Some more Amelia angst for the few, the proud, the readers who can't get enough of it (I'm one of them, of course). This is three parts potential backstory to two parts alternate universe. It's dark and contains adult themes and situations.
Five Times Amelia Shepherd Is Late
1. Because they said you can't get pregnant if you shower after and you won't get pregnant if he pulls out and what are the odds anyway, and because she likes to play the odds and the faster it's over the better and the shower is the only place she feels clean anyway, she pretends to believe them.
She doesn't tell anyone, because she's not interested in hearing what are you going to do? She's not one for planning anyway: she'd prefer to let things happen. Or maybe it's just that things happen regardless. She didn't plan any of this: not to be the accidental baby of an already-finished family - a family of six - and not to bear witness to seven hurtling back to six in a gush of blood and a rush of weak-kneed fear.
They're seven again now. This thought gives her a wicked little sense of pride. She's the one who fucked up their numbers and she's the one who fixed them, except she doesn't tell anyone. She prefers secrets.
Things happen regardless. It barely hurts when the short-lived secret gushes out of her, her knees trembling with exertion.
Six in the house, again. Amy flushes the toilet, lowers the lid as quietly as she can. There's still a step-stool for her in front of the sink. A faded wooden one, with purple flowers. It was Nancy's first. Amy still uses it, sometimes. It's August, hot and sticky, and the bathroom window is open wide to the world. School's going to start soon.
You're growing up, her mother says indulgently the next night, handing her her first pair of grown-up stockings. My baby, she says. Junior high. I can't believe it. Amy tugs on a little on the stockings, testing their strength. They could hold a lot. Maybe everything.
She doesn't use them. But she hangs on to them anyway.
2. It never occurred to her it could be a false alarm, because false alarms are what happen to nice girls, not girls like her. So she assumes it's real, and she tells him with a note of pride.
He has a wedding ring, pictures on his desk of fat happy babies, and she enjoys watching him squirm. Really, it's what she enjoys most of all.
Amelia is highly intelligent but lacks focus in her academic approach.
His voice stumbles and catches and falls and she laughs - in her head it's high and cold, out loud it sounds younger than she feels. She just laughs, watching him.
Amelia's writing is very good, but her behavior lacks discipline.
He asks her how. He asks her why. He asks her what they're going to do. She stands in front of him, hands folded neatly over her skirt, and lets him fall apart.
Amelia has good ideas but lacks follow-through.
He's frantic then, pacing and swallowing. He leans over, grasping his knees, out of breath and she sees his hair is thinning at the top. How perfectly revolting. She asks him, sweetly, if he has told his wife yet. He slaps her face.
Amelia possesses a keen grasp of the material but lacks the motivation to present it appropriately.
She's probably supposed to grasp her cheek and widen her eyes and cry, but she's been hit harder and she's not interested in pretending. She walks away instead, letting her hips sway as she moves, thinking about how they'll widen soon. Of course he watches her; of course she doesn't have to turn around to know.
She waits nearly a month to tell him it was a false alarm. She raises her hand as often as possible during that month, loving the way the pulse in his throat jumps when he calls on her, the patchy sweat under his arms, the dull flush at the back of his neck when he paces the board. She relishes his discomfort, feeds on it and lets it grow within her in the empty space the false alarm left behind. When she finally tells him, there are tears of relief in his eyes, and she laughs openly, inviting him to slap her again. Hoping he will.
He doesn't. She lets him fuck her anyway.
Amelia has many positive qualities but demonstrates a mildly concerning lack of empathy for others.
And how.
3. Addison doesn't do it herself. She seems to think Amy wants her to hold her hand instead, stroke her hair, coo things to her while the instruments open her up and the stirrups split her wide open. So she takes her to someone she knows, and she sits by her side and whispers You're doing great, Amy, it's okay.
Amy wonders what would happen if she just snapped Shut the fuck up, would you? but she doesn't. Her sister-in-law is easily hurt, big blue eyes pooling with tears. What a fucking baby. Hurting her is too easy. Amy prefers a challenge. So she lets Addison fuss over her, doesn't tell her that this doesn't feel any different, to her, than the dentist scraping plaque from her molars: just the well-earned detritus accumulated in a life of indulgence, lived without protection.
She doesn't believe in protection, not in the conventional way anyway. She wears her skirts shorter in the cold, liking the wind burns on her thighs. She wears her jackets thinner in the snow. Leather in the rain, wool in the summer. She wraps skinny bare legs around strangers, lets them fold plastic baggies of pills into her open hands. She lies about her age. Her name. Addie, she says sometimes, when they ask. Kathy. Nan. She laughs gutturally into unfamiliar shoulders when they scream it out: God, yes, Kathy! Fuck me, Addie!
Addison brushes her fingers over Amy's cheek and she braces herself, forces herself not to scream. There's moisture on her face but it isn't tears. There's an ache at the inside of her knee from the strain of her position, sweat beading on her brow. It's hot in this room.
When they finish, they warn her that she might feel some pain over the next few days.
I doubt it, Amy replies.
