The Space Between Us (6 page)

“How about getting off your butt and helping for once? I’m making
your
dinner.”

“Not my dinner,” she said, digging around in the bottom of a bag of barbecue chips. She pulled out a handful of orange crumbs. “Whatever you’re cooking smells like vomit.”

“It does not. It’s hamburger.”

“Hamburger you puked into? It’s making me want to throw up just smelling it,” she said, then licked the
salty seasoning off her fingers. Her tongue was stained orange too.

“So don’t eat it. Go up to your room like you do every night and leave me to eat alone with the old people.”

“Thanks for the permission. You can go back to cooking your vomit-burger.” Her eyes were back on the screen.

“No, I’ve had it with this. Snap out of it! You aren’t grounded anymore. Listen, I’m sorry I said Mom would be ashamed of you. It was six weeks ago. Get over it!”

She rolled her eyes. The whites would’ve been visible from fifty feet.

I took a deep breath through my nose and tried to calm myself down without looking like I was trying to calm myself down. It didn’t matter. She was still staring at the TV.

“That’s right, Amelia. Take deep breaths. Maybe that’ll help you control the universe.”

“Why are you acting like this?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want to miss my show playing butler.”

“You know what I mean.”

Her face was a wall. She grabbed the remote and made deliberate jabs at the TV as she turned up the volume three bars.

Without thinking, I crossed the room, grabbed the remote, and chucked it. It bounced across the wooden floor and slid underneath Dad’s recliner just as the smoke
alarm started to shriek. She yelled a string of words that definitely called for Grandma’s bar of soap, while I sprinted to the kitchen and yanked the pan off the stove.

It didn’t matter. The hamburger was already burned.

I didn’t have time to dump it before Grandma came home, so we had to eat it anyway. Scorched, rubbery meat in watery sauce over spaghetti clumps.

Dad alone was spared the food and the bad dinner table vibe. He called to say someone came by the church and really needed to talk. That was the difficult part of pastoring, he always said, being willing to give himself to anyone’s life crisis.

• • •

The choir concert went well by Dr. Kinzer’s standards: We didn’t forget our words or mix up our entrances, and nobody (meaning me) made a fool of themselves singing loudly and out of tune.

From the top left section of the riser where she’d placed me, I could see Will. He was in the second row, looking kind of dorky in a black shirt and blue tie combo, with a big grin. I’d always made sure he didn’t wear crap like that. Luciana had a solo in one of the songs, so he, no doubt, wanted to be able to see and hear her.

I could see Grandma too, with an empty chair next to her for Dad. No Charly, of course. Grandma smiled. For a moment, I forgot how mad I was at her and smiled
back. Charly could ruin dinner and keep on hating me, and Dad could get held up saving someone’s soul, but nothing changed Grandma.

• • •

That night I lay in bed and stared at my computer monitor, too tired to get up and turn it off. My screen saver was set to slideshow, so I watched the last two years (since I’d gotten my own camera) flicker by. There was one of Dad and Charly hunting for shells at Santa Rosa Beach. Then one of Grandma braiding Charly’s hair last Halloween. She’d gone as a Viking, complete with horn hat and sword.

The next one made me laugh. I couldn’t help it. It caught me off guard. It was of just Charly, from the beginning of last summer, and she had a powdered donut hole wedged in her mouth, the sugar all over her face. She was wearing a tank top and frayed jean cutoffs, and stood beside her bike, with her right arm poised like she was about to hurl the donut hole in her hand at the camera.

The picture was from before the golf course tan and the losers from Baldwin, when we had nothing better to do than putz around and ride bikes to Dunkin’ Donuts. Seconds after the picture was taken she’d decided to start chucking holes off Tremonton’s one and only overpass. I’d pulled the box away from her and sped off before she could get us both arrested.

I didn’t even recognize that girl.

The picture changed to a close-up of Will and me before a youth dance at the church. He hated dancing, but he always took me to the dances anyway, just because he knew I loved them. He would only dance the slow ones, and spent most of those whispering stupid jokes in my ear. I loved those stupid jokes.

I got up and turned off the monitor.

