Chapter Text
The first time, she’s fifteen.
She is cutoff shorts and wiry legs, denim jackets and men’s band t-shirts that fill out in intriguing new ways as her body rapidly changes shape. She’s school uniform and rosary beads, turned-down pages and mixtapes, smudged eyeliner and bitten-down nails. She’s quiet, a voracious reader and surprisingly athletic, an attentive listener in school and at mass and with anyone who takes the time to look her in the eyes and really talk to her. Her school teaches in English, but by the time she’s been in Rome a couple of months she’s pretty much fluent in Italian – she likes the way it surprises people, the way it smooths away any resentment older people have toward the rich American kid and replaces it with admiring smiles and fond stories and new phrases to learn. It was easy to pick up, after Spanish and French. She’s impulsive, stubborn, and fiercely in love with her friends.
Summer break is a cliff edge, filling her with a wild sense of freedom and reckless insecurity. It’s her first summer here, her first opportunity to find out if there’s anything more to her friendships than shared lunch tables and her willingness to carry the load on group projects. The house is too big when her parents are out at work, leaving her home alone with the staff, and too small when her parents are home, pushing each other’s buttons, sniping and lashing out with quiet venom that lingers on every surface and leaches into the air. After a week of it, she’s restless, claustrophobic – itching to be away from the expectations and the stiff formality of this house.
Matthew is the first to call, when he gets back from vacation with his parents. They go into town, buy milkshakes and wander around a record store together. Sometimes, they’ll go to church even when there’s no service, light candles side by side and sit in the quiet. John is there too sometimes, and on those days, they push the boundaries a little more. They pay to go to a movie, then find somewhere to hide so they can sneak into the one playing after. They share a pack of cigarettes, find Italian erotica in the library and read it side by side, their scandalised silence punctuated by poorly suppressed laughter.
John invites them to a party – some friend of his from swim team whose parents have gone away for the week and left his college-age brother in charge. Matthew declines, and Emily hedges. There’s no way her parents will let her go to a house party. “Just sneak out,” John says. “It’s not like anyone would notice.” That stings enough that she suddenly needs to know if he’s right.
The evening of the party, she sits at the kitchen table, listening to La Divina Commedia on headphones, picking at the stickers covering her Walkman and watching her parents getting ready for a state dinner. Thread by thread, she watches them replace clipped resentment with black tie attire and politicians’ smiles, until they’re arm in arm on their way to the door. They’re seconds from leaving without looking in her direction when her mother turns to her, mimes removing headphones. Emily hits pause on the tape and pulls the headphones down around her neck, raising her eyebrows expectantly.
“Don’t sit in here listening to that all night,” Elizabeth says. “It’ll rot your brain. Read something. And don’t give Rosa any trouble.”
“I’m listening to –” Emily begins, outraged, but her parents are already walking out the door “– Dante in Italian,” she finishes, a resentful mutter as she shoves the headphones back on and moves to her bedroom, dropping down on top of the covers. But she’s back up a second later, ripping the headphones off and dropping the Walkman to her bed with a frustrated growl. She goes to the window, watches her parents and their security people get into cars and disappear down the drive.
What is even the point in being the kind of girl who spends her Friday night listening to books on tape of classic literature if her mother is intent on treating her like a brainless delinquent regardless?
Just as John predicted, sneaking out is depressingly easy. She walks down the stairs, down the empty hall, into the empty kitchen and out the back door, waits until the guy in the black suit turns the other way, and runs around the side of the building. She’s in a stranger’s backyard twenty minutes later, John’s arm around her shoulder and someone passing a vodka bottle into her hand, the music so loud she can feel it in her ribs.
She takes a drink, feels her face scrunch embarrassingly in response to the bitter taste, the burning sensation in her throat and her stomach. “Is the ambassador’s daughter a vodka virgin?” an older boy’s voice teases.
“No,” she spits, meeting his eyes with determination despite her flaming hot cheeks. She quirks an eyebrow, licks her lips. “Just used to nicer vodka.”
There’s a whoop, an appreciative laugh, and she takes another drink, forcing a neutral expression as she drops the bottle from her lips, maintaining eye contact. “She’s not any kind of virgin,” somebody says, and the boy’s eyebrows raise with an interested smirk that races through her blood faster than the alcohol.
