Belly Up Read online

  Like an in utero Christopher Nolan–type deal.

  More tears from both Mom and I, and she leaned down until our cheeks touched.

  “Listen to that,” she said. “That kid is thriving.”

  “Yeah, they are.”

  I must have had a weird look on my face beyond the rampant snot and ickiness, because she brushed my hair and whispered in my ear, “Happened to me, too, FYI. Wasn’t sure what to do about you, abortion, adoption or whatever, but then I saw you on that screen and heard you. You were doomed to be my forever loin fruit after that.”

  “I... Yeah. I don’t think I can—”

  “It’s okay. Whatever you decide is okay. And changing your mind is okay, too,” Mom said.

  Dr. Cardiff smiled at both of us before reaching toward the printer beside her. She produced a picture of the jelly bean and offered it to me. I accepted it, but my eyes were still fixed on the screen. “Weird,” I said.

  Mom sat up beside me and dashed at her cheeks with the butts of her palms. “What is?”

  “The baby looks kinda like a chestburster.”

  “Oh, my gosh, from Alien? YES! But I can never say that to my patients. They’d get upset, I think.” Dr. Cardiff grinned. “You’re cool, though. You can hang.”

  I found a smile, my thumb brushing over the picture clasped too tightly in my hand. I had to relax my fingers or I’d rumple the proof of my fetus.

  “I can see the Larssen resemblance. Big head, tiny hands. That’s our mutant superpower, you know. Ridiculously tiny hands. It’s pretty useless in the vast scheme of things,” Mom said.

  Dr. Cardiff started laughing.

  “Oh, my God. Mom!”

  “Little tiny hands, one day pawing at your belly from the inside...”

  “Will you please shut up?”

  “Never, especially when it comes to torturing my kid and future grandkid.”

  Grandkid?

  Oh. Right.

  Holy crap.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The meeting with the guidance counselor turned out to be a meeting with both the guidance counselor and a school social worker. The presence of the fetus made the second a necessity, by policy. I could tell it made Mom nervous to have someone from the state there, but they reassured her they were there as a resource for future family planning. It wasn’t some kind of state-led investigation into whether or not my oopsie reflected on Mom as a parent.

  I felt crummy that it even occurred to her that someone would think that way. My mom was pretty amazing.

  There were a lot of questions about my home life, how safe I felt, how supported I was. There were questions about the baby daddy, too, which got handily squashed when I told them I didn’t know his last name, where he was from and no, I promise, it wasn’t sexual assault. My takeaways from the meeting was that Mrs. Wong, my guidance counselor, had pretty metal hair with a white stripe starting at her temple, that I’d be meeting with the social worker once a month for check-ins, and that they wanted me to enroll in some state program for teen moms that met on Saturdays.

  I was dubious of that and told Mom as much as we walked out of the school, my enrollment packet in hand.

  She wasn’t keen on my skipping out.

  “Do the crime, do the time, m’dear.”

  “But I—”

  “We’re not messing around with the school on this. They’re being pretty reasonable about your end of year, all things considered. Take some time to think about it, but I don’t want to push your luck.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Since the kid was due in February, and I still had three months of senior year left, they determined I could effectively complete my schooling from home the last term without issue. Digital course loads and curriculums meant I could follow along at my own pace; the only time I had to bring my sad carcass in the flesh to campus was to take the finals with a teacher or counselor on hand to make sure I didn’t cheat. One downside: it was possible I wouldn’t actually graduate with my classmates. My ability to contribute to schoolwork might be diminished with a tiny human crap factory, and if I couldn’t complete at the same time as everyone else, there’d be no cap and gown.

  I was weirdly okay with that. I didn’t know anyone in Stonington, and the important part was the diploma, not the horse-and-pony show. Mom seemed okay with it at first, but once we got into the car to leave the school...

  “Well, I didn’t want those graduation pictures, anyway. Much rather have pictures of you with baby puke in your hair,” she said, strapping herself into the Jeep. “Sitting around in yoga pants, dark circles under your eyes, leaking through your bra and staining your shirts with breast milk. Much better than a cap and gown.”

  “Eww! Wait, what... Baby puke in my hair? Does it defy gravity or something?”

  “You’ve clearly never held a baby who’s spitting up. You were a champion barfer. Got great range. You’ve seen The Exorcist, right?”

  “Oh, my God! Mom!”

  “What! It wasn’t green, more white because of the formula and milk, but you get the picture.”

  I appreciated what she was doing, but I recognized the jokes for what they were. Mom, for all that she was on Team Serendipity, used humor to deflect from conversations about hard feelings. The idea of not seeing her brainiac honors kid walk across a stage to get a diploma absolutely bothered her. She wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. So, of course, I silently committed to finishing the course load on time, my spawn’s pukey demands be damned. Not once had Mom reamed me for getting knocked up. The least I could do was provide her that Kodak moment.

  Mormor will hold the baby while I cross the stage, I bet.

