Mourning Becomes Cassandra by Christina Dudley Page B

threw up and passed out, and when I woke up, just Mike was there, listening to some music. I said I had this monster headache, and he made me this drink that made me feel better, and we got to talking. About a month later I got pregnant.”
    I thought of my own high school days; they seemed so Mayberryish that I was glad Nadina didn’t ask me about them. My friends and I had gravitated toward the nerdier activities: band, yearbook, drama, youth group, journalism, French Club. There were of course kids at Bellevue who drank every weekend or got stoned or even just smoked, but they had their clique and we had ours. And my relationship with Troy—so gradual, so solidly based in friendship and mutual enjoyment and respect. It was like Nadina and I didn’t come from the same universe.
    Maybe because, for a brief time, I had been a mother, I found myself wondering if Nadina’s mom had pictured this story for her daughter. “What does your mom do?”
    Nadina spun one of her many silver rings around and around her finger. “She works in some assisted-living place. It stinks in there, but the old people are kind of sweet. Nobody visits them much because after about ten minutes you want to get the hell out. My mom works the graveyard shift. I see her mostly weekends.”
    “Do you still hang around with your friends, now that you live with Mike?”
    “Not as much. Mike likes me around when he’s around. I like the girls at this school, though. Some of them. I think we’re going to see a movie this weekend.”
    “Do you like movies?” I asked. The Twenty Questions was getting a little old, but heck, that’s getting to know adolescents. “It’d be fun to hang out a little every week, and we could see a movie or get coffee again or walk the lake or whatever.”
    “That’d be cool,” said Nadina. She even smiled a little at me. “I like all those things.” For whatever reasons—maybe we never get over high school emotionally—approval from teenagers feels ten times more rewarding than approval from other age groups.
    I smiled back at her. “And they’ve got some kick-off activity planned for us and some of the other mentors and students next Saturday. Sailing, I think, and a barbecue.”
    “Fuck that!” Nadina exclaimed, quickly clapping her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, but I wanna hurl even when I go on the merry-go-round. No way am I going on a boat.”
    “I get seasick, too,” I assured her, “But Dramamine works really well.” I blushed, thinking she probably could tell me all about drugs, over-the-counter or otherwise. “I’ll bring some for you, but you have to come totally sober. No mixing drugs on my watch.”
    “Ay ay, Captain,” Nadina saluted me.
    In the meantime we agreed to go for a walk the following Tuesday, and I promised to try to borrow a dog, so she could lay some of her Petco knowledge on me. I couldn’t honestly say I was looking forward to it—would I have to think of another 150 questions to hold us through another hour? That meant if we spent an hour a week together, I would need to generate…let me see…over 5000 questions before school got out in June.
    My thoughts in a swirl, I headed home, wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into.

Chapter Seven: Of Cheesecake and Stained Glass
    When I woke Wednesday morning, there was an email from Kyle with the poker face subject: “Your chapter.” It took me a while to work up the nerve to open it; I showered, ate breakfast, answered some other messages, including two from Raquel, even cracked open one of the many books on grief or widowhood or losing a child that everyone under the sun had given me. For open house that week I’d knuckled down and invited our old couple friends the Luckers, and I figured I needed to do emotional prep. It was slogging through the “Old Friends, New Beginnings” chapter that chased me back to the email.
    No salutation, of course.
    Reason everyone thinks about technology and special effects so