So the pollen kind of floats in the air, and the leaves shine in the sun. I can see the sun shining off the backs of the cars as they drive by. As they drive toward me. And I feel like I could be happy today if I wasn't pregnant.
What was I thinking? Having sex with Craig without a condom? Just because I am psychotically in love with him is no reason to be so psychotically stupid. But what's done is done. At least Emma's happy.
I pressed my lips together and stared out at the pretty road. I'd have to tell everyone. Craig, my dad, my mom, the school, maybe. I swung my legs. I was sitting on the bench outside the school waiting for Craig to show up so I could tell him. So I could tell everyone. I couldn't breath. I ruined my life, Craig's life, my parents' lives. Ruined.
I saw him and I knew he saw me. But he wanted to take off. Hell, I didn't blame him, really. And he basically knew, I'd asked him if he used a condom and all. But I gazed over at him, at his dark curly hair, at his broad shoulders and jean jacket, at his slight scowl, eyebrows in a V over those pretty pretty eyes.
"Craig!" I called, and saw the scowl slip for a second, and I saw the scared look underneath.
"Uh, Manny, I've got to…uh…there's this lab thing I have to-"
"I took the test and I'll take it again but…I'm pregnant,"
There. It was out. No going back now. He sat next to me and his expression was kind of blank for a second. Maybe he'd get mad. Maybe he'd yell at me, call me names. No. Not Craig. But I didn't know. I was in new territory. Who knew what he'd do.
"Don't be mad," I said, and I sounded so small, so terrified. So…overwhelmed.
Then he looked at me, a dazed smile on his face. I didn't get it. I wanted to crumble up and die, hide in a small corner away from my dad and my mom, away from everyone at school. I was gonna get fat, I was gonna be somebody's mother and he was smiling?
"Maybe we could have it," he said, and I frowned. Looked down at my sneakers swinging against the stone building. Have it? Have it like keep it? And I peeked at him, that wide smile and pale skin, those eyes that made me feel so tranquillized or concussed or something. I felt like I was on painkillers when I was around him.
"Yeah?" I said, just a question. I didn't agree. I didn't see how we could do that.
At Emma's later in the day I wished that her mom was my mom. I wanted that, I yearned for it. Spike had done this. She'd been younger than me. For all I knew my parents were in an arranged marriage and had never even held hands until their wedding day. They were so different from me, so outside of my culture. My parents couldn't understand me. They couldn't understand that I wanted Craig so bad, that I was so insanely attracted to him that I didn't care about condoms and didn't think about them. That I couldn't. They wouldn't understand that I'd made a mistake.
I watched Spike vacuum with this huge mint green vacuum cleaner from the seventies or something. Watched Emma smile a little smile at me. Spike looked worried, though. Yeah, Spike knew what was what.
"Did you tell him?" Emma said, her feet up on the couch, her hand in a bag of chips. She put a few in her mouth and licked the crumbs from her fingers.
"Yeah," I said, and grabbed the remote. It was greasy from her chips, but I started flipping through the channels anyway.
"Well, what did he say?" she said, rolling up the bag of the potato chips, wiping her hands on her jeans.
"Well, he said maybe we could keep it,"
She shrieked in joy, got up and hugged me. I allowed myself to be hugged but didn't hug back. She didn't understand. This was going to be hard no matter what road I chose. The three choices were all fraught with so much danger, like some war torn country field, booby traps under your feet. Barbed wire. This was quite a screw up and why couldn't she see that?