Art & Soul (3 page)

In his hand were berries, which he held out toward the deer.

“You’re gonna love these,” he promised. Each time he spoke I noticed the accent attached to the words. He wasn’t from around here—that was for certain. There was this southern drawl that showed up at the end of each of his sentences; it was soothing.

The deer stepped forward, moving in closer to him. Anticipation overtook me, hoping the deer would connect with the stranger.

Do people feed deer? Is that a thing?

A part of me wanted to look away from him, but another part
really
wanted to keep staring. My left foot moved backward, snapping a branch, and my right foot hit another, causing me to fall backward onto my butt. The deer became startled and ran off in the opposite direction.

“
Shoot!
” he hissed, tossing the berries to the ground before brushing his hands against his jeans. A short chuckle left him. “Almost.”

I bit my lip and moved around, making more noise on the branches. He turned my way, looking as startled as the deer. First he was confused by my entire existence, and then pleased.

His brown eyes smiled before his lips followed in the kindness.

Clearing my throat, I gave him an apologetic frown.

Taking a few steps my way, his gaze searched my face. He waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say, so I remained silent. His hand reached out toward me, but I refused it, pushing myself up from the ground. He kept smiling as I brushed away the wet leaves and branches from the bottom of my bum.

“You all right?” he questioned.

I nodded mutely.

His smile didn’t falter. I wondered if he knew how to
not
smile. “All right then,” he said. “See ya later.” He headed toward the tree house and started climbing the steps. Once he reached the top, the mystery guy disappeared inside, out of my viewpoint. I looked left, right, up, and down, glancing around at the quiet trees, wondering if he had even really existed. Yet I knew he had to be real, because the pile of berries still lay against the dampened grass.

T
here wasn’t
a Sunday dinner when my family didn’t all eat together. Most of the time during the week Mom and Dad worked different shifts, so everyone eating together wasn’t all that common. Except for Sundays; Sundays we always ate together at our dining table because my parents thought it was important to catch up on life over a homemade meal at least once a week.

Mom passed the bowl of crescent rolls around. “Oh! There’s news! Aria, Mr. Harper called about the art show you signed up for a few months ago. He said your work is going to be highlighted as the featured piece in the art museum. It all sounds like a very big deal.” Mom’s voice was soaked in pride and wrapped in golden approval. She never minded that I was more into the creative world than the medical world she lived in. She was one of those parents who believed their children should be their own people.

The crescent roll bowl landed in my hands and I passed it on to Mike, not replying to Mom’s excitement.

“I thought you would be excited.” A slight frown hit her. “I thought this was what you wanted.”

Nothing from me.

“Aria, your mother’s talking to you,” Dad said with command in his tone, even though his eyes were looking past the dining room table to the television in the living room playing Sports Center. Dad had a way of backing Mom up when he was hardly paying attention. He always came into the conversations at precisely the right time, like a spousal sixth sense.

“I’m pregnant,” I stated nonchalantly, stuffing a spoonful of peas into my mouth. The words rolled off of my tongue as if it was a normal thing for me to be saying. As if I’d been trying for months to become impregnated by the love of my life. As if it was the next logical step in my life.

Mike held his crescent roll in midair, his eyes darting back and forth between our parents. My younger sister Grace’s eyes were bugged out. My baby sister KitKat threw a few peas at Dad, but that was normal because she was a one-year-old and always threw peas at Dad.

I supposed their reactions were the precise way to look based on what I’d told them twenty seconds before.

I wished I was invisible.

My eyes shut. “Just kidding.” I laughed, becoming wary of the strange silence that filled the dining room. I poked Mom’s special meatloaf with my fork. Everyone’s faces softened, the shock subsiding.

“You’re kidding?” Mom choked out.

“She’s kidding.” Mike sighed.

“Kidding?” Dad sang.

Grace nodded with understanding. “Totally kidding.”

KitKat giggled, but then again she was always either giggling, howling in tears, or throwing peas.

“Yeah,” I muttered, my voice wanting to shake. I wouldn’t allow it to. “Not kidding.”

Dad tilted his head and was alarmingly calm. “Mike, Grace, take KitKat upstairs.”

“But!” Mike began to argue. He wanted to be front row center to watch our parents verbally assault me and my bad decisions. He was normally the one to get in trouble for drinking and partying with a few of the other football players, so it must’ve been nice to not have the parents eyeballing him with stern looks for a change. I was always the well-behaved kid who promised and delivered straight A report cards each semester. My acts of rebellion were small in comparison: a shaved head and too much eyeliner had been the extent of my wild and crazy—until now.