  It was the first time I’d really acknowledged to myself that I was going to be a parent—that my life would irrevocably change. I’d known in the doctor’s office after seeing the jelly bean on the screen that I wanted to keep it, but up until that point it’d still seemed like a nebulous concept. Motherhood was part of my vocabulary, and part of my reality, but...it hadn’t settled into my bones, if that makes sense. The thing about Mormor holding the baby, though—that was tangible. Graduation would see me wearing a big ugly gown, a flat hat and tassels while my mother snapped photographs and my grandmother held my kid.

  My baby.

  I was going to be a mom.

  I hadn’t articulated it yet to my family, or to Devi, but...I was sure. The surety settled in as Mom drove us back to Mormor’s.

  Now to just get the ovarian fortitude to fess up to it to everyone.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Mom asked a minute later, because long expanses of Serendipity silence were a rare thing to behold.

  “Hmm? Oh, just making a plan,” I said, totally chickening out. “I want to graduate on time for sure, though.”

  “Then you will. You can do anything you put your mind to,” she said.

  “That’s kinda bullshit, though, isn’t it?” I glanced at her profile. “We tell people that—you can do anything—but there are roadblocks. Like, I don’t mean to be Debbie Downer, but I can’t go to Harvard now, even if I got in. If I could do anything, I could do that.”

  The car rolled to a stop at an intersection and Mom cast me a shrivel-worthy side-eye. “Wow, breaking out the cuss words and everything. Someone’s got feelings.”

  I wasn’t really supposed to swear. I could, on occasion, and get away with it, but not in general. My fingers ran up and down the seat belt crossing my chest. I’d had to fuss with it four times so it didn’t hit my aching boobs the wrong way. “Sorry, just... I dunno. I don’t like sunshine and rainbows launched up my butt as a way to motivate me.”

  “Okay, sure, but what if I said you can still do Ivy League, but you might have to do it differently than you planned?” I glanced at her. “Night school, part-time classes. It’s doable. Sure, it’ll be harder if you don’t live on cam
pus, but you can do it. And to be clear, your goal is the Harvard degree, yes? It’s not to live in a dorm room on a Harvard campus? Those are very different things.”

  “Ugh.”

  “What?”

  “I hate it when you do that,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Be smart. You’re a jerk.”

  “I know, right!” Mom feigned a bright smile right before she put on her blinker so she could pull into McDonald’s. “I’m so smart, I’m getting someone I know and their little monster-bean cheeseburgers because cravings are the devil.”

  I sat up in my seat, an eager beaver already longing for tomato and salt between two plasticky buns. “Wow. I love you so much right now.”

  She reached out to pat my knee, giving it an affectionate squeeze as she pulled up to the menu. “I know, kid. Love you, too.”

  * * *

  Mustering the courage to tell my immediate circle that I was 100 percent on the keep-the-baby train took me a couple weeks. Mom suspected as much at the appointment, but she never pushed me for confirmation afterward, which I appreciated. Mormor, by contrast, was a nudge. It was never direct, more in a roundabout way, talking about things like shopping for cribs and strollers and baby clothes, but I never rose to the bait, instead changing the subject or finding a convenient way to leave the room. She’d gnash her teeth about it awhile, but then leave it alone for a day or two.

  I’m pretty sure my mother threatened her with death if she needled me, thus Mormor’s atypical restraint.

  Devi should have been the easiest one to talk to. She was like Mom, never pushing, but I still couldn’t go through with it. It’d be real then—really real. No take backsies. I wasn’t ready to have the conversations that’d inevitably follow the announcement:

  “What color of a nursery do you want?”

  “Are you hoping for a boy or girl?”

  “Have you picked out names?”

  I wasn’t there. Instead, when Devi came over and sprawled out on my bed, we’d talk about Cap and Bucky and their super queer lovefest or Korean skincare or the next Doctor Who or...whatever dorky thing we were into at the moment. I promised myself I’d segue into it, but I never quite made it there.

  It wasn’t until the night before the first day of school, when Mormor was officially out of patience and clobbered me, emotionally, that I found the courage to speak up, and only because she finally managed to piss me off.

  We should have been talking about the outfit I’d hung in the hall—some soft cotton leggings that would stretch while I stretched. A long flannel shirt. A belt. Some combat boots. Or maybe we’d talk about my book bag, stuffed to the brim with fresh notebooks and clicky pencils and pens. Or maybe my three AP classes: English, Calculus and Biology! But no, instead we were going to blow right by my first day of senior year at a new school and go straight to Babytown.

  “We need to discuss Serendipity’s situation,” Mormor opened with. The three of us were seated at the dinner table around a platter of gravy-slathered meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans and homemade rolls. Mom and I had been more casual about dinner back at the apartment, but Mormor insisted on family meals every night. If you were silly enough to walk by the kitchen around five, she’d assign you sous-chef duties, making you cut onions or some other god-awful thing because she didn’t want to do it.

  “What about it?” My mother doled out her potatoes and handed me the bowl. I doubled up on it because I was ravenous. The nausea was still hanging around in the mornings, but by late afternoon, I’d become a walking, talking food vacuum.

  All the food for the food hole!

  “The baby. We have it on our fridge. Look at it. It looks like a Larssen.” Mormor pointed over her shoulder at my black-and-white fetus photo, held up on the freezer by alphabet letter magnets Mormor bought me when I was three.

