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“Do it, then!”
My knees felt weak, so I dropped down to the floor in the middle of the room. I knelt down and rubbed my sweaty palms on the legs of my jeans. With one gigantic breath, I began to tell her.
“It was…um…my junior year,” I said. “In the second semester, a new girl started. It was one of those special schools, um…magnet schools or whatever they call them. One that was supposed to be for the brightest kids around, but it’s really for the rich ones. Every once in a while, they had to pick someone for a scholarship, ya know? Um…well…Aimee won the scholarship.”
Tria leaned back in the chair a little but said nothing, so I went on.
“She was really smart,” I said, remembering. “She deserved to be there more than the other girls did, I’m sure. She got picked on a lot for being from the part of town the rest of us wouldn’t have been caught dead in. She and her mom lived in a trailer park on the southwest side of town. It’s a little better than the area we…I live in, but not by a lot. Her dad was never in the picture, so it was just her and her mom. People gave her a lot of shit, but she just took it in stride.”
“We started going out just a month or so after she started going to my school. We went to prom together, all the weekend parties, studied together and all of that. She was…she was so different from all the other girls there. She was real. She was genuine. I never felt like I had to remind her who my father was so she’d remember her parents would be okay with her going out with me. She was more like you.”
I glanced at Tria, but her expression was unreadable. It was no longer a death-glare, so I took that as progress. I licked my lips a couple of times, swallowed hard, and continued.
“Of course, my parents weren’t too happy about the whole thing. There was a girl I had been seeing the year before who was the daughter of one of Dad’s lawyers. We broke up, which didn’t go over well in general, but when I brought Aimee home, and they figured out where she was from…well, they weren’t pleased. They put up with it, but I knew they were ticked. They were probably just hoping it was a phase that would pass.”
“It wasn’t, though. We…um…we got serious. She was the first…you know?”
Like an idiot, I looked up at Tria again as she raised an eyebrow.
“Um…yeah,” I stammered. “Sorry.”
I ran my hand through my hair and tried to go on.
“We were kids…stupid,” I told her. “I used a condom most of the time, but…well…not always. She got pregnant during the summer before our senior year.”
Tria’s eyes widened and her hand went up to cover her mouth.
“You already have a child,” she whispered.
Pins and needles crept up my legs as my body tensed. At first, I couldn’t answer, and I watched a tear come to the corner of Tria’s eye and spill over her cheek.
“No,” I told her. “Um…give me a sec.”
I rubbed at my own eyes and then followed my fingers with my gaze as I dropped my hands to rest on my legs. I gripped my knees a little.
“I freaked out when she told me,” I admitted, “but my reaction was probably a fairly normal one given the circumstances. We were young and scared. I knew my parents were going to be pissed and that the conversation was going to suck, but I also knew I had enough money to take care of her and still get us both through college. I figured we’d move into my parents’ house and hire a nanny so we could finish high school and then go to Hoffman so we’d be close to home and the baby and whatever. It wasn’t where I planned to go—Dad had already made sure I was set up to study at Harvard Business School—but it would still work out. I mean, I already had a job and a career lined up for me.”
“Once we talked about all of that, we both felt a lot better. Aimee had grown up with nothing, and it hadn’t even occurred to her that with the money I had, we would be able to completely support ourselves and the baby while we got our lives together. She only knew what it was like for her cousin who got pregnant and married young. The father of her baby turned out to be a real asshole and eventually left her with nothing—no
money, no education. I think knowing she’d still be able to finish high school and go to college is what really helped her.”
I took a long slow breath in, then let it out just a slowly.
“We decided to tell my parents first,” I said. “I knew they weren’t going to be happy, but the reaction they had—especially my father—was far more callous than what I thought it would be. He flipped—I mean really, really flipped. He called Aimee every name in the book and claimed she was nothing more than a money-grubbing whore who had let this happen on purpose.”
I had to stop a second, pressing my fists tightly against my thighs as I tried to hold my shit together.
“What about your mom?” Tria asked quietly.
“She just cried,” I said. “She didn’t do anything but take his side. When I tried to get her to defend me, she just turned away.”
I rubbed at my temple for a second, trying to drive away the throbbing in my head. Even though I had no intentions of seeking it out, my body was definitely letting me know it wanted more junk.
“Dad said we’d get nothing,” I went on. “No money, no support. He said he would only pay for an abortion, but we had already talked about it for so long, she was already thinking of it as her child—our baby. She didn’t want to do that.”
Tria’s eyes softened a little for the girl in my past she would never meet. Maybe I had never paid attention before or just never noticed how much like Tria it was to do that—have sympathy for a girl in my past—but now it made me feel warm to know how inherently good she was. I wondered if there was anything she could possibly say about Keith that would make me sympathize with him and decided there wasn’t.
It was one of the hundred ways she was an amazing, incredible woman.
