Wham! The deafening crack of the slamming locker door echoed in the hushed hallways of “Testing in Progress” at Waverly High. As Tara swiftly spun around to face me, her eyes swam with unshed tears. Her face was flushed with emotion.
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“Jesse, I just can’t deal with this right now!” She burst out before she rushed past me toward the stairway, “I’ve got to go.”
“But, Tara, I know something is wrong.” I half-whispered, half-shouted after her. “Dammit, Tara! Talk to me!”
Too late. The exit door was already swinging shut behind her.
I had no idea what had her acting so weird lately. It was driving me nuts.
Tara and I had been dating off and on since sixth grade. She was my first real girlfriend. The first girl I ever kissed. The first girl who broke my heart, when she dumped me for Chris Carloney at the Junior Prom last year.
But ever since the big party on Senior Ring Day, we had been back together. Things were getting kind of serious. We were even talking about the future. It sounded nice to spend it with her.
Then a couple of weeks ago, she started avoiding me. She told me she had to study. I knew she was stressing about acing her mid-term exams; she had her fingers crossed for a couple of scholarships she’d applied for. But it seems like overnight we went from being stuck together glue to hardly even laying eyes on each other anymore .
She used to text me a hundred times a day, call me every morning as soon as she woke up (at 5 a.m.!) and call me again when she was falling asleep at night. But lately she’d been taking the bus home after school instead of hopping in the passenger seat of my Jeep Cherokee I borrowed from my mom.
Today, when I did finally catch up to her in the hall at school, she didn’t even stop to talk to me.
I had been trying to make plans for Valentine’s Day next week. We were supposed to drive up to Indian Head Mountain for a romantic overnight campout. She was going to tell her mom she was sleeping over at her friend Anna’s house. And I had already let my parents know I was planning to camp with a couple buddies that weekend.
With the way Tara was acting, I really wanted to know if we were still on for our big date. I had even been hovering outside her Math class waiting to talk to her. Of course, I knew she’d be the first one finished with her exam. She’s smart as hell. But she did not seem happy to see me at all!
Come to think of it, she actually looked kind of scared when she saw me leaning up against the wall. And then she just gave me the brush off!
“Screw this!” Enough was enough. I took off at a run in Tara’s direction.
I burst from the exit door in time to catch a glimpse of her flaming red hair as she turned around the side of the building. Determined to confront my girlfriend, I kept running. Hey, I’m not really a jock or anything but I’ve got long legs and a lot of speed when I run, so I caught up to her pretty quickly.
“Tara!” I jumped down the three concrete steps to the sidewalk beside the school parking lot. “Tara, wait! We’ve gotta talk!”
I grabbed her forearm.
“Not now, Jesse!” Her voice was anguished as she jerked her arm away from me.
Just then, her big shoulder bag slipped down her arm and fell to the asphalt, scattering the contents all over the place.
“Oh, no…” Tara fell to her knees and started grabbing up pencils, lip gloss, and a calculator.
I knelt down beside her to help pick things up when my eyes caught sight of something that was going to change my life forever.
A sandwich baggie was lying there next to the curb, its contents clearly on display.
I slowly reached out to lift it up. I had to see it more closely.
I looked down at the bag in my hand, then looked over at the girl I’d fallen in love with at twelve-years-old, when she still had braces and frizzy hair and I had a cowlick and always wore sweatpants and Spiderman sneakers.
Tara froze like a deer in the headlights, looking at me with huge eyes. The rest of her belongings were still scattered on the ground around her.
My heart pounded so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything but the drumming, throbbing pulse. I felt lightheaded and dizzy.
I croaked out a whispered question for my girlfriend. “Is this what I think it is?”
She finally moved, covering her face with both hands. I saw tears falling between her fingers.
Her shoulders were shaking as she silently sobbed. I wanted to reach out, to touch her, console her, but I didn’t know if it would just hurt her more.
