The Smart One (38 page)

CHAPTER
18

Winter finally started to melt, and after a quick and wet spring, it became hot. The weather people kept calling it “a burst of summer,” like it was something fun, when really it was just miserable. No one was ready for the weather. People still walked outside with jackets, confused. They hit eighty degrees at the end of March and it just kept going up from there. And Cleo, who was already hot all the time anyway, became more annoyed with each day.

“Tell me there isn’t global warming,” she said to Max one morning. He was eating cereal at the little table they had in the kitchen, and he just raised his eyebrows.

“I mean, are people kidding when they try to pretend it’s not happening? Eighty-seven degrees in April? What the hell is going on here? It’s like those people that try to say the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

“I know,” Max said. He ignored her comment about Holocaust deniers. “The air conditioner isn’t doing much, is it?”

“It sounds like it’s dying,” Cleo said. They had only one air conditioner in the apartment and they kept it in the bedroom. It was an old one that Max had taken from the Coffeys’ attic, and it growled and whined as it tried to spit out cold air. If you stood directly in front of it, you could sort of feel a breeze.

“Even I’m going to the library today,” Max said. “It’s too hot to stay here.”

“Actually, I think I’m going to stay here today.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I just need to work without distraction.”

“Okay,” Max said. “But I’ll save you a seat just in case you change your mind.”

The weather was a problem for lots of reasons, the main one being that all the kids on campus stripped down like it was spring break, and Cleo, who was not ready to show her stomach to all, still wore sweaters, as if the extra layering could hide what was happening underneath. She ended up sitting in her classes, sweating and uncomfortable, trying to cool down by pulling the fabric away from her skin and fanning papers at her face. When she was alone in the apartment, she usually wore nothing more than a tank top and boxers, and she’d sit on the couch with her feet on the coffee table in front of her, hands stretched across her stomach. She sat like that for hours, not moving, just holding her stomach like that was going to stop it from getting bigger.

They opened the windows wide, in an attempt to cool the apartment down. All it did was invite every fly to come in through the screenless openings. Once they were inside, they buzzed around, too dumb to figure out how to get back out. Cleo watched them frantically fly around, hitting the blinds and the walls. Sometimes she tried to sweep them out with papers, but it didn’t help much. Always, right before they died they got especially crazy and aggressive, looping around and dive-bombing Cleo and buzzing out of control as if that last burst of energy could save them. A few hours after that happened, Cleo usually found a little black corpse on the ground, and she’d scoop it up and throw it out the window. One morning, she woke up to find a bunch of dead flies on the table. “A massacre,” she whispered, and then cleaned them up.

After Monica heard that she was pregnant, she came by the apartment. “You could have told me,” she said.

“I couldn’t,” Cleo said. “I couldn’t even say it out loud.”

She finally had what she wanted: Monica was here with her to talk to her about being pregnant. She could have cried or screamed or told her that she was so scared all the time, that she felt like they were making every single decision wrong. They weren’t living in a movie. Things weren’t going to work themselves out offscreen and result in a cute baby. There was going to be blood and fighting and a lot of crying. She knew that much. But she couldn’t say any of that to Monica. What she’d really wanted was her old friend before they’d fallen apart. Now she had someone who looked familiar but felt sort of strange. It was almost better when she was gone altogether.

“It’s pretty messed up,” is all she said.

Monica started to come by the apartment more often. Sometimes she brought an orange or a bag of licorice or a gossip magazine, like little offerings. Most days they ended up sitting side by side on the couch, watching bad reality TV.

“You know,” Monica said one day, looking at Cleo’s stomach, “you’ll get used to people staring. Or not used to it, but it won’t bother you as much after a while. Like when you get a haircut and it feels so different, you feel the missing ends, and then one day you wake up and it’s just your hair again. It’s like that.”

“It doesn’t feel like that,” she said. She knew that Monica was trying to help, but what she wanted to say was that being pregnant was way worse than being anorexic. She wouldn’t say that, of course, because it sounded horrendous. But still, she thought it.

