I sit up fast, only to be hit by a wave of black. I’m dizzy, my heart still beating at the cage of my ribs as if it wants to get out. I collapse back onto the bed, my head landing on Isaac’s pillow, a faint whiff of cigarette smoke puffing up around me.
He’s been here. He’s been in my bed.
I should be terrified, but instead my hands are going up to my own face, fingers tracing my lips the same way he did, trying to recall the feeling. My heart stutters, elated, as my mind fills in the blanks. His voice. His face. The look on his face as he leaned into me and . . .
“No.” I slide off the bed, too weak to stand. I reach for the desk to pull myself up but only knock off a pile of books, the ultrasound fluttering to the floor almost as an afterthought. I grab it, the comforting black and white giving me something to look at, something concrete that can’t be denied.
But there’s a gray area. I see it now. A smudge where my twin and I overlap, our fetal bodies entwined as my hand had been with Isaac’s. I study it as my heart calms, my breath returns. My fingers are shaky, pulse still weak as I touch the point where my sister and I intersect, the adrenaline of wanting Isaac still thick in my veins.
“Oh my God,” I say, the truth hitting me like a surprise stinger after you thought the song was over.
We’re not facing each other in the ultrasound.
Because even then we each wanted different things.
I call Heath, the person who makes the most sense in the world. He comes over right away, like I knew he would. Mom and Dad trust me entirely, which works out great, because no one cares that I shut my bedroom door as soon as he’s in the room with me.
No one but Heath, that is.
“What’s going on?” he asks, clearly nervous at this sudden change.
“Why does something have to be going on?” I ask, aiming for coy but falling somewhat short of the mark. Straightforward is how I operate best, so I do what I did in the dream, taking my shirt off without a word and tossing it into the air.
It doesn’t hit the fan like it did in my dream with Isaac, doesn’t fly straight for Heath’s head to send him crashing into me in a tangle of laughter onto the bed. Instead it lands on my desk, covering my doodles from the night before, the sketch of my own face, looking bored with the boy I’m trying to seduce right now.
Trying and failing.
“What are you doing?” Heath asks, actually backpedaling into the closed door at the sight of me in my underwear.
“I’m . . .” I don’t know what I’m doing, obviously. The girl in the dream with Isaac did, for sure. But the boy in that situation seemed to know what he was doing too. Heath just looks terrified, which I hardly think is necessary. I’m not built like Brooke or anything, but I do get checked out by everyone from the flutes to the football players.
“What’s the problem?” I ask. “Don’t you like what you see?”
“Sasha . . .” His eyes make the journey over my body, once, twice. He swallows hard, then crosses the distance. Not between me and him, but between him and my shirt, which he tosses at me.
“Put that on,” he says. “We need to talk.”
With the door open, it seems. When the sound of dinner cooking downstairs and the comforting pale pink of the hallway safely in reach, Heath sits next to me on the bed.
“I do like what I see,” he says, hand encircling mine, space between everything else. Just like the wedding cake toppers. Plastic. Perfect. Placated.
“But you’re going to Oberlin, and I’m—”
“Not,” I finish for him. “Right, I know. I wasn’t proposing to you, just be to clear.”
“I know that,” he says quickly, and I think I might detect the slightest trace of relief in his voice. “But . . . what if you did get pregnant?”
I don’t remind him that I’m on the pill, a dubious gift given to me a few years ago after a horrific ovarian cyst incident. The prescription came along with an awkward conversation with Mom about how this was a medical necessity and I shouldn’t regard it as permission.
“What if I didn’t?” I say, hand tightening on his.
“Sasha, I just . . .” He swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I can’t.”
I pointedly look at his crotch, where it’s very obvious that he can. That gets a smile, the even whites that his orthodontist worked so hard for making an appearance.
“I can,” he elaborates, bumping my knee with his. “I just don’t know if we should.”
“Right,” I say, eyes wandering to the fan above my bed.
“We’ve got a good thing going,” he says. “I don’t want to look back at my first girlfriend and think about fights and a broken heart or things we’ll both regret.”
It’s the nice thing to say, a way to turn me down that’s still slightly romantic and kind of sweet. But underneath that is the boy I actually know, and his pie chart has always been a solid color labeled “success.” There’s not even a sliver of something offbeat in it that could be dug up in his future political career, like a high school girlfriend who had a quiet abortion, or the same girl sharing the tale of losing her virginity to him while her trusting, working-class parents were making dinner downstairs.
No, Heath plays it safe, all the way. And I can’t really blame him, because I used to be the same, until I smelled cigarette smoke on my pillow and was intrigued instead of disgusted. And to be honest, Heath has always been the same thing to me: reassurance, a boy holding a safety net that I can fall into if the wire I walk trembles, even a little. I never considered falling, because I didn’t know it could be fun.
I slip my hand from his, letting go of a lot more than just him.
“Let’s have dinner,” I say, and we go downstairs to spaghetti night and routine, our behavior exactly what is to be expected.
As if there isn’t a door to my bedroom at all.
seven
I must have scared Heath off last week. He hasn’t come over since he bolted at the sight of my bra, but I’m happier with Vivaldi’s company anyway, perfecting his idea of what spring would sound like. I’m considering moving on into summer when my phone goes off. I stop midmeasure, too aware that the impenetrable mantle I usually shroud myself in during practice time seems to be awfully wispy these days. I glance at the screen and know that I’m looking at Isaac’s number, even if I didn’t program it into my phone. My hands are stopped in place, stuck on an endless F sharp that my lungs refuse to give life to because I’ve been holding my breath to see if he leaves a message.
Disgusted, I pop the clarinet from my mouth and try to wipe away the orange-tinged ring on the reed, a diluted mixture of mom’s spaghetti and my spit. It’s chipped anyway, the ragged end like a fingernail that hasn’t been buffed. I’ll probably find bits of reed in my gums again tomorrow, ground deeply in by hours of practice and then emerging toward the light for me to pluck out. I loosen the ligature and pop the reed free, hands going through the motions blind, because my eyes are on the phone.
“You’re an idiot,” I say to myself.
He doesn’t leave a voice mail, but seconds later a text comes in, the vibration of the phone matching the one in my chest.