by Kieran Scott
I opened my mouth to say something back—something probably stupid like “I can leave if you want me to”—but the nurse saved me.
“Chloe Appleby?”
Chloe cringed at the sound of her own name. I jumped up so fast the nurse looked confused and kinda disturbed. Like maybe I was Chloe Appleby.
“That’s her,” I said, pointing at Chloe.
From the look on her face, I’m pretty sure Chloe was coming up with ten different ways to murder me.
“Let’s go,” I said under my breath. All I could think about was getting out of that room and away from the Judgey McHolierthanthous.
“Right this way,” the nurse said, giving us a smile. A real one. At least someone around here didn’t hate us.
Chloe finally got out of her chair and we slowly followed the nurse. She weighed Chloe, took her blood pressure, and asked her way too many questions about her period. I stared at a pink calendar on the wall. On it was a stork dangling a wide-eyed, smiling baby right over the month of March.
“So your approximate due date would be …”
Chloe and I locked eyes. Due date? What? Already? The woman spun around a plastic wheel and smiled. “March twentieth!”
March twentieth. March twentieth. March twentieth. Suddenly I felt like I had about six and a half months to live.
“I’m just gonna have you pee in a cup for me and then you can see the doctor!” the nurse said brightly. She handed Chloe a plastic cup with a lid, sealed inside a plastic bag, and pointed her toward the bathroom. Seriously. Could this whole thing get any more effed up? Chloe ducked her head in a very un-Chloe-like way, and slipped inside. She started to close the door.
“Will your parents be joining us today, hon?” the woman asked.
Somehow Chloe’s head ducked even further. “Um. No.”
Then she shut the door. The nurse turned to me, grinning, as if this kind of thing happened every day and it was about as big of a deal as charging a cell phone.
“You’ll be in room five. You can wait for her in there.”
I glanced at room five. It was light blue and yellow and cheery, but to me it looked like the bowels of hell. I didn’t move. My mouth tasted like dirt. The nurse stood there with her arm out.
“Um … are they gonna, like … is the doctor gonna go … you know … like in the movies?”
I made a gesture with my hand that turned her face red. God, I wanted to die.
The nurse recovered and tilted her head sympathetically. “Yes, the doctor will give her a pelvic exam to confirm the pregnancy,” she said. “You can wait out here for that if you like.”
“Thank you!” I said in an exhale. I dropped onto the plastic chair just as Chloe came out and handed a cup full of yellow to the nurse. The nurse placed it on the counter, right at my eye level.
I wondered if they did lobotomies in this place.
Chloe stepped to the threshold and looked down at me. “You’re not coming in?”
My heart thumped. “Um—”
“You’ll need to strip from the waist down, hon,” the nurse said, handing her a paper sheet.
Chloe instantly got the picture. “Oh. Okay.”
“I’ll be right here,” I said. “If you need me.”
“Okay.”
Chloe walked inside like she was in a daze and closed the door behind her. Other nurses and patients walked by, did their business, went into rooms. I kept my eyes on the floor, letting my leg bounce as much as it wanted, avoiding catching any more criticizing looks. Finally someone stopped outside the room, knocked on the door, and went inside. Had to be the doctor, but I wasn’t sure. She said nothing to me, and I didn’t look up.
Five minutes passed. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty million. I could hear murmuring voices through the wall but couldn’t make out any words. In my mind I saw Chloe lying on a table, her legs open, the doctor coming at her with some scary instrument. My stomach turned. I finally lifted my head to breathe and noticed that from where I was sitting I had a clear view of the parking lot out the window. My Jeep was parked right in the middle, its army green paint glinting in the sun. Suddenly I saw myself jumping behind the wheel, gunning the engine, and taking off for the shore. Getting. The Hell. Out of here.
My fingers twitched toward the keys in my pocket. Then the door behind me opened.
“Are you Jake?”
I looked up at the doctor. She was thin, pretty, and young, with brown hair, green eyes, and a purple T-shirt under her white coat.
“Um, yeah?”
