THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE - VOICES CARRY

"I try so hard to keep it inside

So no one can hear

Hush, hush, keep it down now, voices carry"

'TIL TUESDAY (From the album "Voices Carry" (1985))

Sometimes, pretending that everything is on the up and up can be just about the hardest thing, you'll ever have to do. Or so, Andie could quickly testify to.

Part of her wanted to scream it out to everyone, just so she could get it out of the way and those paranoid thoughts of whether people could see on her or not that she was pregnant, would evaporate in a matter seconds. Still, she knew that if she did so, then she would also likely have to live with a reputation that was shot to pieces for the rest of her time in high school at least. Not to mention that every time a guy asked her out, she would instantly have to start questioning if he was only doing it out of pity for the poor, single mother at their school, who couldn't get anyone else to touch her with a fire poker, unless she'd paid them to. Not that she was even sure yet if she wanted to have the baby or not, even if she was leaning heavily towards taking the so-called easy way out and having an abortion.

Another frustrating thing, which irritated her to no end was the fact that Andy, the guy who'd played his gigantic part in getting her into this mess, was seemingly able to go on with his life like nothing had happened, and as if it didn't matter to him that the spawn of his seed was growing at a rapid rate inside of her uterus. Maybe, it was for this reason that the gods had decided to play a cruel trick on her, when their teacher had decided that their topic for the next big debate in the debate club (which she'd essentially joined, just to be close to Joey as much as she could, plus to have something to take her mind off her current predicament) would be "Birth Control: Is it Only the Guy's Responsibility?". Of course, she guessed that you'd usually have someone of the male persuasion speaking for the "No Side", but since every guy in the club had glimmered with their lack of enthusiasm for playing said part, Abby had taken over that role and to Andie's surprise, seemed to have quite strong feelings on the subject!

"This isn't 1960 anymore, it the year 2000!" Abby began her speech for the twenty or so other students in the club, plus their teacher, Ms. Foxworthy (better known as "Miss Foxy" among many, if not most of the boys at their school). "I mean, even if we forget about the threat of both getting VD's and spreading them around, until you start a pandemic all on your own, who is it that'll end up pregnant, if things go wrong? It's the girl, duh! So, girls, forget all about that tired, old misconception that all you have to do is lie there and let the guy stick his thing inside of you, while he takes care of all of rest! It's antiquated, it never worked to begin with, and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that it doesn't have any kind of place in today's world!" Abby enthusiastically continued, before getting quite a bit of an applause from her fellow students in return.

"Thanks, Abby. You sure said that in the most "Abby Type of Way" that you possibly could, not that we'd ever expect anything else from you!" Ms. Foxworthy "praised" Abby, who took all of the adulation that she was getting with a wide smile that spoke volumes about how much she was genuinely enjoying herself. "Andie, do you have your rebuttal ready?"

"Yeah, I guess so" Andie cautiously replied, not quite sure if she had it in her to rile up the troops in the way that Abby, who appeared to practically have been born to do this, had just done.

"In your own time, then" Ms. Foxworthy told her, and as Andie cleared her throat, she also began to doubt the validity of everything that she'd written down the day before for this very situation.

"Look, I'm not saying that I don't agree with Abby on some points and in a perfect world, the responsibilities for making sure that the sex that you engage in is also safe, should fall equally on both parties. I'm not disagreeing with her at all on that part. We don't live in perfect world however, and whether we like to admit it or not, all of us are brought up to respect the traditional gender patterns, where the girl to some extent puts her faith in the guy, when it comes to things buying rubber Johnnies and making sure that one is put on in the way that it should be, so that it doesn't fall off during the act. I don't have a penis, so how should I know how it's done?" Abby semi-jokingly finished off her opening by asking rhetorically, which got a small laugh from a few other students in there.

"I'm sorry but has to be the worst excuse that I've ever heard! It's the same as saying that it's the sky's fault that I got wet when it rained, because I was too dumb to figure out how an umbrella works! I mean, what the hell kind of an argument is that?" Abby retorted, sounding like she was ready to go on the warpath (yet again).

"Language, Abby!" Ms. Foxworthy scolded Andie's "adversary".

"I'm sorry, Ms. Foxworthy, but if I have to hear any more sob stories about promiscuous girls that got themselves knocked up, because they didn't stop to think twice for ten seconds before spreading their legs, I'm seriously going to barf both of my tonsils up! Take some responsibility for your lives, girls! If the rest of us can do it, then your daddy-issue filled butts can too!" Abby stated, again in the most "Abby Type of Way" that she feasibly could.