I don’t know how much time really passed before she spoke, but it felt like forever. It was so surreal, like I was having some kind of out-of-body experience, as I heard her say in a shaky voice, “Jesse, I’m sorry. I’m pregnant.”
What I held in my hand was one of those stick things the girl pees on and it gives a plus or minus sign. A pregnancy test. Its plus sign wasn’t very big, but it symbolized huge, colossal results.
My mind was blank for a minute, and then my thoughts tubled, racing and spinning out of control.
The first words I spoke were barely above a whisper. Then I shook my head and cleared my throat before trying again.
“When… I mean, how… Aw hell. Tara, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know! I’ve been freaking out. I was going to tell you but I was so scared how you would react. I’ve been carrying that thing around for the past two weeks.”
The words just poured out of her mouth as the tears ran down her face.
Tara leaned against the building as she said, “I keep checking to see if it’s still really a plus sign. And it is! And I can’t believe I’m pregnant. But it’s true, Jesse. I’m seventeen, I’m knocked up, and I don’t know what to do!”
I was freaking out myself but I couldn’t stand to see her so upset. I gathered her up in my arms and held her as tightly as I could while she cried. I didn’t know what to say—I couldn’t even think straight.
Still in a daze, I grabbed a mini pack of Kleenex that had fallen from Tara’s purse. I gave her a tissue as we finished picking up all her stuff from the concrete.
I stood up and held out my hand. “Come on, babe. Let’s go sit by the lake and talk.”
It didn’t take me long to realize that she had been really scared, thinking she was in this by herself.
We got in my mom’s Jeep and rode through the valley to our special spot beside Mirror Lake. We walked the short distance down the trail to the picnic tables by the water. There we sat and talked for hours.
I found out that it was her friend, Anna, who talked her into buying that fateful pregnancy test.
Even though we had been a couple off and on for a few years, we hadn’t started having sex until senior year. We were doing the mature thing, too, always using condoms. I guess something must have happened, some small leak, and who knows when.
Anyway, they were having a sleepover at Anna’s house when Tara woke her friend up by puking in the bathroom. I think Anna meant it as a joke when she first asked if Tara was pregnant, but it turned out there was nothing funny about it.
Tara said she was scared to tell me, scared to tell her mom, and scared of what was going to happen to her. It wasn’t hard at all for me to understand: I would have been scared, too. Hell, I was scared!
Of course, it all finally made sense how weird she’d been acting lately.
We talked about what we would do if she decided to keep the baby. I let her know how glad I was that she was including me in the decision. I know it’s the woman’s body and all, but she didn’t get pregnant by herself. I didn’t want her to have to decide whether or not to have an abortion by herself, either. It was not fair to be alone in something like that.
Together Tara and I made up our minds to keep our baby and raise it together. We’d talked a lot about having an abortion. How we could just make it all go away and go back to being a couple of high school kids in love. We agreed that for some people it might be for the best, but for us it would be a decision we just couldn’t be happy with.
I figured my mom and dad would flip out at first, but I was pretty sure they’d have my back. Tara’s mom would lecture us about how hard it is to raise a kid. Plus I know she’s going to hate it if Tara doesn’t get to go to college as soon as she planned. But in the long run, I think she will help out, too.
We’ll just do the best we can and deal with everything together.
The sun had long since gone down. The stars were starting to twinkle in the sky when we ran out of things to say. For a while, we sat silently with our arms around each other, listening to the rustle of the breeze blowing through the trees and the evening song of crickets.
My mind was numb, overwhelmed by the importance of this day and the knowledge of my own impending fatherhood. Things that would have mattered so much to me just a few hours ago were tiny and insignificant. I suddenly felt like my whole life I had just been a kid playing around.
Wow, I thought. This is really happening. I’m going to be a dad. I hope I’ll be a good one. Oh, God… I hope everything goes okay. I hope Tara is okay and the baby is okay. I hope it’s a boy. No! Let it be a cute little girl with flaming red hair just like her mom.
Wow, I thought again. I’m going to be a father.