“I’m Doctor Muller. Come on in.” She cocked her head toward the room like she was inviting me inside for a beer. Was she serious? I didn’t want to see what was going on in there.
“Come on,” she said again. “I won’t bite.”
It wasn’t her I was worried about. I shoved myself up and, staring straight ahead at the far wall—past where Chloe was lying—walked inside.
“It’s okay. I have my clothes back on,” Chloe said, sounding annoyed.
I looked at her. Only her stomach was showing as she lay back on the table. Her perfectly flat stomach. There was no way there was a baby in there. Just no way. Was that why they had called me in here? To tell me it was a big mistake? I turned toward the doctor and she was holding this wandlike thing on a wire.
“What’re you gonna do with that?” My hip hit the counter and I caught a glass bottle of Q-tips before they could smash on the floor. “Sorry. Sorry.” I put it back on the counter with a clatter.
“It’s okay,” the doctor said, smirking. My jaw clenched. Glad she was enjoying this. “We’re just going to listen for the baby’s heartbeat.”
My eyes widened. “It’s got a heartbeat?”
They both looked at me like I’d just skipped A in a recital of the ABCs.
“Sorry.”
The doctor sat on a tall stool and squirted some goo on Chloe’s stomach. Then she put the end of the wand on there. Chloe’s hand shot out toward me. I hesitated a second, but then held it. She squeezed my fingers crazy hard. This was so wrong. I shouldn’t be here. Chloe should not be holding my hand. I’d never held her hand in my life.
Then, out of nowhere, this quiet thrumming sound filled the room. It was so fast it sounded like something panicked.
“There it is! That’s your baby,” the doctor said.
“That’s it?” Chloe asked, lifting her head off the table.
“Yep. Sounds good and strong,” the doctor said.
She put the wand away and handed Chloe some tissues. “To wipe your stomach,” she explained when Chloe looked confused. As Chloe mopped up the goo with her free hand, the doctor clasped her hands between her knees. “So, is there anything else you want to ask me, Chloe? Or you, Jake?”
I couldn’t think. My head was too filled with the sound of thrumming, even though the machine was turned off. I shook my head and let go of Chloe’s hand. I couldn’t stop staring at her stomach. There was a baby in there. An actual baby. I had the weirdest sensation. Like my head was emptying out from the back of my skull toward the top. The room tilted so fast I was shocked Chloe and the doctor didn’t go flying. I pinned myself back against the wall and closed my eyes.
Don’t faint, you pussy. Don’t you fucking faint.
“Um, no. I think I asked everything I needed to ask,” Chloe said. Her voice sounded small and high, like she was suddenly five years old.
“All right, then. You have my card and the pamphlets,” the doctor said. “Please give me a call anytime if there’s anything you want to talk about. Anything at all.”
“Thanks,” Chloe said.
She was staring straight up at the ceiling, her hands on top of her stomach, which was now covered by her yellow T-shirt. The doctor shot me this look as she walked out, like she was telling me to take care of Chloe, then she closed the door. Take care of Chloe? Did she not notice I was about to go down? I pressed my palms together—they were slippery with sweat—and tried to breathe.
“It�
��s okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.”
“Are you kidding me?” Chloe sat up so fast it scared the crap out of me. “Omigod. What am I going to do? What am I going to do, Jake?”
Her eyes filled with tears and she clutched her stomach. Right. Clearly it was time to focus. I squinted at her, waiting for my brain to reset itself.
“Okay, okay, calm down,” I said again. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“No! It’s not! It’s not gonna be okay. I can’t have a baby, Jake! I’m seventeen!” Chloe cried. “But I can’t have an abortion! It has a heartbeat! Did you hear that? It’s an actual person.”
“I know … I, yeah, I know.” I had no idea what I was saying.
Wait. Did she just say she can’t have an abortion?
“But, Chloe, we can’t be, like, parents,” I said, panicking. “I mean, can we?”
“No! No, no, no. We can’t. We definitely can’t,” she replied, rambling. “We sooooo cannot be parents.”
