Skye Falling Read online

  “When did you get back?” she asks.

  “Week ago.”

  “Cool. How was…Africa, right?”

  “Yeah. Hot.”

  She looks at me for a few seconds, like she’s waiting for me to say more. I don’t. I suppose I could make more of an effort, but I find small talk to be a kind of torture on par with waterboarding, and doubly so with people I don’t even like. Triply so with people I once trusted who, as it turned out, couldn’t actually be counted on.

  “Okay, then,” she says, rolling her eyes. She looks at Viva. “I saved that print for you. It’s in the back.”

  Viva looks at me. “Are you okay on your own for a minute?” she asks, as if I’m completely socially inept.

  “Of course,” I say, muchly offended, as they walk off.

  So now I’m standing there alone, and I suddenly feel eyes on me. I get super self-conscious and can’t figure out what to do with my hands, so I put them in my pockets, all casual, like hey whatevs. But that feels awkward, so I stop and take out my cellphone to text someone. I can’t think of anyone I actually want to text, though, so I put my phone back in my pocket, as another wave of nausea rolls through me. I decide to look for a bathroom in which to puke.

  Down a narrow hallway, I find one. I try to vomit, but nothing comes up. So, I pee and then head back. As I’m re-entering the room, I see my brother standing at the refreshments table, stuffing cheese in his mouth. I back out, quickly, before he sees me, pressing myself against a wall.

  I can’t believe this nigga came to find me. He’s annoying but he’s also lazy and rarely has the follow-through to finish an anecdote, let alone orchestrate an ambush. I’m halfway impressed, to be honest. But also I’m searching for an exit.

  There’s no door I can get to without my brother seeing me but there is a window down the hall in the direction I just came from. I head straight for it. It’s kind of high off the ground, but I think I can hoist myself up if I use my core like they made me do that one time I tried yoga.

  “Excuse me.”

  I glance over my shoulder. Standing there is the very serious-looking kid I saw viewing adult content earlier. She has braces, and hair done up in plump, shiny cornrows that curl under where they touch her shoulders, and curious, russet-brown eyes.

  “Are you Skye Ellison?”

  “Nah.”

  She frowns at me. “Yes, you are.”

  I glance toward the studio, out of which my brother is probably going to emerge any second, see me, and start bitching about how I never visit our disabled mother, how I suck at family and, really, at relationships of all varieties.

  The kid is still staring at me.

  Maybe she’s right about me being Skye. After all, I am considering jumping out of a window to escape a pretty standard family obligation. Plus, my mouth tastes like sweat and rancid bourbon and…well, balls, frankly. I’m probably gonna hurl any second. All of that sounds a lot like Skye.

  “Okay, yeah,” I tell her. “Fine. Who are you?”

  A look passes across the kid’s face, part I knew it and part oh shit and then she says, “Okay. Well. I’m Vicky. I used to be your egg.”

  2

  I was twenty-six. I had just returned to Philly after a couple of weeks in London. I was standing in line at Saad’s, probably trying to decide between falafel and lamb shawarma, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Assuming it was Some Nigga™, I turned around, ready to give him my best the fuck you want? look, and saw Cynthia.

  Cynthia had been my best friend at summer camp. It was a day camp, run from the basement of Holy Sanctuary Church of God, which was my family’s church, and I attended from the age of five until the age of thirteen. On the first day of camp in the summer of 1989, when I was newly nine, Cynthia came and sat down next to me at the long breakfast table and whispered, “I hope they don’t make us read Revelations in Bible study. I read some of it this summer. It’s scary. I don’t think fourth-graders can handle it.”

  “Are you in this group?” I asked her.

  She nodded, her pink barrettes bouncing at the ends of her plaits.

  “So, aren’t you in fourth grade?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but I’m more of a fifth-grader, emotionally.”

