This Darkness Mine

  “No,” I shoot back, ignoring the blood I feel rising to my face. “And I don’t think that’ll be happening anytime soon, anyway.”

  “Oooooo . . . why’s that?” Lilly leans in closer to me, and Brooke steals what’s left of my orange again. This time I let her. There’s something reassuring in the nearness of them, our body heat comingling with shared words, the little bit of orange skin I can see clinging to Brooke’s teeth that I might tell her about. I may not like my friends all the time, but when you go to a small school you cut your losses.

  And I know they feel the same way about me. So I spill.

  “Heath called me last night, totally pissed. Apparently Charity”—I raise my eyebrows at Lilly, as if she’s accountable for her cousin’s actions—“told everyone I was asking about getting abortions in bio. So of course this means I’m pregnant.”

  “Uh, except for the whole you’re-a-virgin thing,” Brooke says. “When they showed us those pics of syphilis in sixth grade they might as well have signed you up for nun school.”

  I want to correct Brooke with the word convent, or inform her that I’d have to be Catholic to be a nun. Instead I shudder, remembering the picture she means in perfect detail.

  “I’d have to be stupid to have sex,” I say, repeating the first words out of my mouth when I walked out of that doomed health class years ago.

  “Yeah,” Brooke agrees. “Or normal.”

  “Whatever,” I shoot back. “Herpes. Gonorrhea. Pregnancy.” I tick off the cons with my fingers, each one a solid fact that came with its own explicit slide in sixth grade that burned into my mind, confirming that sex could only ruin my life.

  “Pish,” Brooke argues, raising her own fingers. “Oral. Vag—”

  “Stop,” I say, but she only shrugs.

  “They didn’t tell us the good parts, you know?”

  “And no pics either,” Lilly says sadly.

  “Regardless,” I go on, trying to get the conversation back to the fight with my boyfriend. “Heath and I don’t have sex, which I pointed out to him. And then he says—and I quote—‘Just because we don’t have sex doesn’t mean you can’t be pregnant.’” I stress the pronouns exactly the way he did, so that the implications are perfectly clear.

  “Wait . . . what?” asks Lilly.

  Brooke smacks her on the forehead, leaving behind an orange seed. “He’s saying if she’s pregnant, it’s not his. And that, my friend, is top-tier bullshit.”

  “Thank you.” I smile at Brooke. She may be the most uncouth person I know, but she’s loyal. And right now her back is up.

  “What a penis hole,” she says, drawing the attention of some nearby freshmen. “You’re completely frigid, dude. And I say that with affection.”

  “That’s lovely.” I decide not to tell her about the food stuck in her teeth. Lilly does though, and Brooke scrapes it off and spends a solid forty seconds inspecting her find.

  “Seriously,” Lilly says, turning to me. “Sorry about Charity. She doesn’t exactly live up to her name.”

  Brooke flicks the orange skin off her fingernail into the hair of one of the freshmen girls without her noticing. “Not your fault, Lil. You can’t pick your family.”

  “No, you can’t,” I agree, my hand slipping back into my pocket where the ultrasound lies folded, warm from my body heat.

  “Hey.”

  Even if I didn’t know Heath’s voice I would sense it’s him standing behind me because of my friends’ reactions. Lilly’s face goes into the frozen tundra mask she’s perfected on underclassmen who try to correct her when she pronounces words like flautist and pianist the right way, and Brooke scowls like he’s a hard grounder about to take a bad hop. Also she says, “Hey, man, you’re a penis hole.”

  But I do know his voice, thoroughly. It’s come to me through five different models of phones and over Skype, my country wireless slowing his face down so that he looks like a badly dubbed film. I’ve listened to his soft inflections, soldiered through puberty octave cracks, and heard the first guttural moans of satisfied desire that didn’t happen in private. And it’s those accumulations that erase some of my irritation, an acknowledgment that even if I’m not happy with him in this moment, I’ve got enough time invested in him to allow for an apology.

