Read If You're Not Yet Like Me for Free Online Page B

bleed and then she will cry. But none of those lines help; they’re no better than spit, something to toss across your tongue when you’re bored. And when you swallow, it feels like you’re cannibalizing yourself. How long until there’s nothing left?
    The new world functions on email and takeout, and after Zachary walked away from me, I took full advantage. For two months after the break-up, I barely left my apartment. The tissues piled up by my bedside, as did the empty bottles of liquor, and the pizza boxes, and the white paper pails that once held General Tsao’s Chicken. During that dark period, the General was my only beloved.
    One night, sufficiently pickled by vodka, I decided I needed some fresh air, that walking to a bar to finish the evening off would do me some good. If anything, I needed to escape the mirrors in my apartment.
    At the bar down the block, I ordered the specialty: a gin gimlet with a slab of cucumber instead of a straw. The cold liquor was sliding down my throat—oh, sweet relief—when I heard a familiar voice.
    “Joellyn.”
    Dickens slid onto the stool next to me. His hair was shorter, but there were those cheekbones, those eyes, those shoulders, that jaw.
    “Look at you,” he said.
    “Look at me,” I said. “Bloated.”
    “You’re already drunk. Bad day?”
    “You could say that.”
    “Poor thing.” He smiled. A girl could sleep on the pink of those gums. I imagined swinging from the punching bag of his uvula.
    “Why don’t you come home with me, big boy?” I said.
    T hree weeks later, my period did not arrive as scheduled. I maintained a willful ignorance, though I’m not sure how—usually, my menstrual cycle is like a German train: always on time. I told myself it was stress. Not from heartbreak, from the absence of Zachary, which my night with Dickens only magnified. Oh no, definitely not. It had to be work, I told myself, and finances. I’d sent a copy of my unpaid cell phone bill to my mother with a Post-It note that read, “I’m screwed!!!” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked her for a hand out. I also worried I might have some disease. A female one. If I was dying, I preferred to delay the prognosis.
    Of course, from the beginning, the word baby flitted around my mind like a song I was trying to forget. I didn’t take it seriously. Not right away. Part of me figured you might disappear, that my period might come if I just wished hard enough. I was almost as bad as one of those teens who gives birth in the bathroom stall during Spring Formal. A girl won’t bleed, and then she will cry.
    I waited a whole month before I took a test. I’d already replaced my morning and afternoon coffees with herbal tea, and whenever someone offered me a drink, I declined. I had opened a savings account. Not because I was imagining you—or maybe I was—but because I’d hit rock bottom with Dickens, and I was ready to crawl my way out. The sun would hurt my eyes, and I’d adjust.
    When the test read positive, I laughed.
    I’m sure, Baby, you’ve done the math. Zachary isn’t your father.
    “But, Joellyn—!” you want to cry out. Can’t say I blame you.
    I thought about sending the pregnancy test to my mother, with that same note: “I’m screwed!!!” I was screwed. By Dickens. Thus, you. Instead, I threw the test and its box away, and I said, “Well, here we are.” You were listening, I knew. I couldn’t just get rid of you.

    I n a few weeks, you will turn from fetus to baby, and you will have a baby mind to match your baby babble, your toothless crying. You’ll find me with your baby mouth. And when that mouth does learn to speak, you won’t call me Joellyn.
    For now, all I can do is instruct. People talk to the dead, so why not to the unborn? Be careful, I want to say. I’m sorry, I want to say. Things will turn out differently for you.
    Let this be a final story, then, from your dear Joellyn. I’m telling it to soften the blow of revelation. Maybe, by