Giftchild

by Janci Patterson

  Rodney was quiet then, but he didn't pull away. He stayed there, with his breath in my ear and his arm around my waist, just looking out at the streetlights and the suburban haze that blocked most of the stars. I nuzzled into his neck and breathed him in. His collar smelled like the leaves in the park, and I wanted to freeze that moment and live in it, just the way it was, forever.

  But Rodney pulled me closer, his fingertips running down my back and resting on my hips. My body ached, and my mouth moved reflexively against his throat. He moaned softly, and I could feel the vibrations of his voice against my lips.

  For a moment, all I wanted was to invite him in. We could slip through the window and curl up in my bed, and no one would know about it but us. I wanted it in a way that had nothing to do with getting pregnant. But if going to bed together was a thing that Rodney and I were going to do on a regular basis, then we were either in a serious relationship, or seriously screwed up.

  I leaned back on my hands. Gravel from the shingles dug into my palms, and I concentrated on the sting.

  Things clearly had changed. What if there was no going back? Did that mean that I was destined to lose him? Was I repeating my mom's history, even as I tried to avoid it?

  Ugh. I rubbed my forehead. When had my life become such a drama?

  I looked up at Rodney, and found him watching me. "I better go," he said.

  He looked worried again. And all I wanted was to pull him inside and prove to him that everything was okay between us. But if sex was a part of the problem, it couldn't also be the solution.

  "Okay," I said. And Rodney scooted off the roof and onto the shed.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to stay warm. When we'd made out last summer, it was hard and fast and fun. We'd laughed and teased each other, and started whenever we wanted and stopped when one of us got laughing too hard. Which, now that I thought about it, was always, always me.

  But now things felt serious. Heavy. Was it just the sex that changed things? Or was it something more?

  Rodney stood on the roof of Dad's shed. He put one hand down, ready to hop off, but seemed to think better of it and stood back up, looking at me. "Penny," he said.

  My skin tingled, as if it knew what was coming even before I did. "Yeah?"

  Rodney looked at me and the light from the street lamps lit up his face. "You're the best."

  The whole roof seemed to tilt. I hugged my knees to my chest, trying to maintain my balance. And that's when I knew for sure, the thing I'd been trying not to know.

  Rodney was in love with me.

  And for the first time in our friendship, I was completely unworthy of it.

  Chapter Seven

  Week Two

  I woke up to my alarm and slammed down my snooze button. My head ached, and I was sure it wasn't just from lack of sleep. My fingers inched across my stomach.

  One time. We'd had sex one time. So I probably wasn't pregnant. Lots of women had sex while they were ovulating and didn't get pregnant. Right? Because having a baby with a boy who was in love with me would be a whole different game than the one I thought I was playing.

  Mom banged on my door a few minutes later. She shouted through the door, "Is Rodney driving you today?"

  "No," I yelled back. "He has a chess game."

  "Hurry. I'm headed out."

  As I dressed, I brought myself to my senses. Rodney was in love with me. But he wasn't acting differently than he always had. So either this was an age-old development, or he was handling it with class.

  And if he could do that, so could I. I didn't have to cling to him, to miss him every second, to pull him into my bed and absorb all his warmth like a leech.

  I could be cool. That's all I needed to be.

  Downstairs, out the door, into the car, all the way to school, I wore a smile like an ID badge. Hello, My Name Is Cool.

  I had this.

  Mom dropped me off fifteen minutes early, and I strode into the building, throwing the double doors open before me and stalking right down the middle of the hall.

  Act like it's fine, and it will be.

  It had to be.

  I got to my locker, and spun in the combination, my confident smile still pasted to my face.

  And that's when I found the single red rose lying on top of my math book, petals fanned out over the cover.

  The ground sunk out from under me. I put a hand on the locker above mine to keep from being swallowed by the floor. Only one other person had my locker combination, and only one person had cause to give me a rose on a random Friday.

