They The Pretty Stars (Court High 1)

I hugged my body tighter, shaking through my tears.

“All right. Well, I’ll just continue to raise your daughter for you, then.”

I flinched at the slam down of the phone, my head touching the wall as I sobbed. The only thing that took me out of it was the creak of my bedroom door behind me, light streaming into my room from the hallway. I turned, the silhouette not my aunt but someone else.

I turned back, closing my eyes again. Stiff, I didn’t move, not even when my bed sagged down and my sister put her arms around me.

“Em?” Paige whispered, her scent like lilacs. She smelled so much like Mom it hurt sometimes.

I cried some more, the will not within me to protest. I was weak. I couldn’t tell my sister I didn’t need her because I did. I turned in her arms when she prodded me, her hands on my face. We looked alike, my sister and me, but where she looked more like Mom, I looked like Dad.

Her dark hair she had up in a ponytail, her smile on me through that soft light from the hall.

“Why are you here again?” I asked her. She’d come for me so many times, and the reasons hadn’t been because of Dad. They’d been about me, me and my mistakes.

Things were supposed to be different in high school, a new start and a place to be me and no longer be the girl who lost her mom to cancer. That’d followed me all the way from grade school, poor little December Lindquist who lost her mom and her whole family in one sweep. I couldn’t leave LA, though. I couldn’t leave Mom and the memories of her here. Dad may have been able to do that and even Paige, but I couldn’t.

Things were supposed to be different.

I cradled my belly, the loss still there. I didn’t think it would ever go away. I never got the chance to feel my baby, too early the doctors said, but I had felt something. I felt it deep inside my soul, and the moment it was gone, the moment I let him or her go, I felt that loss.

I sobbed again in my sister’s neck. She hadn’t answered my question, but she didn’t have to do so. She’d been here every day leading up to the abortion and stayed many days after. She was probably so behind in school.

“I’m so stupid,” I whispered. “I’m so dumb.” I allowed someone to tell me I was pretty, that I meant something to someone when I meant nothing. I was nothing to Dean, and he showed me that the moment I told him I’d gotten pregnant. He told me I was crazy. He told me I was a liar, then called me a whore. He’d called me that when before he’d shared nothing but love, both for me and to me. He’d said he loved me and he only wanted to be with me, and I’d believed him. I did because I was weak and he showed me attention when no one else did. I wasn’t just the girl with the dead mom. I wasn’t the chubby girl who gained a bunch of weight after her mom died. I was just a girl he loved.

I hadn’t even wanted to have sex.

“I’m so weak,” I continued into my sister’s neck. “I’m so…”

“The strongest person I know.”

I looked up at my sister, thinking I didn’t hear her right. I shook my head. “I’m not. I…”

“Did what you felt was right,” she said, her face stern. “You’re still here, Em. You’re still starin

g the world right in the face, and that makes you strong.”

I didn’t feel strong. I felt like the worst person on the planet. I fell for a boy who used and abused me, then made the decision to abort my pregnancy after a mistake I made. I was selfish.

“You know, you may not believe me,” Paige said, wiping my tears away. “But soon, you’re not going to be in this bed. Soon, you’re going to be all cried out, and you know what you’ll be doing then?”

I shook my head, the tears blinking down.

She massaged my hand. “You’re going to be smiling. You’re going to be alive and sharing that Em smile with me and the rest of the world.” She leaned in. “One day, you’re going to be so far on the other side of this that the very thought of it will make you feel like it was another life and a completely different person.”

I wiped my face. “How do you know?” It wasn’t possible what she said, a different reality.

Paige crooked a finger under my chin. “Because I can see what you can’t. I can see beyond all this and who you actually are. See right now, Em, you’re burying all of it. You’re hiding, but one day you won’t hide. One day, you’ll truly be who you’re supposed to be.”

I scanned her face in the soft light, still unable to fathom it. She couldn’t be right. She couldn’t be.

Pushing her arms over my shoulders, my sister pulled me into her, continuing to let me cry again against her. So many nights she held me like this, had to bring me back when I couldn’t do so myself. She kissed the top of my head. “I see you, Em. I see what you can’t see, and I always will, forever.”

Ten

The Present

I vomited to the point of thrashing, my head deep in the toilet until nothing but stomach bile came up. I idly wondered if I should go to the hospital considering how much fluid I was losing, but the thought of seeing Mira in a hospital bed or, even worse, dead—I shut that thought down quickly. My dad would obviously find out as well. They’d call him wherever he was. He hadn’t been home when the girls drove me home, but he would be eventually.