Immaculate (3 page)

These are your best friends
, I reminded myself. Two people who I knew inside and outside as well as I knew myself. Maybe even better than I knew myself, at least lately. All of a sudden the need to keep it all a secret felt ridiculous. Unnecessary. A waste of precious time, as well as anxiety, that would have been much more manageable divided three ways. We faced everything together. Always.

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” I started, still looking down to avoid seeing their distressed faces. “I've been throwing up every morning for the past week—week and half, I guess—but it's more than that. There have been lots of little things, things that I've tried to just ignore, but they keep piling up and I don't know what to do . . .” My voice caught, and I pinched my eyes shut, fighting off more tears. I had to keep going—I needed them to know everything, and I needed them to worry with me. “My back's been weirdly sore and achy. I have terrible headaches, and I can't stop peeing. I get dizzy out of nowhere, my boobs hurt, and I'm just so tired—so tired no matter how much I sleep.”

“You have looked a little rough around the edges this week,” Izzy said. “I figured it was just all the manic college stressing, though, so I didn't want to say anything that would upset you. You've had some seriously intense black circles.”

“Thanks, Iz,” I said, almost smiling. “Blunt as always. Very helpful.”

“You know you love me and my gloriously unfiltered mouth.” She squeezed my leg and leaned into me, her chin propped against my shoulder. I could feel her eyes on me, processing, evaluating, trying to come up with a rational explanation. Izzy always had answers. Her entire world was built on them.

“So do you have any ideas, Meen?” Hannah asked quietly.

“Not really, no. I've spent unhealthy amounts of time researching online and freaking myself out, but nothing seems to cover all the symptoms. Nothing I could find explains everything. Nothing makes sense.”

“What about your parents? Have you told them?”

“No. I mean, I've complained about being tired and my back hurting, but they've just written both off as the stress of senior year coming up and college applications and all the shifts I've had at Frankie's lately. I didn't want to tell them about everything else and get them all worked up, not yet . . . I keep hoping it'll all just go away on its own. And it's probably nothing, just a phase, so why scare them unnecessarily? Right?” I suddenly felt very hopeful. Ridiculous, actually, for ever feeling so worried.

“I don't know, Meen,” Hannah said, grabbing my hand, her voice still unnervingly soft and whispery. “I'm no doctor, but it kind of doesn't sound like nothing.”

The balloon of hope popped before it had moved even an inch off the ground. I shuddered as I felt another wave of sickness rise in my throat, yelling for Hannah and Izzy to move away. I grabbed the trash can and heaved out every last possible drop until I was convinced that there could be nothing left inside me but blood and veins and organs.

When I finally finished, the girls were still and quiet next to me. I wanted Hannah to wrap her arms around me and say something cheery and optimistic. I wanted Izzy to jump off the bed in disgust, to joke about how completely gross and appalling I looked.

“Mina . . .” Izzy started, and then stopped herself. She seemed nervous and hesitant, which was unsettling. Izzy was rarely nervous or hesitant about anything.

She took a deep breath and looked right at me, her eyes sharper, harder than I would have expected. I tensed, waiting for whatever terrible words were about to come out of her mouth.

“Mina, did you have sex with Nate and not tell us? Because I hate to say it, but everything you're going through sounds pretty damn similar to what you'd be feeling if you were pregnant.”

I laughed. Shrieked, more accurately. Hannah flinched from the sound, but Izzy looked unfazed, cold and stiff.

Pregnant?

Ridiculous. Absurd! Entirely and insanely absurd. I kept laughing. I was shaking, crying from laughing so hard, while they both just watched, stunned by my reaction.

And then, with a pang so unexpected and so harsh that I gasped, choking on the last, frozen laugh, I thought of Iris. I thought of that night. And all her words, her strange and terrible words, flooded through my mind, bursting from that little back corner where I'd hidden them so carefully and neatly for the past two months.

“Meen?” Hannah asked slowly, cautious about pushing the question. “Is that a possibility? Because Izzy's right: all the symptoms add up. You know my sister's over eight months in, and this is all the stuff she complained about at the beginning.”