  I picked up the flower by the stem, which Rodney had bent some to fit into the locker. A single, red, thornless, long stem rose, that Rodney had bought early in the morning, before his chess game with Parker, on a night when he'd been out late.

  Last year, I'd gone with Rodney to buy flowers for his mom for Mother's Day. "Buy the yellow ones," I'd told him. "Red roses are for romantic love."

  Be cool, I thought.

  Who was I kidding?

  I shut the locker and leaned against it. The first bell grew closer, and the press of students around me thickened. I couldn't stand for fear of falling.

  "Hey, Penny," a voice said. I looked up to see Kara waving at me. "Are you okay?"

  "I'm not feeling well, actually," I said.

  "Who's the flower from? Secret admirer?"

  The room swirled. "No," I said. "I have to ask you a stupid question."

  "Shoot."

  "How long has Rodney been in love with me?"

  Kara's shriek fell somewhere between mocking and glee.

  "Shut up!" I said. "Just answer me."

  "Since like seventh grade," Kara said. "Remember how he used to wait for you outside the locker room after gym?"

  I remembered him leaning against the wall, pretending to play with his phone, but really obviously waiting for me. That was four years ago. "No way," I said. "He liked Sarah Kim in seventh grade."

  Kara shook her head. "Maybe. But he liked you more."

  The floor seemed to move out from under me. "How could you not tell me this?"

  "I think I did," Kara said. "Besides, everybody knows."

  I flopped my hands against the locker. "Seriously?"

  Kara grinned. "What's the matter with that?"

  I narrowed my eyes at her. "Aren't you supposed to be against romance?" I asked. "After the text message?"

  "Please," Kara said. "That was last week. This week I want to live vicariously."

  I sunk the rest of the way to the floor. "How was I this clueless?"

  Kara extended her hands to me, pulling me to my feet. "Honey, get a grip. You love him. He loves you. This is not an issue. Now come on. We've got to get to class."

  When I didn't follow, Kara left me standing there, rose hanging in my hand.

  I was sure if I thought about it long enough, I would think of an aspect of my friendship with Rodney that didn't look like a serious, committed relationship. Any minute now, it was going to come to me.

  I went through the next few classes with the rose stem-down in my backpack, bloom peeking out the top of the zipper. I didn't want Rodney to see that I'd left it behind, or crushed it entirely by shoving the blossom under the zipper, but I also didn't want to carry it around in my hand for everyone to ask about. Instead, the flower watched me as I sat in class, reminding me that things had, in fact, changed. I glanced down at it every few minutes, but it was always there, watching me with its velvety, soft petals.

  So much for cool.

  Rodney caught me in the hall at lunch. "Hey," he said. He put out a hand and rested it on my arm, which was something he might have done any day, but today I stepped reflexively into him, standing only inches away, and his hand ran up my arm and around my shoulders.

  My spine tingled. "Hey," I said back. "Thanks for the flower."

  He reached for my backpack and ran his thumb around the bottom of a petal. "I woke up feeling like a jerk," he said, his voice low so only I
could hear. "I didn't want you to think I was using you, you know?"

  My head pounded. No, Rodney. I was using you.

  "I've got another game today," he said. "But Xander told me about this abandoned warehouse by the golf course—he said the roof is falling in. Could be good for pictures. Want to check it out after school?"

  That sounded like a normal thing, and I could sure use a dose of normal. "Sure."

  "Great. I'll see you then." Rodney bent down and kissed me on the cheek. Then he reached down to take my hand, right there in the hall, in front of everyone.

  My face flushed. Oh, no, I thought. If it looks like a couple, and it walks like a couple . . .

  I was the biggest idiot who ever lived.

  After school, I jittered my way to my locker to meet Rodney. He smiled at me, and brushed my arm casually with his fingertips, but when I didn't respond to it he didn't take my hand.

  He didn't push. Of course he didn't. How long had he been following my lead, beat by beat, moment by moment? How could I not have noticed before?

