He paused. Without looking back, he said, “You’re always sorry, aren’t you, Angie? That’s what I should have remembered.”
In her world history class last year, Lauren had done a report on Victorian London. One of her research sources had been the film The Elephant Man. She remembered sitting in the library after hours, staring at the small television screen, watching the well-heeled Londoners taunt and ridicule poor John Merrick, whose face and body had been twisted and tortured far beyond what a man should have to endure. But the whispers and stares hurt him as deeply as any of his deformities.
Lauren understood that now, how much it hurt to be the object of gossip. In all her years at Fircrest she’d strived for the kind of perfection that drew only positive attention. She was never late to class, never broke the rules, never said mean things about other kids. She’d tried, in all ways, to be like Caesar’s wife: above reproach.
She should have known how far the mighty fall and how hard the ground could be.
Everyone was staring at her, pointing and whispering. Even the teachers seemed shocked and unnerved by her presence. They acted as if she carried a lethal virus, one that could all too easily go airborne and infect innocent passersby.
After school, she let herself be swept along by the laughing, yelling crowd. Even in the midst of all these people—friends, mostly—she felt infinitely different. Separate. Head down, she tried to be invisible.
“Lauren!”
She looked up instinctively, though she immediately wished she hadn’t.
The gang was gathered around the flagpole; Susan and Kim were seated on the bricked ledge beside it and David and Jared were playing hacky sack.
She steeled herself for the inevitable. She’d avoided them at lunch by hiding out in the library, but now she had no choice but to say hi.
“Hey, guys,” she said, coming up to the group. She hesitated, saw David do the same.
They stared at each other from a distance.
The girls swarmed her, pulled at her arm. She followed them out behind the school, to their place on the football field. The boys followed along behind, keeping the hacky sack in motion.
“Well?” Kim asked when they were all standing around the goalpost. “How does it feel?”
“Scary,” Lauren answered. She so didn’t want to talk about this, but it was better to be talked to than talked about. And these were her best friends.
“What are you going to do?” Susan asked, scouting through her backpack for something. Finally she pulled out a Coke. Opening it, she took a drink and passed it around.
David came up behind Lauren, slipped an arm around her waist. “We don’t know.”
“How come you didn’t have an abortion?” Kim asked. “That’s what my cousin did.”
Lauren shrugged. “I just couldn’t.” She was starting to wish she were far, far away from here. With Angie, where she felt safe …
“David says you’re giving it up for adoption. That’s cool. My aunt Sylvia adopted a baby last year. She’s way happy now,” Susan said, reaching for the Coke.
Lauren looked up at David.
For the first time she realized that he could walk away from this, leave it in the past along with all his high school memories. Someday it would be as forgotten as his tenth grade MVP trophy or his grade point. Why hadn’t she seen that before?
She’d thought they were in this together, but suddenly all the warnings came back to her. It was the girl who got pregnant.
“Come with me,” she whispered to him, pulling him aside. He followed her to a dark, quiet place beside the bleachers.
She wanted desperately to be held and kissed and reassured, but he just stood there, staring down at her, his confusion as obvious as his love.
“What?”
“I just … I’ll miss you over the break.” She wished he’d invited her along, but it was a family vacation.
“My dad set up a meeting in January. With a lawyer.” He flinched, looked at her throat. “About adoption.”
“Just give it away,” she said, hearing the bitterness in her voice. That would be so easy for him.
“We should at least listen.” David looked ready to cry, right there on the football field, with his friends only a few yards away.
And she knew: None of this was easy on him.
“Yeah,” she said, “sure. We should listen.”
He looked at her. She felt distant from him; older. “Maybe I’ll get you a ring. Aspen has tons of cool jewelry stores.”
Her heart did a little flip. “Really?”
“I love you,” he said softly.
The words sounded different than before, as if he’d murmured them from far away or mouthed them underwater. By the time she got home, she couldn’t remember the sound of those words at all.