Belly Up Read online

  Ish.

  The kid was a presence, always.

  I hadn’t really “popped” yet, but Dr. Cardiff said it was imminent when I asked. My stomach was no longer a simple swell but domed, and soon, it’d protrude, and maybe my bellybutton would do that weird innie-to-outie thing. My jeans were packed away for less-pregnant days, and even my leggings were straining under the growth. My skull leggings, for example? The stretch was so intense, my smiling sugar skulls had morphed into that creepy dude from The Scream.

  Mom said we’d hit the maternity section soon, to look for stuff to get me through my last trimester. It wouldn’t be my most fashionable shopping adventure, but it’d be the most comfortable.

  Or else.

  “Saturday,” I said. “I’ll invite him over Saturday.”

  Mormor nodded, pleased. “Good. I’ll make kok korv, I think. We hear so much about his Romani dishes, we should have some good Swedish food for him to try.”

  “That’d be pretty cool, eh, Sara?” Mom asked.

  Except, was it? Leaf had customs about food, strict ones even, and I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to eat kok korv or really anything we prepared. “I think so, but—okay, he has rules about food. Kinda like kosher eating rules,” I said, using Devi’s parallel because my mom and grandma might understand it better that way. “I want to talk with him tonight to see if food’s an option or if it’ll be hella awkward.”

  “If food’s a no-go, we’ll do kok korv another night, the three of us, and we can just hang out with him,” Mom said, heading off any of Mormor’s accidentally-racist-but-no-less-irritating commentary. “You get out of your group at two on Saturday. If he can’t do dinner, we’ll shove some food at you, then have him over during the day to talk.”

  “Cool. Yes. Thanks.” I packed away the last of the potatoes and pushed myself up from the table to wash my dish in the sink. Three steps in, I stopped dead, my eyes going wide. I nearly dropped my plate on the floor because my stomach was fluttering. It was the only way to describe the sensation—like I’d swallowed butterflies and they were flapping around inside of me. My free hand went to the left side, where it seemed the most intense.

  “Everything okay?” Mom asked, obviously concerned. She rose from the table and came to my side, her hand going to the small of my back. I jerked my head her way. She was concerned; lines creased her forehead, her blue eyes were narrow.

  “I’m okay. I think I can feel the baby. It’s like...a twitch, maybe? Or bubbles inside?”

  “Oh! Oh!” Mom’s worry evaporated and she put her hand over mine. “That’s totally normal. You felt like buzzing bees at first. It wasn’t until later that you used my bladder like a hacky sack. Which is why I sometimes pee when I sneeze.”

  “There’s a shelf life on guilt, Mom. We’re pushing twenty years. Move on.” I pushed my fingers into the spot on my stomach to see if I could feel anything through the skin, but not yet. The baby was being shy. “It’s—really weird. But cool, too.”

  Mormor came to my other side, her hand going over mine. There was nothing to feel, but she smiled all the same. “This is good. She’s healthy in there. She’s strong.”

  Because she’s a Larssen, my brain filled in automatically.

  Which is how and when I decided that my baby was not going to hold my name—the name of a man I barely remembered—but my mother’s maiden name.

  Cassiopeia Larssen.

  * * *

  The conversation about Saturday night with Leaf had to wait until the next school day because I laid down for a “little nap” post-dinner and woke up when my morning alarm went off. I slogged into school, gray backpack attached to me like a weighted wood tick. Black leggings, a long hoodie sweatshirt and one of my more forgiving T-shirts went along with slip-on sneakers. The boots weren’t as feasible anymore because bending was getting more ungainly. I could do it, but it just felt weird and would only get worse.

  My homework was done-ish—enough that I’d get credit for doing it, not enough that I could say it was my best work. I spent each of my classes furiously finishing what work I could because the early nights were a danger to any and all productivity.

