She loved Sheldon Myers.
Shiels Krane, student-body chair . . .
No: Shiels Krane, girl, woman. She loved Sheldon Myers.
She loved the tiny black hairs on his skinny forearms. She loved the points of his elbows when he leaned over, on the desk, and left behind whatever it was he was immersed in—an explanation of how black holes affect the literary theory behind graphic novels—and held his face inches from hers. Cell-widths. And how the molecules he breathed seeped into her lungs and she could see the heartbeat pulsing in his baking red ears.
She loved that he had baking red ears.
She loved the smell of him. He was pears and apricot and . . . shoe leather. Not new, slightly old. He fit her nose. He was clean—he showered most days—but he wasn’t antiseptic. His mother did his laundry, but she didn’t iron and neither did Sheldon, and Shiels loved the rumpled charm of him. If his socks matched, it was serendipity. Maybe a mistake.
But no, no. It wasn’t just all the superficial things. She loved the boy. She loved him for his skin and for what he was underneath. He stood by her. He was steadfast. He was . . . quietly Sheldon, anchored while she flew off with her usual this and that. She needed him. Obviously. Tethered to the ground meant just that, not flying, not going anywhere fast.
They needed each other.
She could see that now. She was not just . . . Shiels Krane, person. She was one half of Shiels and Sheldon, the untethered half. The half that would simply let herself blow onstage and wrangle dance with the first pterodactyl boy she came across. No wonder Sheldon was angry.
He was jealous.
Jealous and upset and . . . put out by her untetheredness. She had stayed on the string—she’d come back to him—but she had gone too far. With Pyke, and then with Sheldon himself. She’d gone too far and hadn’t honored it—how could she have? She hadn’t even known. She hadn’t been conscious.
She had sleepwalked through the most important moment of her life so far.
She needed to apologize. To make it up to him. She still was on his string. Of course she was! And he was on hers.
You don’t just bury a kite because of one wrangle dance in the clouds.
• • •
“Shiels honey,” her mother said, knocking gently. “Can I come in?”
Solicitous mother. Gentle mother. A careful inquiry. Shiels could’ve said no. She crossed the room and unlocked the door because certain things were now clear to her.
She was not going to let her mother—or anybody—put her off Sheldon Myers.
“Oh, that nose!” her mother said, but quietly. Without rebuke. Shiels returned to her bed, surrounded herself with pillows. Her mother sat on the edge, squeezed Shiels’s shoulder just the way she used to when Shiels was young and it was bedtime.
Oh, that nose. What was Shiels going to do about it? Sheldon would never love her—could never—while she was marked this way by a . . . a pterodactyl.
Who would’ve thought this could ever be a problem?
“So . . . ,” her mother said, and smiled sadly.
“Yes, so,” Shiels said.
“You and Sheldon have in fact . . . become closer.”
Closer. Shiels supposed that was one way to look at it. Closer, yet it also felt like they had become oceans apart.
“You know I was trying to anticipate this,” her mother said gently. “It’s hard, as a parent. You want to respect your child’s autonomy, her privacy.” Her mother had tears in her eyes! Shiels was not going to be able to keep it together. “And yet, some things need to be said—”
“Mom, I know about birth control!”
“Yes, and I’m a GP. I have this chat every day with young women like you who know all about birth control, and yet, when it comes down to it, they have not used it. And they’re smart, they have every advantage, they know the statistics.” She set her jaw, wiped her eyes. “Shiels, I’m sorry, I’m not good at hiding my disappointment. In myself as well as in you. I have failed to prepare you—”
“Oh, Mom!”
“No, no, hear me out. I tried to tell you, but I didn’t actually say the words. I want you to think seriously. If you’re going to be sexually active, there are so many better options than just closing your eyes and hoping. And there are STDs to think about—”
“Mom, I know this. I know!”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking of you still as my little girl. I should’ve headed this off months ago.”
