Sorry about the wait. I know it's been a bit longer than usual... I've sort of got excuses...
I hope your holidays went/are going well. :)
Thanks for the lovely reviews on the last chapter, and thanks in advance to those of you who review this one.
It was a Wednesday when I told Beck. I'd decided not to tell him right after my appointment for a couple of reasons - the biggest one being that I was hardly in the state of mind to speak at all and it certainly wouldn't go well if I wasn't at least slightly prepared. It was dinner time the following day before I had really even calmed down enough to even admit it to myself. I knew if I held it off any longer, I would end up with a huge mess, so I woke up that morning and mentally wrote out the script for the conversation while I was in the shower. Beck had to leave school early that day for a big movie audition he'd been preparing for and stressing over for a couple of weeks – another reason why I didn't tell him Tuesday – and I couldn't ruin that opportunity for him, so it had to wait until after. If I had told him before the audition he could decide not to go, and I couldn't have him blaming me ten years down the road for stopping him from taking a chance that could have changed his life. I knew he'd be mad that I didn't tell him right away, but it was better this way.
He picked me up from my house on the way back from the audition and we stopped for some Chinese takeout. The smell of his unopened pork sitting on the console between us made me nauseous and I had to roll down the window so I wouldn't throw up. I responded to a couple of Tori's text messages and fiddled with my jewelry while he told me how the audition had gone. If Beck had noticed I wasn't eating or paying attention to a single word coming from his mouth, he didn't acknowledge it. He drove me back to his RV and led the way inside before I threw my plan out the window and decided to improvise.
"Ummm…I have a problem." He sat down on his bed and opened his takeout container so he could finally eat it. The smell filled the whole RV immediately and I gagged before continuing. "Well, we have a problem." That got his attention.
"We?" He stood up and set his food down on one of the three decrepit suitcases he'd seemingly been collecting in a spot beside his bed. "What kind of problem?" He asked, running his hand through his hair and avoiding making any eye contact with me.
"Umm, well, I'm gonna tell you a story, okay?" He turned toward me and lifted both eyebrows, looking rather impatient. "Sit down." Beck obeyed my order and took a seat on his bed once again.
"What kind of story is this?"
"If you shut up I'll tell you." He scowled but remained quiet, retrieving his food and taking another bite. "Okay. So once upon a time a boy and a girl met at school. The boy thought the girl was really hot but the girl thought the boy was really boring, but she gave him a chance anyway and they started dating, and then they started fucking." Beck interrupted my story by choking on his pork. I waited for him to stop, and then continued. "And then one day the girl wasn't feeling well so she went to the doctor and found out she was six weeks pregnant. The end." He stared at me and didn't say a thing.
"What?" He spit out that one word without moving his face.
"Did you not understand the story?"
"No, I understood it. I'm just…what?"
"I'm pregnant." I stated more clearly, annoyed by his confusion. A million different emotions crossed his face but he mostly just looked like he was going to cry. He threw his unfinished dinner at the trash can and missed, before he ran his hands over his face and a growling noise came out of his mouth.
"No. You can't be." His face was bright red when he uncovered it, and I didn't know what to do, so I just stood there while a series of curse words came out of his mouth. As the seconds ticked by he got angrier and started to completely lose control. Just a few minutes later, I was just standing in the middle of my boyfriend's RV while he threw things around the room. My phone vibrated in my pocket so I pulled it out to check my messages, ducking to avoid getting hit by something small and red.
"How's he taking it?" Tori had known I'd be telling Beck and had been sending me annoyingly supportive text messages all day, begging to know what was going on.
"He's really mad. He's throwing things."
"THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!" Beck shouted just as a picture frame shattered against the wall right behind where my head would have been if I hadn't ducked a second earlier. He was taking the news a lot worse than I'd expected. I'd known he was going to be upset but I hadn't planned on him breaking anything or nearly injuring me.
"Would you calm down for a second?" I yelled back at him, tucking my phone into my bag before I tried to grab his arms to stop him from breaking anything else. He just ripped them out of my grasp and took a step back.
