Tell Me Everything

“Brownie blizzard, please.”

“What size?”

Kels looked at Melanie.

“Medium?” Melanie said. “And make it two.”

The Dairy Queen was empty. Outside, sunlight diffused through a thin layer of gray smog. Little traffic passed on the road. Ceiling fans spun lazily, forgotten ten years ago and never removed. Tattered signs advertised “new” ice cream flavors that had left the menu five years before.

Kels took a seat at a booth with her back to a wall. The pink plastic embraced her as she put her elbows atop the slightly sticky table.

Melanie joined her. “So, Kels, how are things with you?

“Fine.” Kels gave a thin smile. Why had she even scheduled this meeting? Now that Melanie was sitting there in front of her, swiping on a thin layer of chapstick, sunglasses perched atop her head, Kels felt her throat closing up, shutting out the words she had wanted to say so badly when she called Melanie in a panic, ready to cry for three days straight.

“When are finals?”

“Three weeks. But most of my teachers are making us start to study right now.”

“Are you stressed?”

Kels managed a short laugh. “You can’t even imagine.”

Melanie hadn’t seen the four hours of sleep a night in the past week, the times Kels turned the shower on at 2 a.m. so she could cry without her ten-year-old sister hearing her. She hadn’t seen the note Mr. Olivier had added to her last essay, asking whether everything was all right at home.

“It’s good practice for college finals.”

“Well, if I go to college.”

It wasn’t all right and it could never be all right again. But as Melanie looked up from her planner, her eyebrows contracting, Kels’s courage to tell her friend about it melted like soft serve ice cream on hot asphalt.

“Not go to college?”

Kels squirmed. “I’m not sure it’s the right fit for me anymore.”

It wouldn’t be, in about seven months.

“It’s not for everyone.” Melanie set her pen down. On her calendar, Kels couldn’t help but notice the sparkly pink sticker next to big, bouncy letters—Kels, ice cream.

Just a few more weeks until it would be too late.

“How are things with Matt?” Melanie asked.

“We actually aren’t together anymore.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“No, it was…stupid.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Kels hesitated. She’d had the weight of her secret behind her breastbone for weeks, keeping her up at night. It was impossible to tell anyone about it. Maybe Matt had been right. No one had to know…

“Not really,” she said in a small voice.

“Okay.” Melanie gave Kels a warm smile with a worried look behind the eyes. “You seem off. Is that what’s bothering you?”

“Yeah.” Kels cast around in her mind for something else—not Matt, not home, not the sick sense that something alive and slithering had taken over her stomach and made it hard to breathe and sleep and eat. “I’ve just missed you. When are your finals?”

Melanie referenced her planner. “Four…five weeks.” She rolled her eyes. “Except two professors are having theirs in three weeks, and in two of the other classes, we’ve only covered about—”

“Two medium brownie blizzards.”

“I’ll get them.” Relieved to be moving, Kels jumped up and crossed the empty store. The sleepy-looking employee behind the counter upended both cups, shaking them slightly, and then handed them to Kels.

“Thanks.” Kels contemplated the ice cream as she walked back to the table. She handed Melanie hers and slid back into her seat, studying the shapes of the brownie chunks barely visible beneath the ice cream surface.

“I wonder what makes it stay when they turn upside down,” she said absently. She turned the cup over.

When Kels was little, she had been fascinated with Dairy Queen ice cream. She’d begged her parents to buy her blizzards just to watch and laugh hysterically when employees upended them on the way out the window. She’d thought it was magic.

Now, as she studied it, forgetting for the moment that Melanie was there, all she could see was soft ice cream melting, clinging to the sides of the cup as it slid. A drop hung on the very edge, quivering.

Melanie’s hand caught it before it could splatter onto the table, and Melanie’s hand turned the cup right side up.

“Hey,” she said gently. “Don’t spill that on my planner.”

Something motherly in the gesture and in the way Melanie wiped the ice cream from her palm with a damp napkin reminded Kels of sophomore year, when she had met Melanie and suddenly everything in her life had begun making sense, as though Melanie were a strong magnet collecting the scattered pieces of Kels as they flew through the air.

“Kels.”

“Hm.” Kels buried her spoon deep in the ice cream she’d suddenly lost her taste for, willing the tears to stay in her eyes.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on?”

The pressure behind her breastbone was about to burst her chest. Kels’s fingers went limp on the spoon and she pushed her ice cream softly to the side.

“I’m…I’m um, pregnant.”

“Oh.”

Kels couldn’t bring herself to lift her eyes but she heard Melanie shuffling, flicking her planner closed. The bubble in her chest burst and it was too late to stop the tears. Something hot filled her chest.

Matt had been right. She couldn’t do it alone. She still had a few weeks; it would be quick and cheap and the problem would be gone—

“Are you leaving too? Like Matt?”

Suddenly Melanie was beside her, wrapping her arms around Kels. She smelled like lemon candy and her fingertips were cold from the ice cream.

“No, I’m not going to leave!”

Kels leaned into Melanie’s hug, letting the support of her arms pull her flying pieces out of the air and piece them together. She didn’t trust her voice. Tears trickled quietly down her face.

“Why don’t you come back to my house?” Melanie asked after a minute. “We can talk. We can do this together.”

Kels followed without speaking, still holding her melting blizzard close to her chest, her breathing clearer and more free than it had been for a long time. She could do this. They could do this. Together.