Juju's pov
After Callie and Preston had bid goodnight to their parents, we had made it home. It had been a very silent walk, with Callie, Preston and I silently in the back of the group.
Mom takes a deep breath. "Come sit here," she tells me, pulling out a chair at the table. I do as she says, and Callie and Preston sit on either side of me.
"So what happened?" I ask, looking between the three adults on the other side of the table. Everett and Grayson went to their rooms.
Mom looks at the man with red hair and sighs before talking. "I met Archie when I was sixteen. We dated in high school, and... I got pregnant. He wasn't happy," she says.
Archie grunts and mouths 'slut'.
"We broke up. My mom made me get a tutor, because she thought I would start falling behind on work because of you. I had a few, but they all just felt off. Then, I got Jughead. We got together kind of quickly, before you were born. I haven't even seen Archie since he found me in the library that one time," Mom tells me.
I look quickly at Archie before looking down at the table. "Why'd you come now?" I ask him, without making eye contact.
"I was in the military," he says roughly. "Came home a year ago. Got settled in, remembered you, and decided I should meet you," he explains, in that same cold tone. "See how awful of a job your slut mother and nerd father did of raising you."
I glare at him. 'Remembered you,' he had said, as if I'm some long-forgotten toy, or a friend from preschool you have a faint memory of, but nothing more.
"A girl needs her father," Archie says casually.
"She has one. Jughead," Mom says.
"Her actual father," Archie says. He looks at Jughead like he's gum on his shoe.
"He's much more of an actual father to her than you'll ever be," Mom says. I realize then how tired she looks.
"I want part time custody. I want every other weekend," Archie demands.
"Juju doesn't want-," Mom starts, but I cut her off.
"Actually, Mom, I do," I tell her, surprising even myself with the outburst.
She looks shocked for a second, but recovers herself quickly. "O- okay, well, I guess we can do that, then," she says. She looks at me like I'm a stranger before looking back at Archie.
"Good. I want her this weekend. She can meet my girlfriend," Archie says, standing up.
"Girlfriend? What'd you have to do to manipulate her into being with you?" Dad asks.
"Shut up, nerd," Archie says.
"You sound like an elementary school bully," Mom tells him. "The only words in your vocabulary are nerd and slut. Please try to expand."
"Spoken like a true teacher," Archie says sarcastically.
"At least my job isn't to blow up other countries," Mom responds coolly. "Now get out of my house."
After Archie leaves, Preston, Callie and I go back to my room.
"Why do you want to spend every other weekend with him?" Callie asks.
"It gets me away from my mom," I say quietly, looking at the ground as I pull my sweatshirt off.
"Seriously, Juju, why do you hate her so much?" Preston asks.
"I don't hate her. She just... makes me uncomfortable, being pregnant. I guess that's the best way to describe it," I say, playing with the end of a blanket as we sit on the floor.
"She's the same person," Callie tells me softly, with pity in her eyes.
"She's two people," I correct. I can't help but want to blame all of this on the baby. Even though I know it's a stupid thing to do, it feels as if everything in my life has gone downhill since I found out about the baby, and seeing as that was the only thing to have changed, it all has to be the baby's fault, right?
"She's not the baby, Juju. She's carrying the baby, but she's just one person," Callie says carefully.
"I just don't like it," I say, leaning against the bed. "I wish she wasn't pregnant."
"We know, Juju. You've made it very clear," Preston says. "But you're going to get a sibling no matter what, so you should just learn to live with it."
I huff. "I don't want to, though," I say stubbornly.
"Yeah, but life doesn't always go as we want it to," Preston says.
"I know. But why does it have to go so far in the direction we don't want?" I ask, annoyed. I wish my friends would be on my side, would have the same thoughts as me and understand what I'm trying to say.
"Everything happens for a reason," Callie says, smiling sadly.
"What's the reason for this? I have to learn to work with a screaming baby or have a toddler that steals all of my stuff?" I ask.
"You'll find out eventually," Callie shrugs.
"I don't want to," I mutter, quietly so no one can hear.
That Friday, I packed a bag with stuff for the weekend. Archie came over and picked me up at four, and we drove back to his house in his large truck, listening to harsh rock music that was turned up far too loud.
The ride luckily wasn't too long, and we soon made it to a house a few neighborhoods away. It was smaller than mine, and the front yard was filled with dead grass. There were two windows facing the street, one of which had a rather large hole in the screen. The house also smelled rather strange. Not bad, not good, just strange.
Archie walked up to the front door and opened it without having to unlock it, and I grab my bag and follow him.
