Deadbeat

by Amy Sparling

  "Well the baby is due in May, so it won't all be saved," Mrs. Hardy says. When she sees the look Elisa gives me, she adds, "But that's still good. And when you're taking part time college classes, you may still be able to work full time?"

  "I don't know, the shop closes at eight." I say. Elisa catches on now, realizing that I still plan to go to university in the fall. Her face falls and she picks the pepperoni off her pizza.

  A grinding sound comes from the side of the house; the garage door signaling that Elisa's dad is home. Mrs. Hardy rushes to the window and watches him drive into the garage and shut off the engine. Elisa's eyes are fixed nervously on the back door, waiting for him to stumble inside.

  I keep eating.

  "Dammit, why the fuck is there black shit all over the concrete?" Mr. Hardy kicks open the back door with his foot and scrapes off his shoes on the welcome mat.

  "I think it's oil, honey," Mrs. Hardy rushes over to him, takes his coat and hangs it up on the rack behind them. "It must be leaking out of the car."

  "Your damn car, not mine. You just had to buy a foreign piece of shit."

  "I'll take it to the shop tomorrow," she says. She guides him into the living room and he sits in his recliner. Elisa and I keep eating, pretending that nothing is awkward, like we always do around her father. Her mom brings him a plate of food and a beer.

  While Mrs. Hardy is out of earshot, Elisa whispers, "I can't believe you're still planning on taking that scholarship."

  My mouth is full of pizza. Chewing slowly, I take the extra moment to figure out a reply that won't cause a fight. Swallowing, I say, "I can't believe you want me to turn it down." Guess I couldn't think of one.

  Elisa's lips are shiny from the greasy pizza and it makes her snarl even more frightening. "I hate you, Jeremy Lawrence," she says through clenched teeth.

  "You hate me?" I say, mocking her. "Must be those pregnant mood swings I've heard about."

  She hops off her barstool and throws her plate into the sink hard enough for it to shatter. I'm surprised when it doesn't. She points her finger at me and is about to go off some when the backdoor swings open, startling us both.

  It's Mackenzie, dressed in her junior high cheerleader uniform. "Ew, we're ya'll making out or something?" she says. I wonder how she could be so fucking clueless, but then I realize that Elisa is standing very close to me and since I'm still sitting, we are eye to eye. It is a bit compromising.

  "No," Elisa says, looking at me instead of her sister. "He's about to leave."

  "Whatever." Mackenzie shrugs. Her phone starts to ring and she scurries off to her room to answer it. We watch her leave, both of us needing something to look at besides each other. Elisa's parents are no longer in the living room.

  "You want me to leave now?" I ask with bitterness, refusing to sound apologetic. She shrugs, looking at the floor. "If you want."

  I don't say anything for a while and neither does Elisa.

  I decide to be smart for once and weigh my options. I could leave and cause a fight or stay, be sweet to her and have a nice evening.

  I stay. "Baby…" I stand up and cup her face in my hands. "I just want to make the best choice for our kid. And I'm not sure what that is right now, so please don't crucify me."

  She half-smiles, the first indication that she's ready to drop her defenses and stop arguing with me. "Don't go home."

  In her room, I sit on the futon and watch the sports channel. Elisa plays on her laptop and I pretend I don't see her wading through pages and pages of baby naming websites.

  "What do you think about Devon, for a boy?" she asks. I ignore it.

  "Or Madison for a girl, we could call her Maddie." Ignore. Again.

  "Jeremy?" She shoves her laptop onto my lap. "I demand that you get excited about baby names with me," she says, in the most undemanding tone ever. I look her dead in the eye and say, "Maybe we should think more about my parent's offer of adoption."

  "You can't be serious." She takes the laptop back and closes it. "We can raise this child together. It will be fine, you're going to be a great dad."

  "That's just it. I don't know if I want to be a dad."

  "Well it's not really a matter of wanting it, Jeremy. You're forced to be a dad now, that's just how things are."