  “Excuse us, girls,” I say to Brooke and Lilly. My hand slides neatly into Heath’s, and I lead him away from our table without looking at his face yet, a thistle buried in the olive branch. I take him to the back hall, somewhere we’re not supposed to be during lunch hour. When I finally meet his eyes it’s clear he knows exactly how much doo-doo he’s in, that I’m willing to break rules for us to talk.

  “So . . . ,” he starts.

  “One”—I lift a finger—“not pregnant.”

  His hand goes up to his scalp, disturbing the stillness of hair gelled into place this morning. “Sasha . . .”

  “Two”—my middle finger pops up to join the pointer, making an audible tendon creak that we both ignore—“couldn’t possibly be pregnant.”

  “I know that, okay? I know,” he argues back, little spiked edges of irritation that would hit red on a soundboard, making my fingers want to curl back down into a fist.

  “And three . . .” But I lose three as a familiar smell fills the hallway, and my ring finger can’t quite make the upward journey to join the others because my hand is shaking so badly.

  “Sasha?” Heath is different now, his defensiveness evaporated along with the sharpness of my voice, which is stuck in my throat, unable to burrow its way out. His hands find my shoulders, and I squirm under them, not wanting any hair product on my new shirt.

  “Is it your heart? Sasha? You’re pale as a sheet.”

  “Except her sheets ain’t white, man.”

  Isaac’s voice sends another ripple through my system, this one a warm flush that takes over the cold anger that had been directed at Heath. He’s right beside us, eyeing Heath’s hands on my shoulders as if he wants to strike them off. An exhale of cigarette smoke tints his words, and I know it’s this scent that derailed my brain from the invective-laced diatribe that I’d been launching at my boyfriend, the smell of an unfiltered Pall Mall capturing my attention as easily as a John Williams score.

  “This isn’t your business, Harver,” Heath says, ignoring the fact that Isaac knows what color my sheets are, in the same way I choose to dismiss the fact that I know exactly what kind of cigarettes Isaac smokes.

  “Maybe not,” Isaac says, eyes still on Heath’s hands. “But I don’t like the way you’re handling the lady.”

  “I’m fine,” I snap at him, sliding out from under my boyfriend’s grip. “That’s directed at you too,” I say to Heath as I stalk away from both boys. Away from the concern in Heath’s face and the smirk on Isaac’s.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I shout back over my shoulder as I turn the corner.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I say again to myself as I find my locker, willing my traitorous heart to return to a normal rhythm and ignoring the feeling that it beat more loudly when Isaac was nearby.

  I feel like my sheets are screaming their non-whiteness when I walk into my bedroom. I toss my phone and it hits the mattress one second before I do. I spent the rest of the day at school trying so hard to prove that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with me, that I’m exhausted. Usually this is my cram session, a time to crank open the cranium and insert whatever information I’ll need for tomorrow’s quizzes, tests, or in-depth analysis. But my eyes are slipping closed, my legs barely able to draw the twin weights of my feet up to the bed before I’m out.

  Isaac Harver follows me even there, into a dream where he knows the color of my sheets because he’s in my bedroom. He’s leaning against the door—which is closed, something I never allow when Heath is over—and his eyes are moving over me as I pull my shirt off flagrantly, even tossing it into the air like a stripper. Which it turns out is not so smart because it hits my whirling fan blades and turns
into a projectile headed straight for Isaac’s face.

  “Shit,” he yells, diving to get out of the way and knocking into me at the same time. We land on the bed, him on top, the lace of my bra pressed against him as my heart beats wildly. I’m ready for whatever he wants to do next. Anything. I lick my lips and wait for him to come at me, but instead he does something unexpected.

  “You okay?” he asks, hands on either side of my face even though I thought he’d go right for my chest.

  “Yeah,” I say, my voice thin and breathless as I look up at him. His thumb rubs over my check, onto my lower lip.

  “Nice sheets,” he says, rolling off me. “I didn’t know they came in pink.”

  I prop up on one elbow next to him, repeating his movements, learning as we go. I trace my finger over his lips. “Your other girls don’t have pink sheets?”

  He grabs my hand and entwines our fingers, a knot I can’t break. He rolls to his side to face me, our eyes as connected as our hands. “I don’t have other girls.”