  Leaf kissed my cheek as we went into Weller’s class. The other kids didn’t notice. In fact, after the incident with Mamacita and detention boy—whose name was Shane Michaels I found out later—everyone backed off. No one exactly warmed up to me, either, but that was okay. I’d found my friends and they were enough for me. I hadn’t been interested in the social-climbing aspect of school before, I certainly wasn’t sweating it in Stonington, either, particularly not with a bun in ye olde oven.

  Class was a blur. I was having trouble focusing lately, which was less the shiny new boyfriend—he was nice to have around, but I wasn’t ridiculous over him, either—and more pregnancy brain. I’d asked Dr. Cardiff about it at my last check-in. She assured me that, though there’s not a lot of medical science that delved into the subject, preggo brain was widely recognized as a thing that settles in between the second and third trimesters, and sometimes continues on after the baby is born. The brain is overloaded with hormones that makes it work differently.

  I sincerely hoped my brain righted itself after the kid was born. I was already tired of what I’d titled The Dumbs.

  I threw my backpack into my locker and trudged to lunch. I didn’t bother bringing my own food anymore; Leaf insisted he’d take care of me so I let him. The argument wasn’t worth it. When I pointed out he did way more for me than I did for him in return, he simply shrugged and said, “It’s not about receipts. It’s about happiness. Feeding you makes me happy.”

  How do you argue with that?

  You don’t, is the answer. You let your boyfriend spoil you to death with good food and snuggles.

  I sat down and waited wordlessly for him to produce the Tupperware. He didn’t fail me. Instead of rice, there were noodles and veggies and meat. I thanked him and shoveled food into my slathering food hole, not knowing or caring what was actually in my meal, because Leaf had earned my trust over the few months I’d known him.

  About food and in other ways, too. He was the most considerate guy I’d ever met.

  Morgan and Erin sat with us, Morgan carrying their shared lunch tray. She’d recently shorn her hair off above her ears and dyed it lime green, creating a stark contrast with her red hair. Part of me envied the bareness of her neck beneath the buzz. Sure, I’d have looked like Mrs. Potato Head similarly fashioned, but she was likely much, much cooler than me, buried beneath a couple pounds of black curls as I was.

  “What’s shaking,” Erin said, reaching for food.

  “My mother and grandmother want to meet Leaf,” I replied. “They’ve decided if he’s going to be near Cass, he needs to meet their approval. Which is valid, I guess.”

  “I’d love to,” Leaf replied, his hand squeezing my knee beneath the table. “When?”

  “Saturday night? They invited you for dinner, but if you can’t—”

  “Looking forward to it,” he interrupted.

  “You are?”

  My surprise birthed his. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Your food rules,” I admitted. “I wasn’t sure if you could eat out.”

  “Oh! Some Rom might not, but that’s the more insular type. I follow tradition when I can, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a night out. You’re sweet to consider my feelings, though,” he said, brushing a kiss to the backs of my knuckles.

  “Yeah, like gag-me sweet,” Morgan said. “You’re making me look bad, dude.”

  Erin snorted. “No, he’s not. We’re as bad as they are. Maybe worse.”

  “Well, yeah, but what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t give them loads of crap.” Morgan winked at her before turning her head my way. I noticed that, along with the hairdo change, she’d swapped her earplugs from her trusty reds
to rainbow colored ones. “Also, hey, the kid’s name is Cass? You hadn’t mentioned that before.”

  I hadn’t? I could have sworn it’d come up, but maybe that was only with Leaf, who had been true to his word about not spreading any of my news to anyone else without explicit permission.

  See previous comment about most considerate guy ever.

  “Yeah. Cassiopeia. Like the constellation.”

  “Huh.” Morgan chewed thoughtfully. “Cass is gender neutral-ish. That’s cool. Also can go to Cash in a pinch pretty easily. Not that you were, like, thinking along those lines but.”

  “Not about the name, not really,” I admitted. “I figured they could change it later if they wanted to. I have been pretty vocal about making sure I didn’t drown my kid in pink or traditionally girly stuff, though. My mom seems to be on board. I don’t trust my grandmother but I’m going to keep an eye on it.”

