my house.”
Laura wipes her eyes. “I think that’s best.”
I get out of the car. I hold the door open, staring at my feet. I want to add something to this moment. Something poignant. Something insightful. Just something. But all I can think to do is shut the door.
I step over to the Subie and open the door. I sit in my car, shut the door, and stick the keys in the ignition. The car fires twice before it starts. I sit there for five minutes with the motor running. Laura is still in her car. She’s crying.
The Subie is a manual transmission, so I pop the clutch, throwing the stick shift in reverse. I forget to press the accelerator. The car lurches backward a few inches, and then the engine dies.
I hear a car door shut. Laura is out of her car. I open my door. “Laura, I…”
Her back is to me. She slumps her shoulders and leans her back against the driver’s side door of her Calais, head down.
I run around the back of the car and embrace her, both of us crying. This is my moment. I can feel it. It’s my time to say my piece, one way or the other. Either take a stand or else just support her.
“Laura, I knew this girl in eighth grade…” No, I didn’t.
“She got mixed up with an older guy…” I should stop while I’m ahead.
“I was there for her. Saw her go through so much. She had an abortion, and it ruined her. Almost ruined me seeing her go through it…”
A one hundred percent fabrication. All of it. I ramble on for a couple more minutes. My story doesn’t register with Laura. Her eyes are vacant and her tears have stopped. She’s just hanging in my arms.
Not that it matters.
I was given my chance to step up. My chance to be a good Catholic or a good man or a good boyfriend—to be a good something. And instead, I plagiarized the plot of The Last American Virgin.
Jesus might have wanted to be a carpenter, but I got no fucking tools for this.
Chapter eighteen
Hoosier Boys State, Hoosier Boys State
We are one and all for you…
We will fight for, we will strive for
All the things we’ve pledged to do…
Ever loyal, ever faithful
And we’ll always be true blue…
All the rules of right we will follow honor bright,
Hoosier Boys State we’re for you!
Laura called me at Hoosier Boys State to tell me she was vomiting a lot and couldn’t keep anything down. I told her I was running for governor and was stressed out about the primary election.
I didn’t even make it out of the primaries. I lost my party’s nomination to a scrawny cross-country runner from Fort Wayne. The guy was a relentless coalition builder. I won our debate, but he had sixty percent of the votes in his pocket before he even opened his mouth. He went on to win the governor’s race. I left the campus of Indiana State thoroughly disenchanted with two-party politics.
I drive straight to Laura’s house. Her car is the only one in the driveway. The front door is unlocked. I let myself in.
“Laura!”
The house is quiet, the lights turned off, the curtains drawn throughout. I step into the hallway off the foyer. The master bedroom is the only room in the hallway with its door shut. I don’t even knock before I open the door.
“Hey, boyfriend, welcome home.” She’s in her parents’ bed, her head peeking out of the top of multiple sheets and quilts, fists clenched beneath her chin. She looks like Dennis Hopper in Hoosiers when he was trying to dry 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