And it was true. There were things that college professors were used to. They were used to kids getting drunk, or getting overwhelmed, or failing a test and then crying. They were used to girls like Monica getting pulled out of school and returning a semester later. But they weren’t used to seeing pregnant seniors wander around the campus. They could barely look at Cleo. When it finally became clear to her economics professor that she was pregnant, he started avoiding her eyes when he taught. The staring was bad, but it was worse when people pointedly didn’t look at her, when they just avoided her altogether, fixing their eyes on the air around her.

CLEO WAS READY FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR
to end, ready to be away from everyone her age that was celebrating and talking about where they were going to move. They talked about Manhattan and Boston and Chicago and San Francisco. Sometimes they changed their minds just because they felt like it. They were going to live on the East Coast and then decided to try the West Coast. Why not? They had choices. They could do whatever they felt like. She was moving into the basement of her boyfriend’s parents’ house in a suburb of Philadelphia. Was a sadder sentence ever said?

She and Max had both agreed to move to the Coffeys’. She didn’t
want to, but what other option was there? Where else were they supposed to go? Even if Elizabeth had wanted them, her apartment was way too small, and it was still too hard for her to really talk about the baby without causing a fight of some kind. The last time they’d spoken on the phone, she’d said, “You have to understand, I just feel like I failed as a mother, Cleo. To have you pregnant in college is a nightmare and I can’t help but think it was my lack of parenting.” Cleo wasn’t sure if this was supposed to make her feel better, but it certainly didn’t. Then Elizabeth said, “I should have never let you go to that school,” like that was the cause of all this.

She and Max also decided to get married, although that still seemed not quite real. Max had brought up marriage the day after he’d woken her up with McDonald’s on her pillow. The fight was over, but they were still talking carefully to each other, stepping out of the way when the other walked by, saying
sorry
and
please
more often than normal.

They were both in bed, but not sleeping. Max was on his computer and Cleo had her eyes closed, a book resting on her stomach. Max cleared his throat once and then again and again, until Cleo opened her eyes.

“I was thinking,” he said, “that we should probably get married.”

“Married?”

“Yeah. I mean, we’re going to be together anyway, and with the baby, I just feel like it’s right.”

“I just … I don’t know. It’s a lot.”

“But don’t you want to marry me? I want to marry you,” Max said. He shut his laptop and turned to face her. “Will you marry me?”

She said yes, although she felt unsure. It seemed mean to say no. It was a horrible story, really. That was her engagement, Max saying, “We’re going to be together anyway,” and her saying yes, because that seemed the polite thing to do.

Later in the week, Max came home and threw his bag on the floor. “I got something for you,” he said. He pulled a small box out of his backpack and opened it for her. In it was a ring with a large round diamond on it. Cleo looked up at him and tilted her head.

“It’s fake,” he said. “Sorry, I should have said that right away.” He
took it out of the box and held it out to her. “I just thought you should have something now, until I can get you something real.”

“Oh,” Cleo said. “Thanks.”

“Should I kneel?” Max didn’t wait for her to answer, before getting down on one knee. It felt like they were playacting and Cleo wanted it to be over soon. She took the ring and put it on her finger.

Cleo felt funny wearing the ring, like she was pretending to be something she wasn’t. She turned the ring around often, so that the fake diamond faced the other way. She was embarrassed whenever one of her professors noticed it.

When Cleo told her mom that they were getting married, Elizabeth was silent.

“What?” Cleo asked.

“Oh, Cleo,” her mother said. “What do you think is going to happen? That you’ll get married and live together, all happy playing house? Come on, Cleo. You’re smarter than this.”

Cleo wanted to tell her mom that clearly she wasn’t smarter than this. If she
was
smarter, wouldn’t she be in a different situation? It reminded her of the time she got a B in calculus senior year, and Elizabeth had been angry, had shaken her head. “No B’s,” she’d said. “You’re smart enough to get an A.”

