Chapter One
 

Whitney was pregnant, which meant Whitney was dead.

She stared at the test in the locked women’s restroom at Wendy’s, a single room with one toilet. Her best friend, Stacey, had covered the seat with toilet paper and sat with her jeans still on. Stacey watched as her friend held the test in one hand and worried her forehead with the other.

“I take it you won’t be joining me at prom?” Stacey said. Whitney, or some force that seemed to live outside of her conscious mind, shook her head “no” as her friend brushed the toilet paper off the seat and into the commode with her foot. 

“This place is rancid,” her friend said, the swirling water swallowing up her offering. 

“Prom is for people whose mothers haven’t murdered them. How am I going to tell her?” Marge’s face wall-papered Whitney’s mind. Whitney had always been the “good” one. Well, at least the easy one. Garrett—her brother—was the “walking demon” as that one woman at the Piggly Wiggly had not so quietly whispered under her breath. Whitney couldn’t even hate her for it. It was a guilty thought that so often sprang from Whitney’s own gut, she was afraid it would tear through her stomach.

“Whit?” Whitney looked up, and instead of Stacey’s face, she was met with her Police t-shirt, a pensive Sting searching Whitney’s soul.

“This is warped,” Stacey said. Whitney looked down at the plastic wand in her hand, the two lines sealing her fate.

What isn’t anymore? Whitney thought.

“Come on! I gotta piss.” The bang on the door sent the pregnancy test sailing to the dirty floor. Whitney picked it up and shoved it into her backpack and watched as Stacey grabbed her bag. She remembered how they had celebrated their finds freshman year at St. Andrew’s two years ago. They had stood in line at the church a full hour together, waiting for the clothing closet to open its doors. And when it did, they went head-to-head with tired looking mothers and overworked women combing the bins for appropriate work wear. It was Stacey who had found them: two Jansports crammed underneath a mound of ugly women’s sweaters. It was a miracle. And it also made Whitney cry that night knowing she was always forced to be grateful for the things other people didn’t even want.

“Come on!” came the voice on the other side of the door. Whitney was loath to see the face that accompanied it.

“Uck, grody. I should have known you two sewer rats were the ones taking up space.” Whitney stood in the moment where her eyes were still on the tiles. She exhaled a long breath only to have to inhale again and look Denise McGovern in the eyes.

“All yours,” Whitney said. Denise was everything. She walked on a cloud the other students at Central High School were unable to see, hovering overhead and dictating the rules of the school. She was only a year older than them, but Whitney had the feeling even the teachers were scared of her.

“How’s that boyfriend of yours, Nit Whit? I hear you two are on the skids again?” Whitney steadied her eyes at Denise as much as she wanted to run to the parking lot and vomit. But she couldn’t let a girl like that win. She looked like Julie from Valley Girl or at least that was the rumor in the halls. Whitney had never seen the movie and neither had Stacey who begged her to sneak in when it came out three years ago, but the idea felt almost worse than not having enough money to go see it in the first place.

“We’re perfectly fine. And how’s that nose job of yours coming along? I see the swelling hasn’t gone down yet.” She could nearly feel Stacey’s eyes bulging into her back. She’d never dared say two words to Denise before. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones. 

“Geez, Nit Whit, what’s your damage?” Denise shouldered her way past them into the bathroom, and the girls watched as the door was slammed in their faces.

“I don’t think you’re growing a baby,” Stacey said in her ear. “I think you’re growing some balls.” Whitney gave her a tiny smile.

“I’m just tired . . .” Whitney trailed off. She wasn’t sure of what exactly but hoped the “everything” was implicit. They walked out into the dining room, the soles of their sneakers fighting the stickiness of the floor. She felt like everyone was staring at her. Maybe they knew about the test in her bag. Maybe they didn’t. It never felt like anyone needed an excuse to gawk at her. They just did.

