Fingerprints of You (4 page)

I squinted and looked behind him at my mother, who was handing her credit card to the man at the register.

“When you turn out like your mom, just remember who taught you first,” he said before he laughed and walked away.

And in that instant I realized I had become a girl worth talking about, a person worth remembering once I moved away.

A
FEW WEEKS LATER WE WERE SETTLED
in a squat two-bedroom house in West Virginia with the same water-stained ceilings and sluggish showerhead dribble as all the other places we had rented, but this time around was different because by the time I enrolled at my new school the first week of November, I was almost six weeks pregnant.

I spent my first days dodging teachers in the hallways and categorizing students into the distinct groups I’d seen in every school I’d gone to. There were Preps and Hipsters and Weekend-Warrior Partiers with trust funds stitched into their back pockets, the kids who threw ragers at their houses when their parents flew to Vail or Vegas or Key West for vacations. There were the Jocks and the Geeks and the Film Kids, who kept video cameras in their backpacks. The Adrenaline Junkies were the guys who went skydiving or rock climbing
on the weekends, and the Low Riders were the country boys who stuck small wheels on big trucks and cranked rap music from their dashboard speakers. I usually slipped in somewhere between the Art Kids and the English Nerds, never committed enough to join the lit magazine staff, knowing we could move again at any time, but too much of a bookworm to be considered an angst-ridden Art Punk or Emo. It always took a while to make friends, but this was the large kind of public school that made it easy to disappear.

Then, a week after I told Stella about the pregnancy, my new friend Emmy Preston found out her dad was being sent to Afghanistan.

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

“I wish,” she said back, and then neither of us said anything as I tried to wrap my brain around it slowly, the shock of it moving over us like fog. It was bigger than all the arguments with Stella, bigger, even, than my frustrations at having moved again before I finished driver’s ed.

Like a lot of the dads in Morgantown, West Virginia, Emmy’s father enlisted as a reservist for drill pay. That November, when their infantry unit was activated, over a hundred and fifty of the town’s men would have to board a group of old, beat-up school buses and leave for a place that, until then, had existed for us only on television and in newspapers. Now the war infected their families, and Emmy handled the news like the rest of the reservists’ kids: with silent acceptance and a vacant shrug of the shoulders.

Emmy and I had met in Contemporary Lit on my first day at school, and out of twenty-six other kids in the room, she picked me to lean over and ask with a big wide grin, “WantToGetStonedAfterClass?” She had flawless tan skin
and quirky rectangle-shaped glasses she had to wear for reading, and later she said she picked me because of my nose ring, a small silver hoop I wore after I’d secretly gotten my nose pierced when we first moved to West Virginia. I carried the nose ring in my pocket and removed or replaced it depending on the proximity of my mother.

“You were new and I was bored with my scene. Everyone likes new, right?” she once said. “Plus, facial piercings score major points in terms of hipness. Even if you can’t drive.” She nudged me then and smiled.

After class that first day, when I told her my name was Lemon, Emmy said, “Sure it is,” which I was used to, and I followed her out of the building and figured there were worse things I could do than smoke a joint with this long-haired blonde in skinny jeans and a red hooded zip-up. I was almost a head shorter than she, so I had a perfect view of her gold necklace as I walked beside her, the small four-leaf clover resting inside the V of her collarbones. We walked through the back of campus, down by the gym and up a small hill to an empty field, and all the while people watched her. I could feel their eyes on Emmy like the glare of summertime sun streaming through a car window.

“I lost my virginity here last summer. It was the football field a million years ago,” she said as we crossed over the turf, “but now they never mow it, and the only thing it’s really good for is smoking between classes and hiding when they take us outside for gym,” and I knew immediately Emmy and I would be very good friends. She would be the person who taught me never to apologize for who I really was.

And in the same way, it took my mother less than thirty seconds to decide she did not like her when they met. Emmy
came for dinner, and while we waited for the pizza guy to arrive, Emmy tried to convince Stella to get a better job that paid salary, a better haircut with highlights, and a better house on the north side of town near West Virginia University.

So while Emmy prepped for her dad’s deployment over at her house, my house became angry and loud as Stella processed the reality of my pregnancy. Once she knew about the baby, it seemed like happy hour happened more frequently. “Get me a beer, Lemon,” she’d say when she got home from work, shifting her eyes away from my stomach with a dramatic “ugh” or “hmph.”

I was a neon sign in a storefront. I was the intercom voice in the public library announcing someone had left their car lights on. When she looked at me, my body was a stack of catalogues that kept showing up in our mailbox. Unwanted and unnecessary, a waste of natural resources.