  "Things don't have to be like that. We could give up the baby for adoption, maybe even to a random couple so that we don't have to see the baby. We could live normal lives. You could go away to college with me."

  "And then what, Jeremy?"

  "I don't know."

  "You obviously don't know how things work. In a perfect world, guys marry girls when they get them pregnant."

  "No, Elisa. In a perfect world, no one gets pregnant when they don't want to."

  "Okay. In a perfect, yet fucked up, world – guys marry girls. It's called a shotgun wedding. It's the right thing to do. And I'm not even asking you to do that."

  "Really? Because it sounds like you are."

  "All I'm asking is for you to stay home, work and help support me and the baby. I do want us to get married, but that can wait till we're older if that's what it takes for me to keep you."

  "I still think we should look into adoption."

  "No."

  "Don't I get a say in this?"

  She crosses her arms. "Not really. The baby is inside of me, not you. I don't even have to put your name on the birth certificate. So if you don't want to be in our lives, then you don't have to."

  "Dammit Elisa. If you keep the baby then I'm staying with you. There's no way I could let you raise our baby without me. All I'm asking is for you to think about adoption."

  "Okay, I'll think about it." She looks at the ceiling for half a second and then says, "I thought about it and my answer is no."

  Chapter 13

  Twenty-two weeks along. Or five months for normal people like me. It's December, and I haven't given those early graduation papers to the counselor. Part of me kept forgetting to stop by her office and the other part of me, on the days I remembered, just didn't do it. I didn't want to graduate early anymore. The initial thought of it was nice but then I realized I'd be forced to grow up and act like an adult five months before I had to.

  I'd have to work full time.

  I wouldn't get to play basketball.

  Elisa didn't know yet.

  The bell rings and I leave history class, shuffling into the hallway to become part of the blob of students eager to go to our last class of the day. We get ten minutes between classes and I see Elisa on every break except this one because our classes are on opposite sides of the school.

  I slip through a crowd of hyperactive, chatty freshmen girls and duck into the cafeteria. My favorite lunch lady sells me a burrito and I'm halfway through scarfing it down when someone calls my name.

  I look through the crowd of faces to find the one staring at me. It's a girl, Jessica or Jennifer or something. I've had advanced classes with her ever since first grade, but I can't remember her name because she's not the least bit attractive.

  "What?" I say, and then shove the rest of the burrito into my mouth.

  She's standing with some chick I don't know. "Congratulations on little Jeremy Junior," she says.

  My stomach turns over and it's not just because the fifty-cent burrito I ate was probably past its expiration date. "What the hell are you talking about?" I ask, playing dumb, hoping it throws her off.

  "Oh, are you having a girl instead?" She asks. The smile on her face appears genuine but I know better. Girls are vicious bitches.

  I try not to let anything give away my anger. Some chick I barely know knows my secret. She had better be a close, personal friend of Elisa's or I'm going to find whoever ran their mouth and break their jaw.

  "I don't really know what you're talking about, dude." I shrug as I walk past them.

  When I'm in the hallway, alone with my thoughts but surrounded by people, I walk silently to class. My heart is pounding; my fists are a sweaty blanket around
the straps of my backpack.

  How the fuck did that girl know?

  The bell rings just as I'm running into calculus class. I take my usual seat in the back and Mrs. Newton flashes me a stern look for almost missing the bell. She's old and should have retired years ago. She's such a stickler for the rules that if they allowed her to, she'd hand out detentions for almost being tardy.

  On the board is a list of topics that will be on the midterm. We're supposed to study all of class and Mrs. Newton tells us to break into study groups. Most students get up and drag their desks around the classroom forming groups of four or five. I stay where I'm at because my buddy James and three other girls always bring their desks over to mine.

  Sometimes more girls join me. I try not to let it make my ego explode, because I'm not the most popular or hottest guy in school. But in this class of mostly nerds, I am the only athlete and that makes me desirable. Not that I'd ever cheat on Elisa or anything.

  I sigh. If these girls knew I had a baby on the way they wouldn't want to sit by me.

