“Why dudes? I don’t know. Nature, nurture, who the fuck knows. The outcome is the same.” He looked up toward the sky. I looked up with him. Pure blue, not a cloud in sight. “Why Jeremy? Another question with another answer I’m not sure of. It doesn’t seem like we get to choose who we like. I wish we could, it would all be a lot simpler if I could just decide to like someone. If I could, I’d choose Maggie Tyler every damn day. Everything would be easier, my chest wouldn’t feel like it does now, like there’s something rotting inside of it. I would have an apple with breakfast, lunch, dinner.”
He looked back down. I kept looking up. There was a plane in the sky and I was trying to guess how many people were inside it. I pictured every seat, every person, and I wondered about their names, ages, jobs, what they were listening to on their iPods, where they were coming from, who they were going home to. I hoped they all had someone waiting for them at the airport who’d smile at them the second they walked into Baggage Claim, who’d hug them and tell them they missed them and really mean it. Someone who’d drive them home and ask them all about their trip, let them crack open their chest and dump the weight of their day inside.
“Sorry, I’m being a downer,” Darryl said. I looked back at him. He plastered an almost believable smile on his face. “Tell me about your boyfriend. Billy, right? I remember that one time he dropped by just to say hey, just because he missed you. He’s no Jeremy. He’ll be a good daddy.”
“Yeah, he’s the best,” I said.
Darryl stared at my belly. “Can I touch?”
I grabbed the bottle from his hand and took a swig, leaving barely another mouthful. “No.”
* * *
—
SOMETIMES PEOPLE I went to high school with called in.
At best, it was awkward. They’d open the door and, no matter how long it took them to place me, when they did, their smiles would fall for a second. The next second, their smiles would be back and forced, acting like we were meeting on purpose and not because they were hungry and about to pay me. They’d try to hug me, shout, “Class of 2011!” I’d pretend I would be open to hugging if only I wasn’t holding the pizza they ordered. I’d offer them their box in one hand, hold out the open palm of my other for money, hoping to end the interaction as quickly as possible. They’d ignore my moves and ask me if it was true about the baby. After the first few times, I stopped asking how they’d heard about it—everyone was friends with or had a friend that was friends with Billy, had bumped into him over the past two weeks, and had heard him gush about the baby and everything he had planned. They loved talking about how brave I was, that people could fuck off if they didn’t approve, their sister’s friend’s sister was pregnant out of high school, baby socks were the cutest things in the whole world. What they were doing in the fall inevitably came next.
“And I really think that majoring in communications at Cal State Long Beach is going to be a great start to the rest of my adult life.”
“Totally.”
“What’re you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
It seemed as if there was nothing more uncomfortable that I could say. They could support a teenage pregnancy, but not this, not a person who drifted from one moment to the next without any idea about where she was headed. Their smiles would fall again, longer this time, they’d need to look away for a moment to recover. When they turned back, they’d stare at the bridge of my nose, the gap between my eyebrows, the center of my forehead, anywhere but my eyes, a place where their own insecurities might be reflected back to them, murky in the brown of my irises. “That’s so cool,” they would mumble in my direction, might cough or rub the side of their arm, lace their fingers together. “That’s so cool.” Another pause. “So—how much do I owe you?” On my walk back to my car, they’d shout out to say hi to Billy.
It was worse when they didn’t remember me at all.
They’d open the door and look at me like we’d never passed each other in hallways, drunk from the same low-pressure water fountains, copied off each other’s tests, laughed at teachers that didn’t care, laughed at teachers that cared too much, seen each other at the Burger King where you could buy cheap weed. Stanley Luna told me once at a party that I had a killer rack. Standing on his doorstep with two boxes of Extra Sausage, Extra Cheese, Normal Sauce, he barely looked up from his phone, quickly thrust bills and a few coins into my hand, said, “Thanks much,” while closing the door.
Whether they remembered or didn’t remember me, I’d take the long route back to Eddie’s. No matter how loud I turned up the radio, I couldn’t avoid thinking about one fact—even if I wasn’t pregnant, I would be in the exact same place I was now.
Billy used to lie in bed filling out college applications on his laptop. I’d lie next to him, hands behind my head, eyes closed, the clacking of his keyboard soothing me, putting me into the state on the edge of sleep.
“When’re you going to fill out your applications?”
Eyes open. “I don’t know.”
“What do you think you’d want to do once you graduate?”
I’d shrug or try to change the conversation. “Let’s go to Taco Bell.”
“Well, what do you like doing?”
This was the most painful question he could ask, maybe because I knew how I would answer it—I liked eating cereal early in the morning on the front steps of the house, seeing how sure and confident Mom’s hands moved when she folded laundry, watching TV on mute while I listened to my iPod, reading under trees and watching sunlight leak through the leaves above and cast strange patterns on my skin and the pages, pulling off my jeans the minute I got home, Gummy Bears, I liked after we fucked, when we just lay in each other’s arms, not speaking—none of these answers were what he was looking for.
I never applied to any colleges, never was able to answer the question of my future purpose with anything other than the three words that’d made my former classmates squirm, made Billy frown and try to coax ideas out of me.
“Think of things you’re good at,” Billy would say. “Think of people you admire and the work they did, think about what mark you’d want to leave behind on the world.” Mom never minded my answer much, would hug me and tell me I had all the time in the world to decide, I could do all my deciding from the comfort of home and the room I’d slept in every night of my life.
“I don’t know.”
After a few deliveries, I realized my classmates thought I’d started working at Eddie’s as a result of the pregnancy, but I’d been working there for two weeks before I found out. Billy was talking constantly about USC, the community colleges nearby that I could take classes at that would inspire me; he bought a sweatshirt for himself, a bear for mom and me with words on its belly, “Someone Who Loves Me Goes to USC.” Meanwhile, I asked every person I was even slightly friends with if they knew of places hiring.