As She Grows (15 page)

”He just wants in your pants,” I say to Jasmyn, and then survey the table to see what’s left to eat. She jumps off the counter, reaches in front of me, and grabs the last bagel. “If he wants some, he can have some,” she says, rolling her hips and doing this sex dance for a few seconds. “He’s swee-eet.”

We all laugh and I slide up on the counter and listen to Tammy brag about the guy she knows who drives a Mercedes and owns a bar, though she doesn’t know the name, but it doesn’t matter because no one is really listening to her anyway.

It is amazing the secrets clothing can hide: a scar, a bruise, a baby. Pregnancy scares are more regular than periods in this house. The girls announce them as dinner conversation, gulping milk and then smacking their lips:
I’m late again.
And then we all seem to forget about it until the next public announcement served with chicken and potatoes. Only, no one announces it if they
really
think that it’s true.

One day, my shirt will silently rise, my zipper will break, or my tits will overflow my bra, and a meeting will be called, a door will be closed, a soft voice will whisper,
Are you pregnant, Snow?
And finally, I will breathe out and let my belly bulge to its limitless shape.
Yes
.

“Holy shit, girl! Holy shit.” We are sitting cross-legged on my bed, Jasmyn is looking at me, stunned. Her mouth hangs open and then she exhales, “Fuuuck.”

“I know. I’m screwed.” The tears pool in my eyes and blur my vision. I had to tell her, not only because she’s my roommate, but she is also my only friend.

“Fuuuck,” she gasps again, reaches out to hug me, and I am stunned, as if bumping into the unforeseen glass; it is the first time our bodies have ever touched like this. Jasmyn must feel strange as well. She quickly releases. “Whose is it?”

I shoot her an annoyed look: “Mark’s.”

“How pregnant are you?”

“Maybe four, five months, something like that.”

“Holy shit!” Jasmyn’s jaw drops. Her eyes fall to my stomach. She reaches out and pulls up my shirt to get a closer look. “Nah, you can barely tell! You sure?”

I nod my head.

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. It’s too late for an abortion. Don’t tell anyone,” I warn.

Jasmyn raises her fingers to her mouth and gestures that her lips are sealed. “That’s one thing about me—I’m true to my word. True to my word,” she repeats with conviction. And I believe her. “So, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’m just not thinking about it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Fuuuck,” she exhales and then hugs me again.

I stand outside the public library door for a long time, watch women with small children and old people walk out in friendly afternoon time, holding doors open and smiling at strangers. What is it about churches and libraries that makes people believe that if you frequent them you’re automatically a good and trustworthy person? I stand in the parking lot and bum a cigarette off
this Latino guy with bloodshot eyes, who keeps calling me, “Yo, Charlene,” and asks me to come with him to some park. I stand there with him until I’m done my smoke and I head into the library.

I casually drift up and down the stacks, picking out books on volcanoes and plumbing, leafing through them with great interest, should anyone be watching. When I finally find what I’m looking for, I stand just to the left of the section and out of the corner of my eye scan the spines of books on pregnancy. A middle-aged woman comes by and seems to purposefully place herself right in front of my vision. She gives me a cold look and I’m sure she knows what I’m up to, so I pull out
Nutrition for
Cancer Patients
and move to a carrel where I wait until the coast is clear. The moment she’s gone, I quickly grab four books, slide them in the middle of my pile, and go find a table in the kiddy section.

I scan the books, stopping on glossy pictures of smiling couples staring down at bare bellies, the men’s large hands spread over the women’s stomachs as if they were holding basketballs. I imagine my photograph, in the unwritten chapter at the back of the book, entitled “Teenage Moms.” In my photo, I’d be sitting alone in a chair, my round stomach exposed. I’d wear tons of makeup and I’d spike my hair, and I might even be smoking a cigarette because that’s what readers would expect.

In another book, there are charts and graphs, but mostly I look at the magnified pictures of glowing eggs: pink, red, green, and orange, like spongy coral reefs or exploding fireworks. The egg I like best is a blue-grey circle with outward-moving rings, as if a stone was just thrown into its centre. In the later chapters, there are lots of photos of fluorescent-orange babies floating in circles of black space, curled like shrimp. Black dots for eyes and
pink-grapefruit veins. They remind me of fancy finger foods, served at a party, with a dark pumpernickel bread beneath.

I read that my baby is about eight inches, which I measure with my school-agenda plastic ruler. They say that at twelve weeks, the baby is bigger than an avocado. That it hiccups and has a heart, and had eyelids after only thirty-eight days, though I can’t imagine why it needs them so soon.

