Catch Twenty-Two

by James, Marie

  As the two girls begin kissing, I stand from the sofa and wander around the house. Even with the party raging, everyone seems to be respectful of the décor. There are a few empty cups littering the flat surfaces around the house, but nothing seems broken or ruined.

  “Dude!” Linc hisses in my ear, clearly drunk and having a good time. “Did you see what Heather and Drea are doing in the living room?”

  He points over his shoulder with a huge grin on his face. He’s a complete idiot, but he’s a happy idiot, and I can’t fault the guy for having a good time. Hell, I’d be him if I didn’t have so many other things on my mind. If I hadn’t lost my dad. If I hadn’t pushed Frankie away so much that she can’t even stand the sight of me.

  “They’re about two minutes away from eating each other out!”

  He shoves off of me and heads back into the living room to stand beside Graham and Bennett as they all watch the two girls making out. Seconds ago Linc was jovial, but now as he watches them, a sour look has taken over his face. Graham looks like he’s seconds away from lowering his zipper and joining them. Bennett looks disinterested, but his gaze never pulls from the two girls.

  I feel bad for those two girls because I know how guys are, especially after hearing the descriptive conversations they have in the locker room. Even with the encouragement of every guy in the room tonight to keep doing what they’re doing, they will be faced with insults and shame come Monday morning at school.

  And I did the same to Frankie, didn’t I? I was so pleased, so thankful she let me touch her in that haunted house, I could’ve kneeled at her feet and worshipped her, but when it was over I treated her like trash, calling her a slut and suggesting she opened her legs for everyone when she was so tight on my fingers I knew she’d never been touched before.

  Guys are complete assholes, teenage guys especially, and I’m no different.

  That night in the barn… God, that night in the barn. It’s burned in my brain, playing on repeat constantly.

  Two virgins coming together like that, creating a life. I scrape my hand down my face and look around the room. The two girls that were making out are no longer standing but wrapped around each other in a hot and heavy make-out session right in the middle of the floor. Several people stand around, using the cameras on their phones to make sure the night is never forgotten.

  I don’t want this. I don’t want any part of this, but instead of telling everyone to grab their shit and leave, I hit the stairs and head to my room. A sense of grotesque unease washes over me when I see Frankie’s bedroom door cracked. I made sure to close her bedroom door earlier. I even went as far as putting notes on both our doors to let people know that they were off-limits, but apparently it didn’t work. Feeling murderous at the thought of finding people fucking in her bed, I kick the door open with the toe of my boot, but I don’t find a couple teenagers in the throes of passion. Instead, Bronwyn and two of her minions are standing in the middle of the room.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  All three of them turn in my direction, but instead of even looking a little bit guilty for invading Frankie’s space, Bronwyn turns to look at me, a saccharine sweet smile on her lips.

  “Hey, baby.” I cringe at the nickname and instantly regret even pretending to be interested in her to make Frankie jealous.

  “You need to leave,” I spit.

  “You know,” Bronwyn says as she turns in a full circle looking around the room, “I honestly expected this room to be filled with Barbies and My Little Pony posters.”

  I haven’t really paid much attention to Frankie’s room, using most of my focus the couple of times I’ve been in here on the pretty girl I always find sitting on her bed, but Bronwyn’s observations do nothing but anger me even further. Frankie isn’t a child. She’s a beautiful woman, the mother of my unborn child, and I hate seeing someone who doesn’t even like her in her space. It’s a violation, an intrusion.

  “Get. Out.”

  I use the same tone Frankie used with me the last time I stepped foot in here, only I’m not able to hide the hatred in my voice the way she did.

  “Fine,” Bronwyn huffs before looking back at her friends.

  Her two friends slide past me, but Bronwyn reaches for me when she draws near. I shrug out of her grasp.

  “Don’t touch me,” I hiss, looking down at her and hoping she can tell I wouldn’t touch her if she were the last girl on earth.

  All the dislike I faked with Frankie is one hundred percent accurate for the way I feel about this girl.

  “Want to go to your room? I can help you get in a better mood.”

  The offer is ridiculous, and she knows it. Other than using her for a prop to upset Frankie, I haven’t laid a finger on her. I don’t know what her skin feels like or if her lips are soft. I know nothing about her. I don’t listen when she talks, and if Frankie isn’t nearby, I don’t even pay her an ounce of attention.

  “You need to leave,” I repeat. “Not just from up here, but you need to get out of this house. Take everyone else with you.”

  Bronwyn gives me a quick smile, leaving me wondering if she even understands what I demanded of her as she walks away. She doesn’t leave. She doesn’t tell everyone else to leave either, and I just can’t be bothered enough to go down and tell them either.

  I lock myself in my borrowed bedroom and tune them all out.

  Chapter 40

  Frankie

  “Calm down!” Piper demands when I throw all of my pillows to the floor.

  “I can’t! Will you help me look?” More than morning sickness threatens to make me sick.

  “We looked there already.”

  I don’t stop pulling everything from my bedside table, uncaring if my floor looks like it was the primary focus of tornadic activity.

