by Kieran Scott
“You are unbelievable, Jake,” she said, pushing one hand into her hair as she walked back and forth from her flat-screen TV to the end of her four-poster bed. “I haven’t seen you or heard from you or gotten even a text from you since that night and now you come over here and accuse me of being a lying whore?”
My jaw hung so low I swear it scratched against the wool on her pink throw rug. “I didn’t … I just—”
“You’d better not tell anyone I was going out with Will,” she continued, her voice gaining strength. “Because if you do, I’m gonna look like a slut and you’re gonna look like an immature jerk who couldn’t take responsibility.”
I pressed my lips together. There were a million questions in my head. Desperate, awful questions. But I couldn’t ask a single one of them or I knew she’d take my head off again. But I couldn’t just stand there and say nothing, could I?
“So what are you … I mean … what are we … supposed to do?”
Chloe’s scrawny arms fell limp at her sides. She looked away. “I don’t know.”
And then she burst into tears.
“My parents are going to kill me,” she wailed. “Hammond hates me. You hate me. I can’t deal with this. I just can’t.”
I hated watching girls cry. My arms twitched to hug her, but I hesitated a second. Was hugging her a bad idea? Would she think I wanted to be her boyfriend or something?
Suddenly Ally popped into my brain and I wanted to run. Get the hell out of here and never look back. But that wasn’t an option, was it? I lived right across the street. We went to the same school. We had the same friends. It was either man up now, or commit to being the biggest asshole in Orchard Hill.
I took a step toward Chloe, and she basically fell against me. My arms wrapped around her small shoulders. She was so little I probably could have wrapped them around twice.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I said, my voice flat. “I don’t hate you.”
She sobbed into my shirt. “What are we going to do?”
My whole chest tightened. We. She’d said we. We were a we now, no matter what. And there was going to be a baby. She was going to be Mom and I was going to be … I was going to be …
Run, man. Run now.
I gritted my teeth and didn’t move. “I don’t know. But we’ll … we’ll figure it out.”
Chloe held on to my shirt and cried and cried and cried. I stood there and stared over her head at the double doors to the hall. The doors to freedom. I wished I’d never stepped foot in this room in my life.
ally
As soon as I shoved open the door of the Dunkin’ Donuts, the air-conditioning blasted the hot humidity of the outside right off my skin. Annie Johnston looked up from her ever-present laptop and arched one eyebrow like she was sizing me up for the first time. I was so nervous, both from seeing her and from what I had to tell her, that I practically fell into the plastic chair across from hers. There was an open box of Munchkins on the table, and one glance told me she’d already eaten every last chocolate.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
I couldn’t even believe she’d finally answered her phone, but I guess dialing her ten times in fifteen minutes was some kind of record. And then, when I’d told her I had serious news, she’d been, in her words, “mildly intrigued.” Of course now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I could tell her, or that I even should tell her. But I needed to talk to someone and even though we hadn’t spoken since our stupid, drunken—on my side, at least—fight the first week of August, Annie was still my best friend. I just wasn’t entirely sure if I was hers.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. She picked at her black nail polish. Her look had gotten slightly Gothier since the last time I’d seen her. She’d cut her hair into a straight-banged bob and wore cat-eye eyeliner. Her shirt was black and baggy, but her skirt was baggier, and her legs were covered in holey fishnets. There were about a million colorful bracelets on each of her arms, the ones that had gotten supertrendy over the summer.
“Nice collection,” I said, nodding at her wrists.
“I’ve started stealing them from little kids,” she deadpanned. “I think it’s important to teach them, from a very young age, the evils of hoarding.”
I managed a laugh. “Ah.”
“So what’s your news?” Annie asked, leaning back in her chair.
I cleared my throat. “It’s about Jake.”
Annie blinked, as if surprised. “Trouble in paradise already?”
“Kind of,” I said, ignoring the twinge of annoyance I felt over her lack of sympathy. She almost sounded amused. I took a deep breath, grabbed a cinnamon Munchkin, and popped the whole thing in my mouth. “He got somebody pregnant.”
Doughnut clogged my dry throat and I coughed, showering the table with cinnamon. Annie sat up at full alert.
“I’m sorry. Could you repeat that in dough-free English?” she requested.
I chewed, then swallowed with a significant amount of discomfort. Kind of felt like a rock going down my throat and lodging itself in my esophagus.
“He got somebody pregnant,” I said.
“Holy shit. Is it Chloe?” she asked.
I felt my face flush with color and tried not to cough. “What? No! Why would you think it was Chloe?”
The look she gave me clearly said, Don’t insult my intelligence. She knew they’d hung out a lot this summer. She was the first one to tell me, actually. But she hadn’t been sure if they were hooking up. Well. Now we were sure.
I drew the back of my hand across my dry and cinnamony lips. My tongue was grossly gummy. “You can’t tell anyone.”
“Omigod, this is huge!” Annie said under her breath. She gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “Chloe Appleby is pregnant? This is the biggest scandal to hit the Cresties since Josh Schwartz’s dad ran off with Connor Shale’s housekeeper!”
