by Kelly Oram
Jordan clicked the TV off and sank deep into the couch, releasing a defeated sigh. “Well, at least it’s not cliché.” She slid me a sideways glance. “And it wasn’t Transformers.”
Bursting out laughing, I pulled her against me for another hug. “You gripe, Jordan, but I know deep down you secretly love all things cliché.”
She snorted, but she didn’t deny it.
I’d thought the week after Thanksgiving had been the longest of my life, but the week after that was even worse. Things changed between Jordan and me after we watched Shakespeare in Love. I felt like I’d lost my best friend. We were avoiding each other because every time we were together, things were tense and awkward. She’d been understanding and supportive, but I could see the sadness and pity in every look or smile she gave me.
Come the Thursday before the last week of school before break, I’d already had one of my final exams but the worst were yet to come tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday. Jordan and Colin had a particularly grueling test ahead of them tomorrow as well. Judging from the arguing and groaning coming from Jordan’s bedroom as they studied together, neither of them felt very confident about it.
I stayed out of their way in the safety of my quiet bedroom until Sophie called, saying she was on her way over with dinner. When she arrived, Jordan and Colin heard me emerge from my room and decided to take a break from the books as well. They were laughing until they realized who my company was; then the smiles dropped from their faces. “Oh, it’s you,” Colin said, wrinkling his nose.
Sophie scoffed, but her gaze quickly flicked to Jordan. “Hello, Jordan. How’ve you been? Stolen any more boyfriends recently?”
Jordan met her smug look with a cool smile. “Trapped any more poor, unsuspecting guys in unwanted relationships lately, Amy Dunne?”
I didn’t know the obvious movie reference, but this was one time I wasn’t going to take Jordan’s bait. Unfortunately, when Colin snickered, Sophie couldn’t help herself. “Who’s Amy Dunne?”
Jordan smirked. “Gone Girl. 2014. Directed by David Fincher. Rosamund Pike plays Amy Dunne—a psychotic woman who forces her husband not to leave her by getting pregnant against his knowledge, hoping he’d rather stay with her than abandon his child.”
“She’s the villain of the story,” Colin added cheerfully. “Just, you know, in case that wasn’t obvious.”
Jordan coughed to cover a laugh, which was pointless, considering she high-fived Colin. “You guys…” I rubbed my suddenly aching head. “Can we please not do this?”
Sophie had done an amazing job holding back her temper, but she was on the verge of exploding. “Nate, honey, maybe we should go somewhere else.”
I felt like banging my head against a wall. “It’s freezing outside, you’ve already brought dinner, and I still have a ton of studying to do tonight. Can we please just sit down and talk?”
Sophie glared at Colin and Jordan. They both threw up their hands in surrender. “Don’t mind us,” Jordan said. “You guys do your thing. We’ll stay out of your way.”
Colin dragged her into the kitchen. “We’ll just figure out our dinner and disappear back into Jordan’s room. You won’t even know we’re here.”
Sophie scowled at them both for a few more seconds, then sat down at the dining table with a huff. “Fine. Let’s just eat. I hope you like Greek.”
She started handing me food with forced cheer. “So, how are your finals going?”
“Fine.” She wanted to make small talk? Really? Yeah, that wasn’t happening right now. “How’s the pregnancy? Have you been sick at all?”
Pregnancy was the magic word. Sophie’s face brightened, and she dug eagerly into her food. “So far, so good. Only a little bit of nausea in the mornings.” She laughed and held up a forkful of food. “My appetite’s already growing, though. I’m going to have to be careful or I’ll gain a bunch of weight.”
A loud snort of laughter came from the kitchen. Sophie glared at Colin and Jordan again, but they ignored her. “Let’s just do sandwiches,” Colin suggested. “You have roast beef.”
“I think I need something more substantial,” Jordan argued. “Enchiladas sound good.”
“Mexican gives me heartburn,” Colin whined. “I can’t study with my esophagus burning.”
