Chapter 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 think I'm not doing this and then I'm at the register and the cashier is a teenager who does not care about my existential crisis and I think I'm definitely not doing this and 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."
My hands are shaking. My heart is doing something I don't have a name for — not panic, not exactly, something faster and bigger that has panic in it but also has something else, something that is dangerously close to excited and I am not ready to look at that yet so I'm going to focus on the shaking hands.
I'm pregnant.
I'm twenty-one years old and pregnant by my dad's best friend who is twenty-seven years older than me and I am living in his house because a stalker was outside my apartment and my private content tier is offline and my dad doesn't know and I am pregnant.
My brain offers the following contribution: BrattyBaby announces surprise pregnancy. Chat is going to lose their entire minds. The clip will trend for a week.
I almost laugh and then my eyes are wet, which I did not authorize, and I'm laughing and my eyes are leaking and I'm sitting on a heated bathroom floor holding a positive pregnancy test and I am a complete mess.
An actual mess. The kind where your mascara is running and you're laughing at nothing and your hands are shaking and you're scared and excited and overwhelmed and a little bit thrilled and a lot bit terrified and you don't know which feeling to grab first so you just sit there and let them all happen at once.
I think about Declan's hands. His big, careful, patient hands that hold coffee mugs and my wrists and the steering wheel of his car and are going to hold a baby.
A baby that is half me and half him. That's a person who's going to exist. Half my freckles and half his jaw and probably all of his stubbornness and all of my mouth and the world is genuinely not ready for that combination.
Oh god, says my brain. You're excited. You're actually excited about this.
I am. Under the terror and the shaking hands and the mascara situation, I am excited about this and that's the scariest part of all of it because excited means I want it and wanting it means it can hurt me.
I press my hands over my face. Breathe. Think about the version of myself who handles this quietly and alone.
She's right there. It's how I survived my mom dying and my dad almost falling apart and building BrattyBaby from nothing.
I could step into it right now and close the door and handle this by myself and nobody would know I was scared because nobody ever knows I'm scared because I'm very, very good at this.
No. I'm done. I'm done handling things alone.
I have a man in the next room who counted the freckles on my shoulder at two in the morning and who told me he's willing to lose his best friend for me and who says I've got you and means it every time.
He doesn't get the managed version of this.
He gets the messy, mascara-running, sitting-on-his-bathroom-floor version. He gets all of it.
I unlock the door.
The hallway is quiet. His office door is open. I can see him at his desk — laptop, phone, the posture of a man working through something methodical.
I stand in the doorway. I'm holding the test and my mascara is a disaster and I've been crying and laughing on his bathroom floor and I probably look like a woman who has recently received life-changing news on a heated tile surface, which is exactly what I am.
"Declan," I say.
He looks up.
His eyes move from my face to the test in my hand. Then back to my face. Less than a second. And his face does the thing it does when something matters — the underneath one, the one that has nothing to do with control.
I hold up the test.
"So," I say, and my voice is doing about four things at once. "I have some news."