“Shhhhh!” I whispered, glancing warily at the two other patrons and at the middle-aged dudes behind the counter. “Could you please take the glee-factor down a notch? This is my boyfriend we’re talking about, remember?”
Her face went slack and she released the table. I saw her glance once at her computer, and knew she was itching to log on to Twitter and spill the deets in 140 characters or less, but instead she laced her fingers together in her lap.
“You’re right. I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes focused on mine and she did look sympathetic, like it was just sinking in. “Wow. God. Are you okay?”
“Not exactly,” I replied. The rock-hard Munchkin slid slowly from the base of my throat down through my chest, and I felt it the whole way.
“What did he say? I mean, were they, like, together for a while or—?” Annie asked.
“He says they only did it once,” I replied quietly.
Annie shook her head, staring off into space. “I can’t believe he cheated on you.”
My stomach turned. “Well, not really. We weren’t together, and I was with Cooper—”
“That’s such crap. You and Cooper didn’t have sex,” Annie interrupted.
“So what if we had? Would we be, like, even, then?” I shot back. Why was I defending him?
“Uh, totally,” Annie said, like the logic was so obvious. “The point is, you were with this hot guy for weeks and you guys were completely into each other, but you didn’t have sex. Why? Because you knew deep down you weren’t over Jake.”
I knew where she was going with this and I didn’t like it. “Well, that wasn’t the only reason …,” I said, fiddling with an empty and torn sugar packet.
“But it was the main one,” Annie said in a know-it-all voice. “Meanwhile he wasn’t even with Chloe and he didn’t think twice about hooking up with her. How could you not be more pissed?”
“I am pissed!” I snapped. The pair of old men nursing coffees on the other side of the shop looked over, making me feel about two inches tall. I stared at the pink tabletop, my cheeks on fire. “But I don’t know.
Does it matter how I feel? This has nothing to do with me.”
“Dude. Of course it matters how you feel,” Annie said, her voice low. “And if you ever say it doesn’t, I’m gonna smack you upside the head.”
We sat there for a long time in silence. For some reason I couldn’t make myself look her in the eye. It was like I was afraid she was ashamed of me or something.
“Well, if you want my advice,” she said finally, breaking the silence, forcing me to lift my head. “And I’m assuming you want my advice or you wouldn’t have offered to pay me back for my coffee and Munchkins.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t remember offering to pay you back for—”
She pushed the fresh receipt across the table. “It was implied. Anyway, what you need to do, like, yesterday, is figure out how much crap you want to deal with for this guy. ’Cause there’s gonna be a lot of crap. A lot a lot a lot of crap.”
She took another Munchkin and studied it for a moment before biting into it. Jelly oozed out onto her chin. She swiped it up with her fingertip.
“So the question is, do you really want to spend your senior year shoveling up this guy’s crap?” she asked matter-of-factly, pointing at me with the bright red finger. “That’s what you need to figure out.” She sucked the jelly off to punctuate her point.
“That is a disgusting image,” I said.
Annie tossed the second half of the doughnut hole in her mouth and smiled, raising her eyebrows merrily. “Isn’t it though?”
My body collapsed and my head hit the table. She and Hammond were basically asking me the same thing, and they were both right. Did I still love Jake, and if I did, did I love him enough to deal with the massive crap-storm that was about to engulf us?
Outside, the sky was finally black. In a few hours, school would start for the year. In a few hours, I’d either be walking through the front doors of Orchard Hill High alone, or holding hands with Jake. I needed to figure this out, and I needed to figure it out fast.
jake
I tripped over a sprinkler and took a header into the wet grass in Dr. Nathanson’s side yard. Fuck. Just what I needed. I shoved myself up off the ground. The whole front of my shirt was soaked and I looked like I’d peed in my shorts.
Fucking great. Ally was gonna love me now. Why hadn’t I just gone to the front door? Ally’s mom didn’t know anything. What was the matter with me? I had to stop sneaking around girls’ houses like some kind of dumb-ass cat burglar. Clearly it got me nowhere good.
I made it to the backyard without breaking any bones and stood under Ally’s window. The light was on. I took out my phone and texted her.
SRY 4 BAILING. AM IN YARD. CAN I COME UP?
Her face appeared at the window. I lifted a hand. She held up one finger. Not the bad one, thank God. She was telling me to wait.
So I did. The crickets were so loud back here it was like they were assaulting my brain. I tried to wring some of the water out of my shorts, but all I managed to do was wrinkle them. When it was clear that I wasn’t making myself look better, I tipped my head back and stared up at the stars. There were thousands of them. Millions. I wondered if there were any other planets out there with alien people on them, looking up at me. If only I could be wherever they were instead of here.
I heard a door click and slide open, and I squinted. Ally stood at a side door I’d never noticed, waving me down. I jogged over and slipped past her, stepping inside a small room with dozens of shelves, a work desk, and boxes piled everywhere. Luckily it was pretty dark, so she didn’t notice my muddiness. Yet.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“It used to be Quinn’s mom’s gift-wrapping room or something,” she whispered. “We have to be quiet. My mom and Quinn are in the theater having a wedding-movie marathon. She’s trying to get ideas.”