• • •

“Are you awake?”

I blinked. Charly’s voice had reached into my dreams like a hand and yanked me out.

The moonlight from the window was just enough to see her outline as she made her way across the room.

“No.”

She crawled clumsily over me and flopped down between my body and the wall. The bed bounced like a trampoline, springs squealing. I was still too much asleep to be properly confused by her wandering into my room and crawling into bed to talk like she used to.

“What do you want?” I asked. I sounded more annoyed than I wanted to. This was something, wasn’t it? Her coming to talk.

“I don’t know.”

We lay there, just listening to ourselves breathe, staring at the star stickers on the ceiling. They’d been there for seven years. We’d put them up together, before
Charly had moved across the hall, but we’d run out of stickers so they were mostly clustered above my bed.

A minute passed. Maybe two. It felt like twenty.

“I want to tell you something,” she said finally, “but I need you to guess so I can just say yes or no.”

“Why?”

“Just because.”

“Not an answer.”

“Because I don’t want to say it out loud.”

“But how am I supposed to guess it?”

She paused. I felt her cross her arms beside me. “Something’s wrong with me.”

“As in you’re sick?”

“Yes. No.”

“Pick one.”

“Not officially.”

“But you think you have a disease or something?”

“I wish.”

“Good to know your inner drama queen is still intact.”

I looked over at her. Even in the dark I could see she was pale, almost greyish, and her skin looked like it was draped over her cheeks, making shadows beneath them. Gaunt, that was the word. Maybe she was doing drugs. Liam and Asha smoked pot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those idiots from Baldwin did meth. Except Charly hadn’t even seen them in forever. She hadn’t seen anyone.

It was my job to ask. I knew it. And she’d asked me to, but I didn’t want to say the words, because she just might answer.

“Charly, are you on drugs?” I closed my eyes tight.

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“No.”

Thank you, God.
“Then why do you look so pale?”

“Because I’ve thrown up every day for the last two weeks.”

Bulimia.
The word exploded in my brain like fireworks. I hadn’t seen anything—how had I not seen
anything
? She didn’t look any skinnier, and she ate crap, but that wasn’t new. Skittles, Little Debbie cupcakes, onion rings—she’d always been proud of her junk food addiction. How’d I miss the purging?

It didn’t make sense. She’d never been one of those girls who cared, the ones like Savannah, who ordered salad with no dressing and Diet Coke and knew exactly how many calories thirty minutes on the elliptical trainer burned. Charly was just thin.

I was the worst sister in the entire world.

Thalia French came to mind. She was PHS’s poster child for eating disorders. Thalia stood down a row and to my left in choir, close enough for me to see her knobby arms, like flamingo legs, and her buggy eyes when she turned to the side. Her jaw looked too big for her face, and the skin hung loose around her mouth.

I turned back to Charly, who was still staring at the ceiling. She looked nothing like Thalia. Yet. I wanted to yell at her, grab her arms and shake her hard, but I stopped myself. She’d come to me for help, not a freak-out. Besides, an eating disorder wasn’t something I could shake out of her.

“Why would you do that to yourself?” I asked. “You need to stop it.
Now
.”

“It’s not like I can just stop it.”

“You have to. Sticking your finger down your throat every day is crazy and dangerous. Look at Thalia. She’s like a skin-wrapped skeleton. People die of bulimia, Charly.”

“
What?
I’m not sticking my finger down my throat. That’s disgusting.”

I paused, taking in the change in her tone. She’d gone from tragic to outraged in a second. “I know it’s disgusting. You’re the one who just said you were puking every day.”

“Because I have
morning sickness
.”

The stars above me, the ones that hadn’t moved in seven years, suddenly quivered and slid across my view. I blinked. Back in place.

“Morning sickness,” she said again, “but not really in the morning.”

I wanted to reach out and put my hand over her mouth, but it was heavy and numb by my side. My whole body was paralyzed.

“It’s all day,” she said. “It’s every time I’m not stuffing food down my throat, but the food doesn’t even taste good and I think I want it, but then once I’m eating it I realize it isn’t what I wanted at all, and I just want to puke it up . . . . ” She trailed off weakly.

