollow and walked onto the Reillys’ property, compelled by some dream logic that Mirela had taken Lauren’s usual route home. Trying to be like her big sister. Lauren walked around the Reillys’ house into their backyard. “Mirela!” It was abruptly darker now, under the maples and pines.
She had done this. Lauren. She hadn’t thought enough about Mom. She was never home to help. She didn’t pay attention. Her stupid plays that she made them come to. Her stupid birthday party. “Mirela!” she screamed. “Mirela, please!”
“I’ve got her,” she could hear a man’s voice calling.
“Mirela! Someone please help me!”
“I’ve got her—follow the sound of my voice. We’re here. I’ll keep talking. Follow the sound.”
Lights were flicking on in the surrounding houses. Mr. and Mrs. Reilly appeared on their deck. Another figure, a tall redheaded woman, approaching from the other side of the Reillys’.
“Mirela! Help! Mirela, where are you!”
“Keep following my voice. Lauren, is that you?”
A large seated figure in the grass emerged from the darkness in its outlines and then its contours. It resolved into two distinct figures, one seated on top of the other, as Lauren grew closer.
“Lauren, it’s you. Don’t worry, I’ve got her.”
Measurements she had taken with her own hands now slotted into place. The dimensions of his silhouette, softened and imprecise beneath the diffuse moonlight and tree shade, but unmistakable: the distance from nose to upper lip, the degrees of the angle of his jawline, the coordinates of the slope of the shoulders. He was sitting cross-legged on the unadorned back lawn. Mirela was silent in his lap, turned away from him. His hands were wrapped around her. They rocked back and forth.
“I’m doing the squeeze,” Mr. Smith said, looking up at Lauren.
“Who’s out there?” Mrs. Reilly called. She was off the deck now, coming closer. “Can anyone tell me what’s going on?”
You could move your finger through the air and write a story.
“Does anyone need help?” the tall redheaded woman called out. “Is everyone okay?”
Yet another figure emerging now, from behind the hedgerow, someone from the fancier houses, the Rosens’ next-door neighbor, maybe, hands in pockets, head craning.
She remembered what he said. That the audience wants to be told what to see.
What she did next wasn’t a decision. It was the filling of the lungs, the contraction of the heart muscle. The wasp moved its stinger into the base of her throat. She could take no responsibility for what came next, could harbor no guilt, no second-guessing. Instinct, reflex, biological drive. One voice began a sentence and the other ended it. Maybe she was an animal after all.
“That’s my little sister!” she screamed. “Let go of her!”
She looked through the audience’s eyes. A man holding down a child in darkness and dirt. The child’s older sister—though just a girl herself—rescuing her, saving her.
“Lauren, everything’s okay. She’s okay—” he said.
“Lauren, honey, are you all right?” Mrs. Reilly asked, her voice coming closer.
“What’s going on?” the tall redheaded woman asked. “Whose child is this?”
The figure from behind the hedgerow was running toward Lauren now.
“Let go of her! What are you doing?! Let go of her!”
“Whose is she?”
“Joe, go back inside and call the police right now.”
“Where is this child’s mother?”
“Lauren, what are you doing—ma’am, no, please, this is a big misunderstanding—” he said.
“Whose is she?”
“SHE’S JUST A BABY!”
It was her. It was Lauren who was doing it. It was her voice she heard.
“LET GO OF HER! SHE’S JUST A BABY! SHE’S JUST A LITTLE GIRL!”
This must be what it’s like to be Mirela. She was screaming like she could shatter the glass of herself, like she could scream away the world.