  Morgan nodded, pointing her french fry at me. “Good call. There’s nothing wrong with pink stuff, but—” Morgan paused for a minute, thinking. “Okay, so my dad... God. You know how much I hate that downstairs room where we watch TV? With all the football stuff?”

  I nodded.

  Morgan rolled her eyes. “When I was little, Dad signed me up for football. I liked playing—I love sports—but it got stressful fast. There was such a focus on being little men with all the baggage that went along with our idea of ‘being little men’ that I couldn’t get into it.”

  “Toxic masculinity,” Erin chimed in, and Morgan nodded.

  “Yeah, that. So, you have all this toxic masculinity in football, and there I am figuring out my gender still. I didn’t belong there, you know? But I love my Dad a lot so I sucked it up for years, hating it the entire time. I felt obligated to act like all the boys and it just wasn’t me.

  “It got so bad, looking at the shoulder pads started giving me panic attacks,” Morgan finished. “In ninth grade, my therapist backed me up when I told my dad I didn’t want to play football anymore. He only sort of got it, only sort of gets what me being trans means at all, but the point is a lot of stuff for kids follows that pink-and-blue thing. Your kid might like pink stuff, and that’s totally cool! But if they don’t, it needs to be real clear that’s okay, too. Kids will do a lot to make our parents happy even if it’s at our own expense.”

  I understood what she was saying, but we weren’t at the point where my kid could make choices yet. It was on me, and I...kinda didn’t know what I was doing? Supposedly, that’s what the Saturday class was going to teach me, but I doubted they’d touch on gender politics and infants. If they did, super cool, but I was pretty sure they were focusing on Baby 101, like “how not to put your infant in a microwave” and “don’t drink Clorox and breastfeed.”

  “My kid’ll be a loud, fleshy cabbage the first year or so. They’re not exactly going to have an opinion,” I said. “And I really don’t wanna mess her up before she can even talk.”

  “Fleshy Cabbage—album or band?” Erin asked.

  Morgan smirked. “Band, definitely. And you won’t mess it up, dude. Just get the kid all sorts of toys and let them decide what’s fun for them when they get old enough to have opinions. Same thing with clothes. A baby in a dress isn’t going to make or break anyone, but if they get to the point they don’t like dresses? Don’t force it on them. But that’s just my take, too. I’m one trans girl. There are lots of other takes.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. I hope I wasn’t being weird asking.”

  “Nah, we’re friends. You can ask me anything.” Morgan smiled at me and then, without a word, took Erin’s empty water bottle up to the fountain to refill it for her. She took care of her girl, always.

  “What time on Saturday?” Leaf asked, handing me a napkin and motioning at his lip. It took me a second to clue in that I had food on my face, and I cringed and swiped it away.

  “Sorry. I need a feedbag. Let’s say five? I should be home by three but knowing me, I’ll need a nap. And you’re warned, Mormor’s intense. She’s...very. Very what, I don’t know, but she’s very.”

  “Not too worried about it. Five works for me.” Leaf glanced over his shoulder at the cafeteria monitors and, seeing them chatting and ignoring the kids, pressed a quick dry kiss to the corner of my mouth. “I look forward to it.”

  Glad one of us does.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  At nine o’clock on Saturday morning, I was in a classroom at a community college thirty minutes from home, seated next to a girl named Erika who, after five minutes of small talk, I discovered was almost exactly as pregnant as I was, except she was huge. Like Sputnik huge. It made me appreciate my conservatively rounded paunch more; the longer I could put off the carrying-a-basketball phase, the better. I was hesitating on wearing the maternity jeans Mom had bought me with the belly pocket and stretchy waistband because denial is NOT just a river in Egypt.

  Erika was not so lucky. She was well into her maternity pants because, apparently, her kid was going to be the size of the Hulk.

  The poor thing.

  Erika was sixteen and went to school four towns over from me. She had dark brown skin and dark hair as curly as mine that she wore under a red cloth headband. Seeing that my last name was Rodriguez on my Hello My Name Is badge, she peered at me.

