He wouldn’t meet my eyes and stared down into his folded hands in his lap.
“You can tell me. You know nearly everything aboutme.” I reached out and put my hand on his back.
He took a deep breath, and I saw a tear make its way down his cheek. “Mandy’s pregnant.”
Silence. I stared at him, waiting for the punch line. Waiting for him to turn to me and laugh and tell me the real problem. His eyes never left the ground.
“Oh.” I wasn’t expecting that. I searched for something to say, and of course chose wrong. “Is it yours?”
“Of course it’s mine! What’s wrong with you!” He only looked at me a second before returning to his folded hands.
“Sorry.” I returned my hand to his back. I hadn’t noticed taking it away.
After a couple of minutes, Donnie spoke again. “It was only once, really. At least with Mandy. I’d had sex with a couple other girlfriends before, but she was a virgin. I didn’t want to this time. I wanted to do it right. I’d asked God to forgive me for the other ones, and I’d promised I wouldn’t slip again, especially with someone as wonderful as Mandy.” He looked at me desperately. “I’m going to marry her, Brooke. I know that. She knows that. That was a given from our first date.” More tears fell down his face.
I think it might have been easier if he had told me he had killed someone. I had always seen Donnie as perfect. Not just the perfect guy, the perfect friend, the perfect cousin, but the perfect Christian. Although gorgeous, he had always remained asexual in my mind. The thought of him not only having sex with Mandy but having sex with more than one person was akin to finding out your grandfather wears nylon stockings under his dress pants.
“How’s Mandy?”
He gave a sad laugh. “She’s completely fine with it. She’s excited, even. She doesn’t feel like it’s wrong. She’s only upset because I am.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “To her, we’re already married. The ceremony is a formality.”
“Does Pastor Bron know?”
“No. I can’t even think about telling him.”
“How far along is she? Are you sure that she’s pregnant?”
“Yeah, she’s nearly a couple months. When she told me last night, I ran to the store and made her take several more pregnancy tests. They all said the same thing.” His eyes were bloodshot and weary as they pleaded with me. “What am I going to do, Brooke? With the youth group? They won’t let me keep teaching them! And when we tell people we’re getting married, everyone will say we’re doing it ’cause she’s knocked up! They won’t believe the real reason.” His tears flowed harder. “And Mom! Mom will be devastated!”
I hadn’t thought of Sue. He was right; she would be. “You know you’re… there’s nothing you could do that would make her not love you.”
“I know that! That almost makes it worse. I’ve let her down.”
We sat there in silence for a while. After several minutes, Donnie started to swing slightly. I looked at him like he was crazy when he started to laugh.
“What?” I shook my head at him. “What are you laughing at?”
He was laughing so hard now he could barely talk. “Us!” He caught his breath. “What a pair we are. The perfect boys. Brooklyn Morrison and Dionysus Durke. Every mother wanted her sons to be us and their daughters to marry us, and now here we are. In our thirties. One of us a fag. The other a fornicator.” His laughter was bordering on hysterical. “And leaders of the youth group, no less!”
Without realizing it, I found my own laughter matching his. Before too long, we both had tears running down our faces and were doubled over.
“Feel better?” I asked him as we finally began to breathe again.
He looked at me. For a moment, I saw the adorable little boy he had always been sitting in the swing grinning at me. “Yeah. I do, actually. What do you think we should do?”
“What do you mean? What can you do?”
“Should we elope and then tell everybody?”
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t really care, but Mandy wants a real wedding. Nothing too big, but the white dress and cake, all that stuff.”
“You’d have to do that soon or wait till after the baby comes, or she’ll be one fat bride in a wedding dress.”
He laughed again and rolled his eyes at me. “You really are a girl. That’s exactly what Mandy said.”
I again stuck my tongue out at him, solidifying the transition back to childhood. “Either way, I think you should wait before you tell anyone. The youth group has enough to deal with right now with me being involved. Let it settle down before we give them two targets to shoot at.”
