Where the Staircase Ends (21 page)

“Tracey caught Sunny trying to steal the morning-after pill, and she was going to tell the store manager, but Sunny begged her not to. Sunny said she was stealing it for you … that you were too embarrassed to have to buy it
yet again
.” He swallowed thickly, avoiding my eyes, “I guess she told Tracey the reason you and Logan were fighting at The Fields on Saturday was because he’d found out you had a … ” he lowered his voice to a whisper and motioned to my stomach, like he couldn’t even say the word. “That you’d gotten pregnant and had it … taken care of.”

I felt the color drain from my face, everything around me swaying with the rhythm of my quickening pulse. That’s what Jenny had meant when she said,
if you didn’t want people to find out, you shouldn’t have done it.
I walked right into the trap, all but admitting it was true, thinking I needed to protect Sunny when I was the one who needed protecting.

But it still didn’t explain everyone’s strong reaction. I wasn’t the first girl to have accidental pregnancy rumors spread about them. So why was everyone making such a big deal out of it this time?

“There’s more,” he said, his cheeks flushing. “They’re saying you weren’t sure if the father was Logan, because there have been other guys.
Lots
of other guys. And Tracey is telling people that one of the guys is Mr. Thompson—”

“Pervy Mr. Thompson? But Tracey is the one sleeping with him!”

Brandon moistened his lips before continuing. “Apparently not. She’s telling everyone you’re the one he’s been seeing, not her.”

Of course. What better way to deflect a rumor than to pawn it off on someone else? It was the ideal opportunity for Tracey to turn the rumor tides and let someone else serve as the sacrificial gossip lamb.

Brandon kept going, as though he was telling a story rather than unraveling my life. “But mostly people are talking about Logan. They feel bad for him because of what happened to his brother. People are pretty upset that you did this to him—that you took the baby from him after he’s already lost so much, and that you’ve been seeing all those people behind his back—”

“But it’s not true,” I whispered, my voice an echo inside of my head. “It was Sunny. I never … I haven’t even had …”

“I know,” he said, his hand gently squeezing my arm.

“How do you know?” I asked, suspicion entering my voice. Brandon and I were far from friends. He ripped me apart every chance he could when we were in class..

He glanced down at his feet and scuffed his toe along the brown and black flecked carpet of the hallway. When he looked back at me, his cheeks and neck were pink and blotchy.

“I was behind the house that night at The Fields, when you and Logan were fighting,” he admitted, releasing his hand from my arm so he could wipe the sweat from his hairline. “I heard what he said to you, and I saw him … knocking you around.”

“What were you doing back there?” I tried to picture the black, empty shadows behind the half-finished house where Logan and I were arguing. It was dark and hard to see, but then again I was too focused on Logan to notice anything else. Someone could easily have hidden back there and I wouldn’t have seen them.

“I was using the restroom.” His eyes once again darted down to the carpet. I thought about the way Brandon had stood off to the side of the keg by himself, staring into his cup of beer like he didn’t know what to do with it. That night was probably his first time at The Fields. He wouldn’t have known that The Boys Room was on the other side of the open party space, half a block from where Logan and I were fighting.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice fractured. “I should have said something, or done something when I saw the way he shook you around. I was just … I was scared. And then Justin and Sunny came, and Justin punched Logan—”

“Justin punched Logan?” I asked, remembering the cut above Logan’s eye when I had seen him back at Sunny’s. Of course Justin had punched Logan, it all made sense now. Justin knew exactly what was going on between me and Logan; he had seen him shaking me up and was furious.

“Anyway, I wanted you to know that I know it’s not true,” he said, taking a deep breath, straightening his shoulders, and looking suddenly lighter now that he no longer had to carry the weight of his secret around. He started to turn around, but I grabbed his arm and stopped him.

“But you can tell people, Brandon. You can tell them what you saw, tell them it’s not true—”

“Tell them what, Taylor? That I watched Logan shove you and twist your arm behind your back and I didn’t do anything about it?” He shook his head. “Do you know how many times a day people call me a fag? How many times a day I walk down the hall and someone yells
douche-fag
or
homo
?”

