I looked at my empty notebook again. I didn’t have a career. I was seventeen. I couldn’t even bring myself to write a coherent essay on Gulliver’s Travels, and I was still failing math.
It was strange, the amount of planning that went into his life. I wasn’t sure I wanted this man—my father, the movie star—to come to Hopuonk. I wanted to go to him instead. I wanted to start fresh.
All week at school, no one had talked about anything except Johnny Moon. Bridget Murphy, who usually didn’t feel entitled enough to talk to me, came up to me in the hallway and bombarded me with questions about him, none of which I could answer. A few freshmen asked for my autograph. Susan still hadn’t spoken to me, but I saw her staring during study hall. It felt like it had always felt—everyone’s eyes on me—only more.
No one mentioned my gayness. Johnny Moon was bigger than my gayness.
“They’ll send wardrobe people out the day before,” Veronica said. “You can keep the clothes afterward!”
“Wow,” I said. “Cool.”
After we hung up, I felt deflated, which made no sense, because this was literally every girl’s dream, wasn’t it?
I also felt like a fraud. I felt both like I deserved a father and also like I didn’t deserve for a big magazine to interview me, because I was bad at school and I wasn’t even nice, like Susan and Brad.
I stood to get a beer from the fridge, and went outside to sit on the stoop in the freezing cold. I thought of Heather’s face on New Year’s Eve, just after she popped up out of the ocean.
I realized that when Sandra handed me the phone, I’d wished it had been Heather calling.
The Crown
The day after Veronica Michaels called me, I was lying in bed, watching Stephanie Tanner dart around the plastic castle in her fish tank. Sandra knocked on the door lightly before appearing.
“Susan’s downstairs,” she said.
I woke up with a cold, and I’d been sleeping the whole morning. I dreamed about Heather. We were playing this nationally televised game where we had to get across the ocean in a tiny green rowboat and all we had to eat were Froot Loops.
Heather, though she’d been distantly friendly lately, was mostly avoiding me. I guess I knew too much now. She’d even switched some of her shifts at Emmylou’s so we didn’t work together.
My bedroom used to make me feel trapped, but now it was comforting. The ceiling slanted down, creating the same familiar shadows every afternoon. Susan and I painted the walls sky blue when we were twelve, intending to sponge-paint clouds to make it look like the sky, but we never got around to doing the clouds. The blue came out too bright, so I covered the walls with posters and collages that Susan and Heather made me in middle school—magazine cutouts of models, clothing we wanted, the words Friends and Beauty and Gossip shellacked over photos of us at the beach or the mall. Dust motes swirled around in the dim light of my knockoff Tiffany lamp, which sat dutifully on my vanity, next to my prom-queen crown.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and told Sandra to send Susan up.
There she was in my doorway, looking smaller than she used to. Her eyes were red, and she was wearing a baggy sweatshirt with NANTUCKET across the boobs. Her hands were shaking. Mascara was caked under her eyes, like maybe she’d been crying.
“Hey,” I said.
“Taylor,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”
Stephanie Tanner rushed behind her little plastic castle.
“What?”
“Yep,” she said, running her forefinger down my door frame.
“Shut the door,” I said. I made space for her on my bed, like I’d been doing for practically my whole life. “I have a cold, though, so sit at your own risk.”
When we were kids and Susan got the chicken pox, I watched her from the bus stop, standing in the picture window in her bedroom, wearing a white nightgown. She looked like a Victorian ghost. Immediately after school, I rushed over to get the chicken pox from her. All week, while we stayed home from school, we pretended to be Victorian orphans with the measles. “I’m cold,” I said over and over, and she answered, “My mother is coming one day.” We even made Cream of Wheat and pretended it was orphan porridge, and that it was the only food we’d had in weeks.
That was back at the beginning of my obsession with being anyone other than myself—a pirate, an orphan with the possibility of different parents, of living in another time. Now that I actually had a famous father, it felt uncomfortable—not at all as I’d imagined it as a child.
Susan sat down, blew air from her cheeks. She didn’t necessarily look unhappy, but she definitely looked scared. She smelled like Salems and strawberry lip gloss, not like herself.
“It’s Brad’s,” she said. “Obviously.” There was no hint of anger in her voice, no resentment. She was probably a little bit proud.
A few months ago, this would have sent me down a spiral. Now I felt surprisingly solid. Even though it was strange, and maybe even a little bit shitty, I had a way out now.
“How pregnant?” This was a stupid question, but it was the only thing I could think of to say.
“I mean, there’s a baby in there,” she said. And then, “God. I missed this room.”
She looked around, squinting at one of the collages she made—the one she gave me at my fourteenth birthday party at the pizza place in the mall. We got in a food fight with my cake, and the manager made us mop everything up, then kicked us out.
“I thought you’d never come here again,” I said.
She leaned back, letting her arm touch mine. I’d been waiting for this to happen for months, but now I was too sick or too different to feel anything.
“I haven’t told Brad yet,” she said.
We both stared at the popcorn ceiling. It looked like the top of a frosted cake.
“When are you going to tell him? You have to tell him, Susan.”
She settled into my pillows, which were covered in moist tissues. Then she extracted a Salem from the front pocket of her sweatshirt and lit it with a crooked match. When the flame went out, a delicate strand of smoke twisted toward the ceiling.
“I know this is bad,” she said, holding up the cigarette but meaning all of it. Everything.
I sneezed.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but maybe . . .” I didn’t finish. I wouldn’t keep the baby, but this was Susan.
“My mother says it’s a blessing,” Susan said.
Well, she would, I thought. I already felt like the ground had dropped away, and I was afraid for Susan. I don’t know if I was surprised, though.