So I don’t. I just peek inside.
Not shoes. There’s a picture on the box, of what must be inside—a red rubber-knobbed device with a long, black handle. Three Speeds, the box announces. And, across the top, Personal Massager.
“Thanks?” It comes out kind of like a question, because I don’t understand why Seth would give me a back massager. It’s not like I’ve ever complained of back pain.
He grins. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“It’s a vibrator,” he says.
Then I do get it, and I feel melted by the shame.
“It’s no big deal,” he says. “Wade says it’s hard for some girls to come without some . . . help.”
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. “I don’t need one of these,” I say, and I hate my voice, the wobble in it, I hate that Seth has maybe talked to his brother about me, said to him, “So you know the girl I’m dating, Nina? She’s pretty cool. But no matter how much we do it, or how long I lick her, she just can’t come.”
“It’s no big deal,” Seth says again, but of course it’s a big deal. It’s been three months, and I still haven’t had an orgasm. And now he’s tired of trying, so he’s giving me this thing, and I don’t want it.
But giving it back to him seems like a bigger deal than just taking it, so I swing my backpack over my shoulder and zip it open, shove the box inside. “Thanks,” I say, my eyes focused on the teeth of the zipper as they meet and clench.
???
My mom wasn’t supposed to be able to have kids at all. There’s something wrong with her cervix. She found out when she and Dad had been married for a couple of years, after her second miscarriage. She doesn’t talk about it much, but I guess there was a miscarriage every year or so, before me and then again after. If each of her miscarriages were an egg, Mom would have enough to fill a cardboard carton. She could draw little faces on them and keep them in the refrigerator.
I was born ridiculously early, at like twenty-seven weeks, and they had to leave me in the ICU for a couple of months before I could come home.
In other words, I was just barely not a miscarriage myself. I wasn’t breathing when I came out, I didn’t cry, and my veins showed right through my skin. I looked, Mom said, more galline than human. Like a balut, she said. I looked it up, and galline, too. “Galline” means “chicken-like,” and a balut, gross as this sounds, is actually a delicacy in some parts of the world. It’s a chicken embryo, boiled in its shell.
They worked on me and got me breathing, they made me cry, made me suck, kept me warm in a heated plastic box. Eventually my parents brought me home.
Apparently I wasn’t enough, even though I was the egg that hatched, even after everything I had to go through to metamorphose from miscarriage to balut to flesh-and-blood, breathing, eating, bowel-moving human child. Because she kept trying for another. Because that squat crystal glass kept reappearing and disappearing, like a waning and waxing moon.
When I get home from school, I take Seth’s present out of my backpack and push it, still wrapped in the plastic bag, onto my closet’s highest shelf, cramming it behind my old teddy bears and dolls. I slam the closet door so hard that I rip one of my nails, the one on the ring finger of my right hand. It stings, and my eyes fill with tears, and I slide to the thick, soft carpet and chew away at what’s left of the nail, sucking on my fingertip to take away the pain, almost glad for the metallic taste of my own blood.
The house is empty. My parents aren’t here. I don’t want to be here, either. Apparently no one in my family ever wants to be here, which is pretty ridiculous considering what a nice house it is.
Even if they were here, I wouldn’t tell either of them that I was upset with Seth. They vaguely know that we’re dating, but they never ask for details and I never offer.
I consider calling Louise to see if she wants to hang out. She used to be my closest friend, until Seth finally noticed me. She had a thing for him, too, but that was okay, back then. We could yearn for him together. We could drive by his house, late at night when we had sleepovers, slowing down as we passed and craning our necks to see if the window that must be his window—the one above the garage—was lit up, wondering, if it was, if that meant he was home, guessing together about what he might be doing—homework, or playing a video game, or taking a shower . . .
She even stuck around after the mess last year, after what I did to Apollonia. She didn’t have to, I know that. I wondered then, if the roles were reversed, would I have done the same?
But it changed when Seth picked me. Because then it got weird to hang out with a girl who I knew had a picture of my boyfriend as her screensaver. And it had to be weird for her, too. How could she stand it? I figured I was doing her a favor when I got too busy to hang out with her, when all my free time became Seth time.
But sometimes—like now, or when Seth is busy with something else—I find myself missing Louise. I don’t want to just call her up, though, when I have nothing else to do, but I guess sometimes we do things we’re not proud of.
The phone rings three times before she answers. “Nina,” she says, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Homework.”
“Do you want to do something?”
“Sure. Do you want to go to the Lab?”
The Lab “Anti-Mall” is this outdoor shopping center filled with bohemian-chic dress shops and cafes and a running store and two hair salons and an Urban Outfitters. It’s a mall. Nothing “anti” about it, except the name.
“Okay,” I say.
“Can you pick me up?”
“Can’t you meet me there?”
“My mom took the car,” she says.
I shouldn’t have called, but I can’t not pick her up now, not when I’ve been such a dick about avoiding her, even though her house is ten minutes in the wrong direction. “Okay. I’ll be there in a few.”
I drop my phone on the carpet where it lands with a whispered thud. I close my eyes and rake my fingers through my hair. I take deep breaths.
I don’t cry.
Then I relace the boots I’ve kicked off. Slowly, carefully, I wind each lace around the hooks. I make two bunny ears out of the laces and loop them together into a bow. I pull each knot tight. I slip my phone into the back pocket of my jeans.
My keys aren’t where I usually leave them, in the little pewter bowl on my dresser, so I trace my steps downstairs and I find them in a pocket of the jacket I’d shrugged off and thrown into a kitchen chair.
I take the jacket. I lock the house. I walk to my car and slide inside.
Louise is waiting out front when I pull up, so at least there’s that. She waves her funny little quick wave and slips into the passenger seat as if no time has passed since the last time we hung out together. As if nothing has changed.