  My mother frowned. “No, it doesn’t. It looks like an insect.”

  “They,” I corrected both of them. “They look like an insect.”

  “Don’t be pedantic, Serendipity. Answer the question—do you still want to sell it? Them? Sell them?” Mormor sniffed. “I think we deserve to know.”

  My mother rolled her eyes. “She’s not selling the baby to a circus, Ma. She’s looking at maybe putting them up for adoption! And we talked about this—lay off.”

  “So why hang the picture? To taunt me?” Mormor’s fork stabbed into her meat loaf, spearing it like she’d spear the cow itself before butchering it with her bare hands. Her ferocity knew no bounds. “To show me a baby that will not live here?”

  “It’s not about you,” Mom singsonged. “We’ve been over this. A thousand times.”

  Which, if they had, they’d kept me out of it, and I was grateful for that. Their bickering made them sound like those two angry old men from The Muppets.

  I crammed a dozen green beans into my mouth and focused on my plate, pretending my grandmother wasn’t staring at me from across the table. Every clink of her fork striking china, every one of her sighs seeming exaggerated.

  Mom’s foot nudged mine under the table. I glanced over at her. She winked at me and bit into a biscuit.

  “Yes,” I said, looking at Mom, but my words were for my grandmother.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, I’ve decided.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to tell you yet.”

  That ill-advised proclamation, given in a moment of annoyance, hit the floor like a turd dropped from the roof of the Empire State Building.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, I asked for space and you haven’t given it. Like, even a little bit. Mom’s told you to leave me alone, and you haven’t. And now you’re demanding answers and I just...don’t feel like telling you.”

  I shrugged. “Not yet.”

  Mormor’s mouth opened and closed like a fish cast on the banks gasping for water. Eventually, she managed a “You can’t be serious.”

  “She looks pretty serious,” Mom said. “That’s... I know my kid. That is Grade-A serious face.”

  If you’ve never seen a pale-as-paper person turn purple, you’re missing out. Mormor looked like a silver-tipped eggplant, her eyes bulging from her sockets, her cheeks ballooning. She was the throbbing zit that needed popping, but I wasn’t ready to relieve the pressure yet, so I just let her be an engorged rage factory of old lady and went back to eating my potatoes.

  Which were delicious, by the way.

  “Fine. Fine, we’ll talk again when you’re ready to talk about it. The disrespect of this girl.” Mormor’s hissed proclamations were followed by a long line of Swedish words neither Mom nor I understood. Mormor stood from her chair, collected her dinner and stomped out to watch Fox News in front of the new TV in the living room. For extra “screw you, Serendipity,” she turned the volume up to ear bursting.

  Mom glanced back behind her at the living room and then over at me.

  “She mad,” she said.

  “Yep. You know what’d make her madder?”

  “Eh?”

  “She turned the TV up so loud, she won’t hear me tell you I’m keeping the baby.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  First impressions are lasting impressions, and my first impression of Stonington High School was that it was a huge metal wood tick of a building humping the ground. The center was a domed top—the gym, I’d later find out—with two stories of extending branches of classrooms to either side. The football, soccer and baseball fields were in the far back of the property, surrounded by a freshly painted green track. Tennis courts to the left. A large field of grass with dandelions to the right.

  You could fit two of my former high school into the same space.

  My initial meeting with Mrs. Wong had been at the superintendent’s office, which was a separate building, so my first
steps into the school were taken on my first day. Mom was at my side as we headed through the glass doors and past two impressive trophy cases to get to the main office. The floor beneath our feet was black-and-white tile. The walls were brick with oodles of bulletin boards with welcome-back banners.

  Everything smelled like chlorine. It was not awesome on my roiling stomach. God, I love anti-nausea medicine.

  On the upside? The school had a pool.

  To the office counter we went. A middle-aged woman with brown hair came over, smiling at us. I presented my new student packet like I’d present a golden ticket to Willy Wonka. She eyed it and immediately pointed outside.

  “Hi, Serendipity. Mrs. Wong is waiting for you. Two rooms down on the right.”

  “Thanks.”

  My mother walked me down the hall but paused outside of the guidance office door. “You want me to go with?” she asked, patting at imaginary lint on my oversize shirt. I wasn’t showing yet, thank God, but I’d taken to wearing big clothes, anyway, just in case. She tucked a lock of curly black hair behind my ear for good measure.

  “Nah, I got this.”

  “Alright. I haven’t been this invested in your first day since kindergarten, but that was because you peed yourself in the car on the way there.”

  “Gee, Mom. Thanks for bringing that up.”

  “Hey! You’re welcome!” There was a hug, a brief kiss and a whisper in my ear, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

  “...it’s high school. I think I’ll be alright.”

  Mom waggled her fingers and walked away. The fact that a few of my probably-classmates checked out her pert butt in jeans as she left was not lost on me. I rolled my eyes and headed into the guidance office. An elderly woman behind the desk motioned at a long table wordlessly. I parked myself, dropping my backpack onto the floor and waited.

  “Name,” she barked a few minutes later.