The Lit Report (3 page)

Ruth's dad, or Pastor Pete as his parishioners call him, has some dandy tattoos left over from his days behind bars. And I don't mean he was a bartender. The tattoos are all sort of blurry and dreary—knives and hearts and women's names and an awesome Jesus dripping blood from a crown
of thorns. Jesus looks suspiciously like Pete's old cellmate, a biker named Two-Percent (because he's not homo). Two-Percent has been a deacon at
GAGA
since his release five years ago. Peggy is always nagging Pete to have his tattoos lasered off, but Pete loves to “let the tatts testify,” as he puts it, although the older he gets, the grosser the testifying gets. But you'd be surprised how many women with big hair and giant boobs join his church after an encounter with Pastor Pete's body art.

IN EARLY DECEMBER
, Ruth got sick and missed a few days of school. One Friday morning, Peggy called to ask me to bring Ruth's homework over after school. Peggy still doesn't understand that under no circumstances will Ruth do homework on the weekends. But of course I didn't argue. I rarely argue with adults. It seems like such a waste of energy. In my view, childhood and adolescence are non-negotiable sentences. There is no appeal process. No time off for good behavior, no parole. You might as well just wait it out, make plans for your release and try not to piss off the wardens and the other inmates. It wasn't hard for me to maintain a reputation for quiet piety; I'm smart, I like volunteering at the hospital and recycling my pop cans, and most of my elders are tolerable people. Pretending to be God-fearing was slightly more challenging, but I managed that mostly by
keeping my mouth shut and going to church once a week with my mom.

It was a constant source of annoyance to Peggy that I, an only child and the product of a broken home, was much better adjusted than either of her children. To hear Peggy tell it, Ruth has been in trouble since she was in the womb, what with the morning sickness, the premature delivery, the colic, the croup, the broken arm, the eczema, the night terrors, etc., etc. Ruth's older brother, Jonah, was sent to a bible college in northern Alberta right after he graduated high school. Jonah isn't like Ruth. He doesn't smoke, drink or hang around with evildoers. Jonah's crimes are cultural. He loves music, especially jazz and opera. He reads a lot of philosophy books and claims to be an existentialist. He bought himself a subscription to
Gourmet
magazine with his paper-route money when he was twelve. Which means, according to Pete and Peggy, that Jonah is gay and thus in mortal danger of eternal damnation. I know from personal experience that Jonah is definitely not gay. I've known since I was fourteen and he was sixteen and we fooled around a bit (okay, a lot) on a school camping trip. So Jonah got sent to Bible boot camp, where he's supposed to be scared straight by bad food, worse music and mandatory participation in team sports. It won't work. Jonah knows how to wait it out too. And besides, he's already straight.

When I got to Ruth's house on Friday afternoon, Pete was putting up Christmas decorations on the front lawn. Even though it was pretty cold out, he was wearing a tight, white, short-sleeved, V-neck T-shirt and no jacket. I could see the spider web tattoo on his left elbow and the skull on his right forearm and a thorn or two of Christ's crown peeking out of his chest hair. I was glad it wasn't July. July means tank tops.

“Hey, Julia,” he said, gesturing toward the grotesque inflatable nativity scene he was assembling. “Whaddaya think? She's a beauty, eh?”

“Sure, Mr. Walters,” I said. “It's a marvel of ingenuity.” I knew he wouldn't want to hear that the wise men, especially Balthazar, looked like sand-weighted drag queens, or that the Baby Jesus could use a little more air.

“You should see it lit up, baby. Once I get the star on the roof—Praise Jesus! People will drive by and stop their cars and get out and fall on their knees!”

“Sure, Mr. Walters,” I said again. Fall on their knees laughing, I thought.

“Be sure and come by some night,” he said, turning back to pumping up the Virgin Mary. “Bring your mom. I miss her pretty face at the church.”

“Sure, Mr. Walters,” I said for the third time as I went up the front stairs and rang the doorbell. It played the first few notes of “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus.” I shivered, but not from the cold.

Peggy opened the door and greeted me with her usual warmth and charm. Peggy always smells as if she's bathed in Mr. Clean.

