Page 18 of Bluebell Tides

The fact was, ever since Ruth had left Quentin’s convertible and returned to her dorm room, she hadn’t seen him, not once. It was as though they’d privately decided to move through the rest of their lives without the other. Ruth knew that one day, she’d find a way only to be grateful for him—the elite college boy who’d seen something in her and boosted her into the stratosphere. But now, there was only a sour feeling where her heart was.

It wasn’t till the end of January that Dina, Kelly, and Reese convinced Ruth to go out. They sat at the same dive bar where she and Quentin had sat on Halloween, gossiping in a way that made Ruth feel calmer than she had since the beginning of January. They couldn’t convince her to get anything alcoholic. She felt she’d drunk enough for one lifetime at the Bluebell Christmas celebrations. But she sipped water and soda and giggled with her friends. Maybe she’d find a way out of this.

Finally, toward the end of the night, Dina turned her tipsy gaze toward Ruth and asked, “So, it’s really over?”

Ruth let out a single sob, then closed her lips. “Yes,” she said finally. “He isn’t who I thought he was. I don’t know. Maybe he’s exactly who I thought he was.”

Her friends nodded sagely. Reese mentioned that she knew of at least three guys who had big crushes on Ruth. Kelly said that she needed to stay single for a while to “consider her options.”

“But you’re a hot ticket on campus!” Kelly assured her. “I can’t wait to see who you date next.”

But Ruth had no interest in dating, at least not soon. She’d begun working hard on a novella, which her creative writing professor offered to show to a publisher friend. She’d already blown much of her literature class co-students out of the water, and her professor had assigned her separate books and more papers so as not to bore her. Ruth felt as though her brain was working extra fast, and she was losing track of the world around her. This was okay, for now. Or maybe she could get away with it forever. The real world had never seemed so great, anyway.

Sometime around Valentine’s Day, Dina got her first boyfriend. Midway through Dina’s announcement, Ruth got up from her desk and threw up in the wastebasket in the corner.

“I’m sorry!” Ruth cried, embarrassed. “I really am so happy for you! He sounds great.”

Dina blinked at her and moved a bit away, cupping her elbows. “Do you have that flu that’s been going around?”

Ruth said she didn’t know. To be safe, Dina moved into Kelly and Reese’s dorm, leaving Ruth alone and nauseated. Over the next few days, she threw up many more times, so much so that she eventually hauled herself to the campus nurse. Being sick was fine with her. Maybe she was due for a big illness. But she didn’t want it to get in the way of her education and her work.

When the nurse suggested that she take a pregnancy test, Ruth initially laughed it off. “I couldn’t be,” she told her. “I’m single. And every time I… Well, every time I did anything, I was safe.” She wanted to tell the nurse that she was very smart and knew what she was doing.

But the nurse fetched a pregnancy test from the drawer beside her and handed it over. “Let’s put our minds to rest, shall we?”

Ruth could not believe what that test told her.

She could not believe that the two little pink lines indicated she was, in fact, pregnant with Quentin Caldweck’s child. She gaped at the test, then at the nurse, then at the test again. She nearly fainted, then went to the phone to call Dina to pick her up. She felt like a child, calling a mother who’d never been available anyway. Dina came right away.

Ruth was devastated. For three days, she stayed in bed, crying and trying to deal with her nausea. To Dina, she told stories she’d never told anyone, mostly about her mother and how reckless she’d been for having so many children. “We didn’t have any money. We always went without everything, food, clothes, time, space,” she said, sniffling. “I told myself I wouldn’t be like my mother. But look at me! I’m nineteen, and I’m pregnant! Just like her!”

Dina said all the right things. She fetched soup and cookies and made plenty of tea. Eventually, they told Reese and Kelly, but they were sworn to secrecy.

The fact that Ruth was pregnant with a Caldweck was major, major gossip. Ruth could not let it get out.

But the problem with being pregnant, she soon learned, was that people found out anyway. She started showing at the end of April, when she was nearly five months along. She tried to wear baggy clothes to hide her stomach, but it was no use. She could feel people’s stares.

Because of her prowess in the classroom, she’d been offered an internship with one of her favorite literature professors. The professor was a woman named Professor Smith, and when Professor Smith first realized that Ruth was pregnant, she sat her down and said, “Let me know what you need. But there is no reason you cannot finish this internship—and this degree—and have a baby, too. Women do incredible things every single day.”

Ruth wanted to throw her arms around her and weep, but it wasn’t appropriate. She thanked her, then started her internship the following day.

As she worked through May and into June, often in the stifling heat of that old-world classroom, Ruth found herself reflecting on last summer, when she’d left her hometown for Nantucket. That single decision had changed the course of her life.

She knew life could take you anywhere. She felt like a character in a book, charging forward, eager to find out what came next.

Toward the end of June, they were kicked out of the dorms. Dina, Kelly, Reese, and Ruth got a house together not far from campus and moved in, fixing up the smallest of the five bedrooms as Ruth’s baby’s nursery. Ruth couldn’t believe it. She often told them she wouldn’t be hurt if they moved out. “Living with a baby at our age is crazy.”

But they insisted that they didn’t want Ruth to do this alone.

“It’ll be good practice for us when we become mothers,” Dina said.

“If we do,” Reese said. She’d recently told them she didn’t want a family, which Ruth respected. Ruth had previously felt that way about herself.

In the second week of July, Ruth went for a walk in the morning light. She was off work today, and she planned to spend the day reading books and eating plums. For some reason, this was a key craving for her at this stage of the pregnancy.

Because she was set to give birth in September, she’d spoken with her professors about taking the semester off. “It won’t kill you,” Professor Smith had told her. Then she gave her a number for a very good daycare, where Ruth planned to take her baby every day once she returned to school. It was a blessing. It was all going to work out.

And then Ruth turned the corner by the coffee shop and nearly ran headfirst into Quentin and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, CeeCee.