Do you remember the taste of my lips that night?
I stole a bit of my MOTHER'S perfume.
'Cause I remember when my [ father ] put his fist
through the wall that separated the dining room.
Who knew a little red plus sign could have such an accusatory stare? Chloe didn't. Not until she was sitting on the toilet, pants around her legs, and pregnancy test in hand.
She came to the conclusion then that was entirely possible for inanimate objects to have emotions. This one was mocking her.
It took a few moments for the reality of the situation to set in. Her, Chloe Beale; recently graduated, ex-acapella co-leader to the Barden Bellas and winner of The World's Acapella Tournament - pregnant. And it wasn't as if these things didn't happen, but they didn't happen to her.
It only takes one time to make a baby." God, she remembered that talk well. She was in tenth grade, watching as her P.E. teacher, a thin woman with spider-like limbs, stalk across the gymnasium like it was a web. As the elongated ruler connected sharply to the blackboard, she threw accusatory stare after accusatory stare at the teenagers in the room; pointedly ignoring the sneers and distant expressions. They, like she once did, held the same view. Why did such a talk even matter? Pregnancy was for other girls. Stupid girls - small town girls with no future who declared love to a man they fucked once in a pickup truck because: 'a baby can't grow up without their father' and, if they had sex once, it surely meant there had to be some kind of love.
"Have sex without a condom, forget to take the pill - or, even, the protection fails - and you can have a baby. Sex can be just once, but a child is forever."
Just once. That was the hilarity of the whole thing. All it took was Chloe getting drunk at The World's after party, hooking up with a random guy and letting him use a condom that was out of date.
How stupid was she? It wasn't as if Chloe didn't mess around, ( she and Tom were an off and on thing until he graduated from Barden, after all. Not to mention the men peppered in between then and the moment she was sitting on the toilet. ) and she was the one who openly admitted she wished she had more time to experiment in college. But this was not a kind of experimentation she was looking for.
All she could do was try to suppress the hysterical laughter that threatened to bubble up within her throat. Because it wasn't unlike Chloe to hide her feelings behind laughter - but the last thing any of the girls outside needed to hear was her mania at three am in the morning.
Instead, she placed the pregnancy test back into the plastic she had tore it from, and shoved them both into a box with a picture of a ( if you asked her - creepy ) two-toothed baby. Letting it drop to the floor, the ginger reached up and laced her fingers into her hair; almost ignoring the way her scalp screamed as the hairs were pulled and snapped at the base.
"I'm pregnant," she said to the empty air, her voice cracking on the last word.
These things shouldn't happen to her.
& I remember the FEAR in your eyes
the very first time we snuck into the city pool;
late December with my heart in my chest and the [ clouds ] of my breath.
Didn't know where we were running to, but don't look back.
Hi, my name is Sea, and this is me diving head-first into the PP fandom!
You can also find this story on ao3 under the same name, so don't worry about that. Feel free to also follow me at seafaringheart on tumblr for semi-regular updates!