  I didn’t know what that meant. But it sounded cool and I was nervous about not making friends that summer. My regular bestie, Tasha, always spent summers at her grandparents’ house in Wilmington, and my usual camp bestie, Adina, who I’d rolled with every summer since we were five, hadn’t shown up that year. So, I decided right then and there to claim Cynthia as my own. I nodded and said, “I’m pretty much a sophomore, emotional-wise.”

  She laughed, and I laughed, too, even though I wasn’t entirely sure what the joke was.

  We were lightning-fast friends. The kind of homies who held hands while jumping into the deep end of the public pool, who sat together at every single camp activity, and who sometimes called each other first thing in the morning to coordinate matching outfits. We had a lot in common. We were both dark-skinned girls who got teased for it. We were both honor roll students who could memorize long Bible verses with ease. We both liked listening to really sad love songs and making ourselves cry as hard as we could.

  Like many kids who showed up for camp there, Cynthia’s family didn’t go to our church. She didn’t go to my school or live within walking distance. Because of this, I only ever saw her at camp. After a few years, she stopped coming to camp and I lost touch with her. I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years before that day in Saad’s. Still, somehow, I recognized her instantly.

  “Hey, Cynthia.”

  “Skye! Oh my God, girl!”

  She asked me how life was, what I was up to. I told her I’d just got back from abroad and she reminded me how I’d always talked about wanting to travel a lot when we were kids. Instead of taking our food to go, like we’d both planned to, we sat together at a booth and spent an hour catching up.

  “Do you have a significant other?” she asked me, which I took to mean that my recently shaved head and new septum piercing were making me look exactly as gay as I was going for, otherwise she probably would’ve just said “husband” or “boyfriend” like most straights do.

  I told her no.

  “Kids?”

  Oh God, no.

  She was on her second husband, she said. I thought back to camp, when she’d agreed to go steady with this dark-skinned boy whose name I don’t remember, fifteen minutes after breaking up with this light-skinned boy whose name I don’t remember.

  She said she didn’t have kids but that she wanted them “very, very much.”

  Once we were all caught up, and had spent a little while reminiscing, she had to get back to work. It was Saturday, but she said she rarely took a whole weekend off.

  “Let’s get together sometime,” she said.

  I figured she meant it in a polite, we’re not really going to do that though way, so I said sure and we exchanged numbers.

  A week later, she called and invited me out for coffee. This time there was no summer camp nostalgia. She got straight to the point. She said she had been diagnosed as infertile, after several years of trying to get pregnant. She said her eggs were no good and that she was looking for an egg donor. She wondered if I might be interested in being that.

  I wasn’t planning to have kids of my own. I’d decided at age six, when my Penny Pee-Pee doll whizzed on my favorite Wonder Woman T-shirt, causing me to fly into a rage, twist off her head, and throw it out a window, that babies weren’t for me. Thus, I did not feel very attached to my ova. She told me she could pay me five thousand dollars. Which: Um, yes, please. I’d been dreaming of a trip to sub-Saharan Africa, where I’d never been, and five grand would make it possible. I couldn’t think of a reason not to do it. But I did hesitate for a second.

  “Why me?
”

  “You’re intelligent,” she said. “And funny.”

  ALL TRUE.

  “And we have some of the same features, physically. One thing, though. Do you have any cancer in your family? Parents, aunts or uncles, or grandparents, especially?”

  I shook my head. “No. None of those people. And no one else as far as I know.”

  She smiled. “Good. So, what do you say?”

  I said yes. Obviously.

  * * *

  —

  I stare at the kid as the ghost of bourbons past wails in my belly. I close my eyes, willing it to stay down. It’s not going to. I cover my mouth and sprint to the bathroom.

  I’m throwing up stuff I don’t remember eating and between heaves, out of the corner of my eye, I see the kid standing there, watching me. I forgot to close the stall door and I feel grateful to the kid for not looking disgusted or horrified, but instead curious, borderline amused even. I stop upchucking for a sec.

  “You’re really my egg?”

