Definitions of Indefinable Things Page 9

  I stuck the key in the ignition. “Where’s the class?”

  She smiled because she’d won. She always did.

  Two stoplights and a box of tissues later, I found myself sitting next to Carla on a baby blue yoga mat among a throng of emotional pregnant women and their similarly emotional husbands. The woman next to us was referring to her husband as Sugarkins and her fetus as Baby Sugar, and suddenly Carla’s Little Man didn’t seem so cheesy. There was a foldout table in the back with a sign that said HEALTHY SNACKS, as if the words healthy and snacks should be allowed to share the same sentence space. We were in a dance studio–type room, surrounded by mirrors on every side. It seemed warped to me, considering there weren’t going to be mirrors in delivery, and no woman has any desire to see what she’s going to look like when she shoots ten pounds of human out of her lady cannon.

  Carla changed into black yoga pants and a pink T-shirt that was so absurdly tight I was sure I could see the baby waving to me from inside the womb. She was eating a banana and breaking into a cold sweat before we even began warm-ups.

  “I’m the only one here without a partner,” she said as she chewed.

  “Must you use the term partner? We already look like Snake’s moms.”

  “Oh my God, I didn’t even think about that. Are people going to think we’re dating?”

  “Just don’t call me Sugarkins, and maybe no one will notice.”

  “I can’t have people thinking I’m dating you. Ugh. If I were going to date a girl, I’d at least pick one with better taste.” She shot a disgusted look at my oversize sweatshirt. “Time for damage control.” She pushed up on her knees and handed me her half-eaten banana.

  “What are you—”

  “Excuse me!” she yelled. “This is my friend Reggie. We are NOT dating. I repeat, NOT dating.”

  Everyone stared at us in the most hostile, hard-core-judging way that made Snake’s pimple stares seem pleasant.

  “We’re not friends either,” I added. “Just to clear that up.”

  She fell back on her butt, and the mindless chatter resumed.

  “If you weren’t pregnant, I would kill you,” I whispered, handing her the banana.

  Sugarkins woman leaned across her mat and touched Carla on the thigh as her husband massaged her neck. I wondered if he ever considered wringing it.

  “Is this your first class, sweetheart?” she asked.

  “I was taking classes at Boomers, but I switched,” Carla replied in that sickly sweet voice that made mothers weak in the knees.

  “How far along are you?”

  “Eight months.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “Boy.” The woman smiled. “Boys are such a blessing. I have two boys myself. My first girl on the way.” She rubbed her ginormous stomach.

  “Congratulations.”

  “You too.” She looked at me briefly. I’m sure she wondered what I was doing there. I wondered that myself. “It’s nice that you have friends by your side. Pregnancy is the most beautiful experience, but it can also be such a difficult process.”

  “Tell me about it,” I huffed.

  “How old are you, darling?”

  Carla hesitated. “Seventeen.”

  “Oh.” The woman tried not to reveal her true identity as Miss Judgypants Mom, but the look in her eyes didn’t match her kindness. “Well, I wish you the very best.” She glanced at me. “And you’re lucky to have such devoted friends. You’re going to need them.”

  She retreated to her mat and proceeded to further annoy Sugarkins with her baby talk and cheek pinching. I felt his pain.

  The instructor snapped her fingers at the front of the room to summon the group’s attention. She was no older than twenty-two. She was wearing square glasses and had a head full of multicolored hair that curled down her Free People shirt. I doubted her credentials the moment I saw her college ID badge clipped to her workout pants.

  She welcomed everyone, talked about herself, talked about the phenomenon of birth, talked about herself. Then she announced we were working on mock births that day. I didn’t like any of the words in that sentence.

  “Dads, position yourselves between the mother’s legs to prepare for breathing techniques.”

  The mothers spread open like swinging doors as the dads kneeled before the vast expanse of no-man’s lands before them. Carla smiled at me apprehensively.

  “Reggie?”

  “I’m not going down there.”

  “You have to!”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I bet Snake would do it if he were here.”

