by Karen Gordon
“I’m …” she took a breath. “I’m pregnant too.” She sobbed and pulled more paper off the roll.
Steve felt a rush of cold sweat all over his body. Suddenly his borrowed suit coat felt way too tight and three beers and two shots of whiskey churned in his stomach.
“Wha?” He stopped, his brain too foggy to form a complete sentence. “When?” She was on the pill. Wasn’t that supposed to be like ninety-nine percent effective? “What about your pills?”
She looked up at him and shrugged. “I guess they don’t always work.”
He sat back onto the floor and dropped his head against the wall of the stall. God dammit! He wanted to kick at the walls, take out his anger and frustration, but that wouldn’t change anything. He would still be trapped with her. He closed his eyes and cursed his wait-‘til-after-the-holidays plan. Fuck! If he’d not moved back in last month …
They sat in silence, except for her occasional sniffing. The million thoughts popping around in his head started to form coherent questions.
“Do you want to keep it?” God that sounded cold, but he had to know her intentions.
She nodded, and paused before adding, “Look, if you don’t want to … be there.”
He shrugged. He couldn’t give her an answer as to what he wanted to do, not yet anyway. “When are you due? I mean, do you know? Have you been to a doctor yet?”
She shook her head no. “I, um, I thought, ya know, so I went and got a pee test thing …”
“How long have you known?” He was replaying in his mind the past few weeks since he had moved back in, looking for clues. He didn’t remember seeing any pee test stuff in the bathroom trash.
“I did the test at work, last week.”
At work? Why not at home? Something struck him as strange about that, but he brushed it off to all the strange emotions he was feeling right now.
♪ ☺ ♥
He didn’t tell his friends and they didn’t ask questions when he hit the bar hard and Amanda sat at the table and sulked. No one asked about her red-rimmed eyes or mascara smears or noticed that she left her beer untouched and that Steve brought her a Coke.
Since it was a two-hour drive home, they couldn’t stay long. Laura wasn’t excited about driving an unfamiliar car on the winding lake roads in the dark. They all said their goodbyes to Carrie and made promises they wouldn’t keep about staying in touch. Sadness at letting go of one chapter of their lives hung in the air. None of them had reached twenty-one yet, but for most their partying days were already over. Work, kids, and responsibility came at them all too fast.
The ride home promised to be just as painful as the ride there. Steve didn’t ask Laura if she knew why Amanda had been crying, but she was suspiciously silent. With a few drinks in them to drop their inhibitions, Gina and Raquel had started kissing and groping. A very drunk Casey didn’t hide her anger at having to ride with the horny couple in the back seat. Her loud proclamation that “if she wasn’t getting any, no one should” was the last thing said until they reached St. Louis.
Amanda sat center front, leaning in Steve’s direction. He pretended to pass out with his body pressed against the passenger door. Tomorrow he and Amanda would have to talk things out, figure out what was going to happen. Tonight he wanted to enjoy his buzz and wallow in his own pity. Why the hell did his life seem to be just one huge wrong turn?
From the start, he and Tony had been the most pathetic fucks in the apartment complex. Everyone had a mother, except them. Not many had dads, but that didn’t seem to matter as much. They were the kids who only ate food that came in cans or boxes and didn’t have to be cooked. Except for the year or so when dad’s girlfriend Ginny lived with them, they never had clean clothes. He would give anything in this world for his kid not to grow up the same way. He would be there for this kid, and no matter how much it sucked when they were together, Amanda would too. He would do whatever it took to make Amanda happy, make her stay.
He snuck a glance at her. Her eyes were closed like maybe she was sleeping, leaning against him. Might as well start now. He put his arm around her and fitted her head into the crook of his shoulder. She smiled up at him and he looked away. It was going to be hard fighting that trapped feeling all the time. Was that how his mom had felt? Trapped?
In that moment, he saw MG leaving him in a new light. She didn’t get trapped. She got the hell out before she could get sucked into the vortex that was his life. It had been over a year since he had last talked to her. He still thought about her way too much and she probably never thought about him. She was probably in New York living it up with some rich mother-fucker. She wasn’t here. She didn’t want him, his crappy third-shift job, his fucked up family … and he really couldn’t blame her.
Chapter 9
MG shouldn’t have been surprised that Lexi knew who Josh was as soon as she started describing the guy she met in Music Theory class.
“The one with the black earring?” she gushed.
MG nodded but didn’t get a chance to answer before Lexi started her Josh Hagan dissertation.
“He’s from Vegas, and his dad owns like two of the old casinos downtown, and supposedly some other casinos in like Asia. He transferred here from Stanford after he flunked out and his dad made a huge donation to the school to get them to overlook his grades. He’s a Lambda.”
“A whata?”
“A Phi Lambda Alpha.”
“He’s in a frat?”
Lexi nodded. “Oh, yeah, the rich assholes frat.”
“They have one of those?”
“They do here.” To Lexi the social dichotomy of Moreland was just fact. “He was going out with an Alpha Chi, but I don’t think he is anymore.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
She shrugged off her advanced stalker skills. “I blend in with the wood work.”