Dad turned his deceivingly calm stare to Mike. That shut him up quick. He lifted KitKat out of her chair and left the room.

The dinner table conversation took a turn for the worse, and I knew I should’ve told Mom alone first. She was a pediatrician and worked closely with kids and their issues, so maybe she would have understood. But instead, I’d tried to be all nonchalant about the issue and decided to drop my big news in front of my father.

He wasn’t a pediatrician.

He didn’t “get” kids.

He was a plumber.

He dealt with people’s crap for forty plus hours a week. Clogged toilets, sinks, nasty tub drains—you name it, he fixed it.

Which meant by dinnertime, he was pretty annoyed by other people’s shit. Including mine.

“Pregnant, Aria?” Dad hissed, his face turning redder and redder by the second. The bald spot on the top of his head was bright and steaming with anger. Dad was a heavyset man of very few words. He never had much reason to raise his voice at us. We were, on the whole, decent kids. Even with Mike’s drinking and partying, Dad would scold him quietly. He’d had it pretty easy raising us until about three minutes ago.

I didn’t reply to his question. My non-responsiveness made it worse.

“Pregnant?!” His voice became a holler as his fists slammed against the table, knocking over the salt shaker. My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands, and I accidently bit the inside of my lip. Dad’s blue eyes were stern with disappointment and his mouth was so intent on forming a frown that it made me feel sad, too.

“Adam.” Mom grimaced, bothered by the way he was raising his voice at me. “Do you want the neighbors to hear?”

“I doubt that would matter because I’m pretty sure they’ll be able to see it soon enough!”

He was at a full-blown shout, and I was terrified.

“Screaming isn’t going to make it better,” Mom explained.

“And speaking softly isn’t going to either,” Dad replied.

“I don’t like your tone, Adam.”

“And I don’t like that our sixteen-year-old daughter is
pregnant
!”

My body tensed up. If there was anything worse than saying the word pregnant myself, it was hearing the word fly from Dad’s mouth. My stomach was tightly knotted, and I felt my dinner rising back up my throat. I’d never made any mistake that would make my parents seem so broken. How had I screwed up that much?

They were fighting.

They never fought.

The last time I’d heard them do anything close to fighting was when they were trying to pick a nickname for KitKat, and that had ended with Dad kissing Mom’s forehead and rubbing her feet during an episode of “NCIS”.

My hands fell to my lap, and I wanted to try to explain to them how it had happened. I wanted them to understand how I knew being pregnant as a teenager was a terrible thing. I repeat:
being sixteen and pregnant is a terrible thing
. I’d watched the show “16 & Pregnant” on MTV way too many times, and I should’ve known to keep my lady parts away from that guy, but something weird happened to my brain when he called me beautiful. Well, not
beautiful
, but
cute
, which was more than I’d ever been called before by anyone other than my parents. Weird and freak, yes. Cute? Not so much.

Mom ran her fingers through her wavy black hair. She had goose bumps running down her caramel arms. I looked more like her, more Mexican than Caucasian like my father. Her lips were full and her eyes were the color of chocolate candies. Those same eyes were currently filled with disappointment and confusion.

“Maybe I should talk to her alone first,” Mom offered.

Dad grunted before pushing himself away from the table. He didn’t have the same look of confusion and disappointment, he just seemed disgusted with me. “Have at it.”

When he left the room the conversation with Mom moved pretty quickly.

“How do you know you’re pregnant?” she asked.

“Took four tests,” I replied.

“How do you know you performed the tests right?”

“Come on, Mom.”

“Is Simon…?”

“What? No way!”

“Why on Earth wouldn’t you use protection?”

“I made a mistake.” I cleared my throat, feeling ashamed. After seeing the condescending look in her eyes, I bailed on the logic and tried for a more playful approach. “Didn’t you say to Dad that KitKat was an accident, too? Can’t you see how these things could happen?”

“Aria Lauren, watch your words. You’re this close to the edge,” she scolded me. When Mom got upset, her face tightened and the smile lines around her mouth disappeared. She also tugged on her right ear when extremely irritated.

She was right.

I was hanging from the edge, reaching out toward her to pull me up, but she was too busy tugging her ear to death.

“Tomorrow I’ll pick you up after school and we’re going to head to the doctor and get you checked out. For now, head to your room so I can talk to your father.”

My feet dragged toward my bedroom, and I paused on the wooden floor panels before turning on my heel to face her again. “Can you ask Dad not to hate me too much?”

Her mouth softened and those smile lines returned. “I’ll make sure that it’s the perfect amount of hatred.”