  “It’s a pregnancy thing,” Piper says as she reaches for me, a bid to make me calm down, but that is an impossible feat. “Pregnancy brain. I read all about it. It’ll turn up.”

  I can’t even focus on the fact that my best friend has done more research on pregnancy than I have, and she isn’t even the one facing motherhood. Maybe if I could hold my eyes open for longer than an hour, I’d be able to get around to it.

  “What’s in it?” she asks calmly.

  “Everything,” I tell her, swiping at the tears that refuse to subside. “This summer. The pregnancy. Everything. Someone took it.”

  “No one took it.” She grabs me by my shoulders and forces me to look her in the eye. Concern draws her brow in. “Calm down.”

  “Would you be calm if someone took your journal?”

  Her mouth clamps closed, and I have my answer. She writes in her journal daily, or at least she used to before all of her time was taken up by Dalton. I don’t know if she still does, but I’ve been writing in mine a lot since I returned from Utah. I spilled every ounce of my soul into that stupid journal, and now it’s missing.

  “When did you last see it?”

  I do my best to think back, matching my breathing to her calming pace.

  “Fr-Friday, I think.”

  Every day for the last week has seemed like a million years long. I spent the weekend at Piper’s avoiding this house and the birthday party Zeke threw himself. Strangely, the house was in complete order when I returned home this morning to change when I expected to walk into a war zone.

  “You think?” she asks.

  “Yeah.” I take a deep breath. “I wrote in it before I went to school.”

  I don’t mention getting up that day before the sun rose because I had been sleeping the entire day before after Zeke found the tests in the bathroom. My eyes widen with realization.

  “I wrote about…” I swallow. “Everything. Everything is in there.”

  “We’ll find it. You just misplaced it.”

  “He took it, Piper. I know he took it.”

  I make a move to go around her toward the bathroom door leading to his room, but she stops me.


  “We have to go to school, Frankie. He has practice after school today, right?” I nod. “Then we’ll come home straight from school and tear his room apart.”

  I keep my eyes on the door.

  “After school,” she repeats. “Grab your backpack. We need to head downstairs and get that baby something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I mutter, but I grab the strap of my backpack anyway and follow behind her.

  “But the baby is.”

  My mind replays my placing my journal in my bedside table over and over on the way to school. My focus is so absent, more than once Piper reaches across the console of her car and lifts the Pop Tart I’m holding to my mouth. It’s like sawdust in my mouth, tasteless and dry, but I eat it anyway.

  “You have a lot going on,” Piper says as we pull into the parking lot at school.

  I huff. “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “Your mom is due home tomorrow, and you need to talk to Zeke before she gets here.”

  “Talking isn’t going to solve anything.”

  “You need to know where his head is at with this whole thing,” she argues.

  “His head is with Bronwyn and the football team. He doesn’t care about anything else.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  But don’t I?

  He’s avoided me as much as I’ve avoided him since his attempt to talk to me the night he found out about the baby. His routine hasn’t changed a bit. Hell, he threw a party not twenty-four hours after finding out. That doesn’t exactly lead me to believe he’s feeling any responsibility toward our situation.

  “You’ll talk to him today,” Piper urges. “Promise me, Frankie.”

  The car is in park and while she’s staring at the side of my face waiting for my agreement, I lock eyes on the front of the school.

  “Today, Frankie,” she repeats when I don’t answer her.

  Tears once again threaten. “What if he tells me he doesn’t care? What if he tells me he isn’t interested in being a dad?”

  I turn to look at her, wanting to let my own tears fall when I see some begin to glisten in her own eyes.

  She shakes her head as if she’s rejecting the idea, but she’s my best friend and knows I don’t need lies and assurances right now. “Then you’ll know, and you can work out a game plan from there.”

  “This baby changes everything.” I drop my eyes to our joined hands, uncertain of when she even pressed her palm to mine.

  “Of course it does, but that doesn’t mean that all of those changes are bad.”

  “I was supposed to go to college and fall in love, find a great job and have kids in my late twenties. I wasn’t supposed to be the teenage cliché getting pregnant my senior year of high school.”

  “Your path is different now, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t have all those things.”

  I want to let her words sink in. I want to have as much faith in myself as she has in me, but that’s impossible right now. I feel lost, like a lone survivor of a plane crash with no survival skills to draw from. I don’t know how to navigate this alone. Even being a disappointment to my parents, I should be able to sit down and talk with them, knowing they’ll have my back and best interests at heart.

  I don’t have any of that.

  I have her and that’s it.

  “I can’t have a baby and go to college. It’ll be too hard.”

  “Hard doesn’t mean impossible, and me, you, and Dalton can all have different class schedules. We can take turns babysitting. We’ll make it work.”

  An incredulous chuckle escapes my lips. “Dalton would not be interested in helping me with a baby.”

  She gives me a soft smile. “Dalton helps me because it makes me happy and helping you makes me happy. Have you forgotten that he punched Zeke twice for you?”

  She wraps her arms around me before I can answer.

  “Think he’d be interested in sister wives?” I joke.

  She laughs against my hair. “Not a chance.”