  My group spends the first twenty minutes talking about what happened on some stupid ass reality show about teenagers with rich parents. I definitely don't participate in that shit; I just doodle along the sides of my notebook and think about the girl from the cafeteria.

  She had been in a ton of my classes over the years and that's the only way I knew her. If Elisa were friends with her, I would probably know that by now. Elisa is picky with friends and only hangs out with two girls besides Claire. Austin and Claire had been trusted with our baby secret, and they had been sworn to secrecy – so how did some random girl find out?

  I want to text Elisa and ask her about it, but cell phones aren't allowed in school and I don't want to risk getting mine taken away. There's only forty more minutes of class left and then I can ask her while I'm driving her home.

  The bell finally rings, relieving me from numbers, formulas and the scholastic evil that is group work. Grabbing my backpack, I get the hell out of there.

  Austin catches me in the hallway. His face is strained and although he wants to tell me something, it's taking him forever to say it. "What's up, man?" I ask. We're in the school parking lot now, walking toward our trucks, which are always parked in the back row.

  "Is the baby thing still a secret?" he asks.

  "Yes," I say, searching his face for any sign of him being a guilty traitor. "Why, did you tell some girl?"

  "No, man, I haven't told anyone." Nervously, he looks behind us. There is no one close enough to hear us, but he lowers his voice anyhow. "There were a group of girls in my last class talking about Elisa being pregnant. I didn't say anything, but I thought it was still a secret, you know?"

  "What the fuck?" I kick a rock so hard that it flies into the door of a white sports car. "How many girls? Was Claire one of them?"

  He thinks for a moment. "Nah, she wasn't there, but it was four girls. I couldn't hear everything but I definitely heard the words "Elisa" and "pregnant."

  "Did you hear my name?"

  "No, but that part is kind of obvious I would think."

  Elisa is waiting at my truck. Austin and I split up, him going to his truck and me going to the girlfriend I'm about to scream at.

  "Do you want to know what Austin just told me?" I ask her.

  "Open the doors first, it's cold out here." She's hugging herself and shivering, a movement that would have caused me to wrap my jacket around her a few months ago. But she can freeze now, for all I care.

  We get in my truck and the second I start the engine, she cranks up the heater and points the vents in her direction. I'm so full of anger that I'm not the least bit cold, so I turn the knob to low. She scowls at me and cranks it back to high.

  "Austin said that four fucking girls in his class were talking about you being pregnant," I say, hoping to see her break down and ask for my forgiveness because she didn't keep the secret she made me promise to keep.

  Instead, her pink cheeks get even pinker. A shaky cold hand comes to her mouth. "Oh my God," she says, her voice breaking. I continue to glare at her, still thinking I'll get some sort of apology. "How did they know? Did you tell somebody?" she asks, tears forming in her eyes.

  I'm more confused now than I was in the cafeteria. "Did I tell someone? Who did you tell?"

  "I only told Claire!" she says, crying. I don't want to believe her, but her sobs start to convince me. My heart feels like reaching out to her, cuddling her in my arms, drying her tears with my sleeve – all of the things I usually do when I see her cry. But lately the crying has been so frequent, I'm starting to lose my compassion. So I yell.

  "I fucking told you that telling Claire was a bad idea! Now she ran her mouth and told the whole school!"

  Elisa shakes her head. "No, she hasn't. She wouldn't do that to me."

  "Well then how did they find out? Magic?" I throw my truck into drive and peel out of the parking lot. "You wear a hoody every day, its not like anyone can tell that you're getting fatter."

  Her sobs grow louder when I say the dreaded "fat" word.

  I scowl. "I guess our secret is out, babe." The last word is an insult.

  "Claire didn't tell anyone, Jeremy. So unless you told someone, I don't know how people found out."

  Ignoring her, I turn up the radio to drown out our thoughts. I'm sure as hell not letting her know I told Austin after all the shit I gave her for telling her best friend. When I stop in her driveway, she climbs out of my truck and slams the door without saying bye.

  We don't talk for the next twelve days.

