Immaculate (16 page)

My voice faded away as I turned toward the window, staring out at the sunny fields next to our house as my mind scrambled for new answers. “But if it wasn't Izzy, who else could it have been? No one else makes sense. But it doesn't even matter, I guess, because either way it's out there now. If Jesse knows about it and he doesn't have a single real friend at Green Hill, then everyone in the entire town will know soon enough, and there's nothing I can do to change that.”

“Oh, Mina, I'm so, so . . .” my mom started, but she was cut off by a loud thudding noise from across the room. We both looked over to see Gracie on the floor, slumped into a tight ball in the hallway just beyond the kitchen entrance.

“Gracie?” we both said at the same time, kicking the chairs back as we ran over to her.

“Gracie, sweetie, what's wrong?” I asked, kneeling down low to get closer. I reached out to smooth her tangled blonde curls. “Are you hurt?”

She said nothing back, and though I couldn't actually hear her crying, I could feel her little body trembling under my hand.

My mom crouched down next to me. “Baby, you need to tell us what's wrong. Please. Sit up and talk to us.” She latched on to each of Gracie's balled fists and slowly started tugging, urging her up.

After a few seconds Gracie gave in and let my mom lift her like a puppet, but she yanked her hands free as soon as she was upright. She pulled her knees in tight and stared down at the floor, refusing to look up at either of us. This wasn't her typical fighting style. Gracie got angry and upset, of course, like any seven-year-old girl, but usually the more upset she got, the more she talked. Gracie never had any trouble telling us exactly what was on her mind.

“Gracie. Look at me.” I put my palm under her chin and gently tilted her face so that I could see her eyes. As soon as she looked up at me, she broke, a sudden stream of tears pouring down her cheeks. “I . . . I . . .” she stuttered, her porcelain face flushed with the effort.

“I did it!” The confession exploded from her mouth in a scream. “It was me! It was me, Mina.
Me, me, me, me,
” she yelled, slapping frantically at her legs each time she repeated herself, the hits getting harder and louder as she went along.

I grabbed her wrists to make her stop. “I don't understand, Gracie, what did you . . .” The question froze on my lips. A hot tingling knot gnawed at my stomach, and I dropped her hands. “No,” I said, and gasped, putting both palms on the floor in front of me to steady myself.

“No, Gracie,” Mom said. “You didn't. It wasn't you. It couldn't have been . . .”

I watched my mom's face as everything clicked into place, the open-mouthed shock replacing any lingering confusion.

“How could you?” I yelled.

Gracie bit down on her lips and pressed her hands against her ears to block me out.

“Damn it, Gracie, answer me!”

She lurched away from me, her beautiful blue eyes wide with fear. Guilt instantly washed over every last bit of me. I hadn't meant to sound so cold and demanding, not to my little sister. Not to my Gracie.

“Mina,” my mom said, a note of warning in her voice.

“I'm sorry.” I reached out to touch Gracie's cheek. “I am. I didn't mean to yell at you. You just really surprised me. I need you to explain this to me.”

“I told Ava,” she said, her voice tiny and fragile. Ava was her best friend, had been since the first day of kindergarten. “I know you told me not to tell anybody, and I wasn't going to, I promise. I was just so excited! And I hate secrets. I don't keep secrets from Ava, not ever. I wanted her to know how special you were, too. It was like something burning up in me like a fire, and I had to let it out.”

She was looking right at me while she talked, and even then I could still see the pride glowing though her red-rimmed eyes. I wanted to sweep her into a hug and tell her that it was all okay, that she had done the right thing. But I couldn't. I was still too numb to move or speak.

“I made her swear on her grammy's grave that she wouldn't tell anyone. That's what she always swears on when she really means it, and she's never gone against a swear before. But I guess she couldn't keep this secret either. I want to be mad at her, but I did the same thing she did. We both told a secret we weren't supposed to tell. We're both bad people.” Her eyes welled up again, and she looked away.

“But, Gracie,” my mom said, “I still don't understand. How did telling Ava spread the story to girls in Mina's school?”