  “Snake’s already been between your legs. I, on the other hand, have no desire to venture.”

  The instructor began reviewing the first technique.

  “You’re going to make me look stupid!”

  “I’m going to make you look stupid? Not the planet orbiting beneath your boobs?”

  “Reggie!”

  The mothers started the inhale-exhale routine.

  “Fine,” I grumbled. I crawled to Carla’s feet and held her legs apart and imagined that I was absolutely anywhere else.

  She was beginning the inhales when the instructor insisted, “Faster now.”

  All the hee-hoos were like a broken fan.

  “Slowly begin to push,” the instructor ordered. “Dads, it is your job to support the mother as she undergoes this difficult step in the birthing process. Be encouraging. Talk her down. Help her with her breathing. Remember what we’ve learned in past weeks.”

  Carla fake pushed like a pro. She could have been an actress on one of those What to Expect When You’re Expecting DVDs.

  “Encouragements, please,” she demanded through clenched teeth.

  “Uh . . . I hope your baby isn’t a ten-pounder?”

  “That’s not encouraging.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t have time to grab an encouragement-for-the-day calendar on my way over.”

  She was actually breaking a sweat over pretend pushing. Man, she was good.

  “Talk about prom,” she said. “That’s encouraging.”

  “Prom?”

  “Yeah. It’s next weekend. I know I won’t be able to go this year. Pretend like I did.” The instructor sped up the birthing music. Had there been music playing this whole time? “Tell me how much fun I had.”

  Prom. The Met Gala of small-town celebrities. A competition to see who could spend the most money on a more-often-than-not ugly gown that they would never wear again. It was large-scale excitement that fell to even larger-scale disappointment when the night of everyone’s dreams turned out to be a glorified game of Pretty Pretty Princess. Frankly, I would never have wasted my time. But Carla wouldn’t hear of missing it unless something tragic (see: getting knocked up) happened. Carla Banks would have been prom if prom were a person.

  “Yeah, you went to prom,” I said.

  “Did I look pretty?”

  Bite your tongue. Bite your tongue.

  “Uh, sure. You wore a pink dress.”

  “Purple,” she corrected.

  “Okay.” I rolled my eyes. “A purple dress. And Olivia was there, and Ellie, and all of your snobby user friends.”

  “Did I have a date?”

  “A date? Yeah, you did.”

  “Snake?” She opened her eyes and stopped faux pushing.

  We stared at each other, my blue eyes reflected in her brown ones. “Do you want it to be Snake?”

  The music ceased, and the instructor clapped her hands, congratulating everyone on the progress they made, as if clenching their abs to a techno beat prepared them for real-life contractions and hard labor. The class went on for another thirty minutes, but nothing was as eventful as the synchronized birth routine. When it was over, the moms barked at the dads to fold the mats and wipe their sweat and grab fruit and go pull the car around. The husbands obeyed without complaint. I think they feared death by belly smothering if they rebelled.

  I waite
d at a picnic table outside for Carla’s dad to pick her up. She still had beads of sweat on her hairline from the strenuous imaginary birth, her eyes locked onto a piece of chewed gum on the sidewalk.

  I must have been going soft and spineless, because all I could think was that Snake should have been there.

  “You’re good at fake labor,” I said.

  She kept her eyes on the ground. “Let’s hope I’m as good at the real thing.”

  “Don’t forget that there will be a human coming out of you at the real thing.”

  “Trust me, I haven’t forgotten.” She scrunched her forehead like she was concentrating. “It’s entirely new to me, you know? Having a baby. What if I’m a bad mom?”

  “You will be.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Me too. You’re used to being perfect, and you won’t be. You’re going to screw up and forget stuff and want to jump out of your window half the time because life will suck, but that’s not you being a bad mom. That’s you being less than perfect.” I laughed to myself. “That’s you being me.”

  “That’s more terrifying than labor.”