With all the friction between Sophie and my roommate, I should have stayed out of the argument, but I couldn’t resist. “Heartburn is not the only thing Colin gets when he eats Mexican, Jordan. You might want to take that into consideration if you’re planning to stay holed up in your room together all night.”
Colin shot me a sour look. “Very funny.”
I just laughed.
Sophie set her fork down with a frown. “Nate, that is disgusting.”
“But very true.” Jordan stopped looking over a takeout menu and moved to the fridge. “Sandwiches, it is.”
While Jordan started pulling out all the fixings to make sandwiches, I tried to get the conversation with Sophie back on track. “So what do we need to do first? I guess we need to find you a doctor, right?”
“Oh.” Sophie flashed me a bright smile, shaking her head. “No. I already have one. I’m just going to use my doctor in Syracuse.”
“So far away?” I didn’t know much about this whole process, but that sounded weird to me. “I would think you’d want your doctor closer, just in case something goes wrong or whatever.”
Sophie set down her fork and covered my hand with hers. Her smile turned patronizing. “Are you worried about me? Nate, that’s so sweet. But you can relax. The baby won’t be due until the summer when we’re already home. Until then, I’ll just have to go home for the weekend once or twice next semester for prenatal appointments.”
I knew better than to question her judgment. “Okay. So, I guess we should make an appointment for end of next week, when we’re home for Christmas break?”
She shrugged breezily, eyes fixed on her dinner. “No. I already went last weekend. I don’t need to go back for a while.”
I wasn’t surprised that she’d taken charge of the situation—that’s how Sophie was—but I was unexpectedly disappointed and hurt that she’d left me out of it. “You already went? Without me?”
“You were busy with your rehearsals all weekend. I didn’t want to bother you.” She gave me another careless brush-off. “I didn’t think you’d want to go, anyway. You haven’t exactly been excited about this.”
The bitterness in her voice made my temper explode. She had no right to be mad at me. “I wasn’t ready for this, Soph!” I dropped my fork and pushed my plate away, appetite suddenly gone. “That’s a choice you took from me, so yeah, I’ve been upset. But just because I wasn’t ready to have a kid, doesn’t mean I don’t want it. I’ve always wanted kids. Don’t you dare do what you always do and just take over, assuming you’ll do a better job than me. Not with this. This baby is mine as much as it is yours, and I want to be involved. I want to be there for the doctor appointments, and I want to be included in all the decisions.”
Face pale and eyes wide, Sophie sat back, abandoning her dinner. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to leave you out. I won’t do it again. I want us to do this together, too; I just didn’t think you did. We’re going to be a family, Nate.” Some of her confidence returned and she reached for my hand. I let her have it, needing the reassurance as much as she did. “From now on, equal partners.”
I stared at our connected hands, knowing this was probably a good thing. But even as I tried to convince myself that Sophie and I could make things work, my gaze drifted toward the kitchen, where Jordan had given up making a sandwich and was simply watching me with a distant look in her eyes.
Pushing aside my myriad of questions and feelings, I tried to focus on the practical things. The rest was going to take a lot longer to figure out. “Okay, so if you have the doctor all covered, then what else do we need to plan right now? I mean, we don’t really need to start getting baby stuff until it’s closer,
so there probably isn’t a lot to worry about right now, is there?”
“Are you kidding? We have to start planning financially. There are insurance co-pays, and deductibles, an endless supply list of all that baby stuff, and of course we need to start looking at apartments now, because it’s going to take a while to find something that will work for the three of us that we can afford.”
“What?”
“WHAT?” Colin echoed.
Startled by the interruption, both Sophie and I turned our attention to the kitchen. Colin was gaping at us, mayo-covered knife in hand. “Nate, you’re leaving?”
