Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Brian Sweany

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      Chapter eighteen

      Hoosier Boys State, Hoosier Boys State

      We are one and all for you…

      We will fight for, we will strive for

      All the things we’ve pledged to do…

      Ever loyal, ever faithful

      And we’ll always be true blue…

      All the rules of right we will follow honor bright,

      Hoosier Boys State we’re for you!

      Laura called me at Hoosier Boys State to tell me she was vomiting a lot and couldn’t keep anything down. I told her I was running for governor and was stressed out about the primary election.

      I didn’t even make it out of the primaries. I lost my party’s nomination to a scrawny cross-country runner from Fort Wayne. The guy was a relentless coalition builder. I won our debate, but he had sixty percent of the votes in his pocket before he even opened his mouth. He went on to win the governor’s race. I left the campus of Indiana State thoroughly disenchanted with two-party politics.

      I drive straight to Laura’s house. Her car is the only one in the driveway. The front door is unlocked. I let myself in.

      “Laura!”

      The house is quiet, the lights turned off, the curtains drawn throughout. I step into the hallway off the foyer. The master bedroom is the only room in the hallway with its door shut. I don’t even knock before I open the door.

      “Hey, boyfriend, welcome home.” She’s in her parents’ bed, her head peeking out of the top of multiple sheets and quilts, fists clenched beneath her chin. She looks like Dennis Hopper in Hoosiers when he was trying to dry out in the clinic.

      “Thanks.” I make a cautionary descent to a sitting position beside her, leaning in for a kiss. She turns, offering me her cheek.

      “Still pissed about the election?” Her voice is aspirated, her complexion pale.

      “I’m over it. How you feeling?”

      “Horrible.”

      “Eat anything today?”

      “Not today, not yesterday.” She closes her eyes, wincing. “What is it?”

      “Stomach…out of my way.” Laura pushes me aside and rushes to the bathroom.

      She shuts the door behind her. I can hear her dry-heaving through the door. A flushed toilet. The sound of running water as she washes her hands and then brushes her teeth. The door opens. Laura emerges wet-faced and weary. She doesn’t even try to make eye contact.

      “Laura, at least look at me.”

      “I can’t.”

      She tries to crawl back into bed, but I block her path and grab her by the arms. “Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”

      “Don’t have to. I’m sure I look exactly like how I feel.”

      “You’re well into your first trimester, and you look as if you’ve actually lost twenty-five pounds.”

      This is not an exaggeration. Laura’s eyes are sunken into her face. Her cheeks, once round and close to plump, are little more than skin-hued cheekbones. I can see the skeletal outline of her ribcage through her T-shirt. Her shorts hang from her now-boney hips. Her ankles, knees, and elbows are all swollen and disproportionate to her legs and arms, the fatty tissue they once rested in sucked dry by weeks of near-starvation.

      Laura hazards a quick glance at me. The disconnect between us is palpable. Laura doesn’t feel like my girlfriend. She feels like that girl. That varsity cheerleader we all felt sorry for last year who couldn’t do cartwheels because of a “bruised abdomen” and spent half a semester hounding three guys for paternity tests. That classmate Mom used to tell me about from her high school days, the one who would disappear from St. Mary’s Academy, existing only in the hushed whispers of her peers and the stern countenances of a cadre of nuns. That hussy left to her own anguish, a scarlet letter pinned to her left breast, wandering without rule or guidance into a moral wilderness…where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude!

      “Hank.” Laura collapses in my arms, crying. “I just want my life back. I want us back.”

      I want us back. That’s all it takes. As my shirt soaks through to the skin with the sobs of a broken girl not yet ready to be a broken woman, my choice becomes that simple.

      I lay Laura down in the bed, pulling the blankets back up around her face. She isn’t that girl. She isn’t an afterschool special or one of those stupid fucking PSAs. She’s not Nancy McKeon, telling me in the middle of my Saturday cartoons, “Hi, I’m Nancy McKeon, and I’ll be right back with One to Grow On.” Laura is my girlfriend. She is real. And I love her.

      “Laura.” I kiss СКАЧАТЬ