How to Love

thankfully, wasn’t about me. “I’m thinking now is probably an awesome time to tell her that I’m gay.”

I grinned. “Lydia wouldn’t care that you’re gay,” I told her as I flipped through the glossy tabloid. The TV jabbered cheerfully in the background. “You could tell my parents if you wanted, though. Maybe take some of the heat off yours truly.”

Shelby didn’t smile. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said suddenly. She was painting her toenails dark blue, window opened to the sticky heat outside because the fumes made me sick to my stomach. Her ripped-up jeans were rolled halfway up her calves. “Reena.”

I sighed a bit, rolling over on the bed so I was staring up at the ceiling. There were faint tape marks up there, left over from a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge Allie had helped me hang when we were in middle school. I’d pulled it down along with all the rest. “Yeah, I do.”

“No, I mean. Not to like, hit you over the head with a Planned Parenthood brochure or anything, but”— Shelby looked at me pointedly—“you really don’t.”

I laughed in spite of myself, a dark, hollow sound. “You think I haven’t thought about that?” I asked her, propping myself up on one elbow. “You think it just, like, hasn’t occurred to me? Of course I’ve thought about it, Shelby.”

Shelby put the cap back on the nail polish, feet resting on the windowsill. “So?” she asked.

“So, nothing.” I shrugged into the pillows, resigned. “My father would hate me, for starters.”

“I hear that,” Shelby said slowly, “but not wanting your dad to be mad at you is not a good enough reason to have a baby when you’re sixteen.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” I made a face. “I didn’t say he’d be mad at me. I said he’d hate me. I mean, he already hates me, but it’s the kind of hate I can maybe see mellowing out after a while. If I had an abortion, I might as well just pack my bags and forget I ever had a family.” I picked at a loose thread on the quilt, watching it unravel. “Anyway, that’s not even really it.”

“Okay,” Shelby told me. She pressed a thumb against her big toe to make sure the polish was dry, then came over and flopped belly-down onto the bed beside me. Her hazel eyes were sharp and curious. “Then what is it really?”

I shrugged a little, trying to think how to explain it—how to tell her that in some weird way I’d already made a break between my old life and my new one. How to tell her that I just sort of felt it in my bones. In spite of myself I’d already started thinking of the person growing inside me as a person, a half- formed heart beating steady underneath my own. Late one night I’d found a chart on Google that talked about the size of the baby in relationship to different kinds of fruit: Your baby is a grape, your baby is a mango. It was me and this mango-size baby now, is what it felt like. We were all that we had in the world.

“I don’t know,” I said finally, turning to face her. I curled my knees up alongside my chest. “I get that this is going to change my entire life, Shelby. It’s just, like …” I trailed off and shrugged again, determined and afraid. “My life is already changed.”

Shelby looked at me like only a real friend can, like what I’d said made one sliver of sense. Then she sighed. “Well, all right then, baby,” she said softly. “Let’s rock and roll.”

53

After

Shelby brings over a bottle of wine and a pint of ice cream on Friday, clomps up the stairs like a Clydesdale to help me pack. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” she asks again, refolding a pair of jeans and tucking them into the duffel bag on my bed. I am packing light. Hannah sits nearby, playing with her lamb and duck. “We’ll be like Thelma and Louise, only without the murder and fiery death.”

I laugh. “I would love for you to come with me,” I tell her, “but I need you to go back to school so you can make lots of money and support me in my decrepit old age.”

“And keep you in the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I have my orders, then.” She sighs. “How I’m going to survive the rest of the summer without you, however, remains to be seen.”

“Oh, stop,” I say. “We’ll be meeting up in Boston before you know it. And until then you’ll be busy with Cara the hipster poli-comm major.”

Shelby makes a face like, Fair enough. “True,” she admits, smiling a secret sort of smile. “I do intend to be busy.”

I’m missing Shelby’s girlfriend’s visit by two days: We’re leaving tomorrow, Hannah and I, on a jaunt across the country in my crappy old car. It feels like pretend, but I’m dead serious this time: After all, you can’t be a travel writer if you’ve never been anywhere, and I’m done sitting here waiting for my real life to find me. I have a giant atlas, a dozen blank notebooks, and no real plan except to take my girl and go. I am terrified and thrilled.

Shelby flops onto the bed, lifting Hannah onto her chest and grinning. “Hey, girlie,” she says. She turns to me. “So everything is okay now? With your dad and Sol?”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.” I dig a couple of tank tops out of my dresser, toss them on the bed. “But better. I feel better about it. Good enough to go.”

“Well, thank God for that.” She makes a face. “About time. That’s what makes me crazy about you Catholics. You torture each other over stuff that was finished and done with during the Holy Roman Empire. Force everybody to repent and repent and repent, world without end, amen. Makes me nuts.”

I blink at her. “What did you just say?”

“I said it makes me nuts.”

I just stand there for a minute.

What have I been doing, if not exactly that?

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. That’s Peter. Peter, I always liked.

“Hey!” Shelby squints. “What?”

“Nothing.” I jump on the bed with my two best girls and give them both a good long snuggle. “Nothing at all.”

* * *

It’s just first light when I reach Sawyer’s house, dawn coming up gray and dripping behind me. I stopped at the gas station to fuel up and grab last-minute provisions; Hannah’s asleep in the car seat, put out by the early hour. The radio bumbles, a low, soothing sound.

I dig a couple of pebbles out of the planters in the LeGrandes’ front yard, then cut across the cluster of coconut palms on the lawn and toss them, one by one, at his window. Barely seven A.M. but it’s already humid, the slick of damp Florida air across my skin.

Nothing happens. I hold my breath: This is a stupid gesture, way lamer than it is poetic, but it made a weird kind of sense on the way over here. I’m just about to give up when Sawyer raises the screen and looks. “That for me?” he asks. Even from a full flight down, he’s got a hell of a smile.

I smile back, big and reflexive, and heft the enormous Slurpee in my free hand in a ninety-nine-cent salute. “Looks that way.”

Sawyer nods a little, sleepy and impressed. “It’s early,” is all he says.

“I know. I didn’t want to waste any time.” I hesitate, and then I say it: “I just stopped by to find out if you felt like taking a trip.”

Even from all the way down here I can see his dark eyebrows arc. “Where you going?” he asks, leaning a little further out the window, like he’s trying to get a good look at my face.

I shrug, raise my hands a little helplessly. “Not sure,” I admit, still grinning. It feels hugely powerful to say. “But I brought a lot of notebooks.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asks, faux-casual. “Gonna do some writing?”

“Thinking about it,” I tell him, equally glib. It feels like we’re circling something here, like maybe we both