I was still feeling so derailed by Sophie’s suggestion that I could barely put a sentence together. “I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Nate, you’ll have to,” Sophie said. “It just makes sense. We need to start saving right now, and the easiest way to do that would be to move in together and only have one housing payment to deal with. I talked to my RA, and she told me I could get out of my current room at the semester break if we switch to one of the family housing units in another building.”
The room started to spin. This conversation had run away from me so quickly I felt as if I’d been mowed over by it. “Sophie, don’t you think that moving in together is something we should discuss and think about before you go making plans?”
Sophie rose from the table with a huff and stomped into the living room. She threw herself onto the couch with dramatic flair. “It’s only logical, Nate. If you’re really in this with me, then the easiest way for us to save money is to live together. Family housing is easier to get into at the winter semester. We can get into a good place now, right after Christmas break, and not have to fight for a spot next fall. We can stay in the apartment above my parents’ garage over the summer—they’d let us stay for free—and we could save up all summer.”
“Hold on.” I stopped pacing. “I was planning to stay here during the summer.”
Sophie gave me a very condescending eye roll accompanied by a sigh. “We could save so much money going home for the summer.”
Suppressing an irritated growl, I shot a glance at Jordan. “What’d the guy from the movie do?”
Jordan lifted a curious brow. “You mean Gone Girl?”
“Yeah, the one where the woman got pregnant to make him stay with her. What’d he do?”
“He stayed,” she said flatly.
And clearly he lived a long, miserable life with the woman. I didn’t want to be Gone Girl, but I couldn’t just abandon Sophie, either. There had to be middle ground. Something that wasn’t Gone Girl, but also wasn’t “Bye Bye Baby,” either.
“I can’t go home for the summer if I land an internship, which I’m hoping will happen.”
Sophie gritted her teeth and calmly said, “Would this be a paid internship?”
Cringing, I went back to wearing out the living room carpet. “Probably not,” I admitted. “But I could find a part-time job too, just as soon as classes get out. That’s all I’d need to cover my living expenses here.”
“But that wouldn’t be saving money.” Sophie groaned. “You have to think about the future, Nate.”
I raked my hands through my hair. “I am thinking about the future. An internship, if I could get one, would be a huge advantage.”
“Being a gopher for some record company who won’t even bother to pay you is supposed to help you? Grow up, Nate! You’re going to be a father. You can’t keep chasing some ridiculous pipe dream when you have a family to support.”
Her words enraged me. Not because they were insulting, but because she was right. There was nothing stable or guaranteed about my chosen major. I could leave NYU with a degree and still be completely unemployable. That was worth the risk before, but was it now that I had a kid to think about? Spending my summer paying rent and doing a job I probably wouldn’t be paid for when I could go home and make a decent living for the summer doing contract work with my dad like I’d done previous summers was definitely not responsible. And if Sophie was going home to have the baby in Syracuse—which also made sense that she’d want to be near her family—then I needed to be there, too.
Frustrated, I pounded my fists against the nearest wall. “Damn it!”
“Nate?”
I whirled around and leaned against the wall I’d almost just punched through and slid to the ground. I buried my face in my hands. My dreams that had so much promise were evaporating from my future, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was going to be sick.
“Nate?” Sophie’s voice was soft now—delicate and sympathetic. She joined me on the floor, sitting next to me with our shoulders touching. “Nate, talk to me.”
“Fine,” I muttered. “I’ll go home for the summer. I’ll talk to my dad about working for him, and that way I can be there when the baby comes.”
Sophie sucked in a sharp breath. “Thank you,” she whispered. The relief in her voice confirmed that I’d just made the right decision. For better or worse, Sophie was terrified right now and she needed my support.
Exhausted and defeated, I let out a long breath and squeezed Sophie’s hand. “Don’t be scared. We’ll figure all of this out. We just can’t go making a bunch of hasty decisions. I can’t move in with you next semester.”
“But—”
“Look, for now I’ll move back in with my brothers, okay?”