“Arielle,” I said, the name dropping from my lips the second the pieces all lined up in my mind. Ava—Ava
Fowler
. “Ava told her cousin Arielle. Arielle has dark hair, too.” I always forgot that Ava and Arielle were related, because the two were so different, so separate in my mind. But that was why Arielle had been watching me. She knew. And she would do anything to make my life harder—anything that would make her look better than me in Nate's eyes.

Shame squeezed my lungs, cutting off my breath.

Izzy hadn't told my secret after all. Izzy had been loyal. And I'd screamed in her face, said the worst things I could have imagined saying to her, things that I'd known weren't true but had said anyway. Just to hurt her. And it had worked.

I stood up. I needed to be somewhere by myself, away from Gracie.

Gracie rushed to her feet, too, and wrapped her arms around my waist. “Do you hate me, Mina?” she asked, the question muffled against my sweatshirt.

“I don't hate you. Of course I don't hate you,” I said, hanging my arms loosely around her shoulders. “I just need to be alone right now. I need time for everything to settle in my mind, okay?”

She nodded and released me. I turned away and picked up my purse from the table, still unsure of where I was going but knowing I couldn't face Gracie's eyes.

“I'll be back in a little,” I said to my mom, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor. She looked bleary-eyed and exhausted, blinking at her two daughters as if she'd been woken up in the middle of a bad dream and still couldn't sort out fiction from reality.

I flinched and turned my back to her.
I
was the one putting my mom through this—it was my decision that was making her life so difficult.

I could only hope now that I was right, that what I'd told Jesse last night had been true: I'd made the best choice.

That there had been no other answer.

• • •

I hadn't expected to be back in the tree house again so soon.

But after sitting in my parked car in the driveway for twenty minutes with absolutely no idea where to go and less than a quarter tank of gas to get me there, the woods just outside my window seemed to be the easiest solution.

I was sprawled on my back on the dusty, splintered floor, torturing myself by reading through old notes from Nate that I had kept stuffed in the glove compartment of my car, a scattered collection of ripped notebook pages and ratty old napkins that I had expected to treasure for the rest of my life. Some were tedious, practical check-ins he'd snuck to me in the middle of class and probably didn't merit the storage space—
Meet me at my locker after third period
and
Need a ride home?
—but others were much sweeter, more personal messages that seemed to reach out from the page and punch me in the gut every time I read back over them. We had written to each other as if we had all the time in the world. There was so much love on the pages, and so much trust in our future. Gone now. All of it. At least for Nate.
I
still had love, and I probably always would. He was every first for me, except for the one that would have changed all this. The one that Nate and Izzy and the rest of the world thought mattered most.

Before I could stop myself, I started ripping every last note to shreds. If he could cut me out of his life without any hesitation, then I could cut him out, too. I wanted to be completely clean of him, scrub every last touch from my skin.

After the final letter was destroyed, I grabbed my phone from my pocket and grinned at the pile of tiny paper scraps scattered all around me. I had just barely finished deleting his number—one final tie to him—when the phone started ringing and vibrating in my hands. I jumped, startled by the sudden noise, and the phone slipped through my fingers and landed on my stomach with a jolt.

A cold, panicky sweat swept over me as I sat up and wrapped my hands around my belly. That wasn't enough to hurt my baby, was it? It was just a little phone, and it hadn't fallen from more than a foot in the air. Surely that wasn't enough to cause any actual damage.
Right?
I breathed in and out ten times, slowly, trying to convince myself that everything was absolutely fine.

And I knew it was, of course—but still all I could think about was what and where exactly the phone had hit. Was it his or her tiny, delicate head? Fragile little fingers or fragile little toes?

“I'll be more careful,” I whispered, rubbing my stomach in soft, soothing circles. “I promise I'll be more careful.”

His
or
her
head, fingers, toes . . . ? Did I want to know which pronoun it would be? Did it matter, really? I could know soon, very soon, if I wanted to. I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself holding a baby in my lap. Did I see a little boy in a sailor shirt? A little girl with a bright pink sparkly bow on her head?
Probably a gift from her aunt Gracie,
I thought, smiling to myself. Gracie would much rather have a tiny niece to fawn over, that I knew for sure.

