Heartbeat - Elizabeth Scott

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parking them in a different spot, but then he stole a teacher’s car.

      And then he graduated to a school bus. It was empty at the time, but still, I heard that got him a couple of weeks in juvie, or would have except for his parents, who intervened. I guess now he’s taken yet another step forward and by lunchtime, I know what Caleb stole.

      His father’s brand-new, limited-edition Porsche. And he didn’t just steal it. He drove it into the lake over by the park, drove right off the highway and into the water. The police found him sitting on the lake’s edge, watching the car sink. They were able to pull it out, but water apparently isn’t good for the inside of a Porsche.

      “You think he’ll go to jail this time?” Olivia asks as we sit picking at our lunches. I love that we have lunch together this semester, but it’s the first lunch block, and it’s hard to face food—especially cafeteria food—at 10:20 in the morning.

      “I guess it depends on his parents,” I say. “Last time they talked to the judge or whatever. They’ll probably just ship him off again. He must hate them, though.”

      “Yeah. To sit by the lake and watch the car sink like that—”

      “Exactly.”

      “Even when my parents are sucking their lives away with all their computer crap, I’d never do anything like mess with their stuff,” she says. “How can you hate someone who raised you, who loves you so—” She breaks off.

      “Dan didn’t raise me,” I say tightly. “And he doesn’t love me. Or Mom.”

      Olivia nods and I think about hate. I understand what can make someone do what Caleb did, although I don’t think a bored, rich druggie really gets hate. Not real hate.

      I do, though. If there were something I could do to Dan that would hurt him, I’d do it.

      4

      The rest of school is like school always is. I sit, I pretend to listen, avoid my AP History teacher’s attempt to try to talk to me after class and wait for the final bell to ring.

      I used to like school. I was the person—along with Anthony—who got A’s on everything and so wrecked any possible grading curve. I did extra credit assignments for fun. I went out and did research about authors we were going to read. I learned about minor historical figures we’d discussed in passing.

      Last summer, I audited a biology class at the community college to make sure everything I’d learned in Advanced Bio stayed in my head. I was going to do the same thing with chemistry this summer, and maybe something in literature too.

      I was a great student. The kind of student everyone hates, actually. I didn’t make friends in my classes, I had acquaintances that I blew away at everything, but I didn’t care. I wanted great grades, the best grades, and I had Olivia, who was in regular classes and who knew there was a list of the top one hundred colleges out there but had no idea which was number one. Or eight. Or forty.

      I knew what the number one school was, and I knew I couldn’t go there because one year of tuition cost an amount that was enough to support a family (or possibly two) for that year and they were stingy with scholarships, but I wanted a scholarship to one in the top ten. I wanted to be the best, not just for the scholarship I’d need to go to a great college, but because I could be.

      A lot of the time, I was. The best, I mean.

      At school, anyway. Personally, my social life was...well, it was pretty poor. A few kisses at a few parties. Anthony.

      Very poor, really.

      I didn’t mind. My dad—my real dad—was a history professor, and I wanted to be like him. Ever since I was little, that’s what I wanted. To be what my dad was. To see my mother’s face when I got my PhD in history.

      I don’t care about school at all now. I sit in class and if I get called on, I say, “I don’t know.” I don’t do my homework and the leeway I got at first is gone. I’m getting F’s on quizzes. On tests. I’m still ignored by my classmates, but now it’s because I’ve fallen so far behind I’ll never get back to where I was. I’m no threat anymore.

      I have a twenty-page paper on the New Deal that’s beyond late. I haven’t written a word of it.

      I’m not going to. I don’t care about school right now, and if I ever do again, I’ll never care about history. It’s nothing but studying things that have happened. That are gone.

      History is full of death, and I’ve had enough of that.

      5

      It took almost two years for my mother to get pregnant. Two years of planning, of Dan smiling and talking, hoping. Of Mom going to the fertility doctor’s office over and over again.

      Of me hearing her crying sometimes.

      “I’m sad,” she’d say when I asked, and I would watch her, so drained-looking, and wonder why she was doing it.

      But then Dan would show up, dry her tears, kiss her, and she’d smile and I’d know why. She wanted him to be happy. She loved him.

      So she tried. And tried.

      And tried.

      She was pregnant with me when she married my dad. She didn’t know it, but she was. She used to say I was such a quiet baby that she didn’t even know I was there until her clothes started getting tight.

      “Of course,” she’d say, “you made up for it with the colic, but still, you were worth it.” And then she’d kiss my forehead or my cheek. She used to talk about how easy it was, being pregnant with me, before she started trying for Dan.

      Before trying to get pregnant took over her life.

      My dad named me. His parents, who’d died when he was fourteen, left him in the care of his aunt Emma because one set of his grandparents was dead and the others were both well on their way to drinking themselves there. Emma loved history, just like my father, and took out a second mortgage on her house to send him to graduate school. She got sick with a cold the day before he got his doctorate and died of a massive internal infection a week after she saw him get it.

      Dan’s parents are dead, which is the only thing he and my dad have in common, besides the whole being married to Mom part. My mother’s parents are both alive, but they live in Arizona and I’ve only met them twice. Both times were awful. They basically spent the entire visit telling my mother that she was such a disappointment and she needed to “turn herself into someone better.” The second time, Mom told them that maybe they needed to fix themselves and then we left. They didn’t try to get in touch with her again and when she died, they called and left a message.

      I think that’s why Mom was such a great mom. In spite of her parents, or maybe because of them, she taught herself how to love.

      And she did.

      She loved so much, and she loved with everything, with her soul. I wanted to be like that.

      I don’t anymore.

      Mom did a lot of stuff for Dan, but what she did to get that baby...some of it sounded pretty gruesome. Painful, even. I once heard her tell Dan, “I don’t think I can do it. I just...my body is like this thing now.”

      “We’ll talk to the doctor,” Dan said. “He did warn us that with that blood clot you had, things could be even riskier. And I know being on the drugs is hard. So if you’re this unhappy...”

      “No, no,” Mom said, but of course she’d say that. She loved Dan. She knew how much he wanted a baby. She knew that because she was over forty when they started trying, her best chances of having a baby—“The dream baby,” she used to say with a smile—lay with drugs and testing and all kinds of stuff. And risk. So much risk.

      Dan began setting up a nursery in the guest bedroom about thirty seconds after the clinic called to say it looked

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