“Well then, what’re we gonna do?” I said, pressing the side of my fist against my mouth. I felt like if I didn’t, I was gonna hurl.
Chloe did this groan-whimper thing that made her sound like a dying puppy. She turned sideways and slid off the table, pacing back and forth in the small room. “My parents are going to kill me.”
“No, they’re not,” I said automatically. I wiped my hands on the butt of my jeans. But then I realized I had no idea what her parents would do. Some people were crazy about this kind of thing. They, like, threw their kids out of the house over stuff like this. “I mean, they’re not actually going to murder you. Right?”
“Oh. God.” Chloe covered her face with both hands and cried. Her shoulders bounced and she started making these scary choking sounds. Okay, clearly someone was going to have to hold it together around here, and it wasn’t going to be her. I walked around the table, thinking of the doctor’s silent look, and put my arms around Chloe.
“It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.” I pressed my lips together and tried to think. What would make her feel better right now? What could I do or say to make myself feel like less of a prick? “What if we tell my parents first? Like a kind of test run?”
Chloe let out what I thought was a laugh. It was hard to tell with the snorting and blubbering. How the hell did I end up here? Chloe and I had always been casual friends, but until this summer we’d never even talked much. How was it me here, holding her and talking about babies? It should’ve been Hammond. It should’ve been Will. It should’ve been anybody but me.
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“What?” I leaned back to see her face. Her nose was swollen, her eyes were puffed, and her lips were rimmed with red blotches.
Chloe’s hands dropped. “Your parents are way stricter than mine. If we tell them, your dad will definitely kill you.”
I swallowed hard as Chloe grabbed up her denim jacket and bag. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but she wasn’t. In fact, I was kind of thinking about hiding my dad’s shotgun as soon as I got home.
“I think we should wait,” Chloe said, sniffling. She stared at a painting of a sailboat on the wall, like she was talking to it instead of me. “Yeah. I think we should wait to tell our parents until we figure out what we’re going to do. It’ll go better if we have, like, a plan.” She glanced at me then, and swiped the back of her hand under her nose. “Okay?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
As I trailed her out of the room I bit my tongue to keep from saying what I was thinking. If we couldn’t even get through a doctor’s appointment without freaking, crying, and almost ralphing, then how the hell were we going to figure out what to do?
ally
The metal soccer bleacher seat cut into the back of my legs as I watched Hammond take the ball upfield toward the goal. I had to remember not to wear shorts to these games from now on. When I stood up, I was going to look like I’d been sitting on a cheese grater. But then, it would be too cold to wear shorts soon anyway. It was so weird to think that this was our last fall in high school. That this time next year, I’d be cheering for some random dudes on some random college team. Last night over pasta at the Olive Garden, my dad and I had narrowed my choices down from twenty-five to ten, but the schools were still all over the country—everywhere from Stanford to Texas to UConn. Every time I thought about physically being somewhere else, living on my own, I shivered. In a good way.
Freaky.
“Pass it!” Shannen shouted, standing up next to me. “Come on, Hammond! Jake’s wide open!”
Hammond did not pass the ball. Instead he took the shot, even though he had two defenders all up in his face, and it sailed way wide of the goal. Everyone in the stands groaned, even Annie, who sat behind me, unwilling as she was to share the same bench with Shannen and Faith. Claimed she was afraid of Crestie Cooties.
Faith looked up from her texting. “What? What happened?”
“We just didn’t score a goal, thanks to Hammond,” Shannen groused, plopping back down on the bench.
Coach Martz called time-out and the team jogged toward the sidelines, sweating and grumbling. They were losing one–nothing and looked lost out there, possibly because one of their captains was hogging the ball away from their other captain. The sun beat down on Jake’s face as he jogged over to Hammond to ask what the hell he was doing, I assume. Hammond shoved Jake away from him and when Jake tried to grab his shoulder, Ham whacked his arm so hard Jake almost fell over. My fingers curled around the edge of the bench, but Jake didn’t retaliate.