“Why didn't you tell us?” Izzy broke in, loud and accusing. She jumped off the bed and stood, glaring, hands on her hips, as if she couldn't bear to be any closer to me. “Seriously, Meen, I thought we told each other everything. Why would you hide having sex with your boyfriend you've been dating for two years? Do you really think we'd judge you? I don't get it. I just really don't get it.”

“I didn't have sex with Nate, Izzy. I swear to God. Call him up and ask him right now. I'm a virgin. I promise, I'm still a virgin. I need you guys to believe that.”

“So you're not pregnant, then?” Izzy asked, her voice only slightly less damning than before. “You're saying there's absolutely zero possibility that you're pregnant right now?”

I wanted to say no, wanted to promise them that it would be physically impossible for a baby to be growing inside me. But all I could hear was Iris, her words playing on repeat, louder and clearer each time until I was sure my head was actually and literally going to explode all over Hannah's pretty pink and lavender bedroom.
Keeping you and the child safe is all that matters now. Your child, Mina. Your child
. Spinning, twirling, looping, over and over and over:
your child, Mina. Your child. I need your approval.

Yes, Iris!
Yes. I'd said yes. I'd said yes to Iris. What did that mean? What had she been asking?

Why had I said
yes
?

This was crazy. I was crazy. Genuinely, certifiably, without a doubt crazy.

“I mean, no, I don't think so, of course I don't. But . . .” My voice cracked, my brain still resisting saying the words out loud.

“How is there a ‘but' in this situation? Did you fool around with Nate? Get a little too close to be completely safe?” It was Hannah this time, probing, more critical than I'd ever heard her before, at least directed toward me.

“No, it's not that at all,” I said, frustrated that I couldn't make them understand what I needed to say. But really, who
would
understand? Who could take any of this seriously? I mean, I probably wouldn't trust me if I were them.

I barely trusted me as it was.

A pregnant virgin? Unless I was an asexually mutated freak of a human, of course—some highly advanced form of the hydra we had learned about in biology—and a baby would just grow like a bud from my body and break away when it was fully mature, then quite frankly, the explanations for my pregnancy seemed a bit limited.

The fact that I was even considering the possibility only added to the inevitable diagnosis of psychosis and a future in a locked room covered in wall-to-wall white cushions. Maybe I had hallucinated that whole night with Iris; maybe she wasn't real and I had made up that whole conversation in my head, just me and myself. Too many hours on my feet that day, too much heat pouring out from the brick oven, too many vapors from the cleaning solution we used to bleach the rags.

“Then what is it, Mina?” Izzy yelled, cutting through my fantasy, her cheeks glowing red with hurt and anger. “Because you won't say you're not pregnant, but you won't admit to having sex, so what the fuck are you trying to say? We want to help you, but you're making that pretty impossible right now. Stop speaking in code and just tell us the goddamn truth, or I'm leaving, because I'm supposed to be one of your best friends and I don't deserve to be lied to.”

“No, Isabelle, you're right,” I said, meeting her gaze and forcing her to look, really look, at the sincerity in my big blue eyes that couldn't possibly be faked. She knew me too well, too long for any serious deceit to slip past her radar. That was my one hope, at least, and I clung to it.

“I'm scared to say what I'm thinking, because you probably won't be able to believe me. You'll think I'm crazy, or even worse, crazy
and
a liar, and I don't think I can handle that. Not right now, not with everything else going through my head.” I paused, twisting a pillow with my sweaty hands to calm myself. “But I'm going to try. I'm going to tell both of you exactly what I'm thinking, what I know, because you deserve that.”

And so, with much awkward fumbling and stopping and starting and backtracking, I told them about Iris. I told them every last detail I could remember, from what she wore to where we sat to every word and look she gave me. Strange, but even though I had rarely let myself think about her since it had happened, she was still there. Seared into my memory, as bright and vivid as the night we met, whether I wanted her there or not.

