My Julie

Fiction by Abby Henry

Evan’s girlfriend Julie moved into our house in the middle of September. Her parents had kicked her out for being a big fat sinner. That’s what Evan told me anyway.

Sometimes she would wake up at the crack of dawn to make me eggs with the runny insides and two pieces of toast with raspberry jam. Evan told her she didn’t have to treat me like I was a prince but she still did. I pretended I had a golden crown on and a sword in my pocket.

Julie had a big old stomach with a baby inside. The baby looked a lot like a blob, though. She showed me a picture. It had a head with a tiny nose, but the rest of its body looked too small to be anything real.

Julie one time told me that there’s a thin little cord that babies get their food through. She said that whatever she ate went straight to the baby, so that’s how come she had to be careful with her calories.

One time at dinner, Mama told Evan he needed to start saving his money because four mouths is harder to feed than three, and I told her that it’s five mouths actually. On account of Julie’s blob baby.

“Oh, shut it,” Mama told me. I smiled real big because I was smarter than her for once, and I turned the TV on to the cooking channel.

“Don’t be watching that shit,” Evan said to me.

“Hush your mouth,” Mama told him. She flicked him in the back of his head.

“How come?” I asked. My mouth was full of peas.

“You’ll get fat,” he said. “From all that baking, you know?”

Julie rolled her eyes.

“He’s a liar,” she said. “And who cares if you get fat? I sure as hell don’t.” She rubbed her belly soft and smiled.

“I hope this baby is fat and full of food,” she said. “I hope they’re a baker and they use lots of butter and make beautiful cakes with roses and gold.”

Evan shook his head.

When Mama was gone on night shifts, Julie slept in Evan’s room, but I didn’t say anything. Most of the time, though, Evan got his room all to himself. Mama asked him if he thought it might be nicer to let Julie have the big room instead of the couch since she was the one with the baby, but Evan said no because he can’t sleep on thin mattresses.

I asked Mama why don’t they just sleep in the same room like her and Daddy used to, and she said it was because they weren’t married yet.

“How come?” I asked. I thought about Julie wearing a long beautiful dress with flowers and diamonds and lace. I thought that she might let me be the ring-bearer like I was at Aunt Sissy’s wedding. I could pin a flower on my shirt and everything. I would do anything Julie asked me to.

“Evan’s a cheap ass,” Mama told me. I nodded with a serious face because I agreed.

“Evan, how come you’re a cheap ass?” I asked him later.

“Who told you that?” He was chewing on something black and ugly.

“Mama,” I said. “She said that’s how come you and Julie aren’t married.”

“Well it’s not,” he said. “I just don’t believe in marriage.” I thought about that for a while, about how some people say they don’t believe in things that are right in front of them. Like how one time Mama told Aunt Sissy she didn’t think God was up there on account of Daddy leaving us. And I said well who created the Earth then? And Mama started to cry.

“Julie couldn’t fit in a wedding dress anyways,” Evan said after a while. “Her stomach’s too goddamn big.”

On the Friday before Halloween, Julie picked me up from school. She drove Evan’s ugly truck and had to scoot the seat back far to make her belly fit. She told me that she had just gone to the doctor and they said the baby looked all healthy and good. She told me that Evan didn’t come because he had to work. She cried when she said it, so I held her hand, and then she took me to get soda from the gas station. She said I could get any that I wanted even if it had caffeine, so I picked Dr. Pepper. I’d never had one, but I knew they were Evan’s favorite.

When we got home, I went to my room and wrote “I love Julie Bowman” twelve times at the bottom of my math homework. Then I scribbled it out and drew dinosaurs on top, so no one could see what it said.

For Halloween, I dressed up as Peter Pan. Julie was Wendy. Mama was working, so I went trick-or-treating with Julie and Evan instead. I got lots of chocolate and a tiny Bible that was safety-pinned to a Skittles bag. I tucked the Bible inside my pocket and gave the Skittles to Julie.

“Thank you so much, Ty,” she told me. She ruffled my hair. “I can’t wait ‘til my baby is born and we can dress up together. I saw online this mama who dressed up as a big kangaroo and wore her baby on her chest like a little joey. I think I wanna do something like that.”

“That would be funny,” I told her.

“What about me?” Evan asked. “What would I get to be?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Julie said. “You don’t like dressing up all that much.”

“Yeah, Evan,” I said. “You don’t like dressing up at all. You coulda been Captain Hook with us.”

“I’m grown, Tyler,” he told me. He rolled his eyes at Julie, but she didn’t see.

“You don’t want this baby to love me,” he said to her after a while.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. Then Evan told her that this is what she always does and this is why he makes her sleep on the couch because she thinks it’s not his baby it’s only hers. And I ran up to the next house so I wouldn’t have to hear him yell.

Lizzie at school told me I smell like rot and that’s why no girls wanna kiss me. I told her I don’t need any girls because I have a girlfriend called Julie and we’re gonna get married and she’s gonna wear a long white dress with flowers and diamonds and lace. And I told her that we trick-or-treated together and that sometimes we carpool.

And then I told Lizzie that my Julie goes to another school and that’s how come she’s never seen her. I crossed my fingers that she didn’t know Evan’s girl was named Julie and that I was telling a lie. I don’t think that she did. She didn’t say anything to me.