  We walked out to his car, and Rodney opened the car door for me. He'd always done that, because he was the one with the keys. But as he walked around the car to climb in, I obsessed over it. Did he do that for other people, or just me? By the time he started the car, I already had the radio all the way up.

  The golf course was on the outskirts of the city, next to the freeway interchange. It had been built over the top of an old landfill, which backed up to a lumberyard and a recycling center. Behind the rows and rows of wooden planks, past the factory that reeked of tangy aluminum and dried soda, beyond a barbed wire fence to keep people out of the recycling piles, stood the building industry forgot. It probably had been a warehouse, like Xander said, but half of the roof had tumbled inside and lay warped and sunken in the afternoon sun.

  I dug my camera out of my backpack while Rodney grabbed his from the trunk. I held it up, took a test shot of the building, and adjusted the settings. The shape of the structure was too square to look interesting backlit by the sun.

  "The light's pretty bad here," I said. "Let's walk around the other side."

  Rodney followed me, kicking a soda can across the empty lot as we went.

  "Why do people let this happen?" I asked, surveying the sunken roof.

  "Cheaper to let it rot than to tear it down, I guess." Rodney sunk to his knees in front of the building. I crouched behind him to see his screen. He angled the shot so the camera was closer to the foundation than the roof, making the building loom menacingly.

  "Nice," I said.

  Rodney stood and beckoned me toward the building. "Come on."

  The door had fallen half off its hinges, so it jutted out from the building at an awkward angle. In the window next to it hung a tattered sign announcing the building's condemnation by the county inspector.

  Go figure.

  Rodney walked up to the door and peered inside.

  "You aren't going in there," I said.

  He lifted a foot over the hanging door and stepped through the gap. "Why not?"

  I grabbed him by the arm. "Because the roof is caving in?"

  Rodney craned his neck to look farther inside. "Not over here."

  I stood on my tiptoes to look past him. From here, I could clearly see the splintered mass of metal and wood that used to be the ceiling. "Please," I said. "Breathe wrong and you'll get squashed by a falling beam."

  Rodney grinned back at me over his shoulder. "What's the matter? Can't live without me?"

  I tightened my grip on his arm. "I'm more worried about myself," I said. "Your car is a stick shift. I can't drive home if you die."

  Rodney pointed his camera up at the ceiling, taking a picture of the falling detritus against the sky. "Come in with me, then," he said. "You wouldn't want me to die alone."

  I walked up to the building and peered through one of the empty window frames. The ceiling above the door did seem to be intact. "Fine," I said. "But only because I can't let you get all the good shots."

  Rodney stepped his other foot in, and reached back to help me over the fallen debris. I moved in behind him, choosing my steps carefully to avoid broken glass.

  The place had been emptied. All that was left were three wooden crates, the sides facing the fallen roof rotting away from exposure.

  I knelt down, catching the corner of one of the boxes with a sparkling maze of glass shards spreading in front of it.

  I held my screen up for Rodney to see. "I win," I said.

  He inclined his screen toward me, revealing a high-contrast shot of the sunken roof against the windows beyond, the curving line of the collapsed beams standing in sharp relief to the square angles of the window frames. It was better than mine by a mile.

  "Fine," I said.

  Rodney wrapped an arm around my shoulders and took my camera away, looking through my last few photos. "Better luck next time," he said.

  "Whatever," I said. I held his camera out at arm's length and turned the lens on us. "This is the winner. Smile."

  Our foreheads knocked together as we both faced the camera. I clicked the shutter, and then turned the camera around to see.

  Rodney was making a fish face.

  I put a hand on my hip. "You ruined my masterpiece."

  "Retake," he said, holding my camera out just as I had his. But instead of turning toward it, he ducked down and kissed me just as I heard the click.

  When the kiss ended, Rodney still held me close. I could feel his breath on my cheek, and my heart pounded. "Now there's evidence," I said.

  "Of what?" Rodney asked. And he pulled back grinning, like he was daring me to say it. Of our relationship. Of how we were so totally not even pretending to only be friends.