  My heart accelerates, breath stills in my chest, skin explodes as a million nerve endings scream to be pressed against him. It’s so good it’s painful and I jerk awake, fingers splayed open on the pillow where his head rested in my dream, where I see an indent on the pillow I never use, and hair that isn’t mine.

  I sit up fast, only to be hit by a wave of black. I’m dizzy, my heart still beating at the cage of my ribs as if it wants to get out. I collapse back onto the bed, my head landing on Isaac’s pillow, a faint whiff of cigarette smoke puffing up around me.

  He’s been here. He’s been in my bed.

  I should be terrified, but instead my hands are going up to my own face, fingers tracing my lips the same way he did, trying to recall the feeling. My heart stutters, elated, as my mind fills in the blanks. His voice. His face. The look on his face as he leaned into me and . . .

  “No.” I slide off the bed, too weak to stand. I reach for the desk to pull myself up but only knock off a pile of books, the ultrasound fluttering to the floor almost as an afterthought. I grab it, the comforting black and white giving me something to look at, something concrete that can’t be denied.

  But there’s a gray area. I see it now. A smudge where my twin and I overlap, our fetal bodies entwined as my hand had been with Isaac’s. I study it as my heart calms, my breath returns. My fingers are shaky, pulse still weak as I touch the point where my sister and I intersect, the adrenaline of wanting Isaac still thick in my veins.

  “Oh my God,” I say, the truth hitting me like a surprise stinger after you thought the song was over.

  We’re not facing each other in the ultrasound.

  Because even then we each wanted different things.

  I call Heath, the person who makes the most sense in the world. He comes over right away, like I knew he would. Mom and Dad trust me entirely, which works out great, because no one cares that I shut my bedroom door as soon as he’s in the room with me.

  No one but Heath, that is.

  “What’s going on?” he asks, clearly nervous at this sudden change.

  “Why does something have to be going on?” I ask, aiming for coy but falling somewhat short of the mark. Straightforward is how I operate best, so I do what I did in the dream, taking my shirt off without a word and tossing it into the air.

  It doesn’t hit the fan like it did in my dream with Isaac, doesn’t fly straight for Heath’s head to send him crashing into me in a tangle of laughter onto the bed. Instead it lands on my desk, covering my doodles from the night before, the sketch of my own face, looking bored with the boy I’m trying to seduce right now.

  Trying and failing.

  “What are you doing?” Heath asks, actually backpedaling into the closed door at the sight of me in my underwear.

  “I’m . . .” I don’t know what I’m doing, obviously. The girl in the dream with Isaac did, for sure. But the boy in that situation seemed to know what he was doing too. Heath just looks terrified, which I hardly think is necessary. I’m not built like Brooke or anything, but I do get checked out by everyone from the flutes to the football players.

  “What’s the problem?” I ask. “Don’t you like what you see?”

  “Sasha . . .” His eyes make the journey over my body, once, twice. He swallows hard, then crosses the distance. Not between me and him, but between him and my shirt, which he tosses at me.

  “Put that on,” he says. “We need to talk.”

  With the door open, it seems. When the sound of dinner cooking downstairs and the comforting pale pink of the hallway safely in reach, Heath sits next to me on the bed.

  “I do like what I see,” he says, hand encircling mine, space between everything else. Just like the wedding cake toppers. Plastic. Perfect. Placated.

  “But you’re going to Oberlin, and I’m—”

  “Not,” I finish for him. “Right, I know. I wasn’t proposing to you, just be to clear.”

  “I know that,” he says quickly, and I think I might detect the slightest trace of relief in his voice. “But . . . what if you did get pregnant?”

  I don’t remind him that I’m on the pill, a dubious gift given to me a few years ago after a horrific ovarian cyst incident. The prescription came along with an awkward conversation with Mom about how this was a medical necessity and I shouldn’t regard it as permission.

  “What if I didn’t?” I say, hand tightening on his.

  “Sasha, I just . . .” He swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I can’t.”

  I pointedly look at his crotch, where it’s very obvious that he can. That gets a smile, the even whites that his orthodontist worked so hard for making an appearance.

