Me, Him, Them, and It by Caela Carter

Author:Caela Carter [Carter, Caela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Published: 2013-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

My mother decides to take me shopping.

After puking my brains and the baby’s brains into the toilet in the early morning, I am lying in bed, cursing my baby for the words in Lizzie’s e-mail when I hear Aunt Linda and Nora wake up my cousins in the room next door. I listen to showers running and eggs being cooked and the girls backtalking Nora and climbing all over Aunt Linda like a jungle gym. The garage door opens and two cars slide out. Does Nora want to keep me from ever meeting my cousins while I live in the room next door?

I stare at the bed above me, watching as the characters in my life chase each other through my brain—bean-baby sits there like a flesh-colored blob, Lizzie bursts it out my ear as her screaming face appears then fades back into bean-baby, then Todd picks up bean-baby and throws it like a football until he fades out and Nora appears, just her lipsticked mouth moving as she repeats Rule 8 over and over, then bean-baby sprouts from the paper again, taking center stage, then my parents stand there, neither of them looking at the blob or moving to touch it. Then there it is, all alone again, completely unaware of the hell of a life it’s about to be born into when Lizzie’s e-mail starts running in its eyes and the entire routine starts over again. I can’t do this.

I’m still lying there watching the horror movie playing on my eyelids when there’s a soft tap on the door. I roll onto my side to feign sleeping. She opens the door, and I tell myself that I want to hear her just turn around and leave me alone with the purple unicorns, but I know that I’m really pretending to sleep because I think it might make her come over and say that she’ll miss me or that I can come home if I want to or that Nora and her rules are ridiculous or something, anything real. She sits on the bed and puts her hand in my hair and I feel my breath catch.

“You have two beds in here,” she says. The breath rushes out of me like fire. But I don’t move.

“I thought we’d go shopping today, Evelyn. You’re going to need some winter clothes and some clothes for when you start … getting bigger. This evening you have an appointment with your new doctor. But in the meantime I thought we’d go to Michigan Avenue and shop like we are real Chicagoans. It’ll be fun. Get dressed.”

And she leaves. She said the whole thing like it’s some great mother/daughter/bean-baby adventure but she doesn’t give me a choice.

I want to tell her that at four thousand dollars a pop, Aunt Linda and Nora should be able to pay for my clothes. I want to tell her no way am I going out with her if she’s stiff Lawyer Mom. I want to tell her no.

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