Red

by Annie Cardi

Genres: YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

A Christian girl is stigmatized by her peers after seeking an abortion in this modern retelling of The Scarlet Letter for the #MeToo era.
 
Moving to Hawthorne was something Tess and her mom never anticipated, but after Tess’s mom loses her job, it’s their only option. Tess’s grandparents welcome them into their home, on the condition that Tess and her mom attend church, something Mom isn’t too pleased about. But Tess enjoys the church community, finding a place in youth group and the church choir. Faith fills a void Tess didn’t know she had.

After a very personal decision goes public, Tess faces daily harassment and rejection by her former friends, and singing in the church choir is no longer an option. When she meets some kids in the music room, her only place of solace in the school, she finds they don't judge her for what's happened, and she learns to find her voice again. Against the backdrop of the Spirit Light Festival, Tess will need to find the strength to speak out if she is to have any chance of ending a silent cycle of abuse in Hawthorne.
 
Perfect for fans of YA books like Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, or Exit, Pursued by a Bear, by E. K. Johnston, Red is a timely and relevant young adult novel about finding your voice and rising above shame. Anyone looking for teen girl books that explore the complex themes of reproductive rights, religious hypocrisy, and overcoming adversity will appreciate this story of judgment and redemption.
 

Release date: January 30, 2024

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 288

Sample

We have to drive to Maryland for the appointment. Mom got the earliest one available on a Saturday morning so she could drive me there and home and still get to work for the afternoon shift. Also, I’m not supposed to eat or drink eight hours before the procedure, which Mom says will be easier in the morning than the afternoon. “We can stop for breakfast on the way home,” she tells me. “If you’re hungry.”

I don’t know if I’ll be hungry because I’ve never done this before. Neither has Mom, so she doesn’t know exactly, either.

That’s what we call it, though—“the procedure.” We don’t call it what it is. It’s like we’re afraid to say the word, like it’s a curse. Maybe it is. I know that the kids in youth group would basically say as much.

This morning, they’re all at Ignite, the annual fall retreat, where they do team-building exercises and share testimonials at a retreat center in the mountains. I went last year when Mom and I were new to Hawthorne. It felt good to have people take my hand and give me a hug and tell me they were glad I was there. I imagine them all there again today, playing games and praying and learning to trust each other. I remember Lily pulling me into a hug with Bri, and the weight of their arms around me felt like relief. Alden would be with them, encouraging them all to put their trust in each other and in God, because with that they can accomplish anything. When I was there last year, I expected that kind of thing to sound cheesy or disingenuous, but it didn’t. The way Alden said it, it sounded real.

The car feels quiet and empty in comparison to being in that big group.

It’s still dark when we leave, the sun just starting to rise as we drive through Northern Virginia and into Maryland. I wear sweatpants and a hoodie because the pre-procedure paperwork said I should wear loose, comfortable clothing, and because I feel like I could curl up inside them, warm and protected. In the cold morning air, under my hoodie, I feel small and young and old all at once.

We’re lucky. That’s what Mom said when she made the appointment. If this had happened back in Bloomington, it would have been a lot harder to find somewhere to do it. It would have meant a longer drive, staying in a hotel—money we didn’t have. Maybe someone would have stopped us. Having to drive to Maryland, it’s not so bad.

Except maybe, back in Bloomington, this wouldn’t have happened.

The radio’s playing pop-country songs about falling in love and broken hearts and being someone’s girl. We don’t change the station because that’s all the other stations play too.

When I told Mom I was pregnant, she asked who the boy was. That was the way she said it: Who’s the boy, is it someone in your class, is it someone from youth group? Which made it easy to say, Yeah, a boy I met at a youth group thing, you don’t know him, it was one time. When she asked what his name was, all I could do was shake my head. She didn’t press me, and I still haven’t told her.

I don’t know if I can ever tell her.

She didn’t question me when I told her this was what I wanted to do—just looked up the closest places to us, found one that seemed supportive and safe. She scheduled the appointment, read through the pre-procedure materials with me, kept telling me that I was going to be okay.

“This doesn’t have to affect the rest of your life,” she says as we pull off the highway. “I mean, this is one part of your life. It’s not who you are.”

“I know,” I say, even though I don’t yet. I don’t know who I am or who I’m going to be or who I want to be.

