Forever for a Year

by B. T. Gottfred

  * * *

  One week after my birthday and three weeks after we got back together, Carolina came over after my first indoor track meet. I had run well. Won the freshman mile. Coach Pasquini said, “You seem even tougher now,” and patted me on the head.

  It was March 16. Carolina had been strange in texts the past couple days. I worried she didn’t love me as much anymore. I hadn’t been the same since we got back together. I tried. I tried to be so nice. But it’s hard to be nice sometimes if you’ve got that angry voice inside you, and Carolina was the one who put it there. Or made it come back. But when she came over on that Saturday, you could tell she loved me still. She was scared. But different than I had ever seen her. She could barely look Lily in the eyes, told Lily she was sick, but I knew she wasn’t.

  We went in the basement, and she lay down and said, “Cuddle with me,” and so I did even though I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. Carolina couldn’t look at me. She was shaking even though it had been super warm that day for March and it was almost stuffy hot in the basement. Someone must have died. Her dad. She hadn’t talked to or seen her dad in three weeks. Now she had found out he was dead.…

  “What’s wrong, Carolina?” I asked.

  She tried to open her mouth, she tried to look at me, but her face quivered and—what the fuck was going on?

  “Carolina? Did I do something? Man, I’m sorry. Was I mean? I love you. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I think, I think…” she started. Her whole throat shook and her lips vibrated with all this intense emotion. “I haven’t … gotten my, you know, period.”

  I didn’t really know what this meant for about two seconds. Just confused. Like, why is she telling me about her chick stuff? But then I remembered. I’m not a moron. Holy. Crap. She’s …

  She’s pregnant.

  “You’re pregnant?” I said.

  “I don’t know!” she wailed, and that “I don’t know” felt like a yes. And. Pregnant. Pregnant. Baby. I just turned learned to drive! My life was over. Over. Carolina and I would be together forever now. We would have to be. She was stuck with me! No. I don’t like that. I do. But not really. We’d both be stuck. For the baby. I’m too young. Crap. I love her. I love everything about her. I don’t even care now that she cheated. I love her. But a baby … pregnant …

  “Have you taken a test?” I asked after a whole long time of just trying to make sense of what might be happening. I couldn’t really think straight. Baby. Pregnant. I wanted to play video games.…

  She shook her head. “It’s been a week. It’s never been late a week. I looked online, and everything says I’m pregnant.”

  “But how?” I asked.

  “Trevor! We never use a condom half the time!”

  “But…” I started. But what was I going to say? She was right. We only used it if it was convenient. And … crap … I’m that guy. I’m that idiot who got his high school girlfriend pregnant. I couldn’t go to college now. I’d have to work. What would I do? I had to support a baby. I had to get married. For real. Not imaginary. For real. And raise a baby. What the hell did I know about raising a baby?

  Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

  Abortion. My mom did it. We should do that. Yeah.

  “We can get an abortion,” I said before thinking it through.

  “Oh, Trevor, don’t you love me?”

  “I love you, Carolina! But you’re so young and our lives will be over!”

  “I KNOW! DON’T YELL!”

  “Do you want to have it?”

  “I don’t want to be pregnant! But I don’t know! Like, I’m supposed to know better! I’m supposed to be the girl that knows better! And if I just get an abortion because I was stupid, I don’t know! It doesn’t seem right! I feel like I should have to have it and my life will be changed but it’s what I’m supposed to do!”

  Crap. “Yeah…” I said.

  “What?” she said as she wiped the corners of her eyes.

  “You’re right.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yeah. I knew what to do. To use condoms. But we didn’t. I knew I should talk about sex more. But I didn’t. And we screwed up so much. And now this happened. And we have to accept it.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be pregnant, Trevor. I want to be just in high school and in love and go to classes. I don’t want to be mature. I don’t. I want to be a kid. OH MY GOSH, I JUST WANT TO BE A KID! But I’ve thought about it so much and I don’t want to get an abortion.”