  The kid nods.

  “Well, then, do me a favor and hold back my hair.”

  The kid comes into the stall, grabs my locs on either side of my head and holds them back, and my vomiting resumes.

  After a minute or two, the bathroom door opens and I hear a young woman’s voice. “Vicky, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” the kid says, sounding totally sincere. “I’m good.”

  * * *

  —

  Half an hour later, the kid and I are sitting in a booth in a fancy hot dog shop, which is apparently a thing. Thanks, hipsters. The kid has a hot dog loaded with relish and mustard and she’s eating it from the middle out, instead of end to end, which I have never seen anybody do, and I wonder if I’m dreaming this whole day while still passed out. If I am, I just hope someone turns me on my side so I don’t drown in my own vomit like Hendrix.

  The young woman from the bathroom is sitting at a table nearby, drinking a soda and keeping an eye on us.

  “Who’s that?” I ask the kid, sipping seltzer. “Your babysitter?”

  “Babysitter,” she says, “b-a-b-y-s-i-t-t-e-r.” Then she shakes her head no. “That’s my stepsister.”

  “Oh. So, your parents got divorced?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And now Cynthia’s remarried?” That would put her on her third husband, which is 1980s-Dynasty levels of husbands.

  “No. My dad’s remarried. My mom died.”

  At first, the words don’t really register. I spend at least a couple of seconds staring blankly at the kid. Then I’m like: “Cynthia…died?”

  She nods. “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” I say. Which is probably not the proper response. I honestly don’t know what to say, though. No one I was friends with as a kid has ever died, at least no one that I know about. I think of Cynthia, holding my hand as we ventured out into the deep end. I feel sad. But also…I don’t know…disturbed? Cynthia was only nine months older than me. Also, in addition to sad and disturbed, I’m a little bit nauseated still. And now I start to worry that the look of sympathy I’m trying to give the kid resembles my I’m about to puke face. I force the corners of my mouth down as hard as I can, trying to unambiguously convey sadness instead of queasiness. But I guess it doesn’t work because the kid looks at me like she’s afraid I’m having a stroke.

  “What’s wrong with your face?”

  “Nothing. I’m just really sad for you about your mother.”

  “Oh,” she says. “It’s okay. It was, like, two years ago almost.”

  I relax the corners of my mouth a little. I sort of want to ask how Cynthia died. But I don’t know if you’re supposed to ask kids questions like that.

  “You were friends with her?”

  I nod. “We went to the same day camp for a few summers. Once we got too old to go anymore, we lost touch.”

  The kid takes another bite of her hot dog and is quiet for a moment while she chews, then she says, “So, you got paid to do it?”

  “That’s right.”

  She nods, like she knew that. “How much?”

  “I don’t remember exactly,” I tell her. It’s a lie but it feels like the right thing to say.

  “Did you ever think about it?” she asks. “I mean, about me? Like, afterward?”

  “Sure. But in all my imaginings, it never once occurred to me that you might be a person who would eat a hot dog from the middle out instead of end to end.”

  She looks down at the hot dog. “This way is better, though.”

  I shake my head. “Can’t be.”

  “The way I do it,” she says, “the meat stays even in the bun, so when you get to the last bite, it’s equal. It’s, like, meat-bun balanced. But when you get to the last bite, there’s always more bun left than meat. Don’t you hate that?”

  Holy shit, I do hate that! I’ve hated that my entire life! “Wow,” I say. “My egg growed up to be a genius.” Possibly only about hot-dog-related things, but I think we can all agree that’s not nothing.

  “Genius. G-e-n-i-u-s.”

  I want to ask why she’s spelling things, but I’m worried that she already told me and in my haziness I’ve forgotten. I must look confused, though, because she says, “I’m practicing for the spelling bee. I’m West Philly Montessori seventh-grade champ.” She sips her soda.

  “That’s impressive.”

  She shrugs. “There’s not that many good spellers in my grade.”