"No, I won't calm down!" He shouted in my face like I was a lunatic for suggesting it. "Do you realize what this means?" He beat his fist against the wall twice and the thermometer hanging there fell down with a crunching sound. "My life is fucking over! Everything I ever dreamed about doing with my life is gone, Jade! I'll have to get some stupid minimum wage job flipping burgers just to pay your hospital bills, and then what do I do? I'll have a kid – I'll have to give up every dream I ever had of becoming an actor and be a, a car salesman, or an insurance adjustor, or something boring and awful for the rest of my life because I'll have someone depending on me before I even graduate high school!" With every word he broke down more and more, and by this point he was full-out crying – something I had never seen him do before.
"Oh, you'll have a kid? I don't know what you know about babies, but it takes two, alright? We're in this together. You're being completely ridiculous."
"I'm being ridiculous?" He rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration before he spoke again. "My life is over because we were stupid, okay?"
"Your life? Are you the one who has to expand to the size of an elephant and then push this thing out of your vagina? Didn't think so! Don't you even think about talking to me about how your life is ruined. You can leave right now if you want to. I can't." With that, I pulled my bag up onto my shoulder and moved toward the door.
"You really think I'd leave you to do this alone?" He exclaimed, following me outside.
For some reason, Tori was sitting in the driveway in her sister's car. At first I thought I was imagining things, but as I walked toward her I realized she was really there. It was a miracle, really. I wasn't sure why she was there, and I wasn't about to ask, but I really needed to get out of there, and walking would have been my only choice, had she not shown up.
"No, I don't. You're too good for that. The thing is, though, you have a choice." I climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind me, and then I let myself break down and start crying. Beck beat on the window with the side of his fist, yelling something to me that I was too busy having a meltdown to understand.
"Open the door, Jade! Get out of the car! We're going to talk about this!" He shouted through the glass, yanking on the door handle although he knew it was locked.
"We're not going to talk. You're just going to keep yelling, and I'll keep having to duck while you throw things!" I screamed back at him, turning to Tori to see why she wasn't driving away yet. She turned the car off, surprisingly, and climbed out of the driver's seat before she crossed the front of the car and tried to pull him away.
"HEY!" She barked when Beck just pushed her away and continued to beat on the window. "You need to calm down! Both of you!" Beck finally turned away from me, staring at Tori with a look on his face that suggested he'd only just really noticed that she was there.
"Let her leave, Beck. Go back inside and take a deep breath… Watch a movie, take a nap, whatever. Just calm down and you can talk about this tomorrow, okay?"
"But-"
"Don't be stupid. You've said enough. You're upset, okay? That's completely understandable. You can talk about it tomorrow when you're not so angry… You're both my friends. I want to help you, and the best way to do that is for you to go inside and calm down, and for Jade to come with me…" She was holding her arms out as if to guard herself from him, but as his face straightened her fingers met with her thighs. She nodded, he nodded, and Tori took a step back, toward the car.
"You're right." Beck admitted. "I'm sorry." He directed the last part at me, staring through the windshield while Tori climbed back into the driver's seat.
"Oh, Beck?" She poked her head out of the car to add one more thing. "Don't text or call her tonight. Wait until tomorrow."
"Fine." He grumbled, pushing his hair back as he put his back to us and went inside. I don't know how she did it, but Tori had gotten through to him in a way that I never could have.
She then started the car and silently left Beck's driveway. Somehow, she had successfully driven half of the way to my house without saying a word, which was quite the accomplishment for her. I could tell she wanted so badly to speak, as she glanced at me when she thought I wasn't looking at least fifteen times.
"Why'd you come?" I asked her. She shrugged and flipped on her turn signal, letting it tick four times before she answered.
"I thought you could use some help."
"Really?" I questioned apprehensively, as I was still paranoid because of how quickly she'd gotten there, without my asking.
"Yeah. We're friends. That's what friends do, right? Help each other?"
"I wouldn't know." I mumbled, pulling at a string on my shirt and immediately hoping that she hadn't heard me say that. I could tell we were about to have a stupid, cheesy little heart-to-heart.
