Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 3

  All things being equal, the luxury of riding the bus like everybody without their own car didn’t seem worth it. Or as Dev boiled it down for Leo: “My mom doesn’t mind.”

  “Maybe she’d like to sleep in for once,” his friend countered.

  “Nope,” Dev said confidently. “She’d get up anyway, so she can get to the good stuff at the thrift store.”

  “You mean like the She-Ra backpack?”

  Dev adjusted said backpack. As far as he was concerned, his support of a female superhero—dated though she may be—should impress teenaged girls, suggesting as it did his attitude toward female equality, even though said attitude was largely fueled by his inability to see the advantage of subdividing mankind any further than neurotypicals versus whatever he was. So: “What’s wrong with She-Ra?”

  “Other than farting dust?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  But Dev couldn’t let it go. How was it possible that his mom’s driving him to school and/or his She-Ra backpack should so offend neurotypicals that ostracism was warranted? To the best of his knowledge, all the people mocking him had mothers. And how was the She-Ra backpack any worse than anything else bearing pictures with no known connection to their actual function? Was Quaker Oats full of ground-up Quakers? Did buying the stuff famous people endorsed make you famous too? Or was it the fact that Dev’s backpack happened to be used?

  “It’s new to you,” his mother always said whenever she got him something from the thrift store, and Dev was fine with that. In the case of the infamous backpack, there’d been no holes, no stains, no funny smells, and his textbooks fit perfectly, a necessity for someone predisposed to OCD. So that meant the picture of She-Ra was the only “defect,” which Dev didn’t consider a defect at all, just like he didn’t consider Asperger’s a defect. To the contrary, being on the spectrum was the source of his secret power: being smarter than everybody else. Even his once-worthy rival, Leo.

  2

  Some weird kids are born that way, and others are made by their circumstances. Lucy Abernathy fell into the latter category by not conforming to certain biological ratios considered attractive—and she resented the hell out of it. This resentment didn’t manifest itself until she’d had her first period, but once it arrived—her resentment, not her period—it led her to embrace the beastly side of the beauty/beast divide. And not just beasts, but monsters and zombies and the horror genre in general, along with a certain gothic sensibility in her fashion choices.

  Despite living in the brutally sunlit land of Atlanta, where white before and after Labor Day was not only de rigueur but heat-index mandated, Lucy opted to go black and never went back.

  “Ern’t y’all hawt in that?” someone asked her the first time she appeared fully gothed-out in public.

  “In my humble opinion,” Lucy said, “yes,” leaving the sizzle-ass punch line where it belonged: in her head.

  But once The Walking Dead started filming in her backyard, Lucy found herself coming dangerously close to being trendy, a bullet she dodged by hanging out with the second-least trendy member of Atlanta’s burgeoning horror scene, her gay buddy Max. Though born in the same land of peaches, kudzu, and R.E.M., Max considered himself miles above anything below—as he called it—the Mason-Dumbass Line.

  “If it weren’t for you,” he said, meaning Lucy, “I’d be outta here like—” and he slapped his hands before sending one flying, presumably to some place beyond the Mason-Dumbass Line, though the sound effect he chose for said departure was more gunshot than jet or even Greyhound bus.

  Lucy hugged him the first time he expressed the sentiment but immediately backed off on Max’s advice that she “contain” herself, “young lady.”

  “My bad,” Lucy apologized to her BFF, the (unfortunately) gay Max.

  It all went south—literally as well as metaphorically—during the Days of the Dead convention at the Atlanta Sheraton off Peachtree something and Peachtree something else. Lucy and Max met at the Buckhead MARTA station and rode down together, both already in full DotD regalia. For Lucy, this meant a zombie-goth cheerleader she’d assembled from a thrift store skirt she’d razor slit before suturing back together with safety pins, followed by water-damaged pom-poms, a skull-and-crossbones lunchbox purse, and black-and-white makeup.

  “You like?” Lucy said, striking an ironic pose to give her friend a better view of what Max called her on-som-bla, making it sound like a mash-up of Les Mis and NAMBLA.