  Chapter 14

  Mom asks if I will be home for dinner tonight. It's Friday. I haven't been home for dinner all week. "Nope."

  She's vacuuming the living room. I step over the cord on the way to my room. Once inside, I shut my door to drown out the hum of the vacuum, toss my backpack on the floor and change into basketball shorts. Then I unzip my backpack, shake out its contents onto the floor and stuff it with clothes for tonight. Austin and I are going to play basketball at his place and then hit up the pool hall around eight.

  Mom stops me in the garage. She's holding a shopping bag and wearing an awkwardly excited smile. "I got these for you and Elisa. Can you give them to her?"

  I take the bag and peek into it. Pale yellow baby clothes, socks and rattles. "Why?"

  "Oh, just take them. I couldn't help myself, I love shopping for baby stuff."

  "Okay." I crumple up the bag and shove it under my arm. Mom follows me to my truck.

  "Don't tell your dad, okay? He would kill me if he found out."

  I toss the bag on the floor of my truck with no plans of ever showing it to Elisa.

  Although I'm the better pool player, it was his idea to go out tonight. Apparently the pool hall was a great place to pick up chicks, and many of the high school dropout waitresses would serve alcohol to minors. Austin said it was the place to be. He also thought I needed a night out, now that Elisa was temporarily out of my life.

  I don't know if we are broken up, on a break, or going to break up. I just know that I sent Elisa a text twelve days ago and it was never answered. It had said, Sorry for yelling at you.

  The next day I had knocked on her door before school and her mom told me that Claire took her to school. And so the Silent Game had begun. I didn't talk to her, she didn't talk to me.

  To fill the void, I had played basketball in Austin's driveway every day after school. And now we were going to the pool hall with our friends –somewhere Elisa would never allow me to go - where he planned to flirt with every hot girl despite having Maci, who was a pretty hot chick herself.

  Austin thoroughly kicks my ass in basketball and I give up around seven.

  "Fuck this man," I say, wheezing in between breaths. "I can't play you anymore." Squatting down, I rest my hands on my knees. Even in the cold December air, sweat drips off my forehead and evaporates with a poof on the concrete.

  "Alright. Smells like my mom's making dinner,"
Austin says, sniffing the air. Now that he mentions it, I smell food too. My stomach rumbles. We go inside, and although Austin's mom is taking out a brisket from the oven, and although brisket is my favorite food ever, that's not the first thing I notice.

  The first thing I notice is that she's fat.

  Really fat.

  And Austin's mom isn't usually fat. Her and my mom are usually the same size – total MILF-status according to all of my friends. Our moms first met in an aerobics class when Austin and I were toddlers.

  She tells us to wash our hands and set the table. I can't stop staring at her belly, so I smile to cover up my shock.

  "How far along are you, now?" I ask.

  "Twenty-two weeks," she answers, patting her belly with an oven mitt. She starts slicing up the brisket, and I do the math in my head. Five months.

  Elisa's at five months and looks mostly the same except she can't button her jeans or wear tight shirts. I was out of line calling her fat.

  And it's too late to go back and apologize.

  I'm an asshole.

  At the pool hall, my lungs fill with secondhand smoke as I'm forced to listen to the fourth pop song in a row play from the jukebox. The place is packed – we were put on a thirty-minute waiting list for the next available pool table, so Austin and I wait in the back while the guys we came with scope around to find a waitress who will serve us alcohol. I didn't want to drink – in fact, I've never had alcohol – but I was going to drink tonight because that's what guys did. And this was the first time I didn't have a girlfriend holding me back.

  Within minutes, Austin starts flirting with a girl in ripped-up jeans wearing way too much eye make-up and I'm left feeling awkward, leaning against a wall all by myself. I have change in my pocket, so I head over to the jukebox to add some rock music to the queue.

  If the cigarette smell weren't so suffocatingly strong, I would have thought the place was rigged with fog machines. Weaving around tables and people aiming pool sticks, I find the jukebox and use the slimy touch screen to find a good song.