The guys grabbed water and gathered around their coach while the backslappers, including Chloe, made a loose circle around the huddle. Chloe tried hard not to look at Jake as Jake tried hard not to look at Chloe, and Hammond gazed longingly at Chloe from behind. Yeah. Deciding not to do Backslappers this year? Best idea ever. That triangle was even deadlier than the one in Bermuda.
“Shouldn’t you two be down there getting your rah on?” Annie asked the others.
“I decided to abstain from joining anything nonathletic this year,” Shannen said, leaning back casually with her elbows on the bleacher seat behind ours. She crossed her long, semibare legs, and a pair of JV players a few yards away ogled her so hard I thought their eyeballs might combust.
“And I’m concentrating on drama,” Faith said, twirling her blond hair around a finger as she read another text.
Annie snorted a laugh. “Isn’t that what you’re always concentrating on?”
Shannen smirked.
“Huh?” Faith said. Annie just rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” Faith replied. “You can mock me if you want, but Ally’s doing the fall play too this year.”
“You are?” Annie and Shannen asked at the same time.
“I didn’t think you were into that stuff anymore,” Shannen added.
I shrugged. “It’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is, like, the only Shakespeare play I ever understood, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Tryouts are on Monday, so—”
“Auditions. We call them auditions,” Faith corrected me.
“What about work?” Annie asked.
“I’ll still have time to pick up a few shifts a week,” I replied. Annie and I both had part-time jobs at the CVS in the downtown strip mall. “Just not as many as usual.”
“Great. More shifts with Ancient Alice and Smelly Sal for me,” Annie grumbled.
Faith’s eyes lit up in a fake way and she turned to look at Annie. “Hey! Maybe you should join stage crew. Since you already have the uniform down,” she added, flicking her gaze over Annie’s black-on-black outfit with disdain.
“Oh, yeah. Nothing I’d rather do than spend more time with you,” Annie shot back.
“No, no, no, no, no.” Faith shook her head facetiously. “I will be on stage under the spotlights. The stage crew stays back behind the curtains, in the dark, where they belong.”
I was surprised when Annie didn’t yank out her laptop and break
it over the top of Faith’s head. But I’m pretty sure she considered it.
The whistle blew and the guys jogged back out to the field. Annie did take out her laptop, but instead of braining Faith with it, she opened it atop her knees, typing in some observation or another. She hit save and pressed her hands into the bleachers at her sides.
“I gotta say, Chloe looks unreasonably hot for someone in her delicate condition,” she said casually.
I choked on my own saliva. Shannen and Faith both ceased to breathe. I could feel them staring at Annie and I slowly, slowly, closed my eyes, waiting for the explosion.
“Her what?” Shannen hissed.
“Chloe’s not … you don’t mean she’s …” Faith watched from the corner of her eye as Chloe went back to the sideline with the other backslappers to cheer on the team. For the first time, I thought her butt looked maybe a teeny bit wide in her denim shorts. “She’s pregnant?”
“Omigod. That’s why she scarfed that entire bacon cheeseburger yesterday!” Shannen exclaimed, her eyes wide as she grabbed Faith’s arm. “I thought she was just depressed.”
Annie was almost transparently white. “You guys didn’t know?”
I dropped my head into my hands. There was a crushed Wendy’s cup in the dirt below the bleachers, Wendy’s face mashed down the middle so that her eyes had combined to make one big Cyclops eye.
“How do you know?” Shannen demanded.
“Ally? A little help here?” Annie said.
Their heads swiveled slowly to look at me. So slowly I could practically hear their neck bones creaking.
“Ally? What the hell is going on?” Shannen demanded.
“Annie knows because I told her,” I said quietly, checking around to make sure no one was listening in. “And I know because …” God. This was going to hurt. “Jake’s the father.”
“What?” they screeched in unison.
Now everyone in the bleachers was watching us, either intrigued or annoyed, depending on their age range. Plus some of the backslapper girls, the assistant coach, and a pair of grade-school kids playing tag. Chloe, at least, hadn’t noticed us yet. She was too busy screaming for Connor, who’d just blocked a great shot.