She asked, “Since when do you care so much about my mother? I thought she was a cog in a corrupt system?”
Her tone was sharper than she’d intended, but her anger was real. He sounded exactly like her parents. The principal. The other teachers. Her pastor. Her former friends. They were all right and Emily was always wrong, wrong, wrong.
She said the words that would hurt him most. “I believed in you.”
He snorted. “You’re too young to have a credible system of beliefs.”
Emily bit her bottom lip, struggling to rein in her anger. How had she not seen before that he was completely full of shit?
“Emily.” He gave another sad shake of his head, still trying to humiliate her into compliance. He didn’t care about her—not really. He didn’t want to have to deal with her. He certainly didn’t want to see her making a scene at the prom. “You look enormous. You’ll only make a fool of yourself. Go home.”
She wasn’t going to go home. “You said we should burn the world down. That’s what you said. Burn it all down. Start again. Build something—”
“You’re not building anything. You’re clearly planning some stunt in order to get your mother’s attention.” His arms were crossed. He looked at his watch. “Grow up, Emily. The time for selfishness has passed. You’ve got to think about—”
“What do I have to think about, Dean? What do you want me to think about?”
“Jesus, lower your voice.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” She felt her heart beating inside her throat. Her fists were clenched. “You said it yourself. I’m not a child. I’m nearly eighteen years old. And I’m sick and tired of people—men—telling me what to do.”
“So now I’m the patriarchy?”
“Are you, Dean? Are you part of the patriarchy? We’ll see how fast they circle the wagons when I tell my father what you did.”
Fire razed up into her arm, shot into her fingertips. Her feet left the ground as she was spun around and slammed into the side of the car. The metal was hot against her bare shoulder blades. She could hear the tick of the cooling engine. Dean’s hand was clamped around her wrist. His other hand covered her mouth. His face was so close to hers that she could see sweat seeping between the fine hairs of his mustache.
Emily struggled. He was hurting her. He was really hurting her.
“What lying bullshit are you going to say to your father?” he hissed. “Tell me.”
Something had cracked inside her wrist. She could feel the bones chattering like teeth.
“What are you going to say, Emily? Nothing? Is nothing what you’re going to say?”
Emily’s head moved up and down. She couldn’t tell if Dean’s sweaty hand was moving her face or if something deep inside of her, some survival instinct, had made her acquiesce.
He slowly peeled away his fingers. “What are you going to say?”
“N-nothing. I won’t—I won’t tell him anything.”
“Damn right. Because there’s nothing to tell.” He wiped his hand on his shirt as he stepped back. His eyes flickered down, not appraising, but calculating the price of her swollen wrist. He knew she wouldn’t tell her parents. They would only blame her for being out of the house when they had ordered her to stay hidden. “Go home before something really bad happens to you.”
Emily moved out of the way so that he could get into the car. The engine chugged once, then twice, then caught. The radio sparked, the tape cassette coming back alive.
S-A-T-U-R …
Emily cradled her swollen wrist as the bald tires spun for traction. Dean left her in a fog of burned rubber. The smell was putrid, but she stayed in place, her bare feet stuck to the hot asphalt. Her left wrist throbbed along with her pulse. Her right hand went to her belly. She imagined the rapid pulses she had seen on the ultrasound keeping tempo with her own quick heartbeat.
She had taped all of the ultrasound photos on the mirror in her bathroom because that felt like something she was supposed to do. The images showed the tiny bean-shaped splotch slowly developing—sprouting eyes and a nose, then fingers and toes.
She was supposed to feel something, right?
A swell of emotion? An instant bond? A sense of awe and majesty?
Instead, she had felt dread. She had felt fear. She had felt the weight of responsibility, and finally, that responsibility had made her feel something tangible: a sense of purpose.
Emily knew what a bad parent looked like. Every day—often several times a day—she promised her child that the most important duties as a parent would be fulfilled.
Now, she said the words out loud as a reminder.
“I will protect you. No one will ever hurt you. You will always be safe.”
The walk into town took another half hour. Her bare feet felt scorched, then flayed, then finally numb as she traversed the white cedar of the boardwalk. The Atlantic was to her right, waves scratching at the sand as they were pulled back by the tide. The darkened shop windows on her left mirrored the sun as it crept over Delaware Bay. She imagined it passing over Annapolis, then Washington DC, then through the Shenandoah as it prepared for the journey out west—all while Emily trudged along the treadmill of the boardwalk, the same boardwalk she would probably be walking for the rest of her life.
This time last year, Emily was touring the Foggy Bottom Campus at George Washington University. Before everything had so magnificently gone off the rails. Before life as she knew it had irrevocably changed. Before she had lost the right to hope, let alone dream.
This had been the plan: As a legacy, her GWU acceptance would be a formality. She would spend her college years nestled between the White House and Kennedy Center. She would intern for a senator. She was going to follow her father’s footsteps and study political science. She was going to follow her mother’s footsteps into Harvard Law, then work five years at a white-shoe firm, then get a state judgeship, and eventually, possibly, a federal judgeship.
What would your mother say?
“Your life is over!” was what her mother had screamed when Emily’s pregnancy had become apparent. “No one will ever respect you now!”
The funny thing was, looking back on the last few months, her mother had been right.
Emily left the boardwalk, cutting down the long, dark alley between the candy shop and the hot dog shack, crossing Beach Drive. She eventually found herself on Royal Cove Way. Several cars drove by, some of them slowing down to take a look at the bedraggled beachball in the bright turquoise prom dress. Emily rubbed her arms to fight the chill in the air. She shouldn’t have gone with such a loud color. She shouldn’t have chosen something strapless. She should’ve altered it to accommodate her growing body.
But she hadn’t considered any of these good ideas until now, so her swollen breasts were spilling out of the top and her hips swung like a pendulum on the clock inside of a whorehouse.
“Hey, hot stuff!” a boy screamed from the open window of a Mustang. His friends were shoved into the back. Someone’s leg was sticking out a window. She could smell beer and pot and sweat.
Emily’s hand cradled her round belly as she walked across the school quad. She thought about the child growing inside. At first, it hadn’t seemed real. And then it had felt like an anchor. Only lately had it felt like a human being.