“No one has to know,” she says, like it’s supposed to comfort me.

“I know,” I say again.

It’s a small brick building with a sign out front that reads CENTER FOR REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH in delicate blue letters. The first time we came was only a couple of days ago so a doctor could tell me about the procedure. Mom called in sick for me at school and for herself at work, and we drove out to have the consultation. I imagined a building as big as a hospital with a horde of protesters outside, waving signs with pictures of babies on them, but there were only a couple of older women. When we hustled inside, I half-expected the pavement to open up underneath me and swallow me whole.

That didn’t happen, of course. I kept walking.

Now it’s early enough that ours is one of a few cars in the parking lot. We wait to be buzzed into the building and are greeted by the receptionist behind a window.

“Hi, can I help you?” she asks, smiling kindly at us.

“I’m Tess Pine,” I tell her. “I have an eight-thirty appointment.”

She doesn’t ask me to specify what the appointment is for and finds my information in her computer. Mom and I show her our IDs, and the receptionist gives me more paperwork to fill out. While I write, Mom hunches over her checkbook. I know this isn’t the kind of thing we can really afford, but when I told Mom about being pregnant and that this was what I wanted to do, she didn’t make me feel guilty about it. We’ll work it out, she told me.

We don’t say much as we sit there, half-listening to the receptionist taking calls and the waiting room TV playing a home improvement show. Mom sits stiffly next to me, chipping at her nails, flakes of dried red polish falling on her lap. She picks up a pamphlet off the coffee table, flipping back and forth through information about resources available for women during recovery and afterward—therapy, support groups, social workers. I’m sure she never expected to be looking at lists like that for me.

I wonder if I should tell her. She’s here with me, she made the appointments, and she’s paying out of her savings so I don’t have to live with this for the rest of my life. So I can keep living my life. But if I tell her, it’ll change everything, and all I want is for things to go back to normal. The words stick in my throat.

Even though it’s early, there are a couple of other people in the waiting room too—one woman in a pale pink button-down shirt who looks like she could be Gram’s age and who’s flipping through a cooking magazine, and another in her twenties, stomach round and full, like she’s swallowed the moon. I try not to stare at her, the pregnant woman, her face a little tired but pretty. They say pregnant women have a glow, and it’s true for her. While she holds her phone in one hand, the other rests casually on top of her belly, and she looks happy.

That could be me someday. Maybe.

“Tess?” a nurse says as she enters the waiting room, holding a clipboard and looking at me. I wonder how many Tesses she’s seen before, where they were from, who came with them—if any of them had boyfriends they loved or people who hurt them.

Mom stands with me, even though I’m going in alone. “You’ll be okay,” she tells me, her voice shaky. “I’ll be right here. I’ll see you after.”

“Okay,” I tell her, because that’s what I want—for all of this to be over.

I follow the nurse down a long hall to the procedure room. The doctor went over everything with me the other day—the equipment they’ll use to do it and how I’ll be given medication so I won’t feel anything—but I still feel like my legs aren’t part of my body while I walk. My stomach knots, and I wish I could run back to the waiting room to bring my mom with me, like I’m a little kid going to school for the first time. But I keep walking, one foot in front of the other.

Even though I was here a couple of days ago, the doctor still goes over everything that’s going to happen. She tells me how the procedure will go, what I’m likely to experience, and what complications, although rare, are possible. She asks if I feel safe in my current home environment, and I say yes. She doesn’t ask about my relationship with the father, which is a relief.

“Do you have any questions for me?” she asks.

What I want to know is if I’m making the right decision. If this means that things can really go back to normal. If I’ll ever feel normal again. If I’ll be able to pray again, to feel like I’m connected to something that’s bigger than me and like someone’s watching out for me. I want to know if I’ll be okay.

Instead, I say, “No, no questions.”

While the doctor and the nurses examine me and give me medication for pain and set up an IV for sedation, I keep thinking: When it’s over, I won’t have to talk about it or think about it, no one will have to know, it’ll be over … until it’s over and they bring me to recovery.

When Mom and I leave the building, when it’s over, there are more protesters outside with signs. It’s not a big crowd, but enough people for a Saturday morning—older people, teenagers, middle-aged women with mushroomy haircuts. They’re all carrying signs with pictures of fetuses and slogans like IS THIS A CHOICE?

