Detour For Emmy Read online

  DETOUR FOR EMMY

  By Marilyn Reynolds

  Also by Marilyn Reynolds

  True-to-Life Series from Hamilton High

  Telling

  Detour For Emmy

  Too Soon for Jeff

  Beyond Dreams

  But What About Me?

  Baby Help

  If You Loved Me

  Love Rules

  No More Sad Goodbyes

  Shut Up

  Eddie's Choice

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Detour For Emmy (True-to-Life Series from Hamilton High)

  Chapter | 1

  Chapter | 2

  Chapter | 3

  Chapter | 4

  Chapter | 5

  Chapter | 6

  Chapter | 7

  Chapter | 8

  Chapter | 9

  Chapter | 10

  Chapter | 11

  Chapter | 12

  Chapter | 13

  Chapter | 14

  Chapter | 15

  Chapter | 16

  Chapter | 17

  Chapter | 18

  Chapter | 19

  Chapter | 20

  Chapter | 21

  Chapter | 22

  Chapter | 23

  Chapter | 24

  Chapter | 25

  Chapter | 26

  Chapter | 27

  Chapter | 28

  Chapter | 29

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  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  New Wind Publishing

  Copyright © 1993, 1999, 2008, 2014 Marilyn Reynolds

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this publication may be adapted, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without permission from the publisher. Like Marilyn Reynolds’ other novels, Detour for Emmy is part of the True-to-Life Series from Hamilton High, a fictional, urban, ethnically mixed high school somewhere in Southern California. Characters in the stories are imaginary and do not represent actual people or places.

  Originally published by Morning Glory Press, 1993.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reynolds, Marilyn, 1935-

  Detour for Emmy / Marilyn Reynolds

  Summary: Emmy, whose future had once looked so bright, struggles to overcome the isolation and depression brought about by being a teen mother who gets little support from her family or the father of her child.

  ISBN 978-1-929777-05-1

  1. Pregnancy—Fiction. 2. Unmarried mothers—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Reynolds, Marilyn. 1935- True-to-life series from Hamilton High.

  PZ7.R3373De 1993

  [Fic]—dc20 93-657

  New Wind Publishing

  Sacramento, California, 95819

  www.newwindpublishing.com

  To Mike

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the students of Century High School, and to my colleagues in the Alhambra School District, Judy Heitzenrader, teach­er in the Pregnant Minor Program, Annette McCormick, the nurse for that program, and Bitsy Wagman of the Infant Care Center, for help­ing keep Emmy’s story real. Thanks are also due Marilyn Mallow, Alhambra High School librarian, and Barry Barmore, Century High School teacher, for their critical expertise.

  To the Monday evening writer’s group, I am grateful for hunks of time spent listening to and critiquing Emmy’s story, and for general encouragement and good will.

  Marilyn Reynolds

  Chapter

  1

  When I graduated from eighth grade I felt important. I don’t mean to sound conceited or anything, but my friends and I practically ran Palm Avenue School. We took district-wide championship in girls’ soccer and softball that year. I was voted MVP of the soccer team. “Demon Em” my teammates called me.

  My best friend, Tammy Preston, got MVP for softball, and my other best friend, Pauline Molina, had the lead role in the school’s spring play. It was a musical, and Tammy and I got to do a duet that left people gasping with laughter. Tammy couldn’t sing very well, but what she lacked in musical talent she made up for in personality. One thing for certain about my friend Tammy, no one ever said she was shy.

  The three of us were on Student Council, too. We volun­teered time to help out at the Senior Citizens’ Center and we distributed free cheese. Our pictures were even in the Hamilton Heights Times.

  Miss Cheng, the Student Council adviser, said we were an efficient, effective, but sometimes temerarious trio. It took us about ten minutes to find temerarious in the dictionary. I read the definition to Tammy and Pauline twice.

  “Temerarious: reckless, rash; blindly, heedlessly.”

  “I think it means we’ve got balls,” Tammy said.

  “Yuck!” I said. “I’d rather just be temerarious, please.”

  “I’d rather speak English,” Pauline said.

  Pauline claimed not to like words with more than two syllables, but that wasn’t really true. Hearing her deliver her lines in the school play, it was obvious she knew her way around the polysyllabics. When I told her that, she said, “Hmmmm. Polly Syllabic. Wasn’t she that girl who was in Brownies with us and had to move away when her mom ran off with the plumber?”

  “No, Stupid,” Tammy said. “A polysyllabic is a baby frog with a big vocabulary—ribbit, ribbitum, ribbitimus . . .”

  Sometimes, when we met someone new, we liked to pre­tend we were sisters. No one really fell for that, though. I had reddish hair, and freckles, which I hated. I was taller than the other two, and skinny. Tammy had long blond hair and blue eyes. She was cute, but she always worried about being too short. Pauline had dark hair and deep brown eyes, and she worried about getting fat.

  We each had our pet worries, and we’d talk about them on and on into the night, piled together in Tammy’s king-size bed on Friday night sleepovers. Tammy and Pauline and I had been friends since first grade, and we told each other everything.