Whitney was small. She had been premature, the miracle baby that came when all the other babies her mother ever tried to have kept dying. Marge Marksmen didn’t have her daughter until she was thirty-four—an age where “you know better about life,” Whitney’s mother would say, her face a secret staring out one of their grimy windows. Whitney didn’t look like her mother. She looked like her father, Lenny, the man in photos that had long left their places on the wall. She remembered him in black and white now, not drawn to scale it seemed, because he loomed like an oak over everything he stood next to in those pictures. The car, the azalea bushes, Marge herself. Whitney remembered how warm and large his hand would feel on the top of her head. 

“He was a terrible vacuum salesman,” Marge would say as if somehow his height and work ethic were connected. “Remember when we had that pile of them near the fireplace for eight weeks straight?” Whitney did, but for a six-year-old, an absurdity like that was a windfall. She had used her small body to race them around and pretend she was an ambulance there to save the day. 

“Where did he go? Heaven?” Whitney had asked the next year after he died, coming to the startling realization that the man in the photos didn’t live in their house anymore and would never be coming back.

“Oh, no need to worry about something like that,” Marge had said, her own worry eating a line between her eyebrows. But Whitney did worry. And eventually became very good at it.

“She’s going to kill me.” It was an absent thought floating above their heads, but Whitney pulled it down as she pushed open the glass door to the parking lot.

“Large wouldn’t dare. Large knows how these things work. At least she’s not like my dad, Mister ‘You Better Not Kiss or You’ll Get AIDS.’” Whitney looked at her friend, trying not to smile at the irony of Dan the Lady’s Man warning his daughter to stay away from boys. 

Stacey was kind of nuts, and sometimes that was a weird blessing. She was just as poor as Whitney but always managed to look like the star of a Pert commercial. Whitney had wondered what people thought about the two of them until the second week of freshman year she got to find out. A rumor had gotten started that they were lesbians. Stacey just laughed it off like Stacey did a lot of things. “Just another consequence of being alive in a world full of apes,” she had said. But something about the whole thing grew slowly, painfully inside Whitney like a tumor. It was why she practically screamed “yes” when Jamal had asked her out.

“Large might know, but Large is still going to kill me.” As they walked away from Wendy’s down the sidewalk toward the “neighborhood” where they lived, Whitney felt like a traitor calling Marge “Large.” It was Stacey’s thing, a way for her friend to unwind all the worry that knotted ceaselessly inside Whitney's gut. But Stacey didn’t understand what it was like raising two kids at fifty with no husband, one of those kids labeled “retarded” by the state, and another one now pregnant—the knowledge of that blissfully unknowable to Marge for the time being.

Whitney didn’t either for that matter.

On the way to Sunset Village, they walked down South Height Road, and Whitney lost herself in the trees. She loved them, how they shot straight from the ground up into the air. They weren’t aware of what was going on below them and didn’t seem to care. They weren’t privy to people’s problems and had no intention of finding out. 

They just were.

“Earth to Space Cadet.” Stacey’s fanning hand brought Whitney back to reality. “You going in?” Whitney looked up and realized they were at Jamal’s house, the last house until the street gave birth to a string of mobile homes on both sides, one of which her mother and brother were tucked inside.

“No.” She couldn’t tell him yet. For some reason, she knew she had to tell Marge first. It felt the very direction of her life was dependent on one captain, and Whitney very well knew she wasn’t it.

They hit Stacey’s home, a brown and cream rectangular box with a front porch. They used to sit and color on that porch. They smoked their first cigarette on that porch when Marge was sleeping, and Stacey’s dad was still out prowling like a tomcat. There was a whole history here Whitney never appreciated, and it felt like she was being shoved away from it, toward a very steep cliff.

“It’s gonna be okay. I know you know that but refuse to believe it. But you’re loved, Whit. Even if she does kill you, you know she’ll throw you an awesome funeral.” Whitney snorted and laughed, but then all her anxiety began to stream down her face.

“It’s okay,” Stacey whispered into Whitney’s hair, blonde and crunchy like cotton candy soaked in hairspray. Whitney nodded at nothing as she released herself from Stacey’s arms—that sullied blip of what the kids at school thought of them still on her mind—and watched her friend trudge her way to an empty home.

She walked a few more steps to her own and looked up at the grayish box before her—no porch, no shutters—and she let this last moment of the “before” soak her to the bone.