  “Okay.”

  “You won’t leave me?”

  “I just want to go to high school too, Carolina. But I could never leave you,” I said. And I meant it more than I had meant anything I had said in my life.

  * * *

  That evening, we went to the drugstore, bought a pregnancy test, then went to TGI Fridays and she peed on the test in the bathroom. She came back crying, and I thought that meant we were having a baby.

  “It was negative,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know.” We spent all of dinner on our phones reading about pregnancy tests and how accurate they were. It was a really strange dinner.

  * * *

  The next morning, Carolina called me up super early. Like, seven a.m.

  “I got it,” she said.

  “Got what?” I asked, but I knew. I just didn’t want my heart to know it unless it was one hundred percent true.

  “My period.”

  “Carolina…” I said, really soft, but my whole body screamed with so much relief. My whole life was handed back to me. It had been gone. Changed. Gone. But now it was back. I was alive. That teenage dad-boy was dead. Stay dead. I don’t want to be you ever.

  “We get to be kids again,” she said, and laughed. Not a happy laugh. Like an I’m glad that roller coaster didn’t fall off the tracks and kill us laugh.

  Fuck. I’m free. I think.

  83

  Carolina names a baby

  I would have named a girl Isabella. I don’t know what I would have named a boy. Maybe Scott. I know this is my dad’s name and I hate my dad! But I also love him. I love him but I want him to be different. So maybe if I had a boy, I could have named him Scott and then made him to be a better person than my dad. I don’t know. Is my dad a bad person? I don’t think so anymore. I should say I don’t know. It’s all so complicated. Like, I’m such a good person, right? I think so. But I cheated on Trevor. I wasn’t married! I didn’t do it, like, a hundred times! But I still cheated. Trevor’s my soul mate, I know he is. Which is even more important than your wife or husband, so … Never mind. I’m just trying to say that I might have named a boy Scott. Especially if my dad died in a plane crash or something before the baby was born. Then for sure.

  * * *

  I can’t believe for twenty-four hours I thought I would have a baby. It’s so weird because I suddenly feel sooo young again. Like such a little girl. Like I don’t know anything again. Like I don’t want to get married or have babies until I’m sooo old. But for a couple days, especially the night after I told Trevor, which made it so real, I thought I was going to be a mom. I thought I was this adult woman. Like you see on television. Like, as old as my mom. High school and being popular and even school and college and everything any kid thinks about ever felt so, so, so, so silly. Oh my gosh, so silly.

  Now that I know we’re not pregnant, I guess I care about school again. I do. But I care in such a different way. I like it because it’s fun and easy and simple. It’s not, like, this huge life-or-death thing anymore. I’ll still try really hard, I will, but it will just be different.

  I might never have a baby or get married. I really do want to be a CEO and a great leader, and I just know if I had gotten pregnant, that wouldn’t have happened. How many teenage moms grow up to be super successful and on TV and respected? I don’t know one. Maybe there is. But I think it wo
uld be on their Wikipedia page. And I’ve never read about one.

  I mean, yes, okay, maybe I’ll want a baby and a husband someday. But only after I’m successful for sure. But if you made me choose right now between having a baby now and NEVER having a baby at all … gosh … yeah, I would choose never. I’m too young to be old.

  * * *

  So after I had my period and Trevor and I went back to being just boyfriend and girlfriend and not stuck-with-me-forever soul mates because of a baby, something changed in him. Probably in me too. But something changed in how he looked at me. Maybe it was everything. You know, Alexander and our parents and the almost-baby, but he didn’t look at me with those eyes anymore. Those eyes that just looked like they never looked at or even thought about another girl.

  At lunch, I could see him look at other girls. Not like in that creepy sex way like Alexander. But just for an extra moment. Just that tiny little moment that told me I wasn’t everything to him anymore.