  We both climb out of her car, and I do my best to hold my head up high even though I know my face has to be a wreck from the stress and tears of the morning. As we walk into school, I keep reminding myself that the stress of not knowing what Zeke’s plans will be over once I have a long conversation with him this evening.

  Today will be just like every other day at Westover Prep, and anticipating a few nasty looks from Bronwyn and my heart breaking a little more at seeing Zeke with her hurts, but it’s manageable. Then we step inside and the atmosphere is just off.

  More people than usual are standing around the lockers, and as we pass several lean in and whisper to their friends. I can tell they’re all waiting for something. Dread sits heavy in my stomach, but I try to ignore all of them. Piper and I have both been down this road before. How everyone is acting right now is very reminiscent of what the first three years of high school were like.

  I look around for Dalton, waiting for him to pop out from somewhere and break my best friend’s heart, but he’s smiling as he makes his way down the hall, completely oblivious to the strange charge surrounding us.

  “Hey, gorgeous.” He presses a quick kiss to Piper’s lips before greeting me. “Hey, Frankie. Did you find it?”

  I’m not the least bit surprised that my best friend shared the missing journal debacle with him. I’ve gotten used to her sharing everything with him.

  “We’re going to look for it again after school,” Piper says as we close the distance toward our lockers.

  “I can help,” Dalton offers, and God what I wouldn’t give to have gotten pregnant by a guy as nice as the one he has become.

  “Thanks,” I say, ignoring the bizarre silence as I reach for the latch on my locker.

  I nearly collapse when I open my locker, but I’m too stunned by the sight of the baby bottles and pacifiers that fall to my feet to even move. The hallway explodes with laughter when pink and blue baby balloons float out toward the ceiling, hovering over my head by thin ribbon.

  “Oh God,” Piper hisses as she crouches and begins to pick up all the baby paraphernalia at my feet.

  “What are you all staring at?” Dalton yells, but he no longer holds the power in these halls that he once did.

  I can feel the crowd lessen at my back, but not everyone is ready to walk away from the show. My face is on fire, flaming with embarrassment and terror. Everyone knows. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep being pregnant a secret forever, but I was hoping for a little time to wrap my head completely around it first.

  “Looks like she isn’t a boy after all,” Bronwyn says from behind me.

  Tears are trailing down my face when I turn around, fully expecting to see her clinging to Zeke and him having a wide smile on his face, but she’s only flocked by her stupid friends, except for Drea who isn’t wearing a cheer uniform and standing off to the side. These girls are the ones that have done her bidding since day one at Westover Prep.

  It doesn’t take long for me to find Zeke though. He’s standing on the periphery of the crowd, watching. I plead with him with my eyes, but he doesn’t step forward. He doesn’t tell everyone to go to class. He doesn’t walk up to me and place his hand on my belly. He doesn’t claim me or his baby. He simply shakes his head and walks away.

  And now I know I don’t even need to bother with a conversation with Zeke Benson, because he just told me more than words could ever say.

  Chapter 41

  Zeke

  The trouble is, you think you have time. ~Buddha.

  As I stare down at the quote-image Piper Schofield shared on her Instagram, I can’t help but imagine it’s aimed at me.

  Time, in fact, has ticked by slowly the last two days, and every single second of it has been filled with regret, shame, and sorrow.

  I knew exactly what Frankie needed from me when she found me watching Bronwyn’s bullshit unfold in the hallway, but I couldn’t face her.

  It’s simple. I’m a coward. A weakling. The
ultimate piece of shit.

  She needed me, and I turned my back on her and walked away. The same way I avoided my dad when he lay dying in that bed at home.

  He’d be turning over in his fresh grave right now if he knew what I’ve done. Not getting Frankie pregnant, although I know he’d be disappointed in that, but not manning up and taking care of my own responsibilities would send him over the edge.

  I don’t know what Mom will say. She showed up after school on Monday with keys to a small house on the outskirts of town. It was the perfect escape. I packed my things in my borrowed room in the Young’s house and didn’t look back. I wanted to leave a note for Frankie, but I don’t want to hurt her any more than I already have.

  You think you have time.

  I’m punishing her for no reason at all. I have been this entire time, but I know walking away from her a couple days ago when she needed me the most was the final straw. She’ll never understand why I did it. I don’t even understand myself.

  “You can’t just stare at your phone all day, Ezekiel. You need to get ready for school.”

  I hate the idea of school. I hate the idea of suiting up in football gear for a sport that means nothing to me any longer, but I give my mom my best smile and get dressed.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m walking into the locker room with a bunch of guys who cheer when I show up but don’t really know a thing about me.

  “What do you think about it?” Linc asks as soon as I drop my bag of gear in front of my athletic locker.

  “About what?” I mutter even though I don’t have any desire to be in the middle of their stupid conversations.

  “Vaughn has a few ideas,” Linc says.

  My eyes cut to the third-string defenseman, but I’m not really paying him any attention.

  “I was just saying that she’s a whore and nailing little Frankie Young should be on all of our to-do lists. I mean the girl is already pregnant, so it’s not like any of us can knock her up again.” He grins, loving that he’s the primary focus of the entire football team. “Am I right?”

  All I see is red when the guys chuckle and agree with him.