Outside the hospital room was the sound of shoes on the ground, babies crying, people groaning in pain. Freddie's watched blinked a harsh 1:15 AM at him. He knew his mom was going to be pissed about him being out after curfew, but he found he could care less. All he cared about was Sam, curled into his side as he stood next to the bed, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.
"Yep," the doctor confirmed as he walked back in. He had taken blood from Sam around a half hour ago and was now holding up a sheet of paper with the results. "She's pregnant."
"Pregnant?" Sam asked. Freddie took the piece of paper that the doctor handed them and read it over quickly. A positive pregnancy test. Twenty weeks pregnant. Samantha Puckett written at the top in the doctor's loopy cursive. "But-but that's not possible," Sam continued.
Freddie's brain was still stuck in a loop like a bad movie. Sam was pregnant. They were going to be parents. He was going to be a dad at seventeen years old.
His mom was going to fucking murder him.
The doctor chuckled. "Listen kids," he said gently. "This is the weirdest way of trying to get out of getting pregnant I've ever heard." He sat at the foot of Sam's bed. "You're telling me you both touched a pulsating pink rock and now you're twenty weeks pregnant?"
"No," Sam replied, her voice snappy. "I'm telling you I was in sleepwalking and got the flu. My idiot boyfriend's the one with the, what was it again, Freddie, care to share?"
Freddie pulled at the edge of his sweatshirt. "Pulsating pink rock," he repeated.
"Right, pulsating pink rock," Sam mocked. She turned back to the doctor with an accusatory finger. "And you're telling me that I'm twenty weeks pregnant when again, that ain't possible. I might have failed biology but I know how that shit goes down and you don't get pregnant from a freakin' Star Wars rock!"
As if on cue, a nurse walked in wheeling an ultrasound machine. Her smile was too bright for - Freddie cast his eyes down at his watch - 1:21 AM. "Alrighty," she started, her voice perky and shrill. If she noticed the tension in the room - especially strong from where Sam was glaring at the doctor like she was ready to kill him - she said nothing. "You ready for an ultrasound, doll?"
Freddie knew that an ultrasound was going to be a massive waste of time - it was one in the morning and he had a chem test the next day - but he was also sure it wasn't covered by Sam's already spotty health insurance. "Uh, actually," he began to protest. "I don't think that's-"
He was cut off by Sam. "No," she said. "Let's do the ultrasound. So that you'll-" she wagged a finger at the doctor, who raised an eyebrow "-understand that I am not pregnant."
The nurse's smile dropped, but only for a minute. It was so miniscule that Freddie wasn't even sure Sam - blinded by rage - noticed. "Alright, doll," the nurse said to Sam. She set up the ultrasound fairly quickly and it wasn't long before she was pointing at the screen. "Here we go," she said.
Freddie looked at the screen and felt his knees buckle. He wasn't a doctor by any means, but there was very clearly a baby on the screen. The nurse pointed out the hands and the feet and the head. Freddie knelt down next to the bed, not trusting himself to stand. Sam reached behind herself to grab his hands and squeeze. Freddie looked down at his girlfriend, who met his eye. He'd never seen her look more terrified in her life.
"Holy shit," Sam whispered to him.
The doctor looked sympathetic for the first time that night. "I'll leave you two alone for a second." With that, he left, the nurse trailing him closely. With the door closed, Sam and Freddie were left alone with their thoughts.
For a long while, the two of them just sat there in silence, staring at the wall, as if the montomous puke green of the paint would tell them anything. From the other room, a baby wailed and a woman shushed it. Doctors walked by outside, talking quickly, their heels tap, tap, tapping on the floor.
"My mom is going to kill me," Freddie says.
As if a spell has been broken, Sam moves. She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes and groans loudly. "What are we going to do?" she asks. Freddie hopes it's a rhetorical question, because he doesn't have an answer for her. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case, as she turns to him and asks again, "what are we gonna do, Freddie?"
Freddie takes one of her hands in his and gently traces the lines of her palm. "Well," he starts gently. "We'll have to figure it out. We'll get through it together, Sam." He leans over to kiss her head. "I love you. You know that."
One day, at two in the morning when they were both drunk on the fire escape, Sam told Freddie the story of the day her dad left her alone with her mom. It was apparently early in the morning ("a little like this," Sam said at the time, motioning with the mouth of the beer bottle at the sky around them, dark save for the windows of people experiencing the early morning with them) and her mom and dad got in a fight. She told Freddie, with a pained expression he didn't previously think her capable of, of the way her dad yelled "fuck you and that mistake of a child. I'm never coming home again," after which he promptly stormed out the door, never to turn back again. ("But fuck him, right?" Sam asked, even as she twisted the ring that her dad left behind, her only memory of him, on her finger.)