  “You? Mos’ def’, BFF,” Max said. “Your on-som-bla, on the other hand . . .”

  “Say it.”

  “It’s a tad, well, impressionistic, no?”

  Max was being polite. What he really meant was that Lucy’s costume screamed exactly what it was: Maybelline for mimes with a touch of resale improv. She was bound to be blown out of the proverbial water by the ultrarealistic prosthetics the other cosplayers could be counted on wearing. Max, for his part, hadn’t even tried to compete with those TWD audition reels, opting for a satanic clown/court jester, complete with bell cap and a pair of high-tech stilts with spring blades like Olympic amputees used to run in. The result was that he towered two feet over Lucy, which was all well and good—until they had to board the train for downtown.

  “Um,” Max said, eying the too-short sliding doors that had just gasped open.

  Lucy surveilled the situation before saying, “Get down on your knees.”

  “I thought you’d never ask . . .”

  Ignoring him, Lucy explained her plan to ride him aboard like they were playing horsey.

  “How is that an answer?”

  “It makes it looked planned,” Lucy said. “Like it’s part of the act. Everybody else thinks we’re crazy anyway. Why not act like it?”

  “Why not, indeed?” gay Max said, getting down on all fours.

  “We look like Laurel and Hardy,” Max said as they passed a mirrored wall at the Sheraton, “painted by Salvador Dali.”

  Was that a crack about my weight? Lucy wondered. Because if it was, well, it wasn’t appreciated, especially not from Max, who was gay, after all, making weight on her part strictly academic on his. Plus, Lucy wasn’t even fat. She was slightly—slightly—overweight. Healthy, really. Baseline American: what you got from following all those daily recommendations. Nothing crazy like McDonald’s every meal. The main culprit was ice cream. Ice cream, and her mom.

  Mrs. (not Ms.) Abernathy was nonconfrontational. Involved in an argument, she caved more often than not. Witness to an argument, her primary instinct was to deflect. And her go-to line when it came to deflecting? “Who wants ice cream?”

  Lucy, personally, had been deflected a size or two bigger than a girl her height and bone structure should be, assuming you were judging by the unreasonable standards of Hollywood, but also, maybe, by those from the American Medical Association. Lucy couldn’t help it; she’d been trained to associate ice cream with domestic stability. Plus, she liked how it tasted, the mouthfeel of it, all that silky smooth cold. She even got used to the brain freeze, romanticizing it as what it must feel like to do cocaine. She and her brother used to fight sometimes just so their mother would break out the Häagen-Dazs, their mom being stone-cold serious when it came to deflecting.

  Max, for his part, used humor instead of Good Humor to do his deflecting. Like when it came to the cold-as-a-crypt shoulder Lucy had begun giving him ever since his Daliesque weight crack. He kept trying to take it back without actually acknowledging he’d said it, maintaining a stream of stand-up-ready commentary as they roamed the halls, suites, and auditoriums of the con, flipping through fanzines, gazing at the galleries of fan art, posing for photographs Lucy darted out of the frame of just before the click, not wanting to memorialize their surrealistic Laurel-and-Hardy routine.

  And he kept trying, all the way up to the room they were sharing because, well, what part of “gay Max” didn’t you get?

  For Lucy—as it turned out—the answer was: none.


  She got all the parts of gay Max, even the apparently not-so-gay private one. He’d grown so desperate to see her smile he’d stooped to doing impressions. And the one that got her smiling, then laughing, then laughing so hard she lost her breath, pleading, “Stop, stop, stop,” so hard a little pee came out was one Max had timed so perfectly that it caught her off guard and landed smack-dab in the middle of that part of her soul still capable of laughing so hard she peed.

  And what was that killer impression? This: Max, absolutely deadpan, talk-singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as Rod Serling, each set of four to five syllables punctuated by a pregnant pause full of sardonic foreboding. By the time Mr. Bluebird was perched on Mr. Serling’s shoulder, Lucy’s sides were cramping, so her laughter came out interspersed with little cries of pain so incongruous they made her—ironically, perversely, painfully—laugh even harder.