Neither of them said anything after I finished the story. Hannah and Isabelle sat in a daze, looking at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere that wasn't me. I didn't want to press, even though the desire to know what they were thinking about Iris, about me, was burning me alive, top to bottom.

Finally, right about when I couldn't possibly wait another second without combusting, Hannah spoke.

“I think we should go out and get you a pregnancy test. It might be nothing—it's probably nothing—but we need to know that for sure.”

“You believe me?” I asked, so relieved and happy to have my best friend back at my side that the world almost felt right again.

Hannah bit her lip so hard that I could see a small bubble of bright red blood pool at the edge of her two front teeth. “I'm not saying that, Mina. I don't know what I'm saying, at least not yet. I want to believe you, but I have to think there's something to this story that you're not saying. Maybe there's something to this story that you don't even know.” I could sense that a part of her wanted to stop there, go back, and rewind, but she took a breath and kept going. “I've heard that sometimes when something really bad and terrible happens, people block the whole thing out. Make themselves forget without even realizing. Maybe, I don't know . . . Maybe something like that happened to you?”

“Are you . . . are you saying I might have been raped?” I stammered, my air cut off, suffocated by the massive weight of my disappointment. She didn't understand, not at all. “You think I wouldn't know, wouldn't have felt something, some kind of pain that I would remember?” Of all the equally improbable theories, rape would never have occurred to me. Maybe it should have, I don't know, but somehow I knew—I knew without a doubt, with every part of my body, every toenail, every hair, every pore—that it wasn't the answer.

Hannah was crying now, almost as hysterical on the outside as I felt on the inside. But she couldn't reach out to me and I couldn't reach out to her, and so we both sat there—together but still so separate.

“Okay,” Izzy said loudly from across the room, keeping her distance from the bed. “We're going to the pharmacy.” She sounded matter-of-fact and in control, the Izzy I knew and loved so well. “Let's go. Now. I'll drive.” And with that she grabbed her sneakers and her keys and walked out the bedroom door, not giving a single look back, not a hint of what was actually going through her mind.

Hannah sniffled a few times and stood up, sliding her sandals on and running a brush through her fluffy morning hair. She picked up her purse then, glancing over at me to make sure I was going to follow Izzy, too. I nodded and slowly pulled myself out from the tangled blanket, easing down onto the floor one leg at a time. The idea of doing something, anything, to finally acknowledge everything that was happening felt good. It felt right.

“Thanks,” I said to Hannah so quietly that I wasn't quite sure I'd actually managed to say it out loud. But then she walked over to me and took my hand in hers.

“Listen. I don't know exactly what's going on with you, Mina. But I do know that no matter what shows up on that stick, whether it's a pink plus sign or a blue minus or even a big green damn squiggle, I'll be there right by your side and we'll sort it all out together. Okay?”

“Okay.” I smiled for the first time that morning. “I should probably change out of this grotesque shirt first,” I said, catching a glimpse of myself in her full-length mirror.

“Sounds like a good idea. Clean yourself up a bit, and I'll go down to the car and let Isabelle know that you're on your way. I give her ten seconds before she starts laying on the horn, and I don't want my parents asking too many questions about what we're up to.” She squeezed my hand and let it drop, pulling the door closed behind her as she left the room.

I stepped closer to the mirror, so close that the tip of my still-red nose brushed against the cool glass, and my features became a hazy blur of blue and pink and milky white skin. I pulled back a bit, gripping the sides of the mirror so I could really see the girl standing in front of me. Frizzy nest of brown waves, swollen, red-rimmed eyes, cracked lips, stick-straight body without even the hint of any curves.

I couldn't be a mother. I was still a girl. A sloppy, filthy mess of a girl at the moment.

I stared blankly at my reflection for another minute or so, until I realized that, without thinking about it, I had moved my right hand off of the mirror and rested it against my stomach instead, my fingers spread wide in an embrace. I jerked it back down to my side and turned away, moving toward the dresser for a change of clothes.