  “¿Hablas español?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. Dad took off when I was little. Didn’t get a chance to learn.”

  I braced for the usual pushback—the value judgments made about being bilingual in Latinx and Hispanic communities, but Erika was cool about it. She shrugged.

  “Mi padre left, too. I get it. That sucks, but what you gonna do, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  There were nine girls in the room, who all looked as unenthused to be there as I felt. There was me and the Hannahs—Jones and McGovern, respectively, who were as fair-skinned as I was but with far lighter hair—an Asian girl, two Latinas, two black girls and Erika, who was Afro-Latinx if surnames were to be believed.

  Hers was García.

  “Where are you from?” I asked her, thinking I was asking about her hometown.

  “The Dominican. You?”

  Oh. I meant Stonington but...

  “Spain,” I said, which was a bit of information that didn’t always go over so well because it translated to “Colonizer.”

  Super white colonizer at that, thanks Swedish mom.

  Erika nodded but said nothing else. I left it alone—she’d talk to me again if she wanted to. There was a lot going on among Hispanics and Latinx, power dynamics centered on colonialism and colorism. It was complicated stuff that I only sort of understood, so my approach was to be friendly with people sharing my label but not pushy. I was always Hispanic, and no one could take that away from me, but I was also a walking, talking example of what made the community so messy in the first place. I tried not to take it personally when people didn’t warm up to that. It wasn’t about me so much as it was about what I represented.

  Erika would be okay with me or she wouldn’t. I wouldn’t sweat it either way because I wasn’t in the class to make friends. I was there to...

  Put diapers on a bag of flour, I guess?

  The two women who taught the class were licensed social workers, both closer to Mormor’s age than my mom’s. They seemed nice. There was blonde, perky, white Amanda with the cherry-print top and red capri pants and executive bob haircut, and quiet, black Marie in the cotton workout pants, velour sweatshirt and pink Nikes. Marie spoke in such a low tone of voice we had to lean forward as much as our pregnant bellies would allow to hear her, but what she said was supportive, and more importantly, informative. She mentioned Lamaze classes as a thing we should sign up for ASAP, that there were classes online we could take. She talked about state benefits to teen moms that made those classes free or discounted at certain hospitals and birthing cent
ers. She answered questions about getting GEDs for the people who wouldn’t be able to finish high school traditionally with a baby around, but also advised there’d be a whole class on that, so sit tight. She told us there’d be sessions about health benefits and medical resources for both pre-birth and post-birth. There were practical knowledge things, too.

  Like the whole flour bag, disposable diaper and cloth-diaper-with-the-pins thing.

  The disposable diaper was easy. The cloth diaper—not so much. After the third time I stabbed my bag, I was convinced Cass would look like a busted piñata within a week of being born. Amanda and Marie assured me it was okay, to try again—and I managed eventually, but it’s odd to know you can do advanced placement calculus but not baseline baby stuff like diapering your pretend flour kid. Even with Amanda’s help, my diaper looked lopsided and weird.

  “It gets so much easier with practice,” she assured me.

  Maybe that was true, but did it get easier before or after I and my child lost a quart of blood to the diaper-pin gods?

  We took a break for our bagged lunches and then we did what was, essentially, a group therapy session talking about the various challenges each of us faced with our pregnancies. It was...eye opening. One of the girls, Maria, a Latina from a Boston neighborhood, was already working two jobs on top of school to try to save money for her and her baby. One of the Hannahs? Her baby’s father was a friend of her father’s—a married man—and she hadn’t told anybody because she was afraid to. And Erika was contending with a man who had other children with another girl—something she hadn’t found out about until she’d gotten pregnant herself.

  When it came time for me to talk, I didn’t feel included, like Mrs. Wong or my mother had so desperately hoped I would joining this group of fellow preggos. I felt ridiculous because my story was so banal.

  “I had a bad breakup so I got drunk and screwed a guy at a party,” I said. “It was dumb. I should have used a condom. I’m lucky to live with my mom and grandma who are supporting me so I can finish school.”