  Why she was laughing, she couldn’t say. Was it the disconnect between Mr. Twilight Zone and all those bluebirds and sunshine? Was it the political incorrectitude of a gay man from Atlanta singing a song from Disney’s transparently racist Song of the South? Did he even know about that movie, which hadn’t been released from Disney’s infamous “vault” for decades, or was he just familiar with its rehabilitated incarnation as part of the soundtrack for Splash Mountain in Disney World? The only reason she knew about the song’s original background was because she’d heard rumors about this Disney flick that was set in Atlanta and was so racist it’d make your jaw drop. So, of course, she had to track down some scratchy clips on YouTube, after which her jaw did exactly that.

  But whatever the reasons, Lucy needed Max to stop. And so she kissed him—to shock him—to make him stop making her laugh. But then he kissed her back, and Lucy knew they were screwed. So they did.

  Afterward, in the unprotected afterglow, Lucy said, almost as an afterthought: “Wow, that got serious fast.”

  “Yeah,” Max agreed. “Like a . . .” but he didn’t say heart attack. Instead, he just said, “Yeah,” again.

  A few missed periods later . . .

  “Merde,” Lucy said, sitting on a toilet in the girls’ room, staring at the blue cross on the pee stick. This was the third such cross on the third such stick, all from the shoplifted boxes stacked next to her on the toilet paper dispenser.

  “Shite and onions,” she added, using the euphemism her father routinely used around her mother, but nowhere else, which was how she knew he was just talking shit. Which seemed appropriate, sitting in the stall, alone with her pee sticks, trying to imagine the truckload of ice cream it’d take to deflect being pregnant. Because there was going to be some big-time confrontation once that news got out. Not from her mom. Her mom might manage an “oh my” before making a beeline for the fridge. But her dad—the man who’d married a woman who didn’t like to argue because he did, especially the winning part—her dad would call down the wrath of God. And she already knew the words that would crush her: “You ungrateful shit.” He’d use the s-word right in front of her mother—the both of them—just to show how serious he was.

  He’d never used any of those words with her before—other than you, of course. But still they lay there like bricks in her stomach, right next to that catastrophe that would make him hurl them. “You ungrateful shit . . .” She could hear them in her head. And she had nothing to counter them with. But then she did: “Who wants ice cream?” she’d ask.

  Her brother might laugh. Her mom would already be crying between scoopfuls. And her dad—her dad would be holding the door for her. Hostile la viva, baby.

  Well, it was obvious what she needed to do. The good Catholic girl her mom hoped she’d be one day, that girl would make it up to Jesus later, when she was older and ready. And married, of course. Can’t forget that: definitely married. Then she’d have legitimate kids coming out of her eyes. Or you know, where they normally came out.

  Fortunately, abortion on demand was still the law of the land, even in the land of peaches and Republicans. Or so Lucy assumed—until she actually needed one.

  It started with trying to find a place that did them. Local providers wouldn’t even use the word. She knew. When she googled “Atlanta abortion clinic,” all she got were euphemisms: family planning, women’s crisis counseling, women’s care clinic. Lucy settled for a place called Women’s Health Planning, an interesting combination of words that at least implied a connection to Planned Parenthood. They even turned the o in “Women’s” into one of those circly crossy things for woman.

  The lady at reception seemed as pleasant as a warm slice of peach pie, just there to help. “Hi y’all doing?” she asked, hybridizing her “hi” and “how” together with her “y’all,” getting two greetings for the price of one.

  “Not great,” Lucy admitted.

  She’d not worn her zombie-goth cheerleading costume she’d been impregnated within proximity of during “that Mexican Halloween,” as her mom insisted on calling the Days of the Dead convention—not that her mom had a clue about the tricks or treats Max and she had gotten themselves into. Instead, Lucy dressed in a mom-approved plaid skirt, white blouse, and matching knee socks. Mrs. Abernathy wasn’t just clinging to her own past in choosing these outfits, but Lucy’s too—from before they had to pull her out of Catholic school, thanks to a “downturn” in the economy. If her parents ever found out about her current predicament, she figured she’d plead a busted moral compass, thanks to being dumped among the heathens. Spread the blame.