I
t’d been
fifty-four minutes of yelling and screaming between my parents. Even though they were really upset with me, they were determined to take it out on one another. I sat cross-legged on my bed, ear buds in ears, and a blank canvas in front of me. The music was cranked to a deafening volume to avoid hearing my parents fall apart. I would lose myself in my artwork and music to try to forget that I’d broken my family.

At least that was the plan until Mike came and stood in my doorway. His lips moved at a nonstop speed, but luckily my music was shutting out whatever he was saying. Lifting my iPod, I stupidly turned down the sound.

“You ruined this, you know. My senior year is supposed to be epic, but instead I’m going to be the guy with a knocked up younger sister.”

“You’re right. I should’ve really thought about how this would affect my older, popular brother. It was a lot easier when nobody noticed me, right?” I sarcastically rolled my eyes. Mike was a huge guy, the star running back of the football team and on his way to being offered full rides to play football at some of the biggest colleges in the Midwest. With his blue eyes and light brown hair, he looked more like Dad than Mom.

“You’re so fucking stupid. You really don’t know what you’ve done, do you? Listen to them.” He gestured toward the living room.

“Shut up, Mike.” I turned the volume back up on my music. He kept yapping for a good few minutes before he dramatically flipped me off and stormed away. My brother, my hero.

Hours passed before the lights in the house faded to black. Mom and Dad never came to check on me. I hadn’t been able to paint, either. The brush rested in my grip, ready, but I never pushed it against my canvas.

Grace poked her head into my room, but she didn’t know what to say to her big sister who was pregnant.

She walked back and forth for a while trying to figure out something to say, glancing into my bedroom before giving me a sly smirk. “You know KitKat is going to be an aunt to someone that’s only a year younger than her? That’s creepy.”

Twelve-year-olds were a lot more forward than I wanted them to be, that was for sure.

“Get lost, twerp.”

“You’re a twerp, twerp!” she mocked back, placing her hands on her hips and rolling her neck back and forth as if she was nothing more than a body of sass. “I have questions.”

“Of course you do.”

“Do you pee on yourself?”

“What?” I arched an eyebrow.

“Do. You. Pee. On. Yourself? My teacher Mrs. Thompson was pregnant last year and she peed all over the hallway when we were walking to music class.”

“I don’t pee on myself.”
Not yet at least.
Was that something I should be worried about? Would I start randomly peeing on myself for some strange reason?
Note to self—Google pissing during pregnancy.

“I bet you’re going to be super fat too. Some people are really pretty pregnant, like Mrs. Thompson, but I don’t think you are going to be one of those people.”

“You can leave any time, Grace.”

“I’m not changing any dirty diapers. Do you even know how to change a diaper?!”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“Shouldn’t you
not
be pregnant?”

Touché.

I did the only mature thing I could think of.

I took off my dirty socks and threw them at her face, hitting her right in her mouth.

“Eww! You’re nasty!” she whined, washing her tongue against the palm of her hand. “I’m telling!”

Right, because our parents’ biggest issue at that moment was the fact that I’d put dirty socks in my sister’s mouth.

I
went digging
into my dresser and pulled out a pair of underwear and one of my oversized T-shirts to sleep in. I knew I should’ve been in bed already. School didn’t really care if I was tired in the morning. School didn’t care that my life was going through a complete upheaval. School didn’t care that I was moments away from a breakdown.

School just wanted me there by the first bell.

I hopped into the shower to try to clear the fog that was residing inside my head. The water rained down on me for over an hour before I stepped out and dried myself off with a towel. The mirror in front of me felt mocking. My fingers fell to my stomach, and I stared into the mirror trying to understand how I could look the same, but be so different.

I slid the T-shirt over my head, and I glanced at myself once more before walking out of the bathroom. I cringed when I saw Dad lying on the living room couch. He looked like a giant trying to get comfortable on a seashell, twisting and turning unsuccessfully.

My lips parted. My brain searched for the right words.

After standing still for a minute, it was clear there weren’t any right words.

So I left.

M
onday morning Mike
refused to drive me to school.

He said it was because he had to be there an hour early to lift weights before school started, but that had never stopped him in the past. I always ended up going to the art room and messing around for an hour before school.

Even so, he was very adamant that I wouldn’t ride with him. I wanted to complain to my parents about it, but the timing couldn’t have been worse, so the bus was my only choice.

The bus stop was two blocks away from my house. When I tossed my backpack on and left, I saw Simon already standing on the corner. The moment I stood beside him, he could tell everything I hadn’t yet vocalized—best friend extrasensory perception.