This is a recent development. Sometime in the middle of this school year, boys started to look at her differently. Like she’s pretty. Like she could be sexy. Men in suits at political fundraisers have been looking at her like this for a couple of years already, but boys her age have taken a while to catch up. It’s exciting, lighting up her body with a new kind of energy and confounding her brain with a new kind of social capital she’s still learning how to handle. Boys want to kiss her now, and she’s learning that if she doesn’t let them, there can be consequences – rejected boys can be nasty, scary even. They can make up rumours; they can push, and hurt, and take. But if she does let them, then they want more, and she goes to church every week, sits and kneels and listens to Father Gamino talking about sins of the flesh and the sacred bond of marriage, and she knows that the boys do too, because she sees them there, sitting with their families, wearing buttoned-up shirts and serious expressions. If they feel as conflicted as she does about it, they sure aren’t showing it when they’re pawing at her.
She knows there’s always a line, in every kind of social situation. A way to mirror a person’s movements, reflect their interests, to make the interaction about them so they never find out the parts of Emily that she doesn’t want to show them. This is the same, she knows – she just needs to learn how to walk this new line, how to protect this new part of herself. How to show enough interest to flatter them, without creating expectations she doesn’t want to fulfil; to keep just enough distance to keep herself solidly in the middle of the pack, invisible.
With John, she miscalculates, because she loves him, and she thinks he loves her back. She loves that he’s funny and that he thinks she is too. He asks questions like he’s interested in her answers, and he tells her she’s pretty. She loves the thrill of his arm around her, the warmth of his body against hers, the way he looks into her eyes between kisses with a goofy smile, like he’s honestly happy to be there with her. His attention sparks something new and exciting to life under her skin, and when she touches him, she loves the way his body responds. It feels powerful. It doesn’t feel like letting him take something from her; it feels like giving. It feels like they’re making each other a promise.
She hasn’t left her bedroom for longer than a couple of minutes for days, and someone is knocking on her door.
She’s in bed in daisy pyjama shorts and an oversized Pink Floyd t-shirt, flat on her back with a skinny arm draped over her eyes, breathing slowly through her nose and feeling worse than she’s ever felt in her life. She’s constantly either vomiting or feeling like she’s about to. She hasn’t been able to eat more than a handful of dry cereal and half an apple, hasn’t been able to see her friends, or even read anything – each time she tries, the words start to spin on the page and she needs to lie down.
She’s never felt anything like this before – even the time a few weeks ago when she stole a bottle of bourbon from the kitchen and drank the whole thing straight over the course of a hazy, noisy couple of hours, she woke up the next day with a headache and a dry mouth, drank her weight in water, threw it all back up immediately, then felt fine.
Nope. She swallows hard, tries to push that night out of her mind, because the memory of the bourbon at the back of her throat and the hands pushing under her clothes is doing nothing good for her stomach.
“Emily.” It’s her mother. She wants to tell her to go away, but the effort it would take to get words out of her mouth would be too much, so she just keeps breathing slowly and tries to ignore her. More knocking. “Emily, are you listening? I need you to try on your dress for the dinner tonight – Rosa can take it in for you, if you need her to, but she has errands to run this afternoon, so she needs to know now.”
There’s a leap of panic in her throat, and all at once, the nausea turns from a constant, rolling threat into something immediate and inevitable. She pushes herself up to sit, lurches off the bed with a hand clasped over her mouth and makes it about halfway to her ensuite bathroom before she’s gagging audibly. She hears the bedroom door open, hears footsteps behind her as her bare knees hit the tile of the bathroom floor, and she’s dimly aware of her mother continuing to talk as she heaves, tears rolling down her cheeks, abs aching with the effort of throwing up nothing for the fourth time today.
When she finally drops sideways, leaning her head against the wall, her mother’s heels click on the tile floor as she reaches over her to flush the toilet. “Maybe you’re not up to the dinner tonight,” she says, matter-of-fact as ever.
This strikes Emily as a radical understatement. She silently accepts the toilet paper her mother presses into her hand and wipes her nose half-heartedly without looking up.
“I’ll tell Rosa you’re staying home. Try to eat something, Em.”
Her mother leaves, and Emily pushes a slow breath out and hesitantly touches her hands to her too-firm breasts, wincing at the tenderness and acknowledging for the first time what some part of her has known for days already.
She is so, so fucked.
Her parents leave for dinner at the French embassy without her, and she calls Matthew. She’s afraid he won’t answer – she’s been refusing his calls – but he’s there just over half an hour later, sitting cross-legged opposite her on her bed. She’s curled into a ball, forehead on her knees and breathing slowly, the nausea an ever-present distraction. “I’ve really, really fucked up this time,” she whispers, voice trembling, and she feels him shift closer to hear her better. “I’m so fucking stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” Matthew says immediately. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. What did you mess up?”
