This could not be happening.
I pushed away from the counter and began pacing the entire apartment. Hall, bedroom, living, dining, kitchen, dining, living, hall, bedroom. Back and forth, again and again, as if maybe when I found another unexpected room, I could pass through a door into a life where this wasn’t happening.
A baby. A BABY!
I could barely take care of myself!
I paced, again and again, front and back. The hour to leave for Cool Beans came and went. I got a phone call, but I ignored it. A coffee shop job wasn’t going to support a baby anyway.
A baby!
Even though I knew the tabloids no longer cared about me, I could see the headlines anyway.
Movie tart pregnant with singer’s love child!
Director devastated, destroys film negatives.
Ha, whatever. It was all digital.
Writing headlines always cheered me up. I sat on the sofa, picturing the spread. Me, with a Photoshopped belly. Frankie pictured in an oval, the words “SHOCKED AND ANGRY” angled over his head.
Then something of the actresses. “Vanessa determined to win back the hunky crooner.” They’d have some old image of her looking pissed off.
I kicked my feet up on the coffee table. This made me look at my belly, flat beneath the stretchy top of my pajamas.
The kid was in there. I stared at the pale green stripes as if I could see through them. I had no idea what it looked like. A miniature infant? A fish, swimming around?
My laptop was on the floor, so I bent down and picked it up. I opened up a browser and typed in, “What do you do if you’re pregnant?”
That was a mistake. I got a million religious sites about adoption and God loving your baby.
I typed in a new search. “What happens when you’re pregnant?”
This time I got a bunch of medical and pregnancy sites. The image results filled with drawings and photographs of floating babies and strange little pink shrimp-like things.
How did they have photographs of unborn babies? Did they stick something up in you? Was that safe?
I shuddered. But still, I clicked on one.
The baby floated inside a clear bubble. Was it really clear? That seemed risky. I didn’t want to move, in case I popped it. How did pregnant people walk around without feeling totally paranoid?
I angled my head, looking at the kid. It was sucking its thumb, all oblivious. The umbilical cord came out of its belly button, snaking and twisting around. That scared me too. If I turned in a circle, would I get it all tangled? I remembered making toy tornadoes in peanut butter jars as a kid. You twirled the jar and water swirled, tossing around the light bright pegs inside as if they were colorful telephone poles.
I could see the tornado in my belly. I’d have to quit dance class.
But people danced when they were pregnant.
God, I was so ignorant.
I was about to close the laptop and pretend this had never happened when I spotted an ad in the corner. “How far along are you? Use our tool!”
I clicked on it. It was some sort of pregnancy calendar. It asked for either the day of my last period or the day I conceived. Well, that was easy.
I typed in 3-6.
It took me to a new page that read “Congratulations, you are four weeks pregnant.”
What? That couldn’t be right. I went back to the previous screen and typed the date in again. The result was the same.
This time, I read the text. “You conceived two weeks ago. You are just finding out you are pregnant! Congratulations. Pregnancy is counted by the first day of your last period, so you may be adding two weeks to how long it’s been since the baby was conceived.”
Oh, okay. Got it.
There was a drawing of something out of a science book, a bunch of pink bubbles stuck together. Underneath, it said, “Your baby is the size of a grain of sand.”
I looked down at my belly again. Sand? Seriously?
It really had gotten everywhere.
~*′`*~
I typed up multiple texts to both Tina and Corabelle to tell them about the baby, then deleted each one.
I thought I could talk to them about anything. Secret fake boyfriends. VD tests. Boy hopping, sometimes without a whole lotta time in between. Boinking my astronomy TA.
But I couldn’t talk to them about this.
Corabelle’s baby had died of a heart condition when he was only a week old. Her now-husband Gavin had gotten a vasectomy afterward. They weren’t sure they’d ever have a child together.
Tina had given birth at seventeen, but her baby was born too premature to survive.
I couldn’t tell them I’d gotten knocked up by a total stranger. It was too close to home for them. I would say something wrong, destroy our friendship.
Terror started to set in. What was I going to do? I still had one more quarter term before graduation. But I didn’t have a job. And who would hire me if I was pregnant?