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I had tried to get him to engage in some sort of conversation with me, but he was impatient, and it wasn’t long before his hands were all over my body and he was steering away to some private room at the party.
Because I was drunk, and I felt such pressure from my friends, I didn’t say “no” as all of this happened, but I wish I had.
Truthfully, I hadn’t said “yes” either, but that didn’t matter to this boy. My skimpy dress and the fact that I was wearing no panties were enough of a confirmation for him that I wanted this as much as he did.
And who would have cared anyway if I had said no? My friends would have called me a coward, and I would have run home crying. But maybe that really was better than the situation I was faced with at the moment.
Because that night two months ago when I had lost my virginity led to this moment now, sitting on my bed in my mother’s house, still no job, and a slip of paper in my hand that confirmed that all of my worst fears had come true.
I had always had an incredibly regular period. So when it skipped, I was surprised and concerned. And when it still didn’t come after over a month of waiting, I had known that something was off.
So last week, I went down to the convenience store and purchased a pregnancy test. I had meant to take it right then, as soon as I had purchased it. But I just couldn’t bring myself to, especially not in the bathroom of the convenience store.
So instead, I had taken it home with me and hidden it somewhere I knew my mom wouldn’t look. And it had sat there for a week until I had finally decided that enough was enough, and it was better to just check and be done with it so I could figure out what I was doing next with my life.
And in the bathroom, that test had revealed that my worst nightmare had come true: I was pregnant.
Pregnant with the child of someone whose name I did not know, who I probably couldn’t even track down if I tried, and whose face was seared into my mind as more of a nightmare than any sort of good dream.
I didn’t know who to go to for support, either. My mom would freak, and she had every right to. She had done her best to prevent this from happening to me, and still I had failed her. And I worried that, in her freak out, she might kick me out of the house or give me some glaring ultimatum that neither of us would recover from in the end.
Even my ‘friends’ from college were hardly really my friends. In all likelihood, they would say it was my fault, or laugh at me, or just stop talking to me entirely.
Though, that wouldn’t be all that different from how things were at the moment. Since we no longer saw each other at school, and I had never been the fun one anyways, they had no reason to keep in contact with me.
Occasionally there would be a message or a social media post, but I got the sense that it was more for keeping up appearances than anything else.
My lesson had been learned. I couldn’t count on them as friends, or to steer me in the direction that was best for me.
That left only one option: Lucas.
Lucas was my childhood best friend. He was five years older than me, but somehow that had never mattered. We had gone to the same combination elementary and middle school, back before his family had moved out of our neighborhood, and he had always protected me.
Then, right when he was about to graduate from middle school, his family had become suddenly rich, and they had moved. After that, Lucas went to a private high school, but the two of us stayed in touch as best we could throughout that time.
My mom had never trusted him or his family. She had been utterly convinced that they were doing something shady, and when they became rich suddenly and unexpectedly, it only made her suspicions stronger.
She allowed the two of us to remain friends only because she knew how much he meant to me, but she often cautioned me against him, and when we became older, she stopped letting me go over to his place. He always had to come over to ours.
My mom was a strict woman, but she meant very well. She was a strong black woman, and her own family had been very strict. She hadn’t always been so hard on me, but after my father, her one love, died when I was nine, she became that way because she wanted to protect me.
I missed him a lot. He was always smiling, the soft edge to her sharpness. He dulled the pain she felt from being unable to truly follow her dreams, as she needed to work to support us and he always knew exactly what to say whenever I was struggling with something.
I had a feeling that he would have known what to say in this situation, too.
If he was still here, he would have been the first person I would have gone to, and he would have known what to say to my mom so that she wouldn’t freak out.
But he wasn’t here anymore, and so I was out of options except for Lucas.
Lucas was already out of college. He had been a very studious learner while he was away at business school in New York and had started a small tech company when he came back that quickly became very successful.
And while he was still protective of me, it wasn’t nearly to the level that my mother was. Besides, he couldn’t kick me out.
So, I dialed him up, holding my breath as I waited for him to pick up the phone.
“Bella? What’s up?” he said.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I liked it when he used my nickname. It just sounded so nice on his tongue, more than anyone else’s. He had been the first one to come up with it when I was tired of how long my name was and had trouble thinking of other things that people could call me.