For some reason though, while she was used to hearing the truth straight from the horse's mouth, this time it made Andie's blood run cold. Why she said what she said next however, would still be a mystery to her, long after this session of the debate team had come to its end.

"That's really easy to say for a girl, who already knows that she'll never have sex with a guy! You don't know what kind of emotions go into it, or how you can get so lost in the moment that it's nearly impossible to think straight, like you normally can!" Andie fired back and already moments later, wished that she'd found any other way of making her point.

Especially considering that she was now being stared at intently by what felt like it was everyone in there.

To Joey, the Capeside Yacht Club had always mostly been a place that she'd tried to avoid as much as she could and, in some ways, had tried to pretend didn't exist. After all, if there was any place in Capeside, where the vast discrepancies between the poorer part of the townspeople (that made up around ninety to ninety-five percent of the population) and the rich people (who only made up a very small minority, yet sat on by far the greater part of the town's cumulated wealth) was on full display, it was the place that had once described to her as "Full of stuck-up Fat-Cats with way too much money for their own good" by her sister Bessie, who'd been unfortunate enough to be classmates with a pair of daughters of some of the club's prime investors that probably hadn't given her the most positive image of "Their Kind".

For this and many other logical reasons (like how she would feel completely out of sorts among the patrons down there, for one thing), she'd only ever set foot in the oldest still standing building in a the entire region (or so the owners of it liked to brag, anyway) two times before, one time to compete in the "Miss Wndjammer Contest" and the other time to be a spectator for it, back when she was still a kid.

She'd certainly never pictured herself ever working there until Drue (in a move that surely had some kind of selfish and most likely devious thoughts behind it) had told her that they were desperately looking for waiters and waitresses. Now that she was, she could also easily understand why so many others had quit their jobs since Drue's mother had taken over the running of the Yacht Club's restaurant, less than two months earlier. She'd met some types that she found it hard to get along with (many times before, in fact), still Mrs. Valentine was on a whole different level of meanness than she'd ever faced in her life, and it had made her quickly start to agree with the many other workers down there that usually referred to her as "The One, Whose Name that We Refuse to Speak, When We Don't Have to", whenever their boss wasn't around to hear it.

As an added and completely unwanted bonus on her one of her first days working there, she also got to overhear how Mrs. Valentine spoke to her son, and if she had to be honest, then it was a wonder to her why he hadn't run away from home long ago.

"You should have heard how she talked to him, Bessie. It's no wonder that he's become messed up in the head, if that's how he's used to being treated at home" she recounted to Bessie, after a long feeling workday and after the two sisters had just helped one another with tucking Alexander in for the night.

"Are you suddenly feeling sorry for this guy? You said yourself that he's a wolf in sheep's clothing" Bessie asked her back, reminding her of a good point.

"Actually, those were the words than Jen used, and I'm not saying that I'm entirely opposed in how she views him, just that maybe, when you consider all of the facts, he needs to be cut a tiny bit of slack. You and I were lucky that we had an amazing mom, even if we didn't have her for as long as we would have liked to, but if I'd been forced to put up day after day with how his mom talks to him, I'd probably want to find some way of rebelling against her too" Joey reasoned, more to herself than anyone else.

"If you ask me, there are some people that should be made to prove that they can be worth a damn as parents first, before they're even allowed to have children!" Bessie coldly stated, while getting an agreeing nod from Joey. "Just keep your eyes and ears open at all times, when you're around him, okay? In my experience, guys like him tend to get what they want, even when it's from girls that aren't sure if they want to give it to them".

Jen had a tough job on her hands, not that it wasn't one that she'd tried a few times before and for that same reason, should be used to it by now: Breaking up with a boyfriend.

If there was one fact about Jen that even to herself that was undeniable, it was that she hated being involved in conflicts of any kind (something that she saw life as being too short for) and she usually tried to avoid them whenever she could. Of course, it didn't always work out that way and her and her mom certainly had their share of petty (and on occasion not-so-petty) squabbles when she'd been living back in NYC, but since she'd arrived in Capeside, her life had for the most part been blissfully free of them. With Chris however, there was no saying how he'd react to getting dumped by a girl that he in his mind was still in the early "Everything is Nice and Simple" stage with, not to mention without any warning at all that he was about to get told by her that he wasn't worthy of being her boyfriend.