This breaks her, tears spilling over and streaming down her cheeks because she has managed to make such a monumental mess of everything, and this sweet, kind boy who won’t even say the word fuck is sitting on her bed with no idea how much she’s about to disappoint him.
“Just say it,” he urges. “Whatever it is – whatever you’ve done – I can help you. We can fix it together. Nothing is this bad, Emily.”
“Wanna bet?” she mutters, then takes his advice and just says it: “I’m pregnant.”
She looks up, some broken part of her wanting his reaction, ready to absorb his disgust and horror and make it her own. But Matthew – of course – just takes her hand, takes a second to process what she said then says quietly, “Are you sure? Have you seen a doctor?”
“I can’t. I –” Her stomach rolls and she presses her knuckles to her mouth, feeling the colour drain from her face.
“Do you need me to –?” he begins, looking around the room.
She closes her eyes, shakes her head, breathes through it until it subsides. “I’m fine,” she says, opening her eyes. “I haven’t eaten anything. I can’t see a doctor because my mother can’t find out. They make these home tests now – I’ve seen them in magazines. It tests your pee, I guess, but if I walk into a drugstore and buy that then everyone will know I. . .”
“I’ll buy you one,” Matthew says immediately. “Tomorrow. Tell me where to go. And then once we know for sure, we’ll figure out what to do.”
He’s back in her bedroom at ten a.m. the next day, unpacking a pregnancy test and a pack of hard ginger candies onto her bed. “I said it was for my mom,” he says. “I told them she couldn’t buy it herself because she’s too sick, and they said the candies would help.”
“I’m sorry,” Emily says, guilt clawing up from her stomach. “You shouldn’t have to lie for me.”
“Well, you should be able to walk in there and buy it yourself, because you shouldn’t have to be ashamed or afraid,” he replies, unwrapping a candy and offering it to her. “It’s not fair.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?” she whispers, putting the candy in her mouth and picking up the pregnancy test, the instructions blurring in front of her as tears fill her eyes.
“What else would I be?” Matthew replies, and when she looks up at him he honestly looks confused. “Because you’re you. You’re my friend.”
“You’re the best friend in the world, Matthew Benton,” she says, and hands over the test. “Can you tell me what to do?”
It takes thirty minutes. She pees on the stick, then it needs to sit in each of the three little pots of reagent for 10 minutes. They wait in silence. After the final ten minutes, the stick is as blue as she knew it would be, and she stands, tips all the liquid out, gathers all the incriminating trash in the bag from the drugstore and tucks it into Matthew’s satchel. Then she drops onto the bed, drops her head against his shoulder, her entire future spinning out of control, and asks him again: “Can you tell me what to do?”
They go to church. The air is still, her panicked breaths echoing off every surface as Matthew leads her past the confessional box to a quiet little corner with a side altar, drops a couple of coins into a donation box and hands her a votive candle. She kneels, uses a taper to light the candle then places it down in the row of flickering flames, side by side with strangers’ prayers, feeling Matthew silent and warm at her side. He really goes to another place when he prays, and she takes slow, even breaths and tries to follow him there, but her eyes are continually drawn to the little statue of the Virgin Mary behind the candles, her welcoming arms and peaceful expression. “She looks so young,” she whispers.
“Bible scholars think she would’ve been between twelve and sixteen,” Matthew whispers back. “That’s when girls got engaged, back then.”
Twelve years old when an angel dropped out of the sky and told her she had to carry the most important baby in the world. Emily looks at the girl in front of her – the serenity on her face, the world already resting on her, and her arms open to gratefully take on even more.
The people in Bible stories have always felt real to her, if a little hard to imagine in concrete terms – historical figures like George Washington and Queen Victoria. But for the first time, she looks at the Virgin Mary and sees a story someone is telling her. A story for children about the kind of mother they should wish for; a story for girls about the kind of woman they should be. All at once, with a ferocity that knocks something inside her off balance, she’s sure the story is a lie.
“I can’t be a mom yet.” She drops back on her heels, the reality of what she needs to do crystallising as she says it. She clasps her hands and squeezes her eyes shut, terrified she’ll open them to find Matthew gone, because she’s heard enough whispers to know that what she’s thinking about is not a thing you talk about while kneeling in a church with the most religious person you know. “I can’t do it,” she whispers. “I need to finish school, and go away to college, and get a job and a home and make my own life away from my parents. And my mother would –” She shakes her head, cutting herself off, because her mother finding out is genuinely unthinkable. She can’t even entertain the thought if she wants to be able to walk out of here still conscious. “I can’t have a baby right now. She can’t ever know about this.”