  “Do you wish I dressed like her?” I said one day when Trevor watched this sophomore Penn Vadire enter the lunchroom.

  “What are you talking about?” he said, even though he knew exactly what I was talking about. I mean, how could he find both me and Penn attractive? She looked like she should live in New York with her leather jacket and her black jeans and her high-heeled black boots and her dark eyes and her thin arms and her sultry everything. And I was none of that. I was just, you know, me.

  “Forget it,” I said, because I didn’t want to think about it for even one more second.

  All through April and most of May, he still acted like the best boyfriend ever. We would text “I love you” almost as much as ever. And I totally believed he still loved me. But, you know, it was different.

  Trevor came to my soccer games. (I made varsity. So did Kendra. Peggy didn’t make varsity. She played with the freshmen and kept saying soccer was a waste of time.) Trevor and I would still see each other at least once a weekend. You know, go into his basement. We didn’t have sex as much. I mean, we still did. (And ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS with a condom.) But it wasn’t as much. I actually liked it more than ever, but Trevor … I mean, he still liked it and stuff. Obviously. He’s a boy. But you could tell he didn’t love it so much he would die without it like before. That’s another reason I knew Trevor was … I don’t even want to say it.

  And Trevor would go out with his friends more. I mean, when we were first falling in love and in the winter, oh my gosh, he would never choose to hang out with boys instead of me. But now, he’d say, “The guys and I are going to a movie,” or “Just gonna play video games over at Licker’s.” And I wouldn’t be invited. Not that I would want to go, but I guess I would have liked to be invited.

  It made me start hanging out with Kendra more. And the other soccer girls. Peggy and I still weren’t really friends anymore. I mean, we would talk a little. But it was always about soccer or school. Never about boys. Never about our feelings. Never about anything that best friends would talk about. When I think about how we spent our whole lives as the best friends ever, it makes me sad. But when I look at her as just high school Peggy, I can’t be sad. I don’t think we would have been friends at all if we met now. Weird. So weird. But it’s true. It’s like the bubble that only Trevor was inside. Peggy was now two bubbles away. Never mind.

  When I see Katherine now and she is being this crazy bitch (oh, I hate that word, but it’s just who she is), I don’t get scared or even worried. I just laugh in my head. All that stuff I went through with Trevor makes Katherine just the most ridiculous person ever, and you can’t be scared of ridiculous people. You can’t take them seriously at all.

  * * *

  I studied super hard for finals. Not stressed about it. You know, not this panic of I have to get good grades or I’m going to explode. I just wanted to do really well. (And I did. I won’t brag, but I got all As. Well, an A-minus in biology.)

  Before I found out my grades, on the Friday night after finals and school were over, Trevor and I had a date planned. I felt so good and so calm and I was so excited to spend the summer with Trevor, maybe getting a job together at the movie theater or at Lou Malnati’s or something since we went there so often. There was a party that night. Trevor wanted to go to the party. He never wanted to go to parties, but he wanted to go that Friday night. I should have known something was wrong just by that.

  84

  Trevor talks to a hurdler

  There was this sophomore girl on the track team. She was a hurdler. Her name was Betsy Kwon. She was Korean. She had the longest legs. Like six inches taller than both her parents, she said. She ran so fast and chewed gum at the same time. It was magic.

  When we were stretching as a team before every track practice, she would always sit by me. She was really funny. She would always talk to me, laugh at what I said, smile at everything. Then right before we would run, she would say, “This is going to suck,” and wink at me. I’m not sure if she was being sexual. But in my brain, it was sexual. I masturbated to pictures of her in a bathing suit on Facebook. That’s so wrong, but fuck, I did it, so I have to admit it.

  I didn’t flirt with Betsy. I don’t I think I did. But we became friends, and I liked talking to her at every practice. Listen. I loved Carolina. She was my goddamn soul mate. She was. But there was so much crap between us. So heavy. Even though I had forgiven her for kissing Alexander, I had not forgotten. I couldn’t. And even though she had forgiven me for not telling her about our parents, she never quite believed me that I was telling her everything. So we’d have fights about stupid small new stuff even though it was really about big old stuff.

