“Hardly.” Olivia laughed.
Oh, she imagined there could be a dozen potential fathers, all of them like those stoned boys in the parking lot. Boys with greasy hair and fast cars.
“I get it,” Ruby said. “You think I just screw guys randomly.” She hesitated, then added, “Indiscriminately, right? Well, for your information, I have only been with nine guys—”
Jesus, Olivia thought. Nine guys and she was fifteen years old. Olivia couldn’t help but think of her own fifteen-year-old self, with her John Lennon glasses and Indian-print skirts and her one true love, Peter Hershey. They hadn’t had sex until senior year.
“And I love Ben,” Ruby said, her voice passionate now. “I love him desperately. I never got pregnant before. I didn’t just fuck anybody anytime, so there.”
“Okay,” Olivia said. “Okay.”
“It’s not okay. Who do you think you are, anyway?” Ruby leaned back, weary, her stomach rising like a whale on the horizon. “I like sex,” she said dreamily. “I do. It’s hard to believe it can cause you so much trouble. The first time I had sex, I was like thirteen years old—”
“Thirteen!” Olivia blurted.
“And drunk, of course.”
“My God,” Olivia said. She knew nothing about anything, she decided. She was certain that when she was thirteen, she had not even known for sure what a French kiss was, or exactly how babies were made.
“The guy’s name was Guy. Can you believe it? I guess it’s like a French name, except they say Gee. But we all called him Guy, you know. And it was a Halloween party and I went as Scarlett O’Hara because I had just seen that movie for the first time, and I swear I watched it like fifty times in a row because I loved it so much. It’s still my favorite movie, and I thought, Why can’t I be her? Why can’t I have Tara and Melanie and Rhett and all of it, you know?”
That stupid movie again. Here was the kind of young girl who fell for all that romantic gibberish. Olivia shook her head. How could she have seen so much of herself in Ruby? Maybe she was just hoping for that sameness, hoping for a kindred spirit to fall into her lap.
Ruby sighed again. “Where was I?”
“Gee,” Olivia said.
Ruby laughed. “Right. Gee. So I go to the party and I drink only bourbon because that’s like a big southern thing and I wear this hoop skirt and these gross green curtains my mother had in the basement. In case you don’t know, that’s what Scarlett O’Hara does—she makes a dress out of these curtains. And I get drunk as hell, and of course whenever I smoke pot, I get really horny because it like gives me a buzz down there, like I’ve got an electric current down there. And Guy comes as Ike Turner with like a Nehru jacket and this Afro wig and bell-bottoms and he has his face painted black and I’m so drunk that when I lie down, I can’t pull myself back up because of the hoop skirt and everything and Guy and I are making out and laughing because I can’t get up and then he makes some stupid joke about doing the horizontal waltz or something, but I know what he means and I think, Why not? Why not just get it over with? He’s cute and everything, so I go, ‘Let’s do it, yeah’ and he goes, ‘Really?’ and I go, ‘Sure,’ because by this time we’ve smoked a joint, too, and I’m buzzing down there and so we do it.”
“Just like that?” Olivia said. She thought about how much she and her friends had discussed it: “Should we? Should we?” She thought about how terrified they all were.
“It was so nice, too,” Ruby said.
“It was?” Olivia said, surprised.
“I guess if I didn’t like it so much, I wouldn’t be in this predicament, right?” Ruby laughed.
Olivia closed her eyes and imagined her own first time, Peter Hershey pushing into her on the golf course behind his house. He kept his jeans on, just pulled out his dick and slipped her panties off, lifted her denim skirt, and did it. She was afraid of getting caught. The zipper on his jeans made tiny welts on the inside of her thigh.
“After Guy, I would think about doing it with other people, you know? Like I wanted to do it in a bed. And be naked, too. But it wasn’t like a slutty thing. Not like some girls, who go to parties and blow everybody or something.”
When Olivia didn’t answer, Ruby said, “You think it is, though, right?”
“What?”
“You think it’s slutty to have sex like I did?”
Olivia hesitated and then said, “Not slutty exactly. But not right.”
This was hypocritical; she knew that. Certainly she’d had sex indiscriminately. She’d made love with strangers. Sometimes she’d even sought it out. But somehow what she’d done was different. She was older, after all. An adult. Ruby was fifteen. Fifteen!
“All I know is, I don’t want this baby,” Ruby whispered. “And Ben doesn’t want it.”
Olivia reached across the cold, hard place between them.