  Almost every boy at Palm Avenue School who was worth looking at twice was in love with Tammy. My mom said it was because of the way Tammy filled her softball jersey, but my mom always expected the worst from men. I thought Tammy’s popularity had more to do with her personality than her early development. Anyway, something made the guys like her, and since the three of us were practically inseparable, it was only natural that Tammy’s rejects would gravitate toward me and Pauline.

  “I don’t want any hand-me-downs,” Pauline would com­plain to me when one of Tammy’s exes would start hanging around. I liked it though. I didn’t want to bother trying to find a boyfriend for myself. That would have been too much trouble.

  To be honest, I wasn’t all that interested in boys in the eighth grade, except to talk about. Being around them made me nervous. I liked the appearance of being popular with boys, though, which is where Tammy’s discards came into the picture. They would stay near me and Pauline at after­school dances or at the mall, hoping to get a second chance, or at least a look, at their true love. This one guy, Carl, really had it bad. He’d give me flowery notes to pass on to her because he was too shy to speak.

  “He’s a nerd,” Tammy said, reading one of his many notes.

  “He’s a nice guy, Tammy,” I said, feeling sorry for Carl.

  “A nice nerd,” she said, tossing the note in the waste­basket, laughing.

  “He’s a lot better than Gary, who probably won’t even graduate from eighth grade!” Pauline said.

  “But you’ve got to admit, Gary is much cuter.”

  “You’re so shallow!” I accused.

  “Yeah, well, I’m only fo
urteen. I’ll get deep later. Just because you have depth and sensitivity doesn’t mean the rest of us need it.”

  We laughed. Ever since our English teacher wrote on one of my papers that I showed depth and sensitivity beyond my years, Tammy and Pauline had been making fun of me about it. But it was true. I thought about things more than they did.

  I guess I’m kind of smart. I don’t try to be. It just happens. And I like doing some of the things Pauline and Tammy think are boring. Like book reports. I read all the time when I’m home. It’s like I can go to a different world when I’m reading. I forget about how my mom and my brother, David, fight all the time, or how my mom’s always complaining about money. I get to see more possibilities when I read about other people and places.

  Pauline and Tammy read some, but not the kind of thing you can report on. They’ve practically memorized the “good” parts in that book Forever by Judy Blume. And Tammy found a book called The Joy of Sex in the bottom drawer of her mom’s dresser. It had pictures and everything. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The things some people do. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t stop looking.

  Tammy’s mom works in the mornings at a real estate office. For the first two weeks of our summer vacation, Pauline and I would go over to Tammy’s about 10 o’clock. Pauline would bring sodas and I’d bring chips, and we’d take turns reading from the sex book. We could hardly get past a sentence without screeching or laughing hysterically.

  That summer, after the eighth grade, besides reading The Joy of Sex, we’d take the beach bus down to Huntington and hang out there with a bunch of our old Palm Avenue buddies. We’d swim and lie in the sun and talk about high school.

  “What if we don’t get classes together?” Tammy asked on one of those days.

  “We will. We’re taking all the same stuff,” Pauline said.

  “Yeah, us and about eight hundred other freshmen,” I said. “We might not even get the same lunch period.”

  “We’ve eaten lunch together since first grade,” Tammy said. “We’re not going to stop now!”

  “Yeah. First grade. Remember Em’s ketchup sandwiches?”

  We all laughed.

  “We were poor,” I said. “It was easy to nab a little bread and ketchup from Barb and Edie’s on my way to school.”

  Barb and Edie’s is a little bar and sandwich place across from the big furniture warehouse down on Fifth Street. My mom is Barb. My mom’s been part owner there for as long as I can remember.

  “Speaking of Barb and Edie’s,” Pauline said, “let’s get off at the Fifth Street stop when we go home. I’m dying for a big glob of Edie’s onion rings.”

  “Let’s not,” I said. “I can do without seeing The Barb today.”

  “Are you and your mom fighting again?” Tammy asked.

  “Not really. But she’s mad at David, and I don’t want to answer any of her nosy questions about him.”

  “What’s new?” Pauline said. “She’s always mad at David.”

  “Yeah, but this time he’s messed up. He took her old wedding ring and some pearl earrings that were my grandma’s, and he hocked them. He used the money for his friend’s bail. She never wears that stuff, but for some reason she decided to last night.”

  “Oh, no,” Tammy said. “I’m surprised I didn’t hear her clear over at my place. Did she explode?”

  “Like a nuclear bomb! She’s given him until Sunday to get her things back or move out.”

  “What does David say?” Pauline asked.

  “No problemo.”

  “What does that mean, anyway?” Tammy said.

  “I don’t know. That’s just what David always says.”

  “So okay. We won’t go to Barb and Edie’s today . . . C’mon in the water!” Pauline shouted and took off running.

  Tammy and I jumped up and ran after her. The three of us swam out past the breakers, laughing and splashing.

  The great thing about being friends for so long was that it was like a lifetime of non-stop talking. We could tell each other anything without being ashamed or embarrassed. And we didn’t have to go into all the background stuff. We’d lived through everything together so nothing took much explaining.