  We didn’t speak as we waited. I didn’t know if I should take the silence to explain what happened with me and Snake, to assure her that I hadn’t tried to cause problems. But I doubted that she cared. She didn’t seem to be all picking-petals-off-of-flowers googly-eyed about him the way I thought she would be.

  It was Carla who dissolved the quiet when she said, “I’m sorry, by the way.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah. We’ve known each other since we were five, and this is the first time we’ve ever hung out. I mean, besides work and school.”

  “That’s because I’ve never liked you.”

  She smiled the way Snake did when I insulted him. “I guess I’ve never liked you much either.”

  Her father’s BMW pulled up to the walkway. She looked at me in a Carla way that wasn’t like all of the other Carlas. Her eyes were uncharacteristically sincere. Like Snake, it was her best look. “Thanks for coming with me today. You’re the last person in the entire world I would have wanted to spend a Friday night with, but it actually wasn’t too bad.”

  “The disgust is mutual.”

  She grabbed her duffel bag and tossed it over her shoulder. As she walked toward her dad’s car, she paused turning back to look at me. “By the way,” she called, “the answer is no. I wouldn’t want my date to be Snake.”

  Thirty minutes later, I ended up on Snake’s front porch, ringing his doorbell a thousand times until someone had enough nerve to answer. When the door swung open, it was Jeanine, flour spattered across her floral apron.

  “Reggie,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Where’s Snake?”

  Her smile faded the moment I mentioned him. I waited for the next words out of her mouth to be he was sick, dying, or dead, because that is all that would have justified ignoring Carla and making me her go-to by default.

  “He’s having a rough day.”

  “I bet.”

  “There was an issue last night.”

  I knew she was talking about Carla dumping his sorry ass.

  “Is he in his room?”

  She nodded. I scooted past her without asking, because I was quite honestly all cared out. When I made it to his door, I could see that the lights were off. There was no shine beneath the crack. I pushed the door back.

  Darkness. Computer screen shut down. Blinds closed. TV off. A hump of covers. I recognized the scene as if it were my own. Classic Stage 3. Snake was in Disconnect.

  I found him exactly where I expected, lying in his bed with the blanket pulled to his nose. His phone was on the nightstand. Untouched. He had a set of earbuds in his ears, a reverberating noise leaking into the quiet. Drums. Screamo. The Renegade Dystopia.

  He didn’t see me, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Disconnect made you as good as dead, which was why I decided not to do what I wanted to do. Yell. Scream. Put up a fight. Tell him off the way he secretly wanted me to.

  His only cop-outs were sickness, dying, and death.

  Disconnect was all three.

  I wasn’t sure if it was Carla he was mourning or the consequences of yet another mistake. That mistake being me, of course. He probably regretted me, but he probably still wanted me because he knew he shouldn’t. And it hurt him and it made no sense and it was useless, and he needed it. He needed to need because it made him feel. Unfortunately, feeling wasn’t always such a good thing.

  As I peeled the covers back, he glanced up at me with glassy, distant eyes. Disconnect eyes. I lay down on his bed, twisting on my side to face him. He was looking straight at me. But he wasn’t looking at me so much as through me.

  I pulled the covers to my neck and reached my hand to his earbuds. I took one out and put it in my own ear. He didn’t move.

  “You’re a day early,” I whispered. “Wallowing in self-hatred is supposed to happen on Saturday.”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t acknowledge me at all. We lay together for an hour as the Renegade Dystopia screamed into our ears. It really was a crappy band.

  Chapter Eleven

  I SPENT MY ENTIRE SATURDAY MORNING shopping for baby clothes (see: corporal punishment) with Carla Banks. Apparently, my stand-in-dad stint at birthing class gave her the wrong impression. I got the call after I left Snake’s the night before. A chatty little voicemail that said:

  Reggie? Snake texted me your number. Hope you don’t mind. I was wondering if you’d go baby clothes shopping with me tomorrow? I know that’s kind of awkward, but I don’t have anyone else to go with. Call me back!

