Fingerprints of You by Kristen-Paige Madonia Read Free Book Online

around,” I said, thinking he could balance out her anger with all that calmness he always had. “And I think I’ll buy the bus ticket first. If I use my own money, she won’t be able to do anything about it,” I said, because in addition to my allowance and the fives I’d been sneaking from her purse, Simon had started slipping me ten-dollar bills after he found out about the baby, and I hadn’t spent a dime of it, just in case.
    Next to me, Emmy nodded. “I like the way you think, Lem.” Emmy had her own money too. She had worked that summer babysitting a couple of kids who lived in her neighborhood, and she said she wanted to use every penny of it to get the hell out of Morgantown, even if it was just for a week or so.
    “It’s like they don’t understand we’re not kids anymore,” I told her. “I mean, I may not have a license, but I’ll have a baby and a diploma this time next year,” I said, and I meant it as a joke, a way to lighten the mood and verify my adult status, but once the words were out of my mouth I got a sick-to-my-stomach feeling that settled heavy in my lap.
    “I want to know about the dad,” Emmy said after a while.
    “My dad?” I asked, but she shook her head.
    “The baby’s dad. Does he know?”
    I thought of Johnny Drinko still in Virginia and how easily I let him have me in the back room of the tattoo shop that day. I’d never done it in a chair before, and I hadn’t been able to figure out where to put my legs, one foot hanging down toward the floor, searching for leverage, and the other awkwardly folded between Johnny’s knee and the armrest. He told me to bring both legs up to the seat as he reorganized mybody, and I ended up squatted above his lap like I was digging in the dirt. Burying treasure, or searching for it, maybe. He put both his hands on my waist then, pulling me onto him as he tried to find a rhythm. Eventually my leg fell asleep, a bloodless limb dangling.
    “He doesn’t know anything about me, really.” I sank down into my chair. “He was older. Twenty-seven, I think.” I imagined Johnny Drinko spending the rest of his life in that small town in Virginia inking big-boobed women with frizzy yellow perms and drinking beer with his buddies at dead ends in the county. “He tasted like cigarettes, and we did it in a chair where he worked. I sat on top,” I told her. I could feel Emmy looking at me, but I kept my eyes on my fingers as they traced circles around my belly button. “It didn’t feel very good,” I said finally.
    “Jesus Christ, Lemon,” she said, and I tried to decide if she thought I was disgusting, if she thought I was a slut, but then she said, “He sounds like such a scumbag,” which made me feel a little better. “So you’re not going to tell him, then?”
    “I wouldn’t know how to get a hold of him if I wanted to,” I lied. If I had decided to tell Johnny Drinko about the baby, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to track him down at the tattoo parlor, but it was easier to pretend the option didn’t exist. Stella had worked hard to talk me into believing my father would have made things worse for us, in the same way I was working hard to convince myself Johnny Drinko would make things worse for me, and by that time he lived in a world far too detached from mine to bridge the gap.

     
    In the morning I found Stella in the kitchen: Pop-Tart in the toaster, coffee in the mug, black with half a packet of sugar.It was Thanksgiving Day, and I still had sleep in my eyes as I pulled on a sweatshirt. She stirred the mug and then used the spoon to check her lipstick in the reflection. November was the month of Fire Engine Red. She first discovered the color in lipstick form, and she kept a tube of it everywhere important: one in her purse, one on the bathroom counter next to the bars of hotel soap she always took when we traveled, another tube on her dresser top, the tip blunted from use.
    “Fire Engine Red just sounds good,