  Like with David, they knew how he and my mom had been fighting since he was about ten years old. And they knew it kept getting worse. They knew how much I loved David, and also how angry I got with him for doing such stupid things—like this bail money thing. David’s friends were real losers. Maybe if he’d had the kind of friends I had, he wouldn’t always be in so much trouble.

  The wave we chose to bring us back to shore turned out to be about twice as big as I could handle. We all started swimming, trying to catch it and ride it in. Instead, it caught us. I was tumbled over and over, my lungs burning for air, not knowing which way was up or down, my arms flailing, trying to stop the tumbling. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, I felt my knees scrape the sand. I stood up and looked for the others. Tammy’s cheek was scraped and Pauline was coughing and spewing salt water, but we were all there.

  Before we could even really catch our breath, we were laughing. I could feel tons of sand in the seat of my bathing suit and I guess they were in the same situation. We walked back in a few feet, keeping a close watch on incoming waves. We rinsed the sand out of our cracks and crevices and went back to our towels. We lay on our stomachs, in a kind of star pattern, so our heads were together and we could talk. We spent the next hour on what was our number one subject after The Joy of Sex—trying to predict what Hamilton High School had in store for us in September.

  “Hey, listen,” Pauline said. “No problemo. Are we temerarious or what?”

  About 3:00, some of the guys came down from the surfing section of the beach. They sat on their boards near our towels. We talked for a while and then they started doing stupid boy stuff, like trying to untie our straps and pour sand down our bathing suits. Really, guys were such cretins sometimes. Pauline and I just ignored them when they started that stuff. We weren’t their main targets, anyway. Tammy put up with it for a while but finally yelled at them, “Bug off, Bozos!”

  One of them, Carl, looked hurt. The others just laughed. Pretty soon they picked up their boards and went over by some seventh graders, and we heard squealing and giggling and high-pierced shrieks coming from the new centers of male attention.

  “I know one thing,” Tammy said. “I’m not going to have any of these baby boys hanging around me at Hamilton. Not when the place is filled with junior and senior hunks.”

  “I’ll bet the good ones are already taken,” Pauline said.

  “I don’t think so. I think there’ll be plenty to go around. Think so, Em?” Tammy asked.

  “Hmmmm. I don’t really care,” I said. “I’m too young to be worrying about such things.”

  “Yeah, right. That’s why you’ve been glued to The Joy of Sex every morning for the past two weeks,” Tammy said, throwing a handful of sand in my direction.

  We argued about which of us was most interested in the “S” subject until time to go back to the bus. I think we were all really interested, but nobody wanted to admit it.

  Back home I took a long shower. Usually I take short showers because of California’s drought. I’m big on re­cycling, too. If we don’t each one of us care about the earth, we’re not going to have much of a place to live pretty soon. But this night I let the hot water pound my back and stream through my freshly-shampooed hair. That’s got to be one of the best things about going to the beach—coming home and getting totally clean.

  I took the book I was reading to bed with me. Mom was working and David was out, so everything was peaceful. I guess I must have fallen asleep reading because it was about 3:00 when I heard a tapping at my window.

  “Em. Emmy. Open the window. I want to talk to you.”

  It was David. Mom had taken his house keys from him months ago. He had a key to his room, which was part of the original garage and not connected to the house. Other than that
, he wasn’t supposed to even come inside if my mom wasn’t home.

  I opened the window and loosened the screen, and David climbed in. He sat on the edge of my bed.

  “I’ve got to get out of here for a while, Emmy,” he said.

  “Where will you go?”

  “I can’t tell you, Little Sister. The Mom-monster would probably shove bamboo splinters under your fingernails until you broke.”

  David and I had all kinds of secret names for my mom—names we’d made up a long time ago. We called her The Barb, because she could be so sharp and hurtful at times, and Mom-monster, or Mom-witch. I know it wasn’t very nice, but when we were little we thought the names gave us a secret power over her.

  “Come on, David. Where are you going? I won’t tell.”

  “I know. She probably won’t even ask. She’ll be glad to be rid of me.”

  I couldn’t argue with him about that.

  “I’m not sure where I’ll end up—I’ve just got to get out of here. I can’t take anymore raggin’, you know?”

  I nodded my head. It wasn’t the first time David had left home. He was eighteen, but he’d been leaving home off and on since he was thirteen—just after my gramma died, and there was no one left to be a peacemaker between him and my mom.

  “Well, I wanted you to know,” he said. “You and me, we’re the only real family we’ve got without Gramma.”

  I sort of wanted to stand up for Mom—say she’s our family, too. But I knew what he meant. It wasn’t like she seemed to be on our side, or very interested in us.

  “I wuv you, Em.”

  “I wuv you, too, Dabe,” I said, repeating a ritual from when I was three. It was easier, I guess, to say it like little kids, than to just come straight out and say we loved each other.

  I sat up and put my arms around David. He held on for a long time. I smelled the sweet aroma of marijuana coming from his clothes and hair.

  “When will you be back?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you a call sometime when I know Mommie Dearest will be out.”

  “Take care, David.”

  ‘You too,” he said, then crawled out the window and was gone. He left walking. His truck still needed a transmission, and he’d sold his bike just a few weeks ago.