Free She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel Page B

really wanted was something by Judy Blume, something not about freckles. I was aiming for the scoliosis book and praying Mrs. M. didn’t see me sneak it off the shelf. Judy Blume was the personal savior of every girl in the Mooreland Elementary School and I swear if not for her none of us would have known the first thing about the first thing.
    I had my hand on the book but I wasn’t moving, because Mrs. M. and Lindy were chattering away and Melinda was pregnant. It wasn’t as if it should have surprised me; she’d wanted a baby ever since she got married. She’d made a nursery in her little house right away, painting a big smiling yellow sun on the wall so it would be the first thing the baby saw in the morning. She had sewn white eyelet curtains, and even set up a crib. She had made a room so irresistible no baby floating in the heavens could resist it. And one had seen her, and flown down.
    I was happy for her and slightly sick at the same time. There was the pregnancy situation, which was mysterious and a tad ghastly, and there was A New Thing where there had only been my sister and me before. She called us War Buddies. She said we shared the same memories of the Trenches. I had exactly one sister and so did she, a mathematical situation that seemed to suit us both fine. Yes, I was a Nuisance and Pesty but the preschooler Jesus knew I could keep a secret. Not without a price, but I could hold on to information anyway. There had been the time she was babysitting me and we decided to walk over to the trailer where Rick was living at the edge of the park (this is when they were dating), an entirely forbidden thing to do, and Melinda told me if I’d wait outside on the rickety wire steps and not tell Mom and Dad she’d buy me a new jump rope. I was a great jump-roper. I forced her to toss in a little doll I’d seen and we sealed the deal and not one word was uttered by me. I got the whole package, even though she wasn’t in there but a couple minutes.
    We left from school together and Melinda seemed very happy. “So,” she said, “do you want a boy or a girl? A nephew or a niece?”
    I shrugged, slipped the Judy Blume novel out from under my shirt where I’d stolen it. “I don’t care.”
    “You’re such a gigantic turd,” Melinda said, looking away from me.
    “
You
are.”
    Melinda was one of those pregnant women who don’t complain and don’t get weird and don’t suffer the sort of psychosis that makes some mothers want to slice out their babies to save them from their own baby evil. She was relaxed and philosophical, and as time passed I became quite fixated on watching for the baby to turn or kick or hiccup, anything to suggest there was a person in there. It was gross, for sure, but also quite interesting.
    Rick called us when Lindy went into labor and we drove to the hospital in New Castle without singing; everyone was nervous. All of Mom and Dad’s children had been born in the same hospital. It was early December and bitterly cold; Dad drove with care on the snowy roads. In the waiting room my dad paced and smoked as if this were a Cary Grant film, and Mom worked on a sweater and made friends with other people passing through. I stared at the clock. Everything seemed really festive, like we’d all found ourselves in the middle of a natural disaster — trapped in a cabin in a blizzard, or riding out a tornado in a shelter.
    If I had been asked, before Melinda had a baby, if I knew what love was, I would have said sure. I would have said I loved
The Beverly Hillbillies
and Glen Campbell. I loved Mountain Dew. I really really loved my bicycle and Julie’s horse Angel, and other things involving transportation, like riding in the back of Dad’s truck, or lifting up my shirt on a steaming hot day in my sister’s new green Impala, then letting my back stick to the vinyl seat. Then peeeeel my skin off the seat and let the wind blow it. Then lean back and get sweaty again. Then peeeeeel.
    There was