Once again, it also made her question why she kept throwing herself into these relationships that she had to have known deep down were doomed from the beginning and it why it was an undeniable fact, even if she didn't do so intentionally. Still, if you looked at her dubious list of "Who's Who" of boyfriends, one-night stands and hopeless crushes that had little to no chance of materializing into anything more than gazing at them from afar, there was a definite pattern there that was as hard to deny as water being wet and the sun setting in the West and rising in the East. Even before Drue (or, as she'd begun to call him "My Yoke in Life") had arrived in Capeside and had started to point it out to her whenever he got the chance to, she'd been questioning her own decisions and why she made so many bad ones of them when it came to the opposite sex. Her only conclusion was that she must have inherited some kind of penchant for searching out the wrong guys from her mother, whom herself had now become lost in a sort of sad and loveless marriage that Jen wouldn't have wished upon her worst enemy (had she had any of them).

After all, which other explanation could there possibly be, if it wasn't that there was something wrong with her?

"Can I pick your brain on something, Grams?" Jen asked her grandmother on her way out of the door, before she was about to get picked up by her soon to be ex-boyfriend for a date that he'd surely want to forget by the time that they reached its conclusion.

"It you think that I can be of help, sure" Grams answered her with a kind smile.

"Did you ever find yourself getting drawn towards the wrong guys, when you were my age?" she asked Grams, whom it seemed like instinctively got what she was leading into.

"Like the one that you currently call your boyfriend? I can't imagine that the two of you would have much in common, if anything at all" Grams replied while looking like she was staring a hole into Jen's soul. In doing so, she was also hitting the nail on the head when it came to why her granddaughter's latest relationship had on barely stood a snowball's chance in hell of surviving more than a month or two at the most, if that.

"I guess that I was grasping at straws, yet again! Please, just tell me that I'm normal and I don't have to worry if I'll end up living alone with my fifteen cats, because right now, I'm seriously starting to see that as my most likely potential future!" she told Grams, who couldn't help herself from letting out a small chuckle.

"Jennifer, you don't need to worry!" Grams reassured her. "Sure, there are some extremely rare and very few and far between people, who are so incredibly lucky on their first attempt at starting a relationship that they find the one and only for them, but for the majority of us, life just isn't that easy. I would recommend though, that for your next boyfriend, you choose someone that isn't an apple to your orange".

"That's easy to say when you're not sixteen and living in a town, where the combined eligible dating pool for you is close to non-existing! Maybe, I should move on to older guys, because these teenage boys just aren't cutting the mustard!" she teasingly told Grams, just before she heard Chris' car pulling up in the driveway outside.

"Or you could try abstinence for a change. I'm only putting it out there" Grams (just as teasingly) told her back, before they bade one another goodbye.

Was Jen looking forward to it? Hell no! Did it have to be done now, before Chris really began to fall for her?

Absolutely!

"What's wrong with me, Jack?" Andie had to ask Jack later that evening, while they were trying to get some studying done together. Which, to be fair, mainly consisted of her helping him, but one advantage to rarely being alone those days was that whenever she was with anyone, Tim would rarely, if ever appear, like he still had a tendency to do whenever she was allowed to be alone with her thoughts.

"What's happened this time?" Jack somewhat uninterestedly asked back, while only barely glancing up at her with one eye and still keeping his other eye fixed on the text in his Geography homework.

"I did something dumb again. Not that it's anything new for me these days!" she hopelessly stated, as she pushed her books to the side. "First, I basically "Gay-Shamed" Abby in front of the entire debate club, and as if that isn't bad enough, I follow it up by basically announcing to everyone in there that I've had sex at least one time! Something has to be wrong with me, right?"

"Let's deal with this one step at a time" Jack rationally answered, before apparently deciding that he couldn't keep his mind on both his homework and his sister's problems at the same time and giving her his undivided attention. "How did you "Gay-Shame" Abby?"

"I basically said that she didn't have the first clue about what having straight sex is like, because she already knows that she'll never do it with a guy, but it was just as much the way that I said it, like I'm blaming her for being a lesbian. I don't have anything against gay people and least of all, Abby, even if she does have far too big of a big mouth on her sometimes! You must know that about me better than anyone, everything considered".

"Luckily for you, it's Abby that we're talking about here, and from what I can tell, she's got a pretty thick hide. It probably isn't a big deal to her at all, but I'd still offer up a nice apology, if it was me. As for the other part, I don't know what to tell you, Andie. I guess that the best that you can hope for is that everyone in there allowed what you said to go in one ear and out of the other" Jack "tried" to reassure her. Not that he was doing all that great of a job at it, if she had to be perfectly frank.

The day after, Andie figured that she might as well get the worst part of her day out of the way to begin with, so from the moment that she arrived at school, she sought out Abby, who was busy trying to make heads of tails of what was in her locker or not. A locker that Andie had to admit to being the messiest that she'd ever seen, ot at the least in very tough contention for it!