This marks the second time Freddie's seen that pained expression on her face. He wishes, like that night on the fire escape, that he could fix it somehow, come up with some way to make it better. Unfortunately, he doubts this is a problem hard alcohol can fix.
Sam squeezes his hand before standing shakily. Freddie moves back a bit to give her space, watches as she gathers her things - her jacket and her bag, grabbed haphazardly as they left the Bushwell - and then looks Freddie over. "I need to go think."
"Alright," Freddie says as he stands up. "I'll come with you."
Sam shakes her head. "I need to be alone right now." At the look of concern that passes Freddie's face, she rolls her eyes. "Relax, nerd. I'll be fine."
"Alright," Freddie says again. He leans in to kiss her and Sam obliges, their lips meeting in a soft, longing kiss. Sam hesitates a little when she pulls back and, when she finally blinks open her eyes, tears threaten to fall from them. However, Sam Puckett doesn't cry in front of anyone - she wipes her eyes with the sleeves of her shirt and walks out of the hospital room.
Freddie stops at reception to give them his information and foot Sam's hospital bill. She doesn't have insurance and the test and their short stay at the hospital costs almost all of the money Freddie's saved up from working at the Pear Store. Once he pays that - with a sympathetic look from the sixty year old woman working behind the counter, whose nauseatingly fake smile makes Freddie want to throw up - he turns and is released into the cold October air.
Freddie looks at his phone for the first time that night. As expected, there are about ten missed calls from his mother, along with a series of texts ("where are you?" "you are in so much trouble" "please come home, Fredward" "are you with that Sam?"). Freddie ignores all of them - his mom is notoriously crazy at the best of times, and he's sure he's never going to hear the end of this one. He wants to spend as much time as possible being normal before he has to confront her - and reality.
He walks down the sidewalk, kicking at leaves as he goes, watching them crunch under his foot. He isn't sure how long he walks, just taking in the air, watching cars as they whizz past him. He wonders about the people inside (he can hear Sam calling him a nerd from here) - whether they're working the late shift, if they have girlfriends, if any of them are just taking in the October air in the same way he is, to clear their head too. If any of their heads are as messy as his are right now.
Eventually, Freddie comes to a park and sits on a swing. The last time he was here was with Sam, after school, in the twenty minutes when their high school lets out and before the elementary school lets out, when there are no kids on the playground. He remembers the way her hair looked in the afternoon light (gorgeous, framing her head like a halo), the way she smiled when she told him the idea for a skit she and Carly had (a Super Bra skit that sounded more Carly than Sam, honestly, but it made her laugh nonetheless and so he loved it), the way she ducked her head when he told her he thought she was gorgeous. ("Nerd," she breathed with no punch behind it). Now, he swings by himself, wishing he had her by his side. Sam makes everything make sense, somehow. Maybe this would make sense too, with her by his side.
As if on cue, Freddie's phone buzzes with another call. He looks, expecting it to be his mom, and is both relieved and a little concerned when Sam's photo lights up his screen instead. He answers without a second thought.
"Sam?" he asks.
"Freddie," Sam says, her voice rough like she's been crying. His heart drops to his stomach, but before he can say anything, Sam is speaking again. "Just shut up, okay? I have to get through this and it's gonna be damn near impossible if you start your nerdy blubbering."
Freddie almost smiles at that - it's just so Sam, like everything will really be okay. Then, she mutters, "fuck, sorry," and his heart shatters again.
"Sam-" he starts.
Sam interrupts him. "I'm leaving."
A million questions run through Freddie's mind. He feels like an English student doing an investigative journaling piece. Who, what, where, why, how? "What?" he settles on. "Where are you going?"
"I can't tell you," Sam says. "Far." Freddie doesn't know what to say to that, but luckily, Sam keeps going. "I can't stay with my mom. She's a raging alcoholic. That's no environment to be p-pregnant in." She stutters over pregnant like she's not used to saying it yet.
"So just come stay with my mom and me," Freddie offers.
Sam scoffs. "Stay with Crazy? No thanks." Her voice turns serious, then. "You don't deserve this, Freddie. You have a whole future ahead of you. You're gonna be, like, valedictorian at Harvard or some shit. You don't need some white trash teenager who got pregnant weighing you down."
Freddie's heart breaks for the millionth time that night. Sam is so much more to him than that. She is his future. Everything he's going to do, he wants to do with her by his side. Unfortunately, he can't figure out how to voice any of that. "You're being ridiculous," he says instead.
"Maybe," Sam answers. She sniffles again. "You know, uh," she pauses awkwardly here. "You know I love you?"
She rarely says it, but when she does, it's powerful. Freddie feels like his breath is taken away as he replies, "of course I do, babe."
"Okay," Sam says softly. "Okay. Bye, Freddie."
"Wait, Sam-" Freddie says, but before he can say anything, there's a beeping on the other end. Sam hang up.
Freddie swears under his breath, drops his head to his hands and lets out a heaving sob.