  “Oh.” Well, there’s still the hot dog thing, I guess.

  “Where did you go?” she asks me.

  “To school?”

  She nods.

  “Hamilton, for middle school,” I tell her.

  “You’re from West Philly?”

  “Fifty-seventh and Larchwood.”

  “You still live there?”

  “I left the day I turned eighteen. But I still stay in West Philly when I’m in town. My friend owns a bed-and-breakfast not that far from here.”

  She’s watching me intently now and I’m sure she’s trying to read me. I don’t like it. Most people can’t get a read on me but I worry that if this kid really wanted to, she could, like a genetic knowing, passed to her through my DNA or some shit. Then she says, “Why’d you do it, though? Just for money or, like, other reasons, too?”

  I can see the kid is getting at something. I guess this is why she came: to know the reasons she exists. That feels heavy and I wish this conversation wasn’t happening.

  “How’d you find me?” I ask her, mostly to deflect.

  “Google.”

  “You searched ‘where is my egg donor’ and that led you right to me? Wow, technology really is on some next-level shit.”

  She laughs a little, and I like the sound of it more than I could have anticipated. “No, not like that,” she says. “I saw your name on these papers. I guess they were my mom’s. Then I looked you up on Facebook and saw you might be at that art thing today.”

  “Ah.”

  “So, why’d you give your eggs to some girl you only knew at camp?”

  “Jesus Christ, kid,” I say, because she’s legit relentless. “That’s a really heavy question.”

  “Sorry,” she says. “I’m a lot sometimes. People say that about me.”

  Same.

  “It was a long time ago,” I tell her. “I don’t really remember all the reasons. But probably some part of my twenty-six-year-old self thought it would be cool to help make a kid I could maybe someday meet but not have to, you know, support financially. Speaking of which, you know we’re going dutch here, right?”

  She laughs again. The sound gets up under my ribs in this weird way, like a vibration. And then, out of nowhere, this thought occurs to me: I have never seen such a perfect human being.

  “Exc
use me for a second,” I say. “I need to, um, vomit.” I get up and walk toward the bathroom. When I’m out of sight of the kid, I change course and head straight for the exit. I stop. The stepsister is right there by the door. Shit. I head for the bathroom instead.

  I’m halfway out the window when the door opens and the kid enters. She sees me making a break for it and now she looks horrified. Not curious. Not amused. Horrified. I knew we’d get there eventually.

  “You’re sneaking out?”

  “No!” I look down at myself, one leg already out the window, the other foot dangling above the sink. “Well, yes.”

  “Why?”

  Trouble is, I don’t really know why. Not entirely. I mean, obviously I can’t handle this. But going out a window to escape my brother is one thing. Going out a window to ditch a twelve-year-old girl seems extreme even to me. “Look. You seem like a nice kid. But I’m not really…you know…motherly.”

  “Yeah, that’s kinda obvious,” she says. “Good thing I don’t need a mother.”

  I’m not sure I believe her. People can be tricky when they’re trying to get something from you, especially if that something is love.

  The kid shakes her head. “Fine. Whatever. Just go.”

  I feel shame blossoming in my chest and I don’t like it. Maybe it would be better if I came back inside. Maybe the kid really isn’t looking for another mother. I mean, how many mothers does one girl need in a lifetime? I have one and, frankly, it’s too many! And even if she is…well…maybe I could be that. I mean, I might not make the best mother, but I probably wouldn’t be the worst. I could maybe pull off second mom in a pinch. I look at the kid. Take a deep breath. And climb a little farther out the window.

  “You’re still going?!”

  “What? You just said I could go!”

  Exasperated, the kid turns and storms out of the bathroom.

  This is the part where I’m supposed to go after her. But I don’t. I just sit there, half in, half out of the window, until some old lady comes in to pee, sees me, and frowns, all judgy, like she thinks I’m trying to dine and dash or some shit.