down the chamber of the stairwell. Di sighed. “We might as well go, Lester,” she said, clapping her hands soundlessly together.
According to the book Jude had given her, the fetus at eighteen weeks was the size of a bell pepper. Eliza couldn’t decide if that was incredibly big or incredibly small. She was still nowhere near certain she had made the right decision, but it was too late now, and that, at least, was some kind of relief. Too late. Oh, well. No turning back. The fetus, whom she’d named Annabel Lee, had fingerprints, eyelids, and nipples.
Eliza’s own nipples had gone tender with goose bumps, expanded and purpled; her breasts, scrawled with blue veins, were full. She had been fairly certain, before getting pregnant, that they had reached their full dimensions—she had not set her hopes above an A cup—and this sort of monstrous growth was not the final spurt of puberty. She wished she had someone to show them to. Wives had husbands to marvel with. Other women had boyfriends or doctors or sisters. Teddy had handled them in the dark, more timidly than the other boys, but just as vacantly. No one had studied them, like a painting or a car or a song. They were hers alone.
Night after night she’d climbed into the narrow bed across from Shelby Divine, listening to Shelby’s peaceful snores in the dark, more awake than she’d ever been on any drug, her body riveted with her secret. And morning after morning she’d woken up sicker than she’d been with any hangover, so sick she’d felt she was full of a poison. She threw up only once. Mostly her sickness just simmered inside her, suffocating her from the inside out.
Thankfully, the nausea had subsided, and in its place, just as persistent, were Johnny and Jude, bringing her prenatal vitamins, bringing her an IT’S OK NOT TO DRINK button from a Pyramid show, calling her on the hall phone to remind her to eat breakfast (“Neither of them’s your boyfriend?” asked Shelby), waiting for her at Penn Station on Friday afternoon to fight over carrying her backpack, bearing Yoo-hoos and bags of sugared peanuts they’d bought from the street vendor outside. Throughout the week she craved those peanuts, the sweet, salty beginning of the weekend, Jude and Johnny standing at the end of the corridor like two dopey grooms.
On the following Friday afternoon, Johnny surprised Eliza by meeting her at the train station in Jersey instead of picking her up in New York. He wanted to hang out, he said, just the two of them; he wanted to see the town where she went to school, and she was so pleased to see him that she didn’t object to being away from the city for a few more hours. They walked from the train station to the movie theater, down the sidewalk lined with patches of gray ice, and saw Friday the 13th Part VII, sharing a bag of Twizzlers. When they emerged from the theater, it was dark outside. Two guys skating down the middle of the street cut over to the curb when they saw Johnny, calling, “Mr. Clean!” Turned out they’d met in the city, at a show at the Ritz. They talked for a few minutes, comparing tattoos, while Eliza watched the traffic pass by. One of them wanted DRUG FREE across his knuckles. Or maybe STR8 EDGE? Johnny told him to stop by.
“Must be nice,” Eliza said after they’d ordered at the Italian restaurant next door, “to be known by everyone.”
Anyone who needed a tattoo, or a double tape deck, or space to practice, went to Johnny. He would have made a fine drug dealer. Last fall he had organized a benefit show in Tompkins Square Park, with eleven bands and food donated by the Krishna temple. And last weekend, some band from California he’d met through the mail—the mail—had crashed at his apartment, four guys and another four roadies. Eliza had knocked on the door early the next morning to find them sprawled out over every surface, tangled in and out of blankets, in boxers of every imaginable pattern and color. She had never felt so full of desire and so undesirable, pregnant in a gray Harvard T-shirt big enough to be a dress, standing before ten half-naked boys.
“I might as well have been invisible to those guys out there,” she said. “Do I really look pregnant?”
Johnny unwrapped his silverware and pressed his paper napkin neatly to his