It was my turn to swallow thickly. Of course I knew.
Douche-fag
was one of Sunny’s creations. I’d even stood next to people in the hallway when they yelled it at him.

“If people knew that I watched you get beat up by Logan and was too scared to do anything about it, God only knows what other horrible things they would add to that list. I’m just trying to keep my head down and make it out of this place alive.” He sighed and backed away from me a few steps. “I’m sorry, Taylor. I really am. I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry, that’s all.”

He quickly backed away from me, blending into the swelling crowd of students as they made their way to and from lockers on the way to first period.

There were still ten minutes before the first bell rang. I had ten minutes to find Sunny and fix the mess she’d made.

I plowed through the mass of bodies, shoving people aside without looking. I felt the way I did the night of The Fields, absently jabbing people away with my pointy elbows as I barreled toward Sunny’s locker. My feet drummed hard against the carpeted corridor, pounding in time to the words that repeated over and over again in my head:
how could she, how could she, how could she?

Sunny leaned against a row of lockers at the far end of the hallway talking animatedly to Jenny and Amber. For a moment I watched her coppery head bob up and down as she talked, her eyes glittering and widening the way they always did when she told a story and tried to be all dramatic. Then someone shoved me from behind and I stumbled toward her. Her eyes locked with mine.

It was now or never.

“Hey Sunny!” I called, plastering on my bitchiest grin. “I just heard the
craziest
rumor. Know anything about it?”

She said something to Jenny and Amber, who nodded and watched curiously as she made her way across the hallway toward me, anxious whispers passing between them.

I planned to yell, to shout the word
liar
down the crowded hallway so everyone would hear. I wanted to dive at her head and grab a fistful of her fiery hair and drag her to the ground until she squealed for forgiveness. But as I watched her walk toward me, I lost all of my resolve. All of the anger that had welled up inside of me oozed out of my cracking façade until all I could do was stare at Sunny with my arms hanging limply at my sides.

We’d been friends since second grade. We knew everything you could possibly know about someone. She hated mushrooms, she was deathly allergic to fire ants, her face was always covered in red crease marks when she woke up, she was ticklish only under her right knee. I was with her the night her mother left, the same night her father left her on our porch with nothing but her overnight bag and Miss Violet Beauregard tucked under her arm. I was there the day he came back for her, a ghost of the man he once was, and I watched him disappear more and more from her life as we grew up together. I was there through boyfriends and ex-boyfriends, good days and bad. She’d slept over at my house so many times she was practically part of the family.
My
family. Our friendship had lasted longer than marriages. I wasn’t ready to let it go just yet.

“Sunny, how could you?” I said in a whisper, unexpected tears brimming at the edges of my lashes so her face blurred.

She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes wet and shiny in a way that gave me hope.
We can fix it
.
She can take it all back, tell everyone the things she said weren’t true, and we can fix this cracking friendship.

She opened her mouth and for a moment I thought she was going to apologize, but instead I watched in horror as her gum swelled into a pink bubble and quickly disappeared back into her mouth with a loud
snap
.

Then she leaned in so that only I could hear.

“What do you care, Taylor?” Her voice was a block of ice. “I thought you were too good for me and better than all of this. I’m just an interrupting fly, remember?”

I gaped at her, her words not quite connecting on their trip from my ears to my brain. My first instinct was to correct her and tell her it was an
interposing
fly. But how could she have known that? She wasn’t in honors English, and I never told her about having to analyze that poem. There was no way she would even know what an interposing fly was.

I started to ask her what she meant, but I paused one second too long. In that one second she backed away from me so she stood in the center of the hallway, clearly visible to everyone watching.

She raised her voice so she could be heard above the din of the morning hallway chatter. “Everyone knows you did it, Taylor, so stop trying to act all innocent. And stop calling me. It’s pathetic. I don’t want to be friends with someone like you.”

She turned and walked back toward her locker, where Amber and Jenny greeted her with triumphant hugs. Like she’d done something brave.