One time Evan and Julie went out together when Mama was gone, so I stayed home alone. Evan said they would be out for an hour and that I needed to suck it up and watch the house. Julie let me borrow her phone in case of an emergency. So I stayed right next to the window with a blanket over my head and her phone in my hand. I hid my Bible under there too.

Evan and Julie weren’t back in an hour. They weren’t even back in two. I heard noises in the house that sounded like killers so I opened my Bible to the verse where Jesus says he’s always with us. Matthew 28:20. Mama showed me it once at bedtime. But the text was so small I could barely read it.

I waited a while before calling Mama because I didn’t wanna disturb her or anything. I’d never called her when she was at work before.

“Hey, Julie,” she said. “I really can’t talk right–”

“Mama?” I said. I was crying real hard because I was scared and my voice was shaking bad.

“Tyler?” she asked. She sounded nervous. “What’s wrong, baby?”

I told her that Evan had left me and that he said he’d be back but he wasn’t. And she said that she would call him immediately. And that she loved me and she was sorry for raising such a bully.

Evan and Julie came home twenty minutes later. Julie’s face was red and splotchy and Evan looked angry. He hit me hard with his left hand and told me to go to bed now or else. I gave Julie her phone and went.

I laid in my bed for a while until Julie came in. She told me she was sorry and I cried again and she held me close to her chest.

“Sometimes, Evan scares me,” she said. Her voice was all shaky.

“I know,” I told her. “Me too.” Julie put her chin on top of my head.

“I get scared that he won’t like being a daddy sometimes,” she said.

In November, Julie went to the doctor and they told her the baby might have a problem with its cord. Mama told me it’s like when there’s a kink in the garden hose and no water can get out. But except, in this case, it was food and breathing.

Julie came home crying that day, and Evan held her on the couch. I thought that was weird because Evan had never done that before. I guess they were both scared.

Mama told them that everything would be fine because this happens lots of times at her work, and they just have to slip the cord off when they deliver the baby.

“But don’t they have to go to the NICU when they’re born?” Julie asked.

“Sometimes, Julie,” Mama said. “But lots of babies have to.” Julie held her head in her hands, and Evan kissed her hair.

A few days later, in the middle of the night, I heard Julie and Evan fighting in his bedroom.

“Christ, Julie!” he yelled. “And what if it does die? Then what? What do you want me to say?”

I didn’t understand what they were arguing for but Julie told him to please stop yelling. And then she said she didn’t know what she wanted him to say but that he was scaring her bad. And then I heard a sound like a slap and Julie started to cry. So I pulled the blanket over my head and counted to three-hundred-and-two.

At school, I told Lizzie that I was gonna be an uncle.

“No, you’re not,” she said. She was laughing.

“Yes, I am, Lizzie!” I told her. “My brother Evan is a grown-up. He’s nineteen and his girlfriend is gonna have a baby.”

“Oh, wow,” she said. She picked at her nail polish. It was green.

“Are you gonna be Uncle Tyler then?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I told her.

“That sounds weird,” she said. She laughed again, and I wanted to cry.

The rest of November was sad and quiet. Julie spent lots of time alone in Evan’s room, and she didn’t really talk to me anymore. She kept the door unlocked so Mama could bring her vitamins and food and water when she was home.

“They’ll help the baby,” Mama told her.

“How do you know?” Julie asked.

“I just do, Julie,” Mama said. “It’s my job. Take them please.”

“Okay,” she said. And she swallowed them with water.

In art class once, I made a painting of a kangaroo with a heart-shaped pouch. I folded it up and tucked it inside my Halloween Bible and slipped it under Evan’s door. I don’t know if Julie ever saw it because she didn’t say anything, but I hope that she did. I colored it pink and orange just for her.

Julie’s baby was born on the sixteenth of December with no heartbeat and the cord tight around its neck. I think I was in math class when it happened. Mama said she’d never seen a baby so gray before.

They cut the baby from Julie’s stomach because they thought they could save it but they couldn’t. I learned that when your baby won’t cry, the nurses hit it in the back or rub its chest real hard. I imagined that’s what Mama and the nurses had to do, but I never asked. Everything sounded too scary. I thought about Julie screaming and watching her baby be hit and hooked up to tubes and tossed around. And I thought about how Evan wasn’t there. And I wanted to kill him for it.

Mama said Julie lost a lot of blood. A gallon or more. She told Aunt Sissy that the nurses were running around like it was the end of the world or something. She said that it felt like a real tragedy. And that she’d seen so many women bleed but never like this.

Mama told Aunt Sissy that she knew Julie was gonna die, and that made me angry. Because if you knew someone was gonna die, why wouldn’t you do anything about it? Why wouldn’t you scream and shake them back to life? Or hook them up to the tubes?

And then I remembered what Mama’d said about God, and I thought that maybe she was right. Because if God were real why would he kill my Julie? And why would my Daddy run away? And why would Evan still be mean old Evan?

When I went back to school after Christmas, Lizzie asked me if I was an uncle yet. I told her no, and she said she knew I was a liar. And I told her that I didn’t ever lie. And then I pinched her skin so hard she bled.

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