Ally’s mom was getting remarried in the spring, to the guy they were living with, Gray Nathanson. Quinn was his hot, but kind of annoying, daughter. “You want me to go so you can hang with them?”
She shook her head. “I watched Sixteen Candles with them last night, so I did my daughterly duty,” she whispered.
“Yeah, but you love that movie,” I said.
Ally’s eyes flicked over me, surprised. She’d told me once that her mom made her watch it with her every year on her birthday and that she secretly looked forward to it.
“I can’t believe you remember that,” she said.
I remembered everything she ever told me. Because I was in love with her. I just hoped she was still in love with me. Finally she broke eye contact.
“Come on.”
I followed her out the door. She held up a hand to stop me and listened for a second. I didn’t hear a thing. Then she turned, tiptoed through the kitchen, and raced up the back stairs. I followed her quickly, my heart pounding. She didn’t look at me again until we were finally inside her room.
“What happened to you?” she asked, her face scrunched.
“I tripped.”
I sounded like a caveman.
“Oh.” She sat down on the edge of her bed, almost exactly like Chloe had before. “So. What happened?”
“I went to Chloe’s,” I said, pressing my fist into my palm. “She’s a wreck.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Ally said. She hugged herself hard. “I can’t believe you had sex with her.”
“It was one time!” I whisper-shouted desperately.
Ally swallowed.
“And I used a condom, I swear,” I pleaded.
She looked away.
“It was so, so, stupid, Al,” I said, walking over to her. I almost actually knelt at her feet to get into her line of vision, but stopped myself. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was pissed off about you and Cooper and she was upset about …”
About Will, I’d almost said. But then I remembered what Chloe had told me. That no one could know about Will.
“About something else,” I said. “And it just happened. I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t—”
“Oh my God. Stop!” Ally said, holding her hands up in front of her face as if I was trying to pummel her. She got up, forcing me backward, and walked toward her desk. “I just can’t believe you actually did it with her. Why her?”
“But it was just one time,” I said, sounding whiny. “And it’s not like I cheated on you. We weren’t together.”
Ally let out this laugh that sounded more like a snarl. “Okay, fine. What if I told you I slept with Hammond?”
My face burned to a crisp. “What?”
She took a couple of steps toward me. “What if I told you that down the shore this summer, Hammond and I were hanging out a lot and one night it just sort of happened? He started kissing me and I just couldn’t stop myself. What if he—”
I closed my eyes and my fingers clenched into fists. “Stop.”
“But we weren’t together, Jake,” Ally said, mocking me. “It’s not like I cheated on you.”
“Stop!” I shouted, glaring at her.
She flinched. “See? Doesn’t feel so good, does it?”
I swallowed a few times and tried to blink away the mental image of Ally and Hammond doing it. Of him getting to see her naked.
“You didn’t actually …”
She sighed. “No.” She almost sounded disappointed.
Thank God. The images of her and Hammond started to fade. And then I realized, I could maybe forget about it, because it hadn’t happened. But Ally would never be able to. Because what happened between me and Chloe … it had happened.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But what am I supposed to do? I mean, I can’t take it back. And it’s not like it was the first time I ever … I mean, it was the first time with her, but I’ve had sex with other—”
“Omigod, stop talking! You’re making it worse,” Ally snapped. “I don’t need the gory details of your sex life!”
She stormed across the room and started refolding a stack of clothes she had on
the window seat, but she was just making them wrinklier. There was a huge lump in my throat and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or say. This had to be the worst night of my life, hands down.
“It’s not like I thought you were a virgin or something,” she rambled, shaking her head as she basically balled up a T-shirt. “I mean, you’re Jake Graydon. You’ve hooked up with, like, every girl in school, right?”
Well, not every girl.
“So … what?” I said, frustrated. I mean, what was I being accused of? Having a life before I met her? “Like you’ve never …?”
“No, okay? I haven’t.”
Ally dropped the clothes in a messy pile and faced me across the bed.
“Feel better now? You get to walk around knowing that no guy has ever gotten past third base with your girlfriend, while I get to imagine you screwing every hot girl who struts by in the hall.”
I’d never seen her look so angry. So hurt and so small. There was something breaking inside of me.
“You’re going to break up with me now, aren’t you?” I asked quietly.
She didn’t move or blink. Part of me wanted to beg her not to leave me. How pathetic is that? But I couldn’t help it. I loved her. I’d never felt this way about anyone. And the idea that I could have messed it up so bad made me want to throw myself out the window.
And part of me needed her. Part of me realized that there was no way in hell I was going to get through this without her. How was I supposed to deal with Chloe? With Hammond? With Chloe’s parents? With mine? With a baby? I couldn’t figure this shit out on my own, and Ally was the smartest person I knew. And pretty much the only person who cared about me. Or she did. Before tonight.
Most of the summer I had been without her, and every day had sucked worse than the one before. I couldn’t live like that again. I just couldn’t.
