Chapter 7 #2
She waited for the punchline. For the hammer of the joke to fall.
But it never came. Instead, he sat down on the stool, slung his backpack on the desk and then pulled out his chemistry books.
‘Thanks. My pal, Des, is off today and I can’t be arsed with that lot…
’ he said, nodding to the lads at Kev’s table, ‘but I didn’t fancy sitting alone. ’
Kiki’s face was burning. ‘No worries.’ She tried to calm the thud in her chest. Okay, this was fine.
Maybe not a prank. Class will be over in an hour and ten minutes, so just don’t say a word, and you won’t draw attention to yourself.
Apart from Kev’s table, who were now nudging each other and gesturing to her, and the table of the cool girls who were glancing back at her, wide-eyed with surprise.
Keep your head down. Don’t speak. This will all blow over.
‘I noticed that you dropped out of drama class,’ he whispered.
Obviously the ‘don’t speak’ memo hadn’t reached him.
‘Yeah, they wouldn’t let me do the show because… well…’ She cast her eyes downwards, just in case he was the only guy in the whole school that didn’t know she was pregnant.
‘That’s shit that they cut you, though. I mean, it doesn’t affect your ability to act.’
‘No, but it does affect my ability to play the Virgin Mary in the nativity play.’
He flushed the colour of his bright red hoodie as he worked that one out.
She’d worked so hard to get that part, but, of course, she’d been ‘encouraged’ to withdraw when she’d discovered her condition.
She was already four months gone at that point – too late to make a decision about whether or not to have the baby.
In some ways, she was glad that choice had been taken out of her hands, because she wasn’t sure what she would have done.
Her mother had barely spoken to her since she’d found out, other than using Kiki’s condition as an excuse to be even more maudlin when she’d had ten too many drinks.
Much like Kev, her teachers seemed to be quietly ignoring the situation.
So now, she spent most of the day alone, panicking about the uncertainty of her future.
The only thing she knew for sure was that while she was probably uniquely placed to play a pregnant virgin, she couldn’t pull off the second half of the nativity story which took place after the birth.
Her drama teachers could barely conceal their relief that she’d agreed to quit before they had to have an uncomfortable conversation as to why Mary’s baby bump hadn’t disappeared when her child was happily settled in his crib in the manger.
‘Yeah, well, it’s their loss. You killed it last year in Calamity Jane.’
She blushed at the compliment. She’d played Jane and he’d been Wild Bill Hickok, and almost every word they’d exchanged had been on stage because she’d been too shy to talk to him. Also, Kev had been jealous and had watched her like a hawk from one of the tables in the on-set saloon.
The teacher demanded their attention at that point and Kiki was almost relieved to focus on work and not on her classmates’ furtive glances and the ever-increasing need to pee.
This had happened a lot since the eight-month mark – but she was already dinging the top of the mortified scale, and she wasn’t going to add waddling out of the room to her state of embarrassment.
They didn’t speak again until the end of the lesson, when he said, ‘Look, come back to drama class. I know you can’t perform, but at least you can hang out with me, and we can have a laugh.’
She couldn’t stand it anymore. Better to pull off this Band-Aid of a facade before they got to whatever joke he was playing. ‘Why? Why are you being nice to me? You know what everyone thinks of me around here. If this is some kind of game, I don’t want to play it.’
He stared straight at her, his forehead wearing a frown at first, before he shrugged. ‘Do you remember in first year, when I was the only guy to join the drama group, and then all those pricks made fun of me for years?’
Kiki did remember it. Back then, he’d been shorter than everyone else, and he didn’t have the jawline or the perfect teeth, or the broad shoulders or the drop-dead handsome face that he had now. She nodded, saying nothing.
‘Yeah, well, I remember that too. So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to sit next to you in every class.
And I’d like you to come back to drama group until…
well, until you can’t. And any time you’ve had enough of this lot, just text me.
’ He glanced around the room, took in the stares, smiled, then leaned back in so only she could hear him.
‘Because, you know, fuck them. You’re better than them all. ’
There was no bolt of lightning. No Hallelujah chorus. No confetti falling from the sky. But that was the moment that her whole life changed. Right there, as the bell rang in chemistry, she fell in love with him. And that didn’t change until…
Actually, despite how pissed off she was with him now, that had never changed. There was still a part of her that believed that maybe there was a world in which they would ride off into the sunset together.
Ava’s nudge to her shoulder snapped her back from 2009 to a hot, claustrophobic bus on the South Side of Glasgow.
‘Mum, this is our stop. Time to get off. Your eyes were closed. Were you sleeping?’
‘No, love. I was just giving that manifesting stuff a try.’
‘What are you wishing for?’
Kiki sighed, the pressure of holding all this inside her chest making her heart ache. ‘I don’t want to jinx it. But you’ll be first to know if it works.’