Gracie,
I thought, my stomach suddenly clenching with guilt. I hadn't been spending enough time with her lately. I'd been too busy thinking about myself and the baby, and worrying about Dad, Izzy, Nate—the people who weren't behind me. I had it all wrong, I realized. The people I should focus on were the ones who were still there. And Gracie, despite her slipup with Ava, was most certainly still there. She deserved a big sister who appreciated her.

My phone buzzed again, and the screen lit up with a missed call from an unknown number. From the area code and the first three digits, I could tell it was someone from town. I read back over the numbers and froze. The last four numbers looked familiar. Very familiar. Was it Nate? I'd gotten so used to calling him on my cell, his digits always safely stored and accessible with a single tap, that I couldn't remember the full number. I knew that there was a seven and a nine, I could remember that much. But the rest was fuzzy in my mind, a clump of random numbers that I'd never bothered to memorize.

Of course he would call then, right after I'd finally found the strength to erase him. It was as if he'd known somehow—he'd known that I was ready to let him go, and he wasn't ready to let that happen. A small flame of hope flickered in my chest.
Nate wanted to talk to me.
He still cared.

I held my breath and stared at the phone, willing the voice mail alert to pop up. Instead the phone started ringing and shaking again, the same mysterious number glowing up at me from the screen.

“Hello,” I said, gasping, answering before I could convince myself to resist. If Nate wanted to talk to me, then I would talk to him. I owed him that much. We owed each other that much.

“Mina?” The voice sounded husky, familiar, but it wasn't Nate's.

My hope was extinguished just as quickly as it had been lit, a burst of icy cold disappointment filling the dark empty space left behind.

I recognized the voice, though. It was, it was . . . My mind scrambled to match face with tone, trying to pull itself together in the midst of all my crumbling excitement.

“Mina? Are you there?”

The connection snapped together in my head. Jesse. It was Jesse.

“How did you get my number?”

“I'm doing great, actually, thanks so much for asking.” He laughed, and I could feel him grinning through the phone.

“Sorry, Jesse, I didn't mean for it to sound that way. I was just . . . I was expecting someone else, that's all. You surprised me.”

“Yeah, no problem,” he said, his voice sounding slightly deflated. “I got your number from the call list at work. I just wanted to check in after last night and make sure you were okay.” He paused. “Are you? Okay, I mean?”

I smiled, leaning back to prop myself against the wall. “I'm okay. Better at least. Thanks for asking.”

“Yeah, no problem. We're in this together, remember? I mean, I'm not letting Iris down,
no way
. I listen to a lady who can implant innocent people with babies at will.”

The laugh that burst from my mouth was so loud and so unexpected that I had to glance around the tree house, just to be certain that the sound had actually come from me.

“Thanks for that. Really. I think you're the first person to successfully make me laugh about Iris, and I wouldn't have thought it possible. But can you watch that whole ‘we're in this together' business, at least in public? I wouldn't want people getting the wrong idea, if you know what I mean.” I blushed at the thought, glad that he couldn't see my cheeks through the phone.

“Don't worry about that. Firstly, I have no one to tell. No friends, remember? Total loner?”

He was joking, trying to make light of his situation, but there was nothing funny to me about him being so lonely. I barely knew him, though I already knew without a doubt that he didn't deserve that kind of solitary existence.

“And secondly,” he started again, “this isn't my story to tell. It's yours, Mina. Your story. And that's all there is to it.”

“Thanks,” I said, whispering into the phone. I wanted to say more, but he'd managed to catch me entirely off guard. Again.

“Anyway, I'm in the middle of a shift at Frankie's right now, so I should get back to work. But I wanted to ask if I could give you a ride to school on Monday, so we can at least go in together. I'm sure no one really knows anything and it's all going to be fine, but . . . I don't know, you seemed pretty nervous last night. I just thought you might not want to be alone Monday morning, that's all.”