  “I can,” he elaborates, bumping my knee with his. “I just don’t know if we should.”

  “Right,” I say, eyes wandering to the fan above my bed.

  “We’ve got a good thing going,” he says. “I don’t want to look back at my first girlfriend and think about fights and a broken heart or things we’ll both regret.”

  It’s the nice thing to say, a way to turn me down that’s still slightly romantic and kind of sweet. But underneath that is the boy I actually know, and his pie chart has always been a solid color labeled “success.” There’s not even a sliver of something offbeat in it that could be dug up in his future political career, like a high school girlfriend who had a quiet abortion, or the same girl sharing the tale of losing her virginity to him while her trusting, working-class parents were making dinner downstairs.

  No, Heath plays it safe, all the way. And I can’t really blame him, because I used to be the same, until I smelled cigarette smoke on my pillow and was intrigued instead of disgusted. And to be honest, Heath has always been the same thing to me: reassurance, a boy holding a safety net that I can fall into if the wire I walk trembles, even a little. I never considered falling, because I didn’t know it could be fun.

  I slip my hand from his, letting go of a lot more than just him.

  “Let’s have dinner,” I say, and we go downstairs to spaghetti night and routine, our behavior exactly what is to be expected.

  As if there isn’t a door to my bedroom at all.

  seven

  I must have scared Heath off last week. He hasn’t come over since he bolted at the sight of my bra, but I’m happier with Vivaldi’s company anyway, perfecting his idea of what spring would sound like. I’m considering moving on into summer when my phone goes off. I stop midmeasure, too aware that the impenetrable mantle I usually shroud myself in during practice time seems to be awfully wispy these days. I glance at the screen and know that I’m looking at Isaac’s number, even if I didn’t program it into my phone. My hands are stopped in place, stuck on an endless F sharp that my lungs refuse to give life to because I’ve been holding my breath to see if he leaves a message.

  Disgusted, I pop the clarinet from my mouth and try to wipe away the orange-tinged ring on the reed, a diluted mixture of mom’s spaghetti and my spit. It’s chippe
d anyway, the ragged end like a fingernail that hasn’t been buffed. I’ll probably find bits of reed in my gums again tomorrow, ground deeply in by hours of practice and then emerging toward the light for me to pluck out. I loosen the ligature and pop the reed free, hands going through the motions blind, because my eyes are on the phone.

  “You’re an idiot,” I say to myself.

  He doesn’t leave a voice mail, but seconds later a text comes in, the vibration of the phone matching the one in my chest.

  we need to talk

  I’ve got a nasty response already composed, one I’ve used to reject everyone but Heath since eighth grade. But my hands type something else entirely.

  OK when?

  I study the text a second before sending it, aware of the door it will open. My thumb makes the decision for me, hitting send before I’ve given full thought to what might lie on the other side.

  Now. Face-to-face.

  I don’t know what world he lives in, but I’m not a citizen of one where Sasha Stone talks face-to-face with Isaac Harver at eleven at night on a Sunday.

  I’m outside

  “Bull,” I say under my breath, then I hear the purr of a motorcycle in the driveway. I tear my curtains out of the way to see his silhouette give me a little mock salute. How he found out where I live, I have no clue, but I need to get rid of him before Mom and Dad notice.

  I pull on some flip-flops and a hoodie, poking my head into my parents’ room as I head down the hall. Mom’s propped in bed scowling at a romance novel and doesn’t notice when I click her door shut the rest of the way. Dad is sprawled on his recliner in the living room with his earplugs so deep they’ll have to be surgically removed.

  The only thing standing between me and Isaac Harver having a conversation by the light of a full moon is common sense, and I pause with my hand on the doorknob. That day at the courthouse Isaac had my attention, and he knew it. My mouth was inches from his and not wanting to retreat before his probation officer interrupted. And that was in a public place. After the dream I had I’m not sure if I trust myself alone in the dark with him, but for some reason that feels like more of an incentive than a warning. My feet are cutting through the yard to the driveway before my brain sends them the signal to reconsider.