“Oh, it's you, Julia. Go on up.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Walters. That's a lovely apron.” I know better than to call her Peggy to her face.

But she had already turned and was halfway to the kitchen before I started up the stairs to Ruth's room. I've been in Ruth's house so many times that I don't even notice anymore how weird it is that the downstairs is immaculate and the upstairs looks as if the Hell's Angels are having a sleepover. I guess the fact that Two-Percent was living in Jonah's room didn't help. Pete and Peggy's spotless bedroom and gleaming en suite bathroom was downstairs in the clean zone. Ruth's room was okay, though. Kind of dark, due to scab-colored curtains, and a bit smelly, due to the incense Ruth burns to cover up other smells, but still strangely cozy.

Ruth had been decorating her room ever since she could hold a crayon, use a pair of scissors and jab a pushpin into drywall. She never takes anything off the walls, so her room is a giant collage. She calls it Installation One: Childhood, and she says that when she leaves home she's going to rip everything down and burn it in the backyard incinerator. I hope she doesn't. There are pictures of us at Bible camp underneath our grade five report about tree frogs; there's Jonah's recipe for key lime pie, a ticket stub from the first
movie we ever went to (
Babe
) and a signed photograph of Billy Bob Thornton. Every time I go to Ruth's there's something new on the walls. Today it was a lacy Day-Glo orange thong, splayed on the wall like a giant butterfly.

Ruth was lying in bed reading
People
magazine. On her night table was a yellow plate with toast crusts on it; beside the plate was a can of ginger ale. Beside the bed was an empty plastic ice-cream bucket. Ruth's hair, which she had recently dyed blue, was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing red- and white-flowered pajamas. Her face was very pale.

I giggled and Ruth frowned. “Don't laugh at me. I puked on my T-shirt,” she said, pointing at the pajamas. “Peggy made me put these on. They suck but at least they don't stink.”

I put Ruth's homework on her desk next to her computer. The screensaver was a flying monkey from
The Wizard of Oz
with the words
When monkeys fly out of my butt
instead of a tail.

“You feeling any better?” I asked, making myself comfortable in the desk chair and keeping my distance from Ruth's puke-germs. There's nothing I hate more than puking. Vomiting scenes in movies make me nauseous. Even the sight of the bedside bucket made me queasy.

“A bit,” Ruth replied. “For a while this morning I thought I was gonna die, but it's better now. Now I'm just bored.
I can't even be bothered to watch shitty
TV
. My energy level is, like, zero. No, it's more like negative ten.” Ruth pulled her hair out of its elastic and sighed. “Plus, I feel all, kinda, emotional. This morning I cried watching
Regis and Kelly
with my mom. There was something about little homeless kids in Thailand and I just lost it. Plus, my boobs hurt. Like before my period.”

“You think you're
PMS
-ing?” I asked cautiously. If she was, I wasn't going to hang around. A while ago, Ruth had thrown a stiletto-heeled boot at my head when I wouldn't hand over the remote. Other girls get irritable and weepy before their periods; Ruth gets psychotic. I had to have three stitches in my forehead after the boot episode. I scratched the bump where the scar was. Was it really only a month ago? It seemed longer. A lot longer.

“Um, Ruth,” I said cautiously. “You've had a period, right? Since, you know, Rick.”

Ruth looked at me as if I was insane. “Duh,” she said. “You remember. Pizza Day. You freaked out ‘cause I took your last tampon. And then the next day your period started and you had to get a pad from the school nurse.” She took a sip of ginger ale and belched loudly.

“Yeah, but—” I hesitated, wondering if she would figure it out on her own or if she was just in massive denial. Even Ruth can count to twenty-eight, but this was the first time she'd needed to. “Pizza Day was in October. November was
hot dogs.” I pulled my agenda out of my pack, opened it and held it out to her. “Look. Pizza Day—October 18. Hot Dog Day—November 16. Remember?” Ruth took one look at the agenda, threw it across the room, leaned over the side of the bed and puked into the ice-cream bucket.

