"He loves you," I say. Into his shirt.
"I know."
"More than he'll be angry."
"That's the part I'm counting on." He says this with the quiet certainty of a man who has thought about it. Who has probably been thinking about it since before he said the words. "Your dad loves you more than he loves being angry at me. Eventually. Maybe not at first."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then I'm wrong. And I'll still be here."
I close my eyes. His heart under my ear. Steady. Going slightly faster than resting, because Declan Maguire just told me he's going to risk the most important friendship of his life for me and he's lying here in the quiet aftermath of it being as calm as he can manage.
His phone lights up on the nightstand. He picks up the phone. Reads the screen.
"Progress," he says. "They've narrowed the pool."
He gets up. I watch him from the bed. He runs his hand through his hair and picks up his phone and his laptop and he looks like someone who has a long night of work ahead of him and is relieved to have it because work is the thing Declan Maguire knows how to do when everything else is uncertain.
I'm not scared anymore. Or I am, but the scared has something next to it now that's bigger.
19
Billie
I've been telling myself it's stress.
This is a reasonable thing to tell myself. I have a stalker who knows my address and my boyfriend's name. I moved out of my apartment a week ago into a house that isn't mine. My private tier is offline for the first time in eighteen months. My brother is covering for me with my dad and charging emotional interest. Declan Maguire told me three nights ago that he's going to tell my father about us, which is going to detonate thirty years of friendship like a controlled demolition except nobody has done any of the controlled part.
So yeah. Stress. My period is late because of stress. The nausea I've been swallowing every morning for a week is stress. The fact that I fell asleep at two in the afternoon yesterday sitting upright on his couch like a sixty-year-old man after Thanksgiving dinner is stress.
The sore breasts are also stress. Absolutely. No other explanation.
I have been constructing this alternative reality with considerable creativity for approximately nine days and I have been doing an excellent job of it and today I am at the drugstore buying his shampoo because I used the last of it and feel guilty, which is a new emotion in our dynamic, and I am walking past the aisle with the pregnancy tests and I stop walking.
I don't plan it. I'm just standing in a drugstore aisle looking at a row of tests and my hand reaches out and picks one up and I thinkI'm not doing thisand then I'm at the register and the cashier is a teenager who does not care about my existential crisis and I thinkI'm definitely not doing thisand then I'm in Declan's bathroom with the door locked and the test on the counter and the timer on my phone and I am, apparently, doing this.
Three minutes.
I sit on the floor. Not because I need to sit on the floor. Because the alternative is standing at the counter watching the test window like it's a loading screen and I have spent enough of my life watching loading screens.
What are we doing,says my brain.
We're sitting on the bathroom floor of my dad's best friend's house finding out if we're pregnant with his baby at twenty-one years old. That's what we're doing.
Cool. Great. Love that for us.
I press my palms against the tile. It's warm. He has heated floors. I am sitting on his very warm, very expensive floor waiting to find out if I'm carrying his child and somewhere in this house he's on a work call having no idea that his bathroom is currently hosting the most consequential three minutes of my year.
I think about my mom. I don't do that often, not on purpose. She was twenty-three when she had me. Married. House. Plan. A whole adult infrastructure that I do not have. What I have is a ring light and a controller and a relationship that doesn't exist in public and a bathroom floor and approximately ninety seconds left on this timer.
I think about my dad finding out about this and I almost laugh because at this point what's one more bomb.Hey Dad, so Declan and I are together and also I'm pregnant and also I do adult content on the internet. How's the pot roast?
The timer goes off.
Both lines. Very pink. Extremely unambiguous. Not even a squinter. These lines showed up like they'd been waiting.
"Okay," I say, out loud, to nobody. "Okay."