  I hesitated; he waited. Then the wind scattered leaves across the floor, and the ceiling above us groaned.

  I grabbed Rodney by the hand. "We are leaving," I said. "Now."

  Rodney laughed, but he followed.

  Safely outside again, we completed our lap around the building, stopping next to some concrete slabs that might have been parking barriers once upon a time.

  I knelt next to one of them, taking a picture of the corner of the broken roof against the clouds. I could feel Rodney behind me, looking at my screen, breathing on my ear. My heart hammered harder, and I dug my teeth into my lip, willing it to slow down.

  We couldn't go on like this. I had to talk to him. Now. I wheeled around. "What are we doing?" I asked.

  Rodney was staring up at the building again. "Trespassing for the sake of art."

  I punched his arm. "You know what I mean. We're supposed to be friends, but—"

  When Rodney turned back to me, he was no longer smiling. "Penny," he said, "It's okay. We don't have to have this conversation."

  I was finally trying to be open with him, and he didn't want to talk about it? I threw up my hands in surrender. "So roses are okay, but not discussions?"

  He rubbed my shoulder. "I'm just saying, if you don't want to talk about it, don't push it. I'm fine with everything. Really."

  I crossed my arms. That was Rodney's specialty—being fine with everything. But would he be, if he knew? "Forget about me for a minute. What do you want?"

  Rodney sat down on a slab of concrete, leaving me space beside him. I sat next to him, and he put a hand on my arm. "All that stuff about breaking up being inevitable, that was your idea. I just went along with it because it was what you needed."

  Was that true? Why didn't he say something? "You agreed to just be friends, though. Even if it was my idea."

  Rodney wavered. "Maybe I did," Rodney said. "But now I think we were idiots."

  I'd proved that pretty well on my side. "So are we together, then?"

  Rodney looked like a man treading carefully over slippery rocks. "We can be," Rodney said. "If that's okay with you." He looked at me, waiting.

  It wasn't about what I wanted. It was about what I'd done. A slow burn crept over my face. "First I ha
ve to ask you another question."

  A trace of worry passed over his face, but he gave me one solid nod. "Go."

  I scratched at the edge of the concrete slab with one fingernail, loosening some pebbles. "I've been thinking a lot about what I can do for my mom."

  Rodney rested his elbows on his knees, adjusting to the change of subject. "Did you come up with anything?"

  "Yes," I said. "I kind of want to get pregnant."

  Rodney whistled. He leaned back slightly, as if absorbing the blow.

  "I was just thinking about it . . . since you and me . . . you know . . ."

  He hesitated. "Are you asking me to father a child for your mother?"

  It was all I could do not to cover my face with my hands. Own up to it, I told myself. "You don't have to."

  Rodney squinted at the sky. "Obviously."

  Burn. "I'm just saying—"

  Rodney looked at me, like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You're serious?"

  It would be so much easier to play this off as a joke, but I couldn't. Rodney would know the difference. "I am."

  The rays of the setting sun shot through what was left of the dirty windows, illuminating the inches between us.

  I watched Rodney carefully, but he sat calmly, watching the building, giving nothing away. "Say something," I said.

  He shifted uncomfortably. "That's a sweet thing to want to do for your mother," he said. "It comes from a place of love. I get that."

  "But?" I said.

  His voice was strained. "But we can't do that. I mean, not that I mind the process . . ."

  I smacked him on the arm and he put a hand on my knee. The line of the light passed across his sleeve.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "You get why, right? I mean, it's one thing for your mother to adopt a stranger's baby, but for the baby to be ours . . . that's weird."

  My cheeks burned even brighter. I'd been a total idiot not to talk to him about this beforehand. "I get it," I said. "It's okay." I felt like the concrete slab was slowly sinking. What if I was pregnant already?

  It was once. Just once. Women who were trying to get pregnant sometimes had to try for months. You couldn't even get an appointment with an infertility specialist unless you'd been trying for a year.