  Like birthing class, I would have rather been punched in the face. But the list of reasons I was indebted to Carla was endless and unrelenting.

  I might have sort of kind of had a thing for her ex-boyfriend/baby daddy.

  She didn’t try to catfight me in the school parking lot during our confrontation about reason 1.

  Her dad was my boss.

  It was bad karma to shun a pregnant girl whose aunt had just kicked the bucket.

  So there I found myself, moving from rack to rack, hordes of giraffes and butterflies bombarding me at every turn. Flashburn didn’t even have a real mall. It was only a few outdated stores shoved inside a building the size of a warehouse. I only went to the mall for one reason and that was when I was craving a soft pretzel. Or when Karen was forcing me to help her pick out bath towels (see: capital punishment).

  “This is so cute!” Carla exclaimed, lifting a sweater vest with a matching bow tie. It was yellow and argyle and so ugly I could have barfed on it. “What do you think?”

  “You don’t want to know what I think.”

  She hung her head and hooked it back on the hanger.

  “What about this?” I asked, waving a mini white T-shirt bearing the phrase WORLD’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR.

  She laughed in disgust. “Ugh, Snake would love that.”

  “If it were a few sizes bigger, he’d wear it.”

  “Ohmigod,” she said, sifting through the animal-themed section. “Right after I told my dad I was pregnant, Snake showed up to my house in a Darth Vader shirt that said WHO’S YOUR DADDY?”

  I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep from bursting. “He. Did. Not.”

  “I swear to God. My dad almost drop-kicked him right there in my living room.”

  I rounded the corner and snorted into my hand, the weirdest, most uncomfortable sensation I’d felt in weeks. Lately, laughing felt a lot like opening my mouth to speak and hearing my words flow out in a foreign language. Carla, of all people, was laughing alongside me, talking back. It was like we both understood but didn’t know when we’d learned to.

  “Olivia hates him,” she said over her shoulder. “I mean, she thinks he’s hot. Obviously. But she also thinks he’s a prick.”

  “That’s because he is a prick.”

  “Yeah . . .” She dragged it out li
ke she wasn’t sure. Like she was agreeing just for the sake of agreeing. “He wasn’t always like that, though. You know?”

  I wanted to have enough knowledge of Snake to agree. To have the memories Carla had, to be able to say, “Remember that one time he did that awesome thing?” But I didn’t know him before, I barely knew him now, and it was pointless to pretend it would have mattered either way.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  She glanced at me and scrunched her forehead. “Tell you what?”

  “What he was like before.”

  A poutiness seeped into her expression, and I feared I was encouraging Crybaby Carla to make an appearance. “Oh, um . . . I don’t know. He was just . . . different. Like, he’d always say he was excited about Little Man, and kiss me when we’d just be sitting there watching TV, and tell me I was beautiful . . .” She looked away shyly. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”

  I bit down on my tongue. “It sounds like he really liked you.”

  “I thought he did.” She shrugged, her eyes vaguely scanning the heaps of baby crap piled around her. “Maybe I just wanted to believe he did. I don’t know.”

  “He did. And he probably still does.”

  I barely knew why I said it, or why there was an almost rude-sounding confidence in my tone when I did. Carla’s blank stare met my angry one, and it annoyed me that I couldn’t unscowl my face.

  “Did he say something to you?” she asked defensively.

  I managed to loosen my jaw long enough to say, “No. It’s just kind of obvious.”

  She placed her hand on the table behind her and leaned against it, her belly and chest inflating with her breath. “I just don’t get him. He loves me, then he doesn’t love me. We’re making out, then we’re breaking up. His mood swings give me serious whiplash.”

  They’re not mood swings, you idiot! I wanted to yell. It was so clear to me as someone who was constantly shifting, drowning, that there were reasons behind his douchebagness. But for a person who’d never felt it, depression couldn’t be watered down to a game show–style Q&A.

  Question: What makes a person go from “this indescribable happiness is what it means to be alive” to “this is so painful it might just fucking kill me”?