"Don't say that. You have friends." Her voice was a thousand times softer now, like she was trying to talk me down. I hadn't meant that it bothered me, but obviously she'd taken it that way.
"Yeah, you. And you're weird." I let a little smile slip when she immediately took offense to that, taking her eyes off of the road in order to glare at me, which caused her to nearly take out someone's mailbox.
"I'm weird?"
"Yeah, you creep me out. You're a weirdo Tori. You're a weird person."
"Says the girl who keeps jars of fatty lumps on her bedside table…" She pouted, faking hurt feelings while she concentrated on the road. I just grinned, settled into my seat some more, and didn't open my mouth again until we got to my house.
Tori followed me inside without being invited, so I wasn't sure what to do. I was still working on the whole best friends thing. Should I ask her to stay? Tell her to leave? Thank her? Say nothing?
"Uhhh…do you…want to, ummm…stay?" My mouth had quit working properly. It felt like it had taken me an hour to spit out that one question, and what did Tori do? She started laughing at me. She was full-on bent over with laughter, and I wasn't quite sure why.
"What's so funny?"
"It's just…" She was totally hyperventilating. I really thought she was going to pass out and die in my living room, and I'd be too freaked out to enjoy the irony. "It's so adorable how uncomfortable you are."
"What?" She just smiled and rested her hand on my shoulder without a single word.
"Adorable? I'm not adorable."
"Yeah you are. You're super cute. You're adorable." She stuck her tongue out and patted me on the head. The biggest smile I've ever seen covered her face, and it felt contagious.
"Say that again." She took off running through my kitchen, and I went after her, following a second-long delay. "Tell me I'm adorable one more time, Tori! Do it!" I shouted across the room, soon discovering how hard it is to run and laugh at the same time while I chased her through the kitchen, dining room, and down the hall, cornering her by my bedroom door.
"Okay, I take it back." She had gone from a giant smile to a hilariously straight face in half a second, and I just stared at her, waiting for her to break and laugh again. "You're not adorable." She cracked just long enough for me to notice, and pulled her serious face back on right away. "You're horrible and ugly and I have nightmares about your face."
"Ugly? I am not ugly."
"Well what do you want me to say?" She eased into her smile again when I backed off, and neither of us said anything. She laughed rather awkwardly, and I led the way into the kitchen, where I started going through the refrigerator for any kind of food that wouldn't make me puke.
"You know," Tori started to say, interrupted by the screeching sound of the barstool she was pulling out. "I like it when you're nice to me…but at the same time it scares me."
"Me being nice scares you? Do you have your head on backwards?"
"No, I just mean…you never used to be nice to me, so I can't help but be a little paranoid that mean Jade is going to pop up out of nowhere and murder me in my sleep or something to make up for this week…" I stared at her, unsure how to respond. She just blinked twice and then looked down at the counter top, where she was resting her clenched fists.
"…I can be mean if you want me to." I piled the makings of a decent sandwich onto the counter next to her and slammed the refrigerator door shut before she responded.
"Nah, I'm good."
"I'm still getting used to this whole 'friends' thing." I explained while I dug through the silverware drawer for a butter knife. "To be honest, going so long without insulting you is giving me a serious migraine."
"Then you should probably do it. Insult me. Insult me real bad." I looked up from the bread I was spreading butter on to see Tori staring at me, one eyebrow raised and the corners of her mouth turned up just a little.
"Okay…well…" I couldn't come up with anything. I had always been so good at this, but my ability to be a bitch to people had been dying off over the past few days, and I couldn't quite bring it back to life, so I just spit out anything I could think of. "Your shirt. I'm pretty sure my great aunt had that same pattern on her living room curtains. She died in 1997 and she was blind." Tori just smiled, which took all the fun out of insulting her, but I kept doing it anyway. "You should throw those jeans in a wood chipper. Your hair is frizzy. You look like your face caught on fire and someone tried to put it out with a fork. Your cuticles are a disaster area and you have a zit on your chin the size of the United States budget deficit." Tori's grin shrunk a little, but my comments had obviously bounced right off, as I'd intended them too.
"Love you too."