When she was finished puking (it was mostly dry heaves, thank goodness) she started crying, and I left the desk chair and got her a damp washcloth and a glass of water from the bathroom. I curled up on the bed with her and stroked her blue hair away from her sweaty forehead. That's what my mom does when I'm sick and it always helps. I decided against asking her whether they had used condoms. It seemed like locking the barn door after the horse is gone, as Nana likes to say.

When she finally stopped sobbing, I wiped her face with the washcloth and got her to sip some water. I had the idea, even then, that hydration was important.

“I am so fucked,” she moaned.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “We've established that.”

She glared at me and took another sip of water. “It's not funny, Julia. I mean, what am I gonna do? Pete and Peggy will kill me. Or send me away. Look what they did to Jonah, and his biggest sin was listening to Miles Davis.” Ruth gulped and reached for the bucket again. I looked away while she retched.

“What about Rick?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“Are you going to tell him? That he's going to be a father?”

Ruth lay down and pulled the pillow over her head so her next words were muffled. It sounded as if she said, “I don't know.”

“You don't know?” I repeated.

She sat up suddenly, her face flushed, her hands balled into fists. “I don't know whether he's the father, okay? We were really drunk and a couple of his friends were in the room with us, and I think I did it with at least one other guy, but I don't know who. So, to answer your question, no, I won't be telling Rick. Or my parents. Or Jonah. Or anyone else.” Her eyes filled with tears again, and she disappeared under the covers. I could hear her sobbing, but I left her alone. I needed to think.

When we were about ten, Ruth and I had gotten into the habit of making all our decisions with the aid of a piece of ruled stationery with a wavy line drawn down the middle—pros to the left, cons to the right. Oh Henry! or Mars bar. Swimming or biking. Red shorts or blue. We were the Solomons of fifth grade, and by high school we were positively Delphic. Our classmates consulted us on everything. Is it okay to liberate cash from your mother's purse? Absolutely not. Mothers, in our experience, cataloged everything in their purses—tampons, money,
breath mints, lipstick. Should you have sex with your best friend's brother? Probably not, although my objectivity was compromised by the huge crush I had on Jonah. Left to our own devices, Ruth made disastrous decisions and I made boring ones. But the paper oracle never let us down as long as we did it together.

Ruth was in no condition to help, so I grabbed some paper out of her printer and started without her. I knew from experience that it wouldn't be long before she would get bored under the covers. One of the great things about Ruth is that she has a moth-flame relationship with catastrophe. She is more than a Drama Queen—she is a Drama Empress. Another great thing is that she's really creative, and I'm really pragmatic, so between the two of us we can usually figure something out. I started with the facts.

Ruth was pregnant. I was pretty sure about that, but I wrote down
Home Pregnancy Test?
anyway. Under
PRO
I wrote
Know for sure
. Under
CON
I wrote
Where to buy? False results? Cost?
and
Know for sure
. The
Know for sures
canceled each other out, which left zero pros and three cons. I could always use my Big Mac money to go across town to a big chain drugstore and buy the test. And the false result thing was mostly about false negatives anyway. I was pretty sure we didn't need to worry about that. Ruth was still snuffling, so there was no one to argue with my logic. Next I wrote
Father?
Then I crossed it out. I didn't think I'd win that argument.
Underneath that I wrote the word
Abortion
. I sat and stared at it until Ruth surfaced. She wandered off to the bathroom, and when she got back I saw that she had washed her face and brushed her hair and put on some mascara. It was safe to say the crying was over.

One good thing about being at Ruth's is that her mom never sticks her head in the door and asks what you're doing or whether you'd like something to eat or drink. That happens a lot at my house. Ruth's parents leave her alone with her phone and her computer, which Pete checks every once in a while for evidence of skanky surfing. If he ever finds anything really raunchy, he yells at her and shuts her down for a few days. Ruth is pretty stealthy when it comes to computers. She knows how to hide her tracks. Unlike her dad, who watches porn on her computer when she's at school. Ruth says that bit of information may come in handy some day.

She sat down next to me and looked at what I'd written. Then she grabbed the pen and paper away from me, scribbled for a few seconds and handed it back. Under
Abortion
she had written
Pro
=
It's My Life
and
Con
=
Eternal Damnation
. Ruth doesn't mess around with the paper prophet. I could have added to the list, but I already knew which way we were headed.