She opens her eyes, and he’s still there. He takes her hand. “It’s gonna be okay.”
He leads her to Father Gamino’s study and knocks on the door like he comes here all the time. They leave ten minutes later, Emily burning with shame and Matthew with anger. They walk aimlessly through the city while she spirals and he seethes; he buys her a soda then holds her hair back in a rough ponytail as she throws it up into the river, and as he’s walking her back to her house, he says, “He’s wrong.”
“Who is?”
“Father Gamino.”
She stops in her tracks, turning to stare at him. “Matthew. . .”
“He is,” he says fiercely. “He said your –” He falters.
“My baby,” she says bleakly. The words don’t feel real, but it feels important to say them – to acknowledge everything Father Gamino told her about life and souls and sin.
“– he said it’s a person, and if you did what you’re thinking about doing, you’d be taking a human life.” She tears up again, chews the corner of her trembling lip, and he goes on, “But I’m a person too, and if I needed a blood transfusion, nobody could make you give me your blood. If I needed a – a liver, or something, even if you were the only match, you’d still get to decide whether to give it to me. And if I died because you decided not to, you wouldn’t be taking my life.”
“I’d give it to you.” She’d rip her whole liver out and hand it to him right here on the street, if he needed her to.
“My point is that you’re a person,” he says. “You’re not just – a tool to keep someone else alive. You don’t owe your body to anyone else. Me or this baby or anyone. It’s yours first, for you to live your life in. It has to be.”
“I think you’re right,” she says, barely above a whisper. “I know it’s my fault –”
“Not just your fault.”
“– and I know it’s a life. But I can’t give up everything for this. And if it is a person –” She stops abruptly, her head spinning, feeling miles out of her depth.
“Go on. It’s okay.”
“I think. . . a person should be wanted,” she says. “Loved, and. . .” She closes her eyes, wraps her arms around her waist and looks away, looking for the words. “Not – a consequence, you know? A punishment for making a bad choice. A person should mean more than that to their mom.” Her voice cracks on the last word, and without any warning, there are tears rolling down her cheeks, dripping onto her folded arms as she drops her chin to her chest. “I don’t want a baby,” she whispers.
“We’ll figure out a way,” Matthew says, resolute.
“He said I can’t come back to church.”
“Fuck him, Emily. He’s wrong.”
She tells John, and he doesn’t want to know – literally tries not to hear what she’s saying, gets up and walks away, leaving her sitting alone and queasy and unkempt outside the public library. She thinks she should feel something – surprised, maybe, or disappointed, or heartbroken – but honestly, John is the least of her problems right now. She feels decades older than him suddenly, and incredibly stupid for getting herself in this situation with a boy who can’t even listen to the entirety of the phrase ‘I’m pregnant’ before getting on his bike and cycling for the horizon. She spends so much time flat on her back in her bedroom that she starts to get lightheaded every time she stands. Her mother tries ignoring her, yelling at her, sending her father to yell at her, and sending Rosa to coax her out with the promise of a movie and a milkshake, and she ignores them all, staring blankly ahead until they go away and leave her alone again with the consequences of her own stupidity. She strips her clothes off and stands in front of the mirror, wondering if she’s imagining the new firmness between her hipbones, knowing she isn’t imagining the new prominence of her ribs. She can’t imagine ever eating again, when she feels sick so constantly.
Matthew finds a doctor who’s willing do the procedure without her parents’ consent, finds a bus to get them there, and holds her hand in the waiting room. She’s sucking on a ginger candy and shaking from head to toe, her entire body vibrating as if she’s been out in the snow all day, although it’s blazing hot and she’s wearing her biggest sweater. “We could get in trouble,” she says. “This is illegal.”
“We have diplomatic immunity.”
“But we don’t want to use it.”
He just squeezes her hand.
“Aren’t you worried people will think you’re the father?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t care what people think.”