I scan the crowd quickly and am light-headed with relief when I don’t see any familiar faces. Because I’ve been in that kind of crowd before—not here, but at clinics closer to Hawthorne. I’ve looked at the faces of women going in and out and said, “Your baby is a blessing, not a choice.” I thought I was trying to help them. That’s what everyone said we were doing.

Looking over the faces and posters now, I wish I could go back and tell those women, I hope you’ll be okay. Instead, I pull the hood of my sweatshirt down and let Mom put her arm around my shoulders and walk me back to the car.

At Gram and Gramps’s, our home for the last year, Mom sets me up on the couch with tea, a mustard-yellow and maroon afghan, a heating pad, and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility—my favorite movie, even though Mom thinks Austen adaptations are boring. She offers me toast and canned chicken soup, like I have a cold, but I tell her all I want is to rest for a little while. The way she looks at me, soft and sad, like I’m a little girl again, makes me want to cry more than anything else.

I could cry. Mom would hold me and tell me everything’s going to be fine. But I don’t want to hear that anymore. If it’s over and everything’s fine, I shouldn’t have to cry.

It doesn’t feel like sadness, not exactly. Or even regret—that’s what people talked about in youth group when they talked about women who made this choice. Lying under the blankets now, I feel a strange kind of grief, a ghost ship sailing by. Someone I’ll never know standing on deck, and me watching them disappear forever.

But there’s also relief so deep, I feel it with every breath. I don’t need to spend the next nine months and more of my life trying to learn how to be someone I’m not. Not yet. Not having to lie about who the father is, not having to go through it all alone. Guilt, too, churning through me, like I shouldn’t feel relieved to have made this choice. Like I should only feel sad about it. Maybe even feeling like I lost something, and I don’t deserve to be sad about it, either.

I don’t cry.

Instead, I watch Sense and Sensibility and then Persuasion, only getting up when I have to change my pad. Before Mom goes to work, she makes sure I have ibuprofen and tea and my slippers. She hovers beside the couch in her jacket, looking around like she must have forgotten something. “Maybe I should stay,” she says, forehead furrowed in concern. “I can call out. I should be with you.”

“Mom, I’m fine,” I tell her. “I’ll text if I need anything.”

She doesn’t look entirely convinced but kisses my forehead. “Text me for anything. Seriously. I love you.” We both smile a little, as if we’re trying to be strong for each other.

The house feels strangely quiet when she leaves. Usually, at least one other person is home, especially if Gram has her church friends over for prayer circle or Gramps invites a few of his VFW buddies over for poker. But the timing of the procedure was good—my grandparents had already planned to visit Gram’s sister, Dorothy, in Pennsylvania and would be out of town for a couple of weeks. Great-aunt Dorothy is having hip surgery, and they’re going to help during her recovery.

“No wild parties while we’re gone,” Gramps told me with a wink, because he knew that the only parties I went to were with kids from Grace Teen Life, where we watched movies and played Codenames and the hardest beverage we drank was homemade root beer.

“I’ll try,” I told him. “Drive safe.”

“Call us on Dorothy’s phone if anything happens,” Gram told Mom before she got in the car. “I don’t want to come back to the house burned down.”

Mom pressed her lips together in an attempt to smile. Usually, she would have given a sarcastic reply, but I was sure her mind was on my appointment and how we could never tell them about it. Not only would it break their hearts, but they would never see Mom or me the same way again.

“Love to Aunt Dorothy,” Mom said, and we waved at them as they drove down the street.

Now, sitting on my grandparents’ couch, under their afghan, I have an odd sense of not knowing how I got here. Like I closed my eyes and blinked and suddenly I’m not who I thought I was or where I thought I would be. There’s a before and there’s an after, and I can’t identify the moment in between.

I don’t feel like watching another movie, so I put on my headphones and listen to music—choral music, the kind I used to sing with my school choir back in Bloomington. It’s familiar and soothing and helps me remember to breathe in and out.

Every so often, I check my phone. Lily and Bri have texted me a few times: We miss you!!! and Retreat’s not the same without you.