I step inside and look around. There's a pile of shoes under the table next to the door, most of which are ripped or covered in mud. I can tell another girl lives here, because there are her shoes there too. Two dogs run up to me, and one tries to bite me and jump on me, while one hangs her tongue out and stands a few feet away.
I take a few steps forward and see that on the right is a kitchen and on the left is a hallway. I walk to the kitchen, where Archie went. There's a woman with extremely thin, bleach blonde hair sitting at the island next to a girl with really tangled dark brown hair. They're both using Sharpies to color stuff, and the little girl is doing a rather awful job of it. I look down and see small spills of water all over the ground, and move carefully so I'm not standing on any of them.
"Hi," I say quietly, clutching the strap of my backpack tightly in my hand.
The woman looks up. "Oh, you must be Juju!" she says in an accent from New Jersey.
"Julianne," I correct quietly. I'm not sure why, because no one except some of my teachers calls me Julianne, but I don't feel like having this woman call me Juju just yet.
"So nice to meet you," she says, smiling, and I see her large teeth. "Scarlett, say hi to Julianne," she tells the little girl.
The girl looks up, makes eye contact with me, then looks back down to her paper. "I'm Scarlett," she says. She looks a few years younger than me, around eight or nine.
"I'm Julianne," I say, giving her a small smile that she can't see.
"Come, have a seat!" the lady tells me. "I'm Lynn, I'm Archie's girlfriend," she tells me.
I sit gingerly in the seat next to her, setting my backpack on the floor. The dogs come up and sniff it.
"Those are our dogs Treasure and Poncho," she says, pointing to them.
"Cool," I say, watching them closely.
"Scarlett, go show Julianne around the house," Lynn commands her daughter.
Scarlett gets up and drops the pen on the counter, leaving it without the cap on. I resist the urge to put the cap on, and instead pick up my backpack and follow Scarlett as she leads me down the hall and stops at the first door to the left.
"This is the guest bedroom," she says. "My cousin sleeps in there. Both his parents are in jail, so he lives with us now," she says.
"Oh" I say, unsure of how to respond to that.
She leads me to the next door. "This is my room. You'll be sleeping here," she says. She opens the door, and I have to shut my eyes for a second. There are stickers all over her door, and she has a small bunk bed with pink curtains over it. The room is rather messy, and there's a very dirty, very colorful rug on the ground.
"It's... bright," I say.
"This is your bed," she says, leading me into the room. She points to the bottom bunk of the bed, which is more like a mattress on the ground.
"Thanks..." I say unsurely, looking at the piles of chewed stuffed animals littered over the bed.
"Oh, and that's the cat, Sugar," she says, pointing at a large cat with a messy face.
"Uh, what's your cousin's name?" I ask.
"Gavin," she says. "He's ten, like me," she says.
"Cool," I say absentmindedly. "Are your parents divorced?" I ask.
Scarlett nods. "Yep. I see my dad for a few hours every Sunday," she says. "What's your mom like?"
"Awesome," I say. Well, more like she was awesome, but I don't feel like getting into that with this child.
"Well, my mom is better," Scarlett says.
"O- oh," I say, looking at her weirdly. I'm not sure I like her much.
"Let's go back to the kitchen!" she says.
I set my bag on the mattress and take out my phone before following her.
A few hours later, I met Gavin.
"Do you play Fortnite?" he asks as he sits at the island for dinner.
"No..." I say.
"What's on your TikTok for you page? Fortnite dances? Mine is Fortnite dances. What YouTubers do you watch? Ever heard of Poke or Tiko?" he demands.
"What?" I ask softly. My brothers are nothing like this. They like toy cars and soccer, not Fortnite and Tiktok or gaming Youtubers.
"She's lame. Why didn't you have a boy, Archie?" Gavin asks.
Archie chuckles. "Can't control that, Gav," he says as he passes out slightly burnt frozen pizza. "Wish I could, though."
I thought about those four words all weekend.
I meet up with Callie and Preston as soon as I get back to my Mom's house.
"How was it?" Callie asks as we walk around the park.
I shrug. "Different," I reply. "His girlfriend has a daughter, Scarlett, who was kind of bratty, and her cousin lives with them, his parents are in jail apparently, and he talked about Fortnite and gaming the whole time, and used the TV all day and yelled at it when he lost," I say.
"Sounds fun," Preston says sarcastically.
"Are you gonna go back?" Callie asks, glaring at Preston.
"Well, yeah, I will. But not until the weekend after this one, because that was the agreement," I say.
"Right," Preston says, nodding. "So, what else should we do today?" he asks.
"Um... oh, I saw this chocolate pie recipe we could make," I say, smiling.
"Do I get the extra chocolate chips?" Preston asks.
"Of course," I reply, laughing.
"Let's do it," Preston says.