  And then there was that day and night when we thought we were pregnant. You can’t go back in time and pretend you almost weren’t going to be a mom and dad together. It’s like we were living this life as teenage kids in love while at the same time living that life as kids having a baby at the same time. It was so much. Too much. We carried both those lives everywhere.

  With Betsy, it was only fun. It was only smiles and jokes. There was nothing sad or mad or exhausting about talking to her and hanging with her, ever.

  Yeah. Okay. A few weeks before finals, Carolina and I were in my basement and we started having sex and I couldn’t stop closing my eyes and imagining she was Betsy Kwon. Just couldn’t stop. It made me so excited I came super fast.

  Crap. So. Yeah. I felt like such a fake. Such a liar. Such a cheat even if I hadn’t actually cheated. I hated myself again. Carolina is my soul mate, right, and I’m picturing another girl when we are having sex?

  Maybe … maybe … that means she’s not my soul mate. Does it? Can you imagine another girl during sex and still be in love with your girlfriend? I asked Google. I hated all the answers. Nobody knows anything. Man.

  When it happened a second time, you know, me imagining Betsy while I was with Carolina, I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep kissing Carolina when I couldn’t stop thinking of another girl. I didn’t mind being miserable or mad or alone … but I couldn’t be a liar. And whenever I thought of Betsy when I was with Carolina, I felt like such a liar I wanted to bash my head against the wall until I passed out.

  * * *

  I decided to wait until after finals. It was the nice thing to do. If I broke up with Carolina before finals, she might have cried and been so upset, she would fail her tests. Probably not fail. She’s too smart for that. But maybe get a B again. I wanted her to get straight As. I wanted her to go to Stanford or Harvard and then do these awesome things in life. I just didn’t think I could be with her while she did it. Because even when we are forty years old, wouldn’t I look at her and think: “She kissed Alexander Taylor in his goddamn 4Runner”? I didn’t want to think about that the rest of my life.

  I wanted to be a kid again. Just a teenager. I’d been grown-up so long. Even before Carolina. With my mom and her crap and moving and then all the Carolina stuff. Damn. I just wanted to be a kid. Just laugh and smile wi
th Betsy Kwon.

  I loved Carolina. I still loved her so much my stomach got cramps. But it was so much work loving her. We were so old together. I wanted to be young with someone else. I wanted to be a kid. And you can’t be a kid with your soul mate, not forever.

  85

  Carolina can walk alone

  “Carolina,” Trevor said after we ordered at a sandwich place called Uncle Josh’s. He had a look on his face. Oh my gosh, he had this look.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think…” But he couldn’t say any more.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you too,” he said back, “but … I think…”

  “Don’t, Trevor,” I said. I shouldn’t have said that. It makes me so weak. I shouldn’t have.

  “Don’t what?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I … don’t think we should be boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.”

  I started nodding. Oh my gosh. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. But I cried. Not like this pathetic crazy cry. Just, you know, tears and sniffling. But I stopped not too long after I started.

  “I love you,” he said again.

  “Then why are you breaking up with me?”

  “Because you cheated on me.”

  “You said you forgave me! If you didn’t forgive me, you shouldn’t have gotten back with me!” I don’t even know why I was saying this. Really. I didn’t mean any of it. It just came out because.

  “You’re right.…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s … I love you so much it doesn’t feel good anymore,” Trevor said. That didn’t make any sense but I loved it. It felt like a poem. Trevor should be an artist. He should. He’s deep and crazy like that. I’ll be CEO of a huge company and he’ll be a famous artist or writer or something. Except we’re breaking up. So we won’t know each other. We’ll be strangers. We’ll never think about each other ever again. Except I’ll think about him every day until I die.