After seeing all the fetus pictures, the diagrams of women with inflated stomachs and veiny breasts start to catch my eye. I realize that I never thought of how much my body would change between the time of conception and giving birth. This gets me all scared and I become all panicky, as if I was just diagnosed with some terminal disease. I get a pencil from my bag and write down strange words—
linea nigra, areola, fundus, varicose, edema,
Braxton Hicks
—but then I start to feel sick, my stomach swirls, and my head gets all hot. I take off my jacket and cover the books, go to the toilet where I throw up, twice. Still lightheaded, I return to my table, rip the magnetic strips out of the bindings, and slip the books into my knapsack.

I leave the library occupying another body. Leave behind my simple hokey-pokey classifications of right foot, left foot, and think about fingernails and eyebrows and that uncertain line that separates the wet part of your lip from the dry part. I think about breasts, nipples, and parts between my legs that I thought were there for sex, parts I never thought of before. I never questioned, really questioned, the stuff that comes out between my legs or why Mark’s tongue can command my nipples to grow hard. But now, I walk home thinking about all my muscles and bones rubbing together each time I step and I wonder why all this never occurred to me before.

They say first love lasts forever. What they don’t mention is that it’s not really your first love. There are things to prepare most people for this, like the love of a parent, a dog, a grade one teacher, or even a stuffed animal. Really, most people have been loving in multitudes by the time they even kiss someone. But it seems to me that since Mark truly is my first love, he will penetrate my bones.

Mark is not feeling well. He has a cold. He asks me to come take care of him. He doesn’t even mention anything about not seeing him for a while. I fill a brown paper bag with treats like orange juice and vitamin C pills and Tylenol and a comic book for him to sketch from. When I get to his apartment, he pouts like a little boy from his bed as I hold his tea with honey up to his lips.

“How are
you?
” he asks me as I scramble around the room picking up balls of crumpled toilet paper.

From the way he says it, I know he’s asking about the abortion he thinks I had. That he thinks I’ve been at home sick for these past couple weeks, recovering. “Fine,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.” And I climb into his bed, ignoring the funny look he’s giving me, like he doesn’t believe me.

We sleep all afternoon, or rather, Mark does. I tell him I don’t care what we do, I just want to be with him. I take off my clothes and cling to his body, my fingers firmly pressed against his chest.

It’s one thing to love only one person your whole life. And it’s another to have that one person not love you back, not the way you want him to. I’d give anything for him to want me. I stay awake for hours, listening to his soft breath, mouthing the words
I love you
into the back of his neck. And I pray to a God I borrow every once in a while. I pray for him to just give me this one thing, this one small thing I ask for.
Just give me this
.

I wrap my leg over his thighs and Mark squirms, half waking. “You need to shave your legs,” he mumbles grumpily, brushing my leg off, pulling his sweaty body away, and returning to sleep. I’m careful to keep my legs on my side, hold my bare chest into him, my stomach pressing into his back.

Mark would be a good father. I know it from the way he moves his marijuana plants around the apartment for optimal sunlight. I know it from the way he falls to the ground to play with Spliff the moment he walks in the door. Or how he talks about his little brother, like he’d give his life for him. And even though I work so hard at proving to Mark that I will love him no matter what, it’s only Spliff and his brother who he absolutely trusts. And I think it would be like that with the baby.

“So how’s it going?” my counsellor Eric asks nonchalantly, as if everything were normal and he were going to just ignore the fact that I’d missed my past two appointments. I notice he’s styled his hair differently, brushed it down over his forehead instead of off to the side. It’s as if he was trying to look younger or cooler, only trying to look younger makes him only look older.

“Fine,” I say. “Feeling better now. Went to school today.” It’s a small lie. One that I know will make him happy. I don’t tell him I have no intention of going back to that school. That I’ve missed too many classes in the past few weeks. That I’m too afraid of teachers yelling at me, astonished at my nerve, to just walk back into class after so long. I don’t tell him I can’t take another day of walking down those halls surrounded by stupid people I can’t stand. And that I’m sick of dress codes and dumb-ass teachers who have nothing better to do than give you detentions for having bloodshot eyes.

I tuck my chin down deep into my jacket collar and wait for Eric to say something, but he doesn’t. Then I notice the little fishbowl on the table. Inside is a single orange goldfish swimming through a pink castle. “Cute fish,” I say.