“It’s not your fault, Mom. And I’m not sure how getting fixed up now is going to help me if I’m already pregnant!”
Her mother shook her head, apparently still stuck on figuring out how any of this had come to pass. Well, it had. Sometimes a pterodactyl just lands in your neighborhood and everything goes wrangy for a time.
“I’m pretty sure you’re not pregnant, dear,” her mother said. “You slept with him once, last night, yes? Probably that means it’s going to happen again. So I would like to make an appointment for you—not with me, I can’t be your doctor for this—but with one of my colleagues.”
“If I am pregnant, then I’m going to have this baby!” Shiels blurted. “I love Sheldon, I love him! I can get a job, I can put off school, Sheldon and I can do almost anything together—”
Shiels’s mother let her run out of steam; it didn’t take long.
“I know, I know, you’re a passionate young woman, you have a formidable will. I have no doubt you would make an amazing young mother, and we do love and respect Sheldon. I have said that before too. Certainly your father and I would support you in every way that we can. You know that, yes?” Shiels’s mother was holding both her hands now. “But having a child now, at your age, is not a great strategy, is it? Ideally, so many other things ought to be in place before you can even think of starting your own family. Anyway, it’s highly unlikely that you actually are pregnant, dear. Just because there’s a big wind, it doesn’t mean a tree is going to fall on your house.”
“How can you possibly know? We did it, we did it! Are you just hoping that because it’s your daughter, everything’s going to be all right?”
Her mother was staying extremely still, even smiling slightly. “We have talked about your cycles, yes?” she said softly.
“My cycles!”
“If I’m not greatly mistaken, I believe your period is due in the next day or two. So if you slept with him last night, and that was the only time so far, then you weren’t really fertile. Your eggs are ready, as you know, in the middle of your cycle—”
Shiels stood abruptly. “How could you possibly know when my period is due?”
Her mother pressed her lips together, sort of frowning but not really. “I buy the supplies, dear. Our cycles have been pretty well synchronized for the last couple of years. It’s not uncommon. It’s a well-studied phenomenon, though not proven definitely. But once you move away to college, if you’re living in a girls’ dorm, you’ll probably find everyone gets in more or less the same rhythm.”
Shiels put her hands to her face. Was she really hearing this?
“When you’re really trained,” her mother said, “when you start to approach life in a more scientific way, you just might find there’s all kinds of heartache and confusion you can avoid by keeping a simple grip on the facts.”
• • •
A simple grip on the facts.
She wasn’t pregnant. Probably. She had lost her virginity—probably—but had no clear recognition of any of it. And her nose was . . . definitely . . . still purple.
Why could she not remember any of the details? She did remember, in Sheldon’s house, the clumsy, gasping, half-laughing passage up the stairs. Having seen herself wrangle dancing on the video, she felt she could now remember part of what had happened in his bedroom. Or was she fooling herself, creating false memories?
How could she have been so absent when clearly she had been right there? After scrambling up those stairs, she must’ve thrown him into bed. He must’ve been beside himself trying to shush her so his parents wouldn’t hear.
Why had he not texted her, or called her, in all these long hours that she’d now spent lying on her bed, staring at her phone, willing him to notice her?
He must have forgiven her.
Forgiven her?
Forgiven her wrangle dance with Pyke.
When he had woken up, he hadn’t been angry with her. He’d been loving. Drowsy. Stubbled. He’d wanted her to have breakfast with his parents.
He’d thought . . . God knows what he’d thought.
It wasn’t like him to not call.
She stared at her phone and stared. She felt cold all over, shivery and light, as if her bones had been hollowed out.
Maybe her mother was right, maybe she wasn’t pregnant. But she was still going to have to show up at school tomorrow with a purple nose and no Sheldon, and everyone knowing . . . or thinking that they knew . . . that in the course of just a couple of days she’d fallen from the heights, in plain view, with her entrails hanging out for all to see.