"Oh, hi, Andie!" Abby greeted her, after Andie had said her good mornings to her. "What's up?"

"I just wanted to apologize for what I said in front of the debate team yesterday. Your sexuality is no one's business except for yours and I had no right to say what I did" she apologized to Abby, who just smiled back at her.

"You didn't have to apologize for that! All that you did was speak the truth, right?" Abby asked her back, and in doing so, made at least one of Andie's problems quickly go away. "You're right, I'll most likely never know what it's like to have sex with a guy. The feelings involved in having lesbian sex are still the exact same though, in case that you didn't know".

"I never in a million years meant to imply that they aren't. Again, I'm so sorry if said that anything that offended you. I really didn't mean to, I just momentarily lost control of myself".

"Don't worry, it happens to the best of us and at least, you didn't clock some annoying girl one across the jaw and got yourself several months of detention, like I did just before you and Jack started here. I can easily guess though, that you have done the horizontal Rhumba with some guy, from the way that you said what you said?"

"I don't really want to talk about this in the middle of a hallway full of people, if you don't mind" Andie pleadingly asked of Abby.

"Was he ugly? Is that why you're ashamed that you did it with him? Or was it that it was over so fast that you barely realized that it was finally happening, before it was all over in a blink of an eye?" Abby continued asking, more in a teasing way that anything else.

"It was neither of those things, but there are still plenty of other reasons why you can regret it afterwards" she told a suddenly concerned looking Abby, while also trying to do at a low enough volume that not everyone would hear it.

"He didn't force himself on you, did he? If he did, then you have to tell the police about it, or he could do it to someone else".

"It's nothing like that, I promise. He ..." she began explaining, while quickly searching for a way out of this conversation that she hadn't wanted to have (and especially not in this location and at this particular time, of all places!). "He broke up with me the day after, okay?"

Immediately, Andie knew that she'd stuck her foot in her mouth by lying again, given the look of disgust that her lie had brought to Abby's face.

"What a total dickwad! Who is he, Andie? We need to expose him!" Abby suggested, sounding like she was ready to make a feminist cause out of this.

"I don't want to expose him or anything like that! I just want to go on with my life like it had never happened, okay?" she imploringly told Abby, who looked like she was ready to do as she'd been told.

If there was one thing that Andie had already learned about her however, it was that when it came to Abby Morgan, you could never be entirely sure.

For once in Joey's life, it was almost like she was savoring a school day, probably because being at school meant that she didn't have to be at work and in her book, that one fact alone was enough to celebrate in some small manner.

"If you really hate your boss that much, I don't think that Bessie will mind it too much if you tell that witch where she can shove her job up" Pacey semi-jokingly told her during what would sadly be the only alone time that they would likely get to spend together that day, since both of them had to go to work after the school day came to an end. That said alone time took place in the school's boiler room and happened in between two classes, only meant that also they had to make the most of what little time, they had.

"Trust me, it isn't that I don't want to, or use those exact words when I do it, but if I quit already now, I just know that I'll wind up second-guessing my decision afterwards, not to forget feeling like a total loser because I couldn't hack it" she explained to Pacey, before checking her watch to find out that they still had three minutes of snuggle time to go, before they had to get a move on. "Anyway, it isn't like your job is any better, is it?"

"I'm not so sure anymore, actually! I mean, if you think about it like I've had plenty of time to do there already, it's kind of an interesting experiment in how much that it's humanly possible to show completely and utter apathy for the work, you're supposed to be doing! Honestly, before I started there, I'd always thought that there had to be some kind of a limit to it, but now, I'm not so sure anymore! Just between us, I'm starting to see it as a badge of honor that I can't remember the names of two out of my three co-workers for more than five minutes at a time!" Pacey lamely joked, not that there probably wasn't a big hint of truth to what he was saying.

"Why don't you quit, then?"

"It could be worse, I guess. Anyway, Joey, if it's any consolation, I'll always have the undisputed title of being at the loser in this relationship. At least, your dreadful job isn't also a peek into what your future will look like".

"Try harder in school, then! You're already trying as little as possible, so anything more would be a vast improvement!" she teasingly told her boyfriend, before getting a kiss as her reply.

If there was such a thing as a world record for the worst-gone break-up in history, then Jen had to think that she'd not only shattered it on her date with Chris the day before, but she'd also set a new record that could end up standing for all eternity! Or, at least, that was how it had gone from her own point of view, even if she couldn't imagine that Chris would have any fonder memories of the whole ordeal as it had gone down. In the usually better-knowing view of retrospect, she should have just ripped off the band-aid and gotten in out of the way without sleeping with him one more time first, and it had probably only served to confuse Chris even more, when she'd told him right after they were done with their "Carnal Business" that she didn't think they were compatible together.