  If Lucy saw the silver cross around the receptionist’s neck, it didn’t register; knee-jerk Christianity was, after all, the Southern way. Plus, she was too busy filling out forms that seemed to ask a lot more questions than seemed strictly necessary for what she understood to be a simple medical procedure, especially this early on.

  Suddenly, a woman in scrubs opened the door next to the receptionist’s desk, bearing a clipboard of her own. “Smith?” she said, making the quotes nearly visible.

  Lucy waited to see if any of the other girls fidgeting in chairs next to her made a move before raising her hand. “Here,” she finally said, hand over head, head hanging low.

  Unfortunately, the people naming Georgia’s women’s health providers weren’t the only ones disinclined to use the a-word. The “counselor” Lucy was handed off to was equally reticent, preferring to use a different a-word: adoption.

  “There are so many couples—I can’t tell you how many couples—praying for a miracle like the one y’all got growing inside you” was the way she prefaced it. “There’s just not enough babies,” she continued, “to adopt,” presumably because they’d all been gobbled up by the other a-word. “That’s why y’all got people going to Russia, for heaven’s sake.”

  Lucy suspected the word missing in this conversation was white. There weren’t enough white babies for white couples to adopt. And bingo, here Lucy was, carrying one. Praise Jesus!

  They’d already shown her the usual pro-life splatter porn: the ground-up fetuses of late-term abortions, not the featureless clump of cells the thing inside her was at the moment. But it did its job. It made her sick. It made her feel guilty. But it didn’t change how out-of-the-question adoption was.

  “I,” Lucy started, stopped. “Adoption,” she finally declared. “No,” she added, signaling that the counselor could stop talking about it, but the counselor didn’t. Not as long as she had a “but . . .” still in her and interjected it before Lucy could make herself even clearer. Finally: “I don’t want my parents to find out,” she shouted.

  There, that was done. But not quite. “Oh dear,” the but-lady said. “Surely you know Georgia has a parental notification requirement for underage . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  No, Lucy thought. I was not so aware. Who thought that was a good idea? No, wait, don’t tell me: a bunch of white, male, Cracker Barrel Republicans . . .

  “But,” she said, borrowing it from the but-lady.

  “But nothing,” the but-lady said, taking
Lucy’s clipboard away. “You’ll need to get the proper form signed and notarized with a copy of at least one parent’s state-issued photo ID.”

  “And where do I get a copy of the ‘proper form’?” Lucy asked.

  “At one of those other places,” the but-lady said, her peaches and cream having apparently curdled.

  There was a reason her mom couldn’t handle conflicts very well. She’d been abandoned herself. Raised in foster care, a part of her life she claimed not to remember. All she could recall were the parents who adopted her and sent her to Catholic school. The only problem with the story: she was twelve when she was adopted. Still, as far as her kids were concerned, she had no past before that: their mother was born at the age of twelve.

  Lucy’s arriving home now, pregnant and wanting to put the kid up for adoption? Other than being a personal affront to her mother’s past, who knew what might happen? For all the time she’d known her, her mom seemed like she was perched on a ledge an overloud voice might startle her off of. What was this going to do? Lucy, for one, didn’t want to be around to find out.

  So what were her options? She could throw herself down the stairs and hope for a miscarriage, she guessed. But if she wound up in the hospital, they’d find out then. She could google the rules on abortion in surrounding states but already suspected she’d need to go all the way up north somewhere before she could get what the Supreme Court said she had a right to—red-meat politics notwithstanding. But then how was she supposed to explain disappearing for the couple of days it’d take to get someplace sane?

  RU-486 was an option—not from any place local, of course, but online, sure. She could have FedEx deliver her abortion pills just like the Adderall Max’d scored for finals. But they’d want a credit card or PayPal to pay for the stuff, which came down to the same thing, statement-wise, and her mom had been opening her credit card bills before Lucy could ever since all those credit bureaus started getting hacked. Max’s parents were apparently less vigilant or—more likely—afraid they’d find a bunch of gay-related charges, confirming what they weren’t asking and Max wasn’t telling.