Stella also started sleeping with her boss, Simon, a freelance photographer who’d hired her to help him stay organized after he landed an ad campaign with The North Face for a shoot in Dolly Sods Wilderness Area. Simon had grown up in Fort Collins, Colorado, a place that seemed as foreign and far away as Kabul, Afghanistan, where Emmy’s dad was deployed. He’d spent a few years working on a farm in Costa Rica, and even went to college for a little while to study photography, but ended up on the East Coast because he fell in love with a woman who didn’t love him back enough to stick around. That’s what he told me, at least, one night when we stayed up to watch
Saturday Night Live
together. And then he said he decided to stay in West Virginia once he’d arrived, because he liked how slow it was. He liked the heat in the summer and the green in the spring, and mostly he liked the way
Morgantown encouraged people to take their time. The way he said it made me homesick for the apartment that smelled like bread, and my friend Molly-Warner, and it even made me miss the smell of skin and ink a little bit, since Johnny Drinko said something similar the day we made tequila sunrises.

Stella claimed his upbringing out west made him more cultured and interesting than the other men she’d met in town. I think she liked the way he paid attention to her paintings and the way he’d show up with new brushes or art books, little gifts none of her other boyfriends would have thought to buy. He liked all the same late-night television I did, and he was good at explaining how Spanish conjugations worked, one of the subjects I’d fallen behind in since the distraction of the pregnancy, so I liked him okay. Better, at least, than Denny in Philadelphia or Rocco in New Jersey.

November turned the town a dark rusty color as orange and red leaves began dropping to the ground, and Emmy and I wasted time hanging out down by the lake every day after school. Sometimes we’d do our homework, and sometimes we’d just listen to music or play cards. She was good at gin rummy, and I was a blackjack badass. By then Emmy was kissing a boy from our physics class, a long-haired guitarist named Dylan who worked after school as the poetry editor for the Morgantown High literary magazine. Dylan liked to listen to the Shins and he liked to smoke pot, but mostly he liked to drive us around three wide in the cab of Emmy’s old blue truck, since his parents hadn’t bought him a car and he usually rode to school on his dirt bike. He was the kind of guy who would never outgrow his long hair, who would never hold a nine-to-five.

“Do you think he’s too quiet or too artsy?” Emmy would
ask me before he’d show up at the lake. “Do you think he’s too nice? Or too boring, maybe?” she’d ask as she sucked on a cigarette and stared out at the water.

I’d nod or shrug, thinking of how similar Dylan and Emmy were, how brave and fearless, carefree. Emmy was one of the popular kids who hung out in the parking lot between classes smoking cigarettes but also landed her name on the honor roll, while I was the kind of kid who just aimed to blend in. I was the new girl, an increasingly curvy loner who’d had to walk home from school before I met Emmy and Dylan, and it constantly surprised me she’d chosen me to be her partner in crime. I asked her about it once when we were parked down at the lake and she was venting about a girl in our class, Jenny Myers, who’d just gotten a new Mini Cooper. I knew she and Jenny had been friends, but we never hung around with her, and I wondered why she’d bailed on her old friends and replaced them with me.

“Aside from the obvious fact that I’m ridiculously intelligent and adorable, why’d you pick me and walk out on them?” We were good enough friends by then, and I was feeling honest—honest and maybe a little worried she might walk out on me, too. Plus, I’d heard some of the girls had been giving her a hard time, the girls with the right clothes and the right boyfriends. I’d seen the notes scrawled on the bathroom doors. They called her a fake and a traitor, and I wanted to give her a chance to talk about it.

“I spent three years with the Preps and the Partiers, you know?” she said, and I nodded.

Before I came along, Emmy was part of a close-knit crew of Partiers, and she’d told me she and Jenny Myers and Allyson Carter and Maggie Rothbright had founded their
clique freshman year in French class; the group of boys followed shortly after.

“And I knew who I was supposed to be when I was with them. But it was never really me. Those kids come from families with money, and I always felt like I was playing catch-up.” We were standing in front of her truck, and she dug the toe of her red Vans into the mud. “This summer I just got sick of it. It’s like I knew they were just friends of convenience, party friends. I knew we wouldn’t keep in touch after graduation,” she said, and shrugged.

And I understood exactly what she meant. I’d felt the same way about most of my friends in high school too. All the kids I’d spent the last years with never felt important, except for Molly-Warner and Emmy, maybe because I always figured we’d move before anyone had the chance to really get to know me.

“And then you showed up,” Emmy said. “You rescued me, really,” and I loved the way she said it like that. “Plus, you were cool. And not cool in a knowing-about-the-best-parties or having-the-best-clothes kind of way.”

I shook my head. “I am definitely not that kind of cool.”

“No, you’re authentically cool, though,” she said. “Cool in the way that you can be totally happy sitting in my truck bed reading a book while me and Dylan make out in the front seat,
and
you’ll actually have something smart to say afterward.” She pulled out her pack from her back pocket and lit a smoke with her lucky yellow lighter. “You actually care about what you read and don’t just pretend to be reading because you think it will make you seem smart.”

“That would be totally lame,” I said, and she nodded because she knew by then how important books were to me even if she didn’t share the interest.

“And it’s cool that you don’t care if you have a lot of friends, if you’re popular,” she said.

“I have no skills at being popular.”

“And I love that,” she said.

“Rumor has it, popularity is overrated,” I said back.

“Exactly. You rescued me, really,” she repeated, and then she elbowed me and smiled before she took a long drag.