17.

I had to ask Ms. Jedel for a recommendation to get into an English seminar at NYU. I’d sent the application in, but the recommendation was way late. When would I ask her? At the end of the day or the beginning? Which day was the best day to ask for something like this? Friday? Inside the classroom or outside? What would I say? “Ms. Jedel, I know I haven’t been doing so terrifically, but I wondered if you would consider …”

Ms. Jedel had a very formal demeanor, and she wore tailored pencil skirts and navy patent-leather pumps, which made her stand out even more next to the bedraggled male teachers in jeans and sneakers. When I had her freshman year, she stood at the blackboard, holding the chalk in her fingers like a cigarette. “If you cannot spell separate, you are not up to par,” she would say. I’d imagine her going home at night to her apartment with a single paper grocery bag nestled in her arms—dinner for one—and I imagined her pushing her glasses daintily up her nose as she undressed next to the closet door. I always pictured her wearing a beautiful cream silk slip under her skirt and blouse, and imagined her getting undressed down to that, then padding off to the kitchen to ladle her take-out risotto onto a white plate and eating it sitting down with a tall glass of water. In some weird way, she gave me hope that my adulthood would be elegant.

“Ms. Jedel, I have a big favor to ask you.…”

Then senior year something happened. I took her film class and she discussed Dog Day Afternoon and Raging Bull, in her same skirts and pumps, and she was too far removed from real life. She was a nerd. And a spinster. I ended up getting a B-plus for the fall semester.

“Ms. Jedel, believe it or not, after my less-than-stellar performance so far in the film class, I’m actually thinking of majoring in film. I know, I know, but this year has been hard for me. I’m deeply in love, and now I’m with child, actually. Could you cut me a break, Ms. Jedel? Could you?”

I endlessly put off asking her, until I finally got up the nerve on February twelfth, my eighteenth birthday. I thought that asking her on my birthday, even though she didn’t know it was my birthday, would somehow mean she’d say yes. I was wrong.

Vanessa was waiting outside in the hall.

“What’d she say?”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “She turned me down.”

“No!” she said, her eyes widening. “So obnoxious. I’m sorry, Thee. I can’t believe it. Come with me later and we’ll do birthday ice cream, and you can help me buy tennis sneakers. I’ll cheer you up.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking, This birthday is turning out to be complete rubbish, as Mom would say. Mom had asked me if I wanted a party, but my last big birthday, my sweet sixteen, took place at Dad’s squash club with too many kids I didn’t know smoking pot on the dark empty courts. I just wanted this one to come and go.

I went with Vanessa after school to buy tennis sneakers on Thirty-Fourth Street. She’d picked the last semester of our senior year to join the tennis team. I was jealous because I knew she’d be good at it and probably get really skinny, whereas I was a depressed slob, getting fatter by the second, coming home from school every day and crashing onto the couch like a plane.

A mop-topped boy brought out a stack of boxes and popped the lid off the first one.

He bent down and took the heel of her foot.

“How’s Fiona?” Vanessa asked. “Still howling at the moon?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “She just sold her second apartment, so she’s all excited. Maybe the real estate thing will be her … thing.”

“That’s so great. She’s found her calling, I know it.” She looked at the white leather lace-ups that made her already narrow foot look even narrower. “What do you think?” She twisted her ankle around. “You’re coming to my first match, right?” She grinned and gathered her long brown curls into two ponytails on either side of her head. “Promise margarine?”

I nodded, trying to conjure up watching a game on the shiny new aluminum bleachers in Battery Park. My favorite sunglasses had split in two at the nose when I had sat on them the summer before. They were still on my dresser, sitting, sitting, sitting, as if one day I’d magically take them into the kitchen and Scotch tape them perfectly together. Why couldn’t I just throw shit out?

“Ness, I’m really fucked up,” I said, a shelf of misery forming in my throat.

“What is it, babe?” she asked, taking the sneaker off and gripping it. “You still thinking about the you-know-what?”

“I would be,” I said, staring at the stack of boxes. “If I’d had the you-know-what.”

She froze. “What do you mean?”

“At the appointment, I don’t know, I freaked out,” I said. “I hopped off the table.”

“Thea, that was way over a month ago—why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I honestly didn’t. “I’m going back. I just had a little moment that day. I’m going back.”

“Aren’t you running out of time?”

“There’s still time,” I said. “It’s not too late.” The boy returned and paused in front of us with another box, which he set on the floor by Vanessa’s feet.

“I’m going to take these, thanks,” she said, pointing to the sneakers and quickly getting her boots back on. We went to the counter and Vanessa pulled out a crumpled wad of twenties. I didn’t know what she was thinking; she’d gone mute. I’d been sort of coasting with this fuzzy problem in the back of my mind for weeks, but the look on her face—she looked like she’d seen a ghost—brought it raging to the front.

We got outside and the tide of people on Thirty-Fourth Street coaxed us toward Seventh Avenue.

“Will doesn’t know, does he?” she finally asked. “You have to tell him.”

“I’m going to tell him. It’s so hard to find the right time.”

“There won’t be a right time, Thea, it doesn’t exist. Just get it over with.”

“I know.” We got to the corner and waited at the light.

“Thea, do you really think you and Will are going to go off and, like, just blow off college and get sucky jobs and live on love in some prairie town, with a baby?” she asked. “What’s going on? What’s going on in your head?”

“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “Maybe part of me thinks that. I can’t help it. What’s wrong with me?”

“If you decide to go ahead and have it, I’ll shut my mouth, but right now it seems like a bad idea.” She held her knapsack, with its prickly pink rubber key chain dangling off it, in front of my face, as if to prove a point. “We’re really young, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“How different would it be if we were, like, twenty-four?” I asked.

“That’s still young!” she exclaimed. “But at least you’d have a college degree. You’d have a shot.”

“Is college really necessary anymore?”

She shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, is it?” I shrugged.

“I don’t know what to say, Thee,” she said, brushing her hand across my stomach. “Jesus, babe, what a moosh you are. You can’t let go of anything, can you?”