4. She knows he's kinky, that they met on an internet sex site, that he'll do anything and take anything. There's Charlotte, of course. But this has nothing to do with Charlotte and everything to do with Amelia and what she wants and what she needs and what no one in California has been able to give her. She wants to hate herself and she wants to hate everyone else and she wants to be fucked until the hate explodes inside of her.
And he's only too happy to oblige, it seems. Sure, he tries to touch her hair sometimes, to stroke her back and she laughs openly at him. When he hovers between her thighs, trailing his lips over her, she knots her hands in his hair hard enough to hurt and yanks him away. He gets it. Most of the time.
Maybe Charlotte can join in, she proposes once, to see if she can make him angry. But his eyes have something like excitement in them instead. Disappointed in both of them, she straddles him and blocks out the image of Charlotte's bony bare shoulders, her sharp hipbones and pert little handfuls of flesh. Amelia's never really liked fucking women. She's done it, of course, to get something in return - but the days of pills and needles are over; now she fucks to forget and she fucks to remember how to hurt and she doesn't think Charlotte would be able to do that for her.
Then she's late, and she's going to tell him except that when she struts by his office Charlotte is in there, lounging against his desk, perfect little shapely calves crossed one over the other and for one shameful second she thinks maybe she's hurting her.
Hating her own softness, she interrupts, drags him to an exam room on a made-up consult and fucks him on the paper-lined table. Wet bits of paper cling to the back of his thighs, catching on the hair there. His pants are pooled around his ankles. He looks like a little boy with a fistful of chocolate and more smeared on his face, guilty and lusty all at once: he wants none of this and more of it the same time. She kneels in front of him, takes him in her mouth and uses her teeth until he has to cover his mouth with a stupid-looking disposable pillow.
He drags her up, her hair tangling around his knuckles, and half scrapes her lips off. It's dirty and sweaty and she's about to tell him - because wouldn't that be perfect - when she feels a rush of wetness between her legs that has nothing to do with the thick fingers pinching at her nipples or the suction at her neck. Fuck, she spits and shoves her clothes back on, slamming the door behind her.
Amelia? Are you okay?
There are other people around. Of course there are. So she smiles sweetly at him, strokes the blossoming bruise at her hip through the thin fabric of her skirt. Presses harder, until it hurts.
I feel great, she says.
5. Miraculously - she hates that word, but somehow it seems to fit - there's nothing wrong with him. He's chunky and fully-formed, hair sprouting on his still-pliant scalp. There's no trace on him of anything she's done. It must be the same thing that protects those babies that get dropped on their heads or forgotten on top of cars by other bad mothers.
That's what she is. A bad mother.
For twenty-four hours, she's a bad mother. Then they come for him.
The social worker asks again. I just want to make sure you're sure. She rolls her eyes. She's sure. She's never sure of anything so she knows that if she feels this sure now, she must be.
So she says sure when they ask her if she's ready.
She says no when they ask her if she wants to say good-bye.
They offer again, but she doesn't want to meet the couple. She knows enough: that they're older than she is. Interracial. He'll look like them. And that they've promised not to tell him who she is, not even if he asks, when he's older. That they won't tell him anything about her.
If he's lucky, he'll get no part of her. And then it will be like she was never there at all.
The pen scratches across one form after another. She practices different signatures: one slants backwards, one forward. She can change it any time.
When she found out, it was already too late. She was already gone. Addison didn't even ask her to leave. She has the feeling she could have done anything to her and she still wouldn't have kicked her out. It's the kind of power that makes her feel terribly guilty and almost excited all at once but really, isn't it Addison's own fault for being weak? For letting her in? For watching, silent and empty-eyed, when Amelia crossed the fence?
Even when she caught them, she just stood there mutely at the foot of their tangled limbs. Darkness and light, swirling together. Look closer and Amelia's the darker one. She's always the darker one.
Say something! Amelia yelled and Addison just turned and walked out. Amelia was sure she'd return to packed suitcases, screaming accusations, tears, but all she got was: Does this make you happy, Amy?
She threw herself out, since Addison wouldn't. She fucked him once more for the hell of it, half hoping Addison could hear over the crashing of the waves outside. If he'd let her she would have done it right on the beach, rolled him in the sand like a sugar-crusted cruller. He muttered that she betrayed Addison and she snorted into the ropy muscles of his shoulder, amused that he was as shit to her as he was to her former sister-in-law. He was a dick, but a hot one, chiseled and finessed and willing to pretend she was someone she's not. She welded her hands across the spectacular breadth of his ass and screamed much louder than she meant.
Even though no one heard.
Then she left, holed up in an empty, dimly lit flat that matched her insides, drank until she realized the nausea wasn't a hangover. Then she drank some more.
When she found out, it was too late.
Now the social worker bundles him in a blue-striped blanket. Like a prisoner. He's wrapped too tightly to move and he lets out a pitiful whimper. She folds her arms over her swollen breasts. They're rock hard and might be painful to someone who would notice. Slap, slap, the social worker's cheap shoes hit the linoleum with welcome finality.
When the room finally empties, leaving her alone, she looks up at the clock on the battered plaster wall. Eleven-oh-three. She calls it, out loud, like time of death.
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