I imagine everyone at Ignite, at a retreat center in the mountains, all log cabins and dirt trails and expansive views. I inhale and exhale, as if I can smell the crisp fall air and campfire smoke. Last year, the theme for the retreat was “Living Fearlessly.” Alden had us write down our fears and toss them into a bonfire, giving them up to God. “ ‘When I am afraid, I put my trust in you,’ ” he’d said, quoting Psalms. “Let your fears go, tonight and forever, because Jesus is with you, and He’s with us here right now.”

One by one, we tossed our papers into the fire, watching them burn to ash. Cinders floated away from the fire and into the sky like stars. Around me, some people pressed their hands together and closed their eyes in brief prayer after watching their fears burn. A few even raised their hands toward the sky. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, and it felt like a door opening.

God, please let this be real, I prayed, even though I didn’t exactly know what I meant by that. But it was what I wanted to feel—the people around me, the air, the fire, the sky, the letting go, the holding fast.

Bri leaned her head on my shoulder, and across the campfire, someone started singing. I sang along, light the fire in my heart again, while the flames warmed my face, and below the night sky, it felt like this was the beginning of something good.

Now they’re all back at Ignite, and I’m here. I don’t even know what the theme is for this year’s retreat—I hadn’t asked, and Alden hadn’t mentioned it. I have a strange feeling of homesickness for a place I’d only been to once for a couple of days. But I miss being crowded into a room with people I was getting to know, hearing them open up about their struggles and their faith, feeling like maybe I could be open like that too.

Maybe I’ll be back there next year. Maybe it’ll be like this year never happened.

I send heart emojis back to Lily and Bri, saying Miss you guys too, like I’m stuck at home with the flu. I expect to get at least one other text, asking me how I’m doing, but it never comes.

I don’t go to church on Sunday morning. It’s the first time I haven’t been to Grace Presbyterian for service since we moved to Hawthorne last year. Gram and Gramps go every week, and I go with them, at first because they expected us to go, and eventually because I made friends there and sang in the church choir, and because I liked being part of a community, bound together by our faith.

Grace Presbyterian livestreams their services. It’s not super high-tech, but they started doing it a few years ago for people who aren’t able to get to church because they’re chronically sick or older and have a hard time leaving the house. That was never an option for us, no matter how hard Mom tried to convince Gram that livestreams were basically the same as going for real, because Gram insisted that we all be there in person every Sunday.

“I know going to church isn’t your favorite,” she told Mom, voice clipped, our first Sunday in Hawthorne. “Lord knows we had that fight often enough when you were a girl. But it can be a good group of people around you, to support you. Plus, it’s important to me and it’s important to your father, and in this house it’s what we do together.”

“I know,” Mom said tiredly. We’d arrived the night before, after packing the car and driving all day from Bloomington. “Maybe we can get a pass this once—”

“You know, Laura,” Gram said, her voice even but firm, “we’re happy to have you and Tess here. We are. But it’s still our house, and our way goes.”

I never minded going to church, not even that first day. The way Gram had described it, “a good group of people around you, to support you,” sounded like something I could use. The last few years had felt so unsteady, first with losing Dad and then Mom losing her job and worrying about where we’d live, how we’d get by. A little extra support sounded like a good thing.

Now, curled up in bed with my phone, I consider logging into the livestream. No one would even know it was me watching. Even if they did, no one would question it. They think I’m a good church girl who volunteers and goes to youth group movie nights and sings in the choir and sits in a pew with her grandparents every Sunday. No one knows what I did yesterday.

Almost no one.

But I set my phone aside. Watching from a distance feels too strange, a reminder that something is different.

Maybe I don’t deserve to watch. That’s what some people in youth group would say, considering what I did yesterday.

Next week, I’ll be back there, I try to reassure myself. Maybe I’ll feel like I belong again.

I imagine everyone at church next Sunday—people from youth group with their families, my grandparents’ friends, the choir huddled together. We’ll be singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “Abide with Me.” I can almost hear Alden leading the group, with his clear tenor and confident piano playing. The way everyone looks to him, the way he shines in front of a group, the way he draws the light out of everyone else—it’s part of what makes him a good youth minister and choir director. I fall back to sleep, repeating the lyrics in my head: When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

I still don’t get any other texts asking me how I am.

By Monday morning, I’m feeling better, like the doctor said I would, and plan to go back to school. Mom says I can stay home for a few more days if I want, but what I really want is for things to get back to normal, even if that means going to French class. When I check my phone, I see a bunch of messa. . .