Saturday, November 19th, 2011. 8:34 A.M.
Daphne woke up again, and the sun was shining through her window. She must have been exhausted from her early morning excursion, because she had crashed for almost three hours. She knew her mom would have left for work already, so at least she could continue her panic alone, for now. She swung her feet, still clad in sneakers, over the side of her bed and reached for her bag, grabbing her cellphone. Finally, Emmett had texted her back.
wats wrong? r u ok
pick me up? ill buy u breakfast
ok
Daphne eyeballed her bag, and the test that was still sitting in the bottom of it. She really didn't want to look, it was too terrifying. She quickly got dressed into jeans and a sweatshirt and went to brush her teeth. There was still coffee in the pot, so she chugged a cup and waited, impatiently, for Emmett to come get her.
Almost an hour later, they were sat on a bench outside their favorite coffee shop, and Daphne couldn't seem to release her vice grip on her latte. Anxiety was coursing through her veins, and she was almost certain her right leg would be bruised from how hard she was bouncing it against the metal seat. After what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes, a cool hand slipped over her wrist, and the weight of it stilled her nervous shaking.
"Hey," Emmett's gaze was level, concern only evident in the slight downturn of his brow and the ghost of a smile on his lips. "You blow up my phone all nght, now I'm getting the silent treatment? What's up?"
She shouldn't have done this. Shouldn't have sent him dozens of texts in the middle of night. Should not have wandered to the Kwik-E-Mart and bought four pregnancy tests and a slushy. She should have kept her mouth shut and gone to bed and had a rational thought about this whole stupid situation before she opened her big fat mouth.
She should've gone home instead of boning her brother's best friend in the backseat of his pimped-out Lexus.
The metallic tang of blood on her tongue, salty and coppery and hot. Her bottom lip flayed open with her teeth, skin chewed off in a nervous habit. She darts her tongue out, soothing the raw skin.
"Do you remember-" she starts, then has to take a deep, steadying breath. "Last month, do you remember when you picked me up by the old house?" A single nod. "I was with Wilke, he got suspended and I had a really crappy day, and we got a little drunk and had sex... AndIthinkImightbepregnant."
Her hands had moved so swiftly and with so little breadth that she wasn't even sure he caught the last bit, the important bit, but he had, she knows it, she watched a full reel of emotion go over Emmett's face in a nanosecond, and she knew he had caught every single sign. Another nod, slower, almost comically so, while the information swims around his brain and starts to land in the appropriate order, and his jaw works up and down like a fish on dry land.
Okay, he signed, okay. Did she take a test? Yes. Did she take more than one test? Four, or five really. Was every one positive? No, but one is in her bag and she couldn't bring herself to look. It's only been three weeks, are you sure you aren't sick? An exasperated glare. Yeah, you're not sick. Did you tell him yet? Absolutely not, have you lost your mind!
"What are you going to do?"
"Crawl into a hole and die, hopefully."
Saturday, November 19th, 2011. 9:50 A.M.
She didn't want to do this again but he insisted and practically dragged her kicking and screaming down the block and she thought maybe she should have worn cinder blocks on her feet instead of sneakers and there's still one test in her bag and why is he making her do this again and -
Then the two teens were standing in the aisle of a corner store, backs to the cooler full of beer and milk and coke. Emmett had one hand full of the cheapest pregnancy tests in stock, the kind that don't even have a stick, just a flimsy strip of paper with a color chart. White means good, pink means bad. He had taken the last test from her bag, glanced at it and tossed it in the garbage, paid and then marched them back to their spot on the bench.
"Three weeks is practically nothing, right? It's too early to know and I'm pretty sure most people don't know until it's almost too late to do anything about it."
She watched him sign all of this without moving a muscle, and suddenly her brain started to reboot, because right, we do know this, we take health class every year and every year we sit through the state mandated abstinence speech and roll our eyes and then go and look up the actual facts on the library computer. And two months ago, an internet search told us that even women who are trying to get pregnant don't know until six or eight weeks and I definitely wasn't trying and I just have to wait to be sure.
With a new stash of tests hidden in her bag, and a new, half-irrational sense of optimism, Daphne Vasquez made her way home and tried desperately to put all thoughts of pregnancy and babies and whatever else out of her mind for three more weeks.
Because she can't be pregnant, right? This is silly, this is just her hormonal pubescent sixteen-year-old brain and body playing tricks on her, and she panicked for no reason at all but now she has internet knowledge on her side and she just isn't going to be pregnant.