It’s midnight under a skillet when I turn to leave. Wishing I had another slice of pizza and a flashlight. Wishing I could stop thinking about the girl and what I’d done. I reach for the wharf ladder without calculating how she’s been loading gasoline for two hours. She’s riding far lower and that ladder’s not where I left it. Doesn’t stop me from clawing and flailing and grabbing for it on my way down, down, down, falling between the barge and the wharf. Four or five stories, way too much time to consider the trouble I’m in. Like no PFD, like what my CO will have to say about that. I hit the sea and the smack knocks any lingering sense out of my head.
I’m underwater. After the first shock of being wet, heading deeper into the black sea, I remember what they taught us—kick off your shoes. I remember the girl, like maybe I deserve this. She was way too young. I swim to fight against the descent, to reverse it even, feeling all I don’t know about the depth and darkness below me, the crush from above.
What’s down there?
Twenty-seven thousand abandoned wells.
What else?
I couldn’t say.
Isn’t imagining worse than knowing?
Yes it is.
*
After we’d done it for the second time the girl had shown me her American history paper.
Alexander Hamilton was born on the island of Nevis, on January 11 in either 1755 or 1757. He was illegitimate, meaning his mother, Rachel Faucette Buck, was not married to his father, James A. Hamilton. Still, Alexander became the first U.S. secretary of the treasury under George Washington. He established a national bank and a system of tariffs. He helped found the U.S. Mint and the Revenue Cutter Service, an outfit that would become the Coast Guard one day.
Alexander Hamilton was a bastard.
He was also a soldier in the Revolutionary War, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Quasi-War.
Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler. Then he cheated on her with Maria Reynolds. Hamilton resigned from office. Later on, he was shot by Aaron Burr in New Jersey. Later on, he died from his wounds in a house on Jane Street in New York City.
The End.
D–. Her teacher had written across the top, Where is your thesis statement? Where are your supporting paragraphs? This is your midterm American history paper, not some outline for a Wikipedia entry. This is unacceptable. Redo.
“Is that why you chose me? Revenue Cutter Service?”
“Yup.” She wasn’t embarrassed to admit it.
“Shoot. A D-minus? That’s ’cause you’re a girl. I would have flunked you. That paper sucks.”
“He’s right.”
“About what?”
“I did copy it from Wikipedia.”
“Why?”
She chewed her cheek while she thought. “To establish the mediocrity democracy promotes.” I could see a mole shaped like a mushroom at the base of her neck. “Just kidding. I did it ’cause no one’s teaching me what I need to know.”
“What’s that?”
She studied me, bit her lip, but said nothing.
“Honey,” I told her, jealous maybe, feeling cruel, “your boyfriend’s been dead for decades.”
*
I swim for the surface, though with no moon, there is no surface. I kick and flail, kick and pitch into the black water until I strike solid steel, and the full weight of the trouble I’m in arrives. I am under the ocean, under the hull of a half-loaded tanker. It is nighttime in America. In one direction there’s air. In the other, miles of something else. Port and starboard are gone, replaced with a sudden memory of how I used to follow the path my father’s tractor cut through some very tall grass, a green tunnel. I remember a grasshopper’s weight bowing over a stalk of gama grass. My hands are on her hull, her heft. My lungs ache. She’s huge. I cling to her underside, a lamprey, a remora. Inside, it’s dry. Inside, air. I search her for a curve that might show the way back in, hoping she got whatever it was she wanted.
*
Thirteen girls wait in the principal’s office. Fourteen if you count me, the recording secretary. Though at forty, I’m not a girl anymore. And usually I’m just the regular secretary, but today there are legal concerns. Today we’re official, so, recording secretary.
The scent of tropical fruit rises from the girls’ hair. Their lotions and perfumes smell of the pharmacy. Better than the stale lunch on my breath. I stand. I sit. One pregnant teenager is a sight to catch your breath. Thirteen pregnant teenagers is an eclipse of sun, moon, earth.
“So.”
There’s a lot I could tell them. I was also pregnant in high school, a condition that ended in a Matamoros doctor’s office. Or he said he was a doctor. I could tell the girls about that, if speaking intimately to the thirteen didn’t feel like speaking intimately to Queen Elizabeth or the Virgin Mary. Though the Virgin Mary may be a bad example.
I verify the spellings of their names. “Meghan Collins? Meghan with an h?”
“Yes.”
“Kristina Lepore? With a K?”
“Yes.”
“Nancy Dean? That’s easy.”
Nancy smiles quickly, scared she’s in trouble. I hear my office phone ring. It has been ringing ever since the girls started showing. Television, newspapers, national magazines. Parents wondering what we’re doing.
“Amy England. Diane Nolan. Elizabeth O’Brien. Brien with an e. Lisa San—”
“—chez.”
She volunteers before I can even get there.
“Sanchez. Of course. Katy Leese. Katy with a K? Leese with three e’s?”
“Right.”
Each girl gets one moment of attention and a smile. I already know the proper spellings. I have their transcripts in front of me, but the room’s so quiet I have to say something. “Well.” I smooth the papers in my lap. “So. When are y’all due?”
Principal Caplan arrives. Principal Caplan has sweat in his sideburns. One pregnant teenager is a persimmon, odd but understandable. Thirteen of them is biting into a piece of molded fruit. Too ripe. Caplan’s mouth opens. He takes his seat, hiding most of himself behind a formidable partner’s desk. Principal Caplan has no partner. Neither of us does. Not really. My not-really boyfriend is a tankerman on the Gulf, so it’s a life of dry spells when he’s out at sea. Rumor is he’s getting into port tonight, but he hasn’t called yet.
Caplan looks like gray meat. We’ve been putting in twelve-hour days ever since pregnant teenagers started sprouting like fungi in our district. We’re in one of those storms of media attention a person hears about. Everything awful and shrill and not from here is bursting down our doors, climbing in through the drainpipes.
Caplan stares at a stupid poster in his office that praises teamwork, that urges us to remember “Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.” He’s too tired to know where to start with the girls. I cough to get him going, priming the pump, reminding him who is principal.
“Here’s what I want to know,” he says. I record his words in shorthand scribble. “Is this some sort of pact? A promise to raise the babies together?” He looks at each one of the girls with fatherly intention. “That’s what they said on the news last night. Is that true, girls?” He clears spit from his lip edge. “I’m thinking it must be, because I know pregnancy’s not contagious.”
Hormones course past brains and ovaries. Lip balm and lonely slumber parties. Hot tears, humidly occult locker rooms, ringworm, and beige bra straps. Liz glances at the other girls’ shoes. “Like, are we a coven of witches or something?”