The hallway released a collective breath as everyone who had paused to eavesdrop slowly started to move again. Murmurs of excitement and awe passed between everyone who had witnessed the event. The only thing more thrilling would be if one of us had thrown a punch.

And that was that. It didn’t matter that the rumor wasn’t true. It didn’t matter that I was still a card-carrying member of the V-club or that Sunny was the one who had gotten herself in trouble. Nothing mattered except for the words Sunny had yelled across the hallway for all to hear, the words that would quickly spread in whispers, notes, and text messages across the population of my high school until everyone stated them as fact. Because words don’t sink, they swim. And rumors have legs and run sprints through the hallways, diving into ears and out of mouths with Olympic speed. There was no pushing the words back inside once they hit the high school airwaves. In a single moment, I became the new Tracey Allen, only worse because my friends had completely abandoned me.

I stumbled into the nearest bathroom, my legs folding under me as I collapsed into one of the open stalls. The whispered words of my classmates followed behind me, jabbing into me like pins into a cushion.

Did you hear? Yes, of course it’s true. Sunny said
…

Is that her? The one who had the
…

I heard she was sleeping with ten different guys and a teacher the same time as Logan. Isn’t that gross?

Do you think he knows?

What a skank. I never really liked her anyways.

Poor Sunny. Can you imagine?

Poor Logan. Can you imagine?

Poor Justin. Can you imagine?

I pressed my cheek against the metal of the restroom stall door. The cold felt good against my hot skin, anchoring me to the floor so my vision stopped spinning. Normally my mind would’ve raced with the grossness of leaning my face against a public restroom wall, but my brain could barely process the exchange with Sunny; there was no room in my head to debate the pros and cons of my cheek against the germ-infested bathroom surface.

Someone had written “Tracey Allen is a
SKANK
!”
in black permanent marker on the opposite wall, the letters large and block-like so they were clearly visible to anyone who entered the stall. I stared at them so long and hard that they swam in and out of focus, until finally Tracey’s name disappeared and all I could see was the all-caps adjective they had used to describe her. Why did we think Tracey was a skank? In that moment I couldn’t even remember. Someone had said it to me once and I believed it. Someone had written it across the stall of a bathroom and that made it true. How long would it take for my name to make it onto the bathroom walls?

I leaned over the toilet and threw up, the contents of my stomach easily emptying into the white porcelain bowl. After I finished, I managed to fish my phone out of my pocket, my shaking fingers barely making contact with the screen.

“Mom?” I said, my voice breaking at the sound of her hello. “Can you come get me? Please?”

There must have been something heavy in the way I spoke, because my mother didn’t even question my request. I was in her car with my forehead pressed against the passenger side window fifteen minutes later, watching the school as it disappeared from my view and knowing with sad certainty that it would never be the safe haven it once was.

* * *

“Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?” my mother asked later that evening after I’d politely declined her dinner offer for the third time. Her eyes were thick with worry, her mouth pressed into a frown as she leaned against the doorframe of my bedroom. She looked like she wanted to come in, but she hovered outside the threshold.

I shook my head and looked up at the ceiling, counting the cracks over and over again so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes and tell her what had happened. I
wanted
to tell her. I wanted her to put her arms around me the way she had when I was younger. I wanted her to rock me back and forth and tell me that everything would be okay, but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. I was too afraid of what she might say. Would she think it was my fault? Would she tell me I deserved it? I could only guess, and something in the pit of my stomach wasn’t entirely sure she would take my side.

I listened to the heaviness of her sigh, broken by the sound of the door clicking closed when she finally gave up and left.

Justin hadn’t responded to any of my texts, and I could only assume that the gossip had reached his ears and he’d chosen to listen. Did he believe the whole rumor, or just part of it? I hoped he at least didn’t believe the part about Mr. Thomas. I hoped he knew that I wasn’t that kind of person, but I wanted to hide in my bedroom so I’d never have to find out. I wanted to disappear inside the purple-and-white quilt covering my bed so I wouldn’t have to see his face when he told me he chose Sunny’s lie over me. I wanted to
die
.