Page 6

“Nice,” I say. “Slacker.”

Lilly shrugs. She’s always been this way, smart enough to skate by but not really caring. She’ll be married in five years, have three kids before thirty and call herself happy.

Great expectations, indeed.

Her eyes are glued on Cole as he walks in the room, and I’m guessing her mind might still be on baby pictures, but probably not mine. I roll my eyes and schedule a reminder in my phone to ding the second I walk in the door. If I don’t grab Mom as soon as I get home, I’ll forget. There are bigger things on my mind, and the last thing I need is Lilly hassling me about it if it slips through the cracks.

Heath comes in and gives me a smile, but takes his usual seat at the front. I study the back of his shirt, the precise cut of his hair—always even because he gets it trimmed on schedule. Next to me, Lilly is teasing Cole about bubbles. Legs crossed, body at an angle, eyes cast upward, fingers twisting in her hair. Everything about her is screaming at him to notice her and it’s working.

Meanwhile I’m ramrod straight staring at Heath’s back, well aware that he’d be irritated if he knew his tag was sticking up.

I don’t tell him.

three

All the stupid people I know are happy.

A fresh set of nails. The release of a new video game. Mascara that doesn’t run. Shiny rims on a car. These are the things I hear people gushing about as I walk out of school, their momentary elation at the simplest things serving as a reminder that I have higher ideals, bigger goals, a reward in my sights that won’t chip, wash off, wear down, or become boring. Sometimes I think I should borrow Dad’s earplugs to get through the day.

I drive home, ignoring the ache of my hands as they clench on the steering wheel. I’m squeezing more than necessary, thinking about Cole and Lilly in English. A cloud of pheromones surrounded them by the time Mrs. Walker started class, their eyes on each other’s mouths when they talked, straying to other body parts as if they lacked the willpower to control their gaze.

Heath and I aren’t like that, never have been. There’s a calm assurance in our relationship: he is my boyfriend; I am his girlfriend. We’ve been together since eighth grade, a slow escalation from texts that held nothing more than casual information (I’m home. Going skiing. Your hair is pretty.) to mild groping in his parents’ den that came about more from curiosity than passion. We make out because we’re supposed to. That’s what couples do.

The clinical nature of our relationship doesn’t bother me, the hard and fast definitions of what we are to each other reading more like a contractual agreement than anything bordering on affection. We’re cutouts on top of a wedding cake, fingers interlaced but bodies permanently frozen far apart from each other, our smiles painted on. And who cares, really? Wedding cakes are supposed to have toppers. Girls like me are supposed to have boyfriends. Checkmark.

My phone dings at me as I walk in the door, right on schedule. Picture, it says.

“Mom,” I yell, kicking off my shoes. “I need one of my baby pictures.”

I flip through the mail on the table, adding to the pile of acceptance letters from colleges I have no intention of going to. Still, they look nice padding the bottom drawer of my desk.

“Mom,” I call again, raising my voice to be heard over the ice dispenser as I get a drink. There’s no answer. I gulp down half the glass of water and pour the rest on the aloe plant she keeps on the kitchen windowsill. Its leaves are trimmed back, the tips brittle and brown from where she’s had to clip it so many times to treat the little burns she always manages to accumulate in the kitchen. She’s had the same plant for ten years; it’s one of the more useful things we own. So I water it when I’ve got anything left in my glass, one hard worker to another.

“Mom,” I try for a third time, irritated now. I’ve got homework, studying, and hopefully at least two hours of practice ahead of me. Taking care of this baby-picture business was supposed to be a quick chore, a box to checkmark. But she’s not home, which means I’m going to lose time digging through plastic bins jammed at the back of the hall closet.

I open the door and flop to the ground, dragging out an old globe, a pair of waders that fit no one, a shower mat that ended up in here for some reason, and a shoe rack with zero pairs of shoes on it. The photo bins are stacked nicely on top of one another, the only thing in here with any semblance of order.

But that’s on the outside. Once I pop the top off the first one, I realize I’ve signed up for more than a few minutes of browsing. Mom’s never been the neatest person, but the tubs aren’t even sorted by decade. There’s a shot of my mom in the nineties wearing plaid and drinking beer out of a Styrofoam cup in the same bin as a sepia-toned shot of someone I don’t know and don’t have a timeline’s chance of ever having met.

“Seriously?” I mutter under my breath as I toss a picture of Dad proudly displaying his first cell phone. I jam my hand to the bottom of the pile and close my eyes, counting on dumb luck to deliver me from this mess of undated, unnamed, unorganized people. A sharp edge slides under my thumbnail and I yank back, dragging it with me.

The paper is thin, the corner jammed a couple millimeters under my nail, angry red dots of trapped blood welling around it. I pull it free and unroll it, expecting to see the receipt from when Mom bought the plastic bins.

But it’s a picture. Specifically, an ultrasound.

“Wonder what Lilly would make of that,” I say to myself. I don’t know if fetal-me would be more interesting to her than Cole Vance’s tiny penis.

Except . . . it’s not me. Or rather, it’s not just me.

I scan panel to panel, analyzing what I see, separating black from gray, sound bouncing back off solid versus liquid. The shapes are difficult to distinguish, more white noise than picture. But the neatly printed text at the bottom cannot be misinterpreted, my mother’s name and the date—when she would’ve been pregnant with me.

But I’m not alone in there.

A paradigm shift is defined as a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions, and people often come unmoored when they occur. The Catholic Church persecuted Galileo when he argued for a heliocentric universe; people didn’t know germs caused illnesses until the nineteenth century.

And I thought I was an only child until just now.

I take it well, all things considered. That is to say I fall over, crumpling the photos I’d tossed aside. A thousand sharp-edged corners dig into my skin as all the blood leaves my head, my fingers and toes tingling as every drop concentrates to my center. To my engorged heart.