Annabelle
You force yourself to get dressed in the morning.
To wait for the bus at the end of the driveway, your breath rising in a hot cloud in front of you.
You experiment by holding it as long as you can.
Convince yourself you can just disappear.
That would solve everything, wouldn’t it?
The problem of your body, of its horrible mutiny.
You had thought that the long holiday break might give the kids at school a chance to forget. To drop their torments about Sabrina, their interests reset with the new year. But the girls on the bus rally for a few chants when you board, ask in mock-innocence where in the world Sabrina has gone.
Has she moved in with her creepy old boyfriend?
Which one?
They’re playing house, how cute.
Maybe she’s pregnant! one of them shrieks.
Oh my god, the others say. Annabelle, is she going to have a baby? Is that why she can’t come to school anymore? Annabelle, tell us the truth! You can tell us.
God Annabelle, you’re the smart one! Didn’t you tell her she’s gotta make those guys bag it up!
Your face burns and your ears ring, which they take as confirmation.
Oh my god, look at her! You guys, look!
You turn toward the window, your face as close to the cold glass as you dare, and study the trees as they blur past you, your breath a shallow pant. Now you know how people would treat you if they knew. Like a joke. Like a fool. Like a disease they might catch.
At the end of the day, after suffering the endless whispers and taunts about Sabrina and her supposed baby, you relish the chance to go to the yearbook meeting where you can hide your face behind the camera.
You photograph the boys’ basketball team practice but you are distracted, clicking the shutter without pausing to frame your shots or make sure you are getting the best angle.
Between drills you see Henry Hicks tap Victor Donohue on the arm and nod in your direction.
You can’t make out what he says but you don’t have to hear.
A new feeling wells up in you. Rage. You are so angry that this is happening to you, angry about the women you met with who stole from you, angry about the ways people whisper, angry at Miss Hamilton for not being able to see.
The anger crests like a wave, huge and total and so much bigger than you.
You don’t know what you are doing until you’ve already done it. Heaved the camera up above your head and bashed it down on the floor.
John Hall had been in the middle of a drive toward the net but stops, holds the ball in his hands.
Coach Wentz bleats his whistle. It stretches on and on.
It is the perfect sound. High and clear, outraged.
It rings in your ears for a moment and you try to hold it in you.
You think if you could just find the words for that sound you would be able to tell everyone exactly what you need to say.
“I don’t know what you think you’re up to young lady, but it is unacceptable. Men, back to your drills.”
The basketball thumps across the floor, a steady beat like a heart pounding.
Henry Turnbull kicks the camera’s lens toward you.
There’s a crack through the glass. When you press the shutter it makes an ugly grinding sound.
You hear one of the boys muttering to another.
She’s acting crazy because of her sister. Did you hear? Sabrina is knocked up.
In the hallway outside the gym everything seems to tilt.
You are cold from the burst of sweat already cooling to a chill on your back.
How can you face everyone with the broken camera?
Even if it can be fixed it will probably need to be sent away for repairs.
They will probably cost a lot of money, money the committee doesn’t have.
You can’t walk back into that room. You imagine the way they will all look at you.
It will be clear that you’ve ruined this one special thing with which you were trusted.
You hang the camera by the strap on the door of Miss Hamilton’s classroom and creep away.
It’s still a half hour before the late buses will take kids home from sports practices and after-school meetings but you can’t bear the thought of waiting around to be caught.
It is seven miles from school to your house.
It’s cold and there’s a thick layer of slush on the ground from the last snowfall, but you decide to walk anyway.
Your coat is in the classroom, your bookbag, anything you might need, but you cannot make yourself go back inside and answer for what you’ve done.
The first mile isn’t so bad. Your body still holds some of the heat from being inside.
But by the second your toes feel frozen in your shoes and the wind knives through your sweater, the only one that is big enough to cover you anymore.
A few cars slow but you keep your arms crossed and do not turn to them.
A man yells something from a passing truck but you can’t make it out.
For the most part, there is silence, just the sounds of the woods.
Fallen branches breaking under tiptoeing deer.
The flutter of birds squabbling over the last of the berries in the trees.
By the third mile your feet feel like hooves.
You can’t wiggle your toes in your sneakers.
Darkness seeps into the spaces between the trees and the cars are few and far between, but when they come their headlights bore into you, the harsh white light making you see spots. Snowmelt soaks your sweatpants.
Finally the house comes into view, the roofline over the tops of the trees.
You would run down the driveway if you thought you could get your body to cooperate.
If you could make your limbs move any faster, if your now-numb feet could be trusted to carry you any quicker.
The first few times you try the knob it slips in your frozen fingers.
You grip your right hand in your left to warm it up and only then can you make the right shape, your fingers formed into a raw, red claw.
You run the water in the kitchen as hot as it will go, stick your hands under, scream and pull them back. Sabrina enters the room, reaches past you, turns the water off.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I walked.”
“From school? Annabelle, for someone who is so smart, you can be so stupid sometimes. Come on.”
She pulls you up the stairs and runs the bath.
You take your sweatshirt off, revealing your stomach, hard and taut, still not as round as the women you’ve seen around town, running their hands over the dome of their bellies, smiling, accepting well-wishes from strangers.
But undeniably changed. Even you will admit that now.
You are too tired to hide anymore. You hear Sabrina take a breath, sharp, as though she’s been punched.
“Jesus Christ,” Sabrina says. “Annabelle.”
It feels good, to bare your body to her in the way you did as girls, when everything about the two of you was still the same.
No scars, no difference in your shapes, no self-consciousness about being naked together.
When you thought you were interchangeable and that felt like reassurance.
If one of you ceased to exist, there was another one of you ready to take her place.