That never made sense to Cleo. If she was smart enough to get an A, wouldn’t she have gotten one in the first place? She often wondered if she was even smart at all, or if Elizabeth just expected her to be, so she had to live up to it. Of course, the next semester she had brought home an A in calculus. Elizabeth had just nodded. “I told you,” she said.

She wore the ring for Max, since it seemed to make him happy. After a while, her fingers got bloated and she had to take it off. She was scared it was going to get stuck on there, that her fat little sausage finger would lose circulation and have to be amputated.

A little while later, Max came home with an identical ring—except this one was bigger. She wore it until that, too, got too tight, and she placed it on her dresser. She was ringless until Max replaced it again. Sometimes she took all three rings and lined them up next to each
other. She never asked Max where he got them. They were probably from Walmart but she didn’t want to know.

WHEN SENIOR WEEK CAME,
Cleo was relieved. At least when it was over, people would stop talking about it all the time. Max kept insisting that he should skip it. “I don’t even want to go to Hilton Head,” he said. “I hate it there.” Because he was nice enough to lie, she told him he had to go. It didn’t go unnoticed that he was acting in a way that very few college boys would. She saw the way his friends looked at her, like she’d ruined his life, like he didn’t have as much to do with this situation as she did. And so, because of this, she kept saying, “You have to go.”

Max finally agreed, but tried to get her to come with. Cleo was firm on this. There was no way in hell she was going to Senior Week with a huge pregnant stomach to be the only sober person in a sea of Bucknell students. She’d rather be trapped in a cave with Mary and Laura for seven days straight than go through that.

“Then I’m not going the whole time,” Max said. “Just for a few days.”

Cleo figured that was better than nothing.

With Max gone, the apartment was so quiet. Even when she walked outside, the town felt empty, since all the seniors were gone. Before he left, Max went to the grocery store and bought Cleo enough food that she would have survived a war. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched him unload frozen pizzas, boxes of cereal, macaroni and cheese, and soup. It made her start to cry, watching him pile up all this junk food for her, and she had to turn and go into the bathroom so she wouldn’t bawl in front of him. These hormones really were a bitch.

Secretly, Cleo had been sort of looking forward to her time alone in the apartment. She realized that it would be the last time ever that she’d really be all by herself. After graduation, they’d be at the Coffeys’ and then there’d be a baby. And while that was hard to imagine, hard to think that it was really going to happen, she knew enough to be grateful for this time.

She watched marathons of old TV shows, and stayed up well into
the night, then slept past noon and ate huge bowls of cereal. She read stupid books and ate ramen. And after two days, she felt like she was going out of her mind. She’d started to have nightmares about the baby, where she forgot it someplace and left it behind. In one, she was buying shoes and Weezy came up to her and screamed at her for leaving her baby in her purse. Cleo was confused as to how the baby had gotten there in the first place, and tried to say so, but couldn’t get the words right. She woke up sweating.

She had wanted time alone, but now she wanted Max. She felt desperate for him. She wanted someone else to be there when she woke up to tell her that the baby wasn’t even there yet and to assure her that she didn’t (and wouldn’t) leave it in a purse. She couldn’t help but imagine Max at the beach, drinking and talking to girls. Every night, she thought,
Please, God, don’t let him make out with anyone. Please, God, don’t let him decide to leave me
.

When Max came home, Cleo almost knocked him over. She sat with her legs on his lap while he told her about the week and who got really drunk, who hooked up, who threw up all over the floor. Cleo laughed at these stories, so happy to have him home. They talked into the night, and Cleo kept her leg linked around his in bed. She wanted to make sure that he was really there. What had she been thinking, taking him for granted? Was she out of her mind? This might not be what she had imagined, and this certainly wasn’t perfect, and maybe she was wearing a ten-dollar ring from Walmart, but Max was still the best thing she had in her whole life at the moment, and she couldn’t forget that.

GRADUATION WAS LONG AND HOT,
but the upside was that in her robe, Cleo looked like she was just chunky and not necessarily pregnant. The downside was that both of their families were there, and they were all together for the first time ever.