YOU WANT TO KNOW about her abortion. Namely, if she got one or not. And honestly, I’m not the right person to ask, because I don’t want to talk about it. Some things, girls have to go through on their own. Tell one other person and suddenly you’re too big to fit through it.
All I remember is Lou making a comment at school. “Tabitha put on weight,” she said to me when we both happened to be in the bathroom at the same time, washing our hands practically in tandem.
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I felt like I should defend her, because Lou barely ever even talked to me, and my allegiance was with Tabby, no matter how weird she had been acting lately.
“Maybe because you see her, like, every day. But in gym class she had a doctor’s note to avoid jumping on the trampoline. And I wasn’t looking or anything, but I saw her when she was changing after class. Her stomach looked super bloated.”
I thought about Tabby. The girl I saw eat less and less every day. Maybe I hadn’t noticed her putting on weight, but she hadn’t been losing it, no matter how many Cheetos she ditched in favor of celery sticks.
“I thought you might know something,” Lou said. I shook my head. She was gone before I could ask her about the trampoline, about what that had to do with Tabby’s stomach. But it only took a few seconds for me to figure it out. The same thing every teenage girl is taught to be terrified of.
But Tabby couldn’t be pregnant. I hadn’t seen her drink in a while, but that was only because she was trying to cut out alcohol. She didn’t like how she got when she drank it, didn’t like how it made her forget. Mark didn’t like who she became.
Had she told Mark? Would he be happy? In my head, there were two versions of him. One who wanted to go to every doctor’s appointment and put together a crib and time contractions. Another who accused her of lying to keep him around, who spat out lines like How do you know it’s even mine?
“Are you okay?” I asked her when we were out for a walk at night, something we used to do when we needed to get away from the boxes that were our homes, the ceilings that trapped us under the stars. “Are things okay with you and Mark?”
“What’s up with you?” she said, kicking a pebble with her pink Converse. “Things are fine. You know, we have our moments. But we’re making it work.”
Making what work? A baby? A relationship? Suddenly I felt like a little kid tagging along, trying to get my big sister to notice me.
“Here’s the thing about Mark,” she said, and tilted her head back to the sky. “I love him more than he loves me. But I think I’m okay with it. I mean, every relationship is a bit off-balance. One person always cares more.”
I thought about me and Dallas. There was so much to say.
“You know you can tell me anything,” I said. The words came out of me so loud that they were practically a shout. They were a demand. Tell me anything and everything because there is so much I need to tell you.
She rubbed her arms and pulled the sleeves of her shirt over her hands, making her fingertips disappear. “Sometimes,” she said, dragging out the word for so long that I wondered if she even had the rest of the sentence planned. “Sometimes I wish I could stop apologizing. Like, not everything is my fault.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. She just laughed, but it wasn’t her normal laugh. It was hollow, like she had been emptied out.
“You know what I mean. Every girl knows. We all apologize for everything. It’s like, genetic. In our DNA.”
She was right. I lost track of the number of times I said sorry on a regular basis. Sorry to the lady in the cafeteria for not carrying cash. Sorry to teachers for not knowing the answers. Sorry to girls for hogging the mirror in the bathroom. Sorry to boys for being too much and never enough.
Sorry for my body, for all the ways I fought with it. Even sorrier for the hot clash of emotions in my chest, the way they all churned there nonstop.
“You can tell me anything, too,” she said.
So I did. I told her everything about Dallas and nothing about how I wished it was Beck instead. Beck was the one whose thumbs I felt tracing my jawline, his arms pinning me beneath him. You’re beautiful, Elle was supposed to spill from his lips. But of course, I left all that out. Tabby listened to my ugly truth, her hand finding mine, fingers tangling together, and she made it less ugly somehow.
“I can’t believe you kept all this from me,” she said. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t tell me. I thought we told each other everything.”
As much as I love Tabby, there was a tiny part of me that was annoyed. She managed to take something wholly and utterly mine and make it all about her. But I wasn’t pissed off for long. There was too much going on inside my head.
Weeks later, I heard the rumors, same as everyone else. Somebody saw a girl about Tabby’s height wearing an orange Princeton hoodie in front of the clinic. The hoodie—remember that, because it was an important detail. That was Mark’s college. Mark’s sweatshirt.
And when Mark found out—that was when Tabby fell apart.