She wishes she could say the same. She’s fidgeting with her sleeve, tearing at the skin around her nails with her teeth and staring down at the waiting room floor, and each time someone walks by the window, she imagines it’s her mother. When the doctor calls her into the room, she takes Matthew with her, and answers a series of deeply embarrassing questions while he sits silently by the bed and pretends not to listen. The doctor explains the procedure, shows her the equipment and explains how it works, and there’s a moment when Emily is sure she’s about to pass out – the room turns black, there’s a metallic taste in her mouth, and everything tips sideways. The doctor lowers her onto the examination bed, raises her feet above her head, and waits until the moment has passed before continuing her explanation as if nothing happened.
She asks again if Emily is sure, reminds her of the law, and the risks, then leaves the room to prepare the anaesthetic.
“What if this is my last chance?” Emily says, the risks of the procedure spinning in her mind. “What if after I do this, I can never be a mom?”
Matthew thinks about it for a second. “Well, does that change your mind?”
She shakes her head. No matter what, she cannot have a baby right now. She’s never been more certain of anything in her life. She can live with whatever happens next.
“You’ll be a mom,” Matthew says. “You can be anything you want to be. And you’ll be ready next time, I promise.”
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “It’ll be alright.”
“Hold my hand?”
“Always.”
She wakes groggy and sore, hollow and relieved. When she gets home, she gets back into bed, exhausted, cramping, and pretends to be asleep. Eventually, she falls asleep for real, and for the first time in weeks, she has no nightmares.
The next morning, her mother comes into her bedroom, throws her curtains open, pulls a dress from the closet and drops it onto the bed. “I have given you a lot of freedom these past few weeks,” she says with no preamble, pulling the covers back from Emily’s face, “but attending mass is not optional. Get up, get dressed, and get in the car. You have twenty minutes.”
Emily’s standing up and putting on the dress before it occurs to her that she could’ve refused. It’s not like her mother can pick her up and bundle her into the car anymore. But she allows herself to be swept along in autopilot until they get out of the car outside the church, and then all at once, her legs stop working. She stands, rigid and frozen, looking up at the church as her parents walk toward the steps, until her mother turns and catches her standing there. “Emily,” she says, her smile frozen. “Come on, now.”
“I’m just –” Emily begins, then her lungs feel too full, overinflated like they could burst any second. “I’m – I need –” She forces her darting eyes to meet her mother’s steady gaze, and something in her expression kicks Emily’s brain into line. She clenches her jaw shut as her mother takes a couple of steps closer, forces herself to push a breath out and pull in another. “I haven’t said confession yet,” she says. “Matthew and I missed Father Gamino yesterday. I’m going to try and catch him before mass.”
Her mother’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. “You are making a scene. This isn’t about confession.”
There’s a sharp stab of pain low in her belly; tears spring to her eyes. “I’m sorry for not being fucking invisible for two minutes,” she says, too loudly.
“Keep your voice down and watch your language,” Elizabeth hisses.
She wants to scream. Instead, she lowers her voice, glances pointedly around. “You’d better get inside before I embarrass you any more.”
There are people streaming by on either side. Emily maintains stony, determined eye contact until her mother turns away; the second the eye contact breaks, she’s crying, running to the side of the church and dropping down onto the ground, her arms folded around her stomach. She’s still sitting there, taking trembling, gasping breaths, when Matthew sits down beside her.
“I looked for you,” he says. “And I saw your parents sitting without you, and your mother looked. . .”
“Furious,” Emily says, pulling the hem of her dress up to wipe tears from her cheeks.
“I was going to say tense,” he says. “How are you feeling? Does it hurt?”
“A bit,” she says. “But it’s not that. I can’t go in there.”
“Yes you can,” he says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “I’m right here with you.”
He takes her hand, pulls her to her feet, and they walk inside together. Father Gamino, mid-sermon, stops talking and stares at them as they walk down the centre aisle, and there’s shuffling interest on either side as people turn to look at what’s causing the hold-up. Emily’s cheeks burn as she thinks about her mother sitting somewhere in the rows, and she looks down at her feet, tries a few times to pull him into a pew, but Matthew keeps walking, right to his usual space at the front. When Emily looks up, they’re staring at each other, Matthew and the priest, and even then, without knowing what’s starting, she finds it unnerving.
Months later, when Matthew is smoking a blunt under a tree on the campus of their private Catholic school, ranting about how the institution of the church is a scam while their wide-eyed friends exchange worried glances, there’s no doubt in her mind that something in him is broken irreparably, and she’s the one who broke it. Biting her ragged thumbnail, she looks up, catches John’s eye, and for the first time since she told him she was pregnant, he doesn’t look away. They stare at each other, two pairs of dark eyes reflecting the same guilt and dread and too-big responsibility.