MG shook her head, still confused.
“I’m quiet …”
MG stifled a laugh and nodded her head.
“So people don’t notice me. I pretend to read books before class or in the library or café and they talk. It’s like I’m not even there.” Lexi seemed more proud than hurt by the snubs.
“Like last semester, these two Alpha Chi girls in my History of Math class were always talking about him. How he was going to some party with one of their sorority sisters. They sounded happy about it. Then a few weeks later he passed them outside our classroom and they called him an asshole.” She shrugged “Guess the party didn’t go so well.”
MG smiled and shrugged. It was all good with her if he broke up with the sorority girl.
“Did he ask you out?” Lexi seemed a little surprised by this idea, and MG was tempted to ask if it sounded crazy that he might ask her out. She really had no idea where she was on the Moreland social ladder.
She kept her answer noncommittal. “He … told me his band was playing downtown Wednesday night and that I should come see them.”
Lexi’s eyes lit up like she was impressed.
“And he took my number and gave me his.” MG pulled out her phone and showed the number to Lexi.
Now she really was impressed. “Wow, you are so lucky. He is soooo hot!”
It may not be nice to say, but it felt great that her roommate was jealous that she had his number. It looks like lots of girls crushed on his whole slightly-dangerous, I’m-in-a-band, rich-boy persona. Which only made her want him a little more.
She had always loved a guy who was a bit of a challenge. It was once she caught them that they usually weren’t so interesting. Most looked so much better in the crush stage, before becoming major let-downs once they took her out, or she slept with them. Blame Steve Shrader. She smiled, thinking about all the crazy shit they had done together, both in bed and out. It was his fault that she was spoiled for other guys.
But Josh, surely he would be pretty wild in bed. He sure as hell looked like he knew more than the typical five-minute wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. And there is no way she
could be bored dating him. Maybe there’d be a trip to Vegas, gambling, hanging out in casino night-clubs.
Her mind was getting way ahead of her. He had only asked her to come hear his band. If she wanted more she was going to have to play it cool.
♪ ☺ ♥
She didn’t have to try too hard to get Lexi to join her on Wednesday night, in fact she seemed genuinely surprised that MG wanted her along. MG got the feeling that between being a scholarship and way too talkative, Lexi had an even sadder social life than she did.
Josh told MG not to worry about getting in to the bar. The bouncer at the door was there for crowd control, he wouldn’t card her. Sure enough, he only glanced at MG when she walked in and completely ignored Lexi.
“Do you see him?” Lexi shouted over the noise.
Of the three thousand students who attended Moreland it looked like half were packed into this hallway of a bar. MG scanned the crowd for Josh’s blonde hair. Lexi spotted him and grabbed MG by the arm and pushed them toward the far end of the bar where he was sitting on the edge of a small stage. He smiled as they approached.
“Cool, you made it.” He yelled in MG’s direction. She smiled in reply.
“This is my roommate, Lexi,” she screamed back at him and pointed behind her.
Josh nodded and smiled at Lexi, who grabbed onto MG’s shirt like she was meeting a rock star. They were going to have to work on her subtlety.
He leaned in close between the two girls., “We go on in a few minutes.” He pointed to his James Bond-looking watch. “You should be able to get a table then. The place should clear out once we start playing.” MG and Lexi laughed and nodded.
MG yelled, “That bad?”
He shrugged. It was too loud to really hold a conversation. He jumped up on the small stage with two other guys. They plugged into amps and arranged their instruments in the tight space of the stage. MG and Lexi tried to stay out of their way.
♪ ☺ ♥
They really weren’t that bad. They could all play their instruments and knew the songs from beginning to end, which put them way ahead of Chuck’s basement band. It was the kind of music they played that fell flat with the college crowd. It was too sad and dramatic and full of angst. It remind MG of some of Pearl Jam’s slower stuff. Good, but … slow.
The lead singer/lead guitarist was kind of cute, if you went for little-boy looks. He had to be college age, but he could probably pass for fourteen, and he reminded MG of the guy who played the younger brother on Party of Five -- cute, but too cute, almost pretty.
A group near the stage cleared out and left an open table after the third song. There wasn’t a mass exodus, but unfortunately Josh was right, people were leaving. MG and Lexi took the table, pushed the dirty beer glasses and dinner plates aside, and welcomed the chance to set their heavy winter coats down.
A waitress came to take their order. MG went with a pitcher of beer and just prayed she wouldn’t need to break out the horrible fake ID she’d bought from a guy in Manhattan. Luckily the waitress just smiled and nodded, then cleared away the dirty dishes.
“I think he likes you.” Lexi leaned into MG and shouted in her ear.
MG looked up at Josh and caught him looking at her. Her heart lurched, but she wasn’t ready for him or anyone else to know that. “Maybe, but I’m not taking him too seriously. I think he likes a lot of girls.”
On a break between sets, Josh sat at their table along with the other guys in the band. He introduced them as Austin the bassist and Daniel the lead singer/lead guitarist/pretty boy. He waived a credit card at the bartender who sent over a pitcher of beer and three glasses.
