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My boyhood friends are far away,
I can barely still hear their ringing laughter;
and you: you’ve fallen out of the nest,
you’re a young bird and have yellow claws
and big eyes and you pierce my heart.
(My hand must seem gigantic.)
And my fingertip lifts one drop from the well
and as I listen, listen, for some sound from your thirst
I feel your heart and mine beating
and both from fear.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
She doesn’t know how this happened to her, but two pink lines say it has happened to her. She made a misstep, took an uncharacteristic risk, and now, she’ll take the fall.
Erin is not much of anything, if she is wholly honest with herself. She is nineteen. She is a quick reader—two-books-on-a-Saturday quick. She likes dogs—only the big ones, though, not the small ones who are always complaining, always hanging-on. She has a handful of cousins but no siblings, and somehow she always kept friends at cousin-distance, too. The result of her quiet, faintly scornful interests is that everyone in her life is someone to see a few times a year, nothing more.
She is not really lonely, no matter what the face in the mirror and the gray quiet of her little apartment on early mornings before her early shifts suggest. Nothing remarkable has ever come her way; no golden road has unfolded before her. In this way, too, she’s escaped tragedy. Until now.
Is a pregnancy a tragedy?
She could argue it both ways, and she has, ever since she missed her period and lost her appetite. Fear always wins for yes in her head—fear, most of all, of a future cut off from even a chance at being ordinary.
Does that even make sense? She never wanted to be ordinary before. She doesn’t know if she wants it now. Sometimes she is sure, between breaths that hardly feel like breathing, that she is supposed to be more interesting, more complete, before she is a mom. But putting all the confusion of that aside, this whole mess is embarrassing. Nineteen is still a teenager. This is still a teen pregnancy. She’ll be featured on a cautionary flyer, maybe, at Dillon High, for what has happened to her.
Nobody at her old high-school in South Orange would expect this of her. Nobody at her restaurant job in Dillon—a couple thousand miles from where she used to call home—expects anything of her, one way or another. She doesn’t make waves at work. She makes her money, saves her money, and goes home.
So why did she go home with Jason?
Erin is not even a particularly nice person, and that’s what makes it all the more—insane, really, that she bailed some random dude in a wheelchair out of a bad date (a date that was half his fault, she thinks, after hearing how he found this chick). That she then hooked up with him—
Stupid, she chastises herself, when she takes the second test. The third test. They all say the same damn thing, and Erin decides that the best thing she can do is be really fucking clear with Jason, about what she’s prepared to do.
He doesn’t take it well. Erin’s starting to think that Website Girl may not have been the craziest one on that date. Erin’s ready to run home, run away, become the kind of person who doesn’t have to choose between a future based on nothing, and a future based on one mistake.
The only things she even liked about Jason were that he was funny, and cute. How does that square with a lifetime of responsibility? How does that square with her need to be certain?
The first time she and Jason talk—really talk—and he says he’s sorry, and she hears him out more than she even meant to—she finds he doesn’t lack for certainty.
The second and the third time all say the same damn things: that he’s cute, and he’s funny, and he is relentlessly stubborn. She doesn’t even know if she likes him that well—if she’s compatible with him. That doesn’t matter to him, and amidst all the fear she feels, the lifted pressure to get along is surprisingly freeing. She can say whatever she wants to him, and he takes it. She can demand assurances, or tell him that no assurance whatsoever could even help, and he’ll still find something to say.
Erin has two parents who love her, and whom she never really forgave for being busy and ordinary and not overly attentive. She has a host of little grievances against life that, at nineteen, she hasn’t even begun to unspool.
Jason is also nineteen, and also an only child, but there, the similarities end.
Jason has never been ordinary. He was supposed to be a hero, and then he was supposed to be a martyr—but he wanted neither future.
When he tells Erin he wants to be a father, she doesn’t quite know if she believes him. It’s too soon, they’re too young, he’s too damn crazy—
But the one thing she’s certain of is that Jason isn’t afraid.