I think she was trying to be funny, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I simply shrugged.
“Can I make you something else?”
“I’m not that hungry.”
She brought her lips together before scanning the room, as if searching for magic words that would make me chipper again. “Oh, I almost forgot to ask. Did you call your parents?”
“No. I was going to call them earlier, but you took the phone cord with you.”
“You could call them after dinner.”
“I guess.”
She used her fork to cut a bite of turkey. “How are your studies going?” she asked. “You’re behind in your homework and you haven’t been doing that well on your quizzes lately.”
“I’m trying,” I answered, even though I really wasn’t.
“How about math? Remember that you have some pretty big tests coming up before Christmas break.”
“I hate math and geometry is stupid. Why does it matter whether I know how to measure the area of a trapezoid? It’s not like I’m ever going to need to use that in my real life.”
I heard her sigh. Watched her cast about again. “Did you write your history paper? I think that’s also due next week.”
“It’s almost done,” I lied. I’d been assigned to do a report on Thurgood Marshall, but I hadn’t even started it.
I could feel her eyes on me, wondering whether to believe me.
* * *
Later that night, she tried again.
I was lying in bed with Maggie-bear. I’d retreated to my room after dinner, and she was standing in the doorway, dressed in her pajamas.
“Have you thought about getting some fresh air?” my aunt asked. “Like maybe going for a walk or bike ride before you start doing your homework tomorrow?”
“There isn’t anywhere to go. Almost everything is closed for the winter.”
“How about the beach? It’s peaceful this time of year.”
“It’s too cold to go to the beach.”
“How would you know? You haven’t been outside in days.”
“That’s because I have too much homework and too many chores.”
“Have you thought about trying to meet someone closer to your own age? Maybe make some friends?”
At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Make friends?”
“Why not?”
“Because no one my age lives here.”
“Of course they do,” she said. “I showed you the school.”
The village had a single school that served children from kindergarten through high school; we’d ridden past it during the tour of the island. It wasn’t quite the single-room schoolhouse I’d seen in reruns of Little House on the Prairie, but it wasn’t much more than that, either.
“I guess I could head to the boardwalk, or maybe hit the clubs. Oh wait, Ocracoke doesn’t have either of those things.”
“I’m just saying that it might be good for you to talk to someone besides me or Gwen. It’s not healthy to stay so isolated.”
No doubt about it. But the simple fact was that I hadn’t seen a single teenager in Ocracoke since I’d arrived, and—oh yeah—I was pregnant, which was supposed to be a secret, so what would be the point anyway?
“Being here isn’t good for me, either, but no one seems to care about that.”
She adjusted her pajamas, as though searching for words in the fabric, and decided to change the subject.
“I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea to get you a tutor,” she said. “Definitely for geometry, but maybe for your other classes, too. To review your paper, for instance.”
“A tutor?”
“I believe I know someone who’d be perfect.”
I suddenly had visions of sitting beside some ancient geezer who smelled of Old Spice and mothballs and liked to talk about the good old days. “I don’t want a tutor.”
“Your finals are in January, and there are multiple exams in the next three weeks, including some big ones. I promised your parents that I’d do my best to make sure you don’t have to repeat your sophomore year.”
I hated when adults did the logic-and-guilt thing, so I retreated into the obvious. “Whatever.”
She raised an eyebrow, remaining silent. Then, finally, “Don’t forget that we have church on Sunday.”
How could I forget that? “I remember,” I finally muttered.
“Perhaps we could pick out a Christmas tree afterward.”
“Super,” I said, but all I really wanted was to pull the covers over my head in the hope of making her leave. But it wasn’t necessary; Aunt Linda turned away. A moment later, I heard her bedroom door close, and I knew that I’d be alone the rest of the night, with only my own dark thoughts to keep me company.
* * *
As miserable as the rest of the week was, Sundays were the absolute worst. Back in Seattle, I didn’t really mind going to church because there was a family there named the Taylors with four boys, all of them from one to a few years older than me. They were boy-band perfect, with white teeth and hair that always looked blow-dried. Like us, they sat in the front row—they were always on the left while we were on the right—and I’d sneak peeks at them even when I was supposed to be praying. I couldn’t help it. I’d had a massive crush on one or the other pretty much as long as I could remember, even though I never actually spoke to any of them. Morgan had better luck; Danny Taylor, one of the middle ones, who at the time was also a pretty good soccer player, took her out for ice cream one Sunday after church. I was in eighth grade at the time and desperately jealous that he’d asked her, not me. I remember sitting in my room and staring at the clock, watching the minutes pass; when Morgan finally got home, I begged her to tell me what Danny was like. Morgan, being Morgan, simply shrugged and said that he wasn’t her type, which made me want to strangle her. Morgan had guys practically drooling if she so much as walked down the sidewalk or sipped a Diet Coke in the food court at the local mall.
The point is, back home there was something interesting to see at church—more specifically, four very cute somethings—and that made the hour pass quickly. Here, though, church was not only a chore but an all-day event. There was no Catholic church in Ocracoke; the nearest one was St. Egbert’s in Morehead City, and that meant catching the ferry at seven in the morning. The ferry generally took two and a half hours to reach Cedar Island, and from there, it was another forty minutes to the church itself. The service was at eleven, which meant we had to wait yet another hour for it to begin, and the mass lasted until noon. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ferry back to Ocracoke didn’t leave until four in the afternoon, which meant killing even more time.
Oh, we’d have lunch with Gwen afterward, since she always came with us. Like my aunt, she also used to be a nun, and she considered attending services on Sundays the highlight of her week. She was nice and all, but ask any teenager how much they enjoy eating lunch with a couple of fifty-odd-year-old former nuns, and you can probably guess what it was like. After that, we’d go shopping, but it wasn’t fun shopping like at the mall or the Seattle waterfront. Instead, they’d drag me to Wal-Mart for supplies—think flour, shortening, eggs, bacon, sausage, cheese, buttermilk, various flavored coffees, and other baking stuff in bulk—and after that, we’d visit garage sales, where they would search for inexpensive books by best-selling authors and movies on videocassette that they could rent to people on Ocracoke. Added to the late-afternoon ferry ride, all of that meant that we wouldn’t get back to the house until almost seven, when the sun had long since set.