“So you stayed … that’s good.” He poured himself a beer and refilled the girls’ glasses before setting the pitcher in front of Austin. Daniel glared at him, and MG wasn’t sure if it was because of the comment or he just really wanted a beer.
“Oh, my, god, you were so great!” was Lexi’s overly enthusiastic review.
Daniel finally got the pitcher and poured himself a glass of beer. He briefly glanced at Lexi and said, “Thanks,” before he went back to glaring at Josh.
“You didn’t think the music was, I don’t know, too … “
“Lame?” Austin finished the sentence for Josh, then they both looked at Daniel who got up and walked away, but not before a quick, “Fuck you,” to Josh and Austin.
Josh watched him go back on stage and mess around with the dials on the amps and readjust their position. “I told you he sucks.” He turned back to MG. “He plays great guitar, but …”
“He’s really not that bad of a singer, it’s just the stuff he’s singing. Why don’t you guys try something faster, less … sad.” MG shrugged back at Josh.
“Josh said you sing.” Shit! Evidently Austin was in on the lie now.
“Well, OK, I mean, I have before. There was a band that played parties in high school and after a few beers …”
“So maybe you could sing with us sometime.”
It seemed she was hedging away from her lie as much as he was pushing her toward it. Then it occurred to her, maybe Josh only talked to her because he wanted her to sing with his band. Maybe that’s why she had the attention of the campus hottie. Her heart pounded with indecision. Did she come clean and risk losing Josh’s interest or try to keep up this ridiculous lie?
“Yeah, sure, sometime.” She’d take the gamble and see how long she could play it.
“Cool, we practice at Daniel’s place in town. Can you come by Friday?” Austin wasn’t going to let this go.
Lexi, who had become mute with a fangirl crush until now, grabbed MG’s leg under the table. “I can give her a ride. Where is it?”
“Only blue house on Cherry Street,” was Austin’s cryptic reply when he saw Daniel approaching the table again.
He let out a long sigh. “Let’s do this?” Daniel sounded like he would rather be anywhere but here.
Austin and Josh stood and slowly drained their beers, clearly aiming to irritate Daniel further. They all three got back on the stage. Josh readjusted his amp to undo everything Daniel had done during the last break. Tension rolled off the stage.
MG unconsciously bit at her thumb cuticle, her habit when she was stressed. She now had two days to memorize the lyrics to a song so she could go embarrass the shit out of herself in front of her dream man and possibly be part of a band that hated each other.
The second set was worse than the first. The discord between the guys came through as disjointed rhythm, making the sad songs even sadder. MG and Lexi stayed and drank Josh’s beer, but decided to call it quits around midnight. The place was mostly empty and it was starting to get depressing.
Josh and Austin waved to them as they left. Daniel ignored them.
Chapter 10
He had heard all the pregnant-women horror stories he could stand from the guys at work. The “my wife goes ape-shit crazy when she’s pregnant” jokes ran a close second to the “my wife never wants sex” complaints in the break room.
Amanda was already a little unstable, so Steve was prepared for the worst …, which never happened. From the time she told him about the baby she was calmer, less paranoid and jealous, even happy on most days. Maybe it was just that she needed something to look forward to because planning and getting ready for this baby became her happy hobby (or obsession, depending on how you looked at it).
Their apartment filled with books full of baby names and their meaning, books on what was happening to the baby each month, magazines with ways to decorate a nursery and all sorts of stuff for the baby. Almost every night after work Amanda would stop at the baby super store and find another thing that she was sure they were going to need.
In the short amount of time they had together every evening, Steve would assemble whatever she bought or put batteries in it to make sure it worked. Amanda was usually too tired to cook, so they would order in and lay around the apartment together, creating a space for their family, piece by piece.
They settled into a wonderfully drama-free routine. The irony wasn’t lost on Steve that the event he first saw as a huge disaster was the catalyst that finally brought them some peace. Their relationship that had started out as just sex and then spiraled into painful drama, was now the stable, somewhat happy place that Steve had always dreamed of. They were no longer the couple that everyone wondered why they even stayed together.
♪ ☺ ♥
He skipped sleep to go to the first ultrasound with Amanda. It wasn’t definite, but all signs were pointing to a girl. While the nurse ran the wand across Amanda’s tiny lump, Steve scooted in closer, transfixed by the clear image on the screen. She was real. Really real. She was no longer a sexless idea that he couldn’t see or feel. That was his daughter. His daughter. He kept repeating the phrase in his head, trying to wrap his mind around the idea that this little girl would call him dad. That she would look to him to take care of her. She would want stuff, like dolls and clothes, and he already wanted to get them for her. His daughter. Emotionally he aged a few years in that ultrasound room.
He and Amanda had a rare lunch together after the appointment, and even she noticed the change in him. She smiled at him, sitting close to her on the same side of the booth, his arm protectively laid behind her.
“Are you happy it’s a girl?”
He smiled. “I would have been happy either way, but yeah, now that I know I kinda like the idea.”