The dual gasps from the kitchen broke my heart. “I’ll help you find another roommate first,” I told Jordan. It wasn’t much of a consolation for leaving her. “You know I want to stay, but she’s right. The room with my brothers is already paid for. I could save a lot of money moving back in with them, and I’m going to need every penny I can save. But I’ll stay until we find a replacement for me, and he or she will be even better than me.”
Jordan’s thick swallow and silent nod had Colin wrapping his arm around her. “I understand,” she whispered.
Yeah, she understood. But she was devastated.
She wasn’t the only one.
With nothing else to do but plow forward through this unavoidable train wreck of a conversation, I turned my attention back to Sophie. “As soon as I can, I’ll move back in with my brothers, and I’ll get a part-time job next semester. I won’t need to perform in another showcase, so I’ll have more time next semester. I’ll put away as much as I can. And maybe we can start those couples pregnancy classes together.”
“Really?”
Sophie’s eyes filled with hope. Her vulnerable expression made the weight of my true responsibility hit me full force. I wasn’t just responsible for the child inside her; I was now responsible for her, too. She was in this position because of me—well, I’d helped her get there. I needed to take care of her as much as our child.
“Yeah.” The air seemed to suck out of the room as if that one word were a vacuum, sealing me to my fate. I swallowed back the urge to panic. “I’m not ready to get back into a relationship with you, but I want to try and at least be friends again. If we can manage that much, then I don’t know. We’ll just have to see. We’re going to be parents together, after all. You think you can settle for that much?”
My question hung in the air for a moment while Sophie wrestled with her emotions. She closed her eyes, a few tears spilling down her cheeks, and nodded her acceptance. I broke down and pulled her into my arms. “Come here.”
She was so relieved by the hug that she clung to me and burst into sobs. “Shh,” I cooed, stroking her hair. “Baby, shh, everything’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this.”
Clinging to me as if her life depended on it, she soaked my shirt with tears. “I miss you so much, Nate.”
“I’m here, Soph. You’re not going to do this alone. I promise.”
Vaguely, it registered in my brain that Colin and Jordan must have left when the front door clicked shut. I felt Jordan’s departure all the way to my core. The fact that she left without saying good-bye spoke volumes as to how our future was going to go. This situati
on wasn’t just going to ruin a chance for a relationship together; it was probably going to ruin everything we shared. Without meaning to, I’d become Gone Girl after all.
The day of the showcase, I should have been skipping through my day, bursting with relief, excitement, and anticipation. My final exams were done, and in less than an hour I’d be the first freshman in three years to perform in the Steinhardt semester showcase. And I was ready. My song had come together even better than I’d imagined, and I was confident that I was going to shock the life out of the judges I’d failed to truly impress back at the beginning of the semester. Today should have been my day, but I couldn’t shake my depression.
Jordan was my best friend, but after my talk with Sophie things between us had gone from awkward and brittle to hopeless and broken. Even though I wasn’t back together with Sophie, it was clear that I couldn’t keep both of the women in my life. I wanted to hang on to Jordan, but because of the baby, Sophie was going to win out. I knew it. Sophie knew it. And Jordan knew it. But what could be done? Jordan claimed she understood, but she’d avoided me as much as possible all week, and now it was almost showtime and she still wasn’t there.
Glancing at my watch again, I wrung my hands out and tried not to pace. No need to let all the other performers see my nerves. They were all paying close attention to me with equal amounts of curiosity and resentment because I was a freshman—I heard there was a pool going as to whether I would suck it up or not. I didn’t want them to realize I was freaked out, even if I was more worried about Jordan than my performance.
A hand fell on my shoulder. “She’ll be here, Nate.”
I glanced up at Chris, and then looked at Ty. He nodded. “There’s no way she’d miss this.”
Pushing my way past the evening’s first performers, I peeked out the side of the curtain. Colin was in the front row with an empty seat next to him—the only empty chair in the house. When I caught his attention, I pointed toward the door to the right of the stage. “Where is she?” I asked when we met backstage.