I followed the melody of her voice, listening but not listening, twirling around inside her words and keeping my eyes on the stars, holding them in place with my gaze so they wouldn’t slide again. The air-conditioning was turned up too high, and the sweat dripping down my sides into the small of my back had turned cold. Shivering, I pulled the sheet up around my shoulders.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked. I could hear a shimmer of panic in her voice.

I didn’t want to say anything. As long as I didn’t take her words and assign them meaning, I wouldn’t have to see the cataclysmically stupid thing she’d done.

“What am I supposed to say?” My voice was hollow. “I don’t even understand what you’re saying.”

“Yes, you do.”

Morning sickness.

I wasn’t going to say it for her. She couldn’t just hint and suggest around it, so that I was the one who had to say it and make it real.

Morning sickness.

My heart and my stomach dropped down down down
through my body and the bed and the floor, leaving me empty.
Charly. You idiot.

“Say it.” My voice sounded flat and hard in my own ears, but I couldn’t infuse life into it. Everything had already drained out of me.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Say it, or I won’t help you.”

“I’m pregnant.”

I felt nothing. I rolled onto my side and looked at her. She was chewing her bottom lip, staring at the same fake stars. And she was wearing the silver hoops Savannah had bought me for my birthday. Not that she’d asked if she could borrow them.

That’s when the flood of sadness fell on me, forcing the air out of my lungs, crushing every bone in my body. And that casing of anger I’d built around myself, I could feel the brittle shell crack and six weeks of hating just shatter and fall like broken glass.

Pregnant.
That wasn’t even physically possible. It’s not like I was totally naive, despite Dad’s refusal to sign the sex ed waivers every year. I’d been sent to the library to do projects on careers in the arts or money management, but I’d gotten all the info from Savannah later on, and I’d made sure Charly knew.

But it was impossible for a virgin to be pregnant, and Charly was a virgin. Like me. Like Dad and Grandma and
God expected us to be. She didn’t even have a boyfriend, and that wasn’t something she could’ve hidden from me. I would have known. She’d told me every single detail of her relationship with Finn Grier last winter, from first glance and first kiss to final fight. She would’ve told me if she was seeing someone, and even if she hadn’t, I would have seen.

“I’m pregnant,” she said again.

“No, you’re not. That’s not funny. You’ve never even had sex.”

She shuddered, brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, eyes closed.

“Right?”

She didn’t answer. She started to cry. I watched her, forcing myself not to close my eyes or plug my ears. I kept watching, even when it got ugly, when the crying became gasps and sobs and gulps, and I was dying to pull her to me and squeeze her until it wasn’t true. Or roll out of bed and run away from her and this feeling.

I’m pregnant.
Those words ended everything.

“Dean?” I asked.

“What? No. Of course not.” She wiped her face on the sleeve of her shirt and hiccupped. “He’s nobody. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know about it, and I’m not going to tell him.”

“What?”

She shook her head, and wrapped her arms back around her knees. “Trust me, he doesn’t want to know.”

I looked away so she wouldn’t see the disgust in my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I was just so . . . disappointed. Except that word didn’t hold half of what I felt. She wasn’t who I thought she was. Definitely not who Dad thought she was.

Anger flickered somewhere inside of me.

“Since when . . . ,” I started, feeling the flame spread. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me you were having sex, and what . . . I mean, I just can’t believe you’ve been doing this behind my back. Dad is . . . and Grandma . . . ”

“I know.”

“You
know
? No, you don’t! You don’t know anything! If you’d thought for one second about what you were doing, if you’d even once considered what it would do to Dad and to Grandma,
then
you’d know. And you wouldn’t have done it.”

She had no response.

“But you did do it, because the only thing you really
know
is that you’re the center of the universe.”

It was true, and I wasn’t going to feel bad about saying it just because she was all curled up and wounded and crying. “You know what you are now? A statistic. Another pregnant sixteen-year-old. You should give MTV a call and see if they’ll take you. Oh, and not just any pregnant
sixteen-year-old, but a pastor’s daughter—an
abstinence
-preaching pastor’s daughter.”