How could she have been this dumb? Of course, he was going to get upset, when she sprung it on the poor boy out of nowhere, and if it had been him who'd done the same thing to her, wouldn't she have been just as torn up as he'd been, if not more? In any case, she figured that it had to have put her karma downright down in the dumps and seeing Chris looking like his whole world had come crashing down around him in school the day after didn't do anything to soothe her guilty conscience.

"Look at it this way, Jen. Now that you're single again, you'll have lots of time to reflect of every wrong step that you took along the way that led you to this misery" Drue smirkingly told her on the way to their next class. Luckily for her, she could tell him to take a hike when the school day came to an end, but when it came to those eight hours or so per day, she was still forced to endure him for the greater good of everyone at Capeside High.

"You count that as a positive?" she asked back, in a tone that hopefully clearly implied that she didn't want to discuss this any further with him.

"In your particular case, I sincerely have to doubt if a few months of not getting any would be the worst thing in the world. It's just funny to me how easy it was to get you to break up with him" Drue remarked, and immediately, Jen's blood began to run cold.

"You broke us up on purpose? Why?"

"Jen, all that it took was two minutes of me putting doubts in your head and from that moment on, you were more than ready to throw "Loverboy" to the side like a sack that's full of old potatoes! You weren't ever going to last!" Drue "defended" himself with, although it still sounded to her like he was proud of his actions.

"That still doesn't give you the right to mess with my life like this, you psycho!" she told Drue off, not caring that they were starting to draw stares from those around them with their little showdown, or whatever you wanted to call it.

"That's a little harsh, don't you think? Face it, Jen, I did you a favor by not allowing you to drag it out, until you couldn't stand the sight anymore of Chris, or whatever his name is! You're far too nice for your own good, that's always been your problem" Drue tried convincing her.

"The next time that you feel like doing me a favor, try this one on for size: Don't talk to me! And if you really want to do me a favor, pretend that I don't exist! That would just be awesome!"

"Then you would be able to help me with fitting in here, would you?" Drue said tauntingly, before getting far too up in her face for her own liking. "It would be such a shame if I had to tell my mom that her experiment failed and the school would miss out on all of that money that in the right hands, could do so much good for everyone here" he continued tauntingly, while she tried to calm herself.

"You would do something that selfish, wouldn't you? You haven't changed at all!"

"Life is like my mom has taught me that it is, Jen, full users and those who use them. Not that I'd ever admit to agreeing with that horrible, old bag on anything other than that one thing, but I have to concede with her on that one undeniable fact of life. In any case, hating me for playing by the rules is a waste of time, when you can spend it hating those that came up with them".

For no explicable reason, Jen suddenly found herself wishing that she hadn't broken up with Chris the day before.

Andie had only wanted one thing out the rest of her school day: To have it go by in the most uneventful way thinkable, with her concentrating on her studies and little else, least of all the fetus that was inside of her belly. This was more or less the way that it had gone too, right up until she was leaving for the rest of the day when to her great surprise, a flustered looking Andy came over to her as she came out of the main entrance.

"What have you been telling people about us?" he asked her with a blaming tone in his voice that only made her even more angry with him than she already was.

"Not the entire truth, if that's what you're afraid of. I want to, it isn't that, but I still have a tiny bit of my reputation left to uphold, after all" she told Andy off, as she tried to walk away from him as fast as she could.

"Well, someone has been spreading a rumor that I slept with an unnamed junior girl and dumped her right afterwards! No offense, but I only have one name on my suspect list!" Andy told her and instantly, she put two and two together in her head.

"I might have told one of my friends that. I didn't think that she'd ..." she began saying, before being cut off.

"Look, I know that I could and probably should have handled this whole situation between us better than I have, but we both know that I'd never dream of doing that to you! You have to understand that when you told me, it felt like you'd made my entire world come crashing down" Andy tried explaining to her, and even if part of her didn't want to hear him out, there was a bigger part of her that wanted to. "I still like you and I want to help you to get through all of this, all you have to do is let me".

"I ... I don't know what to say" was all that she could get out, so shocked was she at this sudden and unexpected turn of events.

"It's something to think about, at least. Just do me one favor first and set the record straight, alright? I haven't always been an angel, but I've still kept all of your secrets safe, haven't I? There has to be something to be said for that" Andy told her with a small and charming smile, before leaving her with her thoughts for her short walk home.

A walk, where it for the first time in a long while began to feel to her like everything was beginning to fall into place.

END OF CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE