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In June of the year Lacie Baskerville turned seventeen, she started her morning by vomiting into her toilet and thought with horror that her cancer must have come back.
She’d been cleared by all her doctors some months ago, and she’d been participating in ordinary life with reckless abandon, and she had a school life and a social life and everything and if she was going to have to square up against her own death again Lacie thought that she deserved her money back. She’d lost her virginity, even—about six weeks ago, she and her friend Jack Vessalius had had clumsy sex in the shut-down showers at the rec center’s swimming pool, and Lacie had come out of it secure in the knowledge that she was not attracted to men in any way, shape, or form, and had gladly moved on with her life. Why was she getting sick again now?
Once her nausea had faded, Lacie wiped her face and rinsed her mouth and brushed her teeth, and then pulled out her phone to ruin Oswald’s day, because even though it was spring and beautiful and early, he would be even more upset if she kept this from him.
ill omen
i frew up
Because if she had to ruin the morning, she might as well do it with a meme. At least she and Levi would be amused.
The rest of Lacie’s morning was spent in a whirl of activity; Oswald made her get into bed and then had a panic attack, and it took everything in both Lacie and Levi to keep him from calling 911, but once he was restrained and calmed down, he and Lacie worked together to keep Levi from hitting on Jack’s older brother Oscar over the phone, since, as an obstetrician, Oscar would have faster connections at the hospital than Levi did, and as a Vessalius, and, as a Vessalius, his connections were on par with those of the Baskervilles. Oscar listened to Lacie’s account of her symptoms over the phone, and asked a few questions about her recent activities, and then, upon hearing that she had, in fact, had sex recently, and that her period was, in fact, late, suggested that she try a pregnancy test before jumping to any conclusions about cancer.
Levi had laughed his ass off. Oswald had teared up. Lacie had pissed on a stick, and then had had to call Oscar back and inform him that he was going to be an uncle.
“Really?” said Oscar, sounding delighted, and then, “Wait, you’re seventeen. You’re a high schooler, Lacie, you—”
“Can do whatever I want, I’m a living Baskerville,” Lacie said. “Though, don’t worry. I haven’t decided on whether or not I’m keeping it yet. Just—you can tell Jack, maybe? I blocked him last week for hitting on Levi, and he hasn’t stolen my phone and gotten himself unblocked yet.”
“Of course,” said Oscar. “Is there anything in particular you’d like me to say?”
“Tell him that Nii-sama is going to murder him for knocking me up,” Lacie said brightly, “and that he’d better start running quick! Ooh, I’d kill to see his reaction to that…”
“I—Jack’s my little brother, ” said Oscar helplessly. “I can’t say that to him. He’s too cute.”
A week and a half ago, Jack had called Lacie up at three in the morning to help him hide his ex-girlfriend’s body. It was a hobby for him: he’d date a girl, squeeze all he could out of her, and then kill her and hide the corpse. Lacie often helped; she thought it was funny. She didn’t think it was cute, though, and couldn’t see how someone like Oscar Vessalius, who had been dating the same girl since he was thirteen and who was, according to his bills, planning on proposing marriage at some point in the near future. Maybe Jack just hadn’t told Oscar about all his murder—which was a strange thought, seeing as Oscar basically funded all of Jack’s activities simply out of love for his younger half-brother, and had taken to looking after Lacie and Oswald, too, even though Lacie and Oswald were both Baskervilles and didn’t really need it.
“Oh, all right, I’ll tell him, you big baby,” Lacie said. “It’ll be fun to see how freaked out he gets.”
“Please don’t hurt my brother,” said Oscar.
“No promises.”
Lacie hung up, casting an unamused glance at where Levi was already posting about her pregnancy on every single social media he had before pulling Oswald aside.
“What do you think I should do?” she said.
“Whatever you think is right,” said Oswald. “I would rather just punch Jack, since I know you two used protection and you consented to it, but if you want him dead—”
“No, not about Jack, we’ll scare him straight and then let him be,” said Lacie. “It isn’t his fault the condom broke. About the—the baby, Nii-sama. Should I keep it?”
“Do you want a baby?” said Oswald.
“I mean, babies are basically small animals, like, rabbits,” said Lacie. “I distinctly remember, when we were asking for a rabbit as kids, Levi telling us that no, we couldn’t get a rabbit, because he had us already and there was no discernable difference between children and pets, so this would be a pet that he legally could not say no to. But I would also be growing it in my body for nine months, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
Oswald nodded. “If that was what you wanted, I would do whatever it took to support you.”
“You always do that, Nii-sama,” Lacie said with a slight laugh. “I cannot stress enough how much that would change literally nothing about my life. You’ve been practically waiting on me hand and foot since you hit puberty, and it’s not exactly like you were completely ignoring my existence before. Face it, Nii-sama, your favorite hobby is spoiling me rotten and honestly you need more and better outlets before I take up cliff diving, or something, and you have a stress aneurysm.”
“Please don’t take up cliff diving, it’s bad for my heart.”
“And we wouldn’t want to hurt your poor heart, now, would we, Nii-sama?”
Maybe, Lacie reflected, taking a serious look at her brother, giving him a niece or a nephew would be good for Oswald. He really was very overprotective of her, and it seemed directly related to his nightmares: multiple times a week, he would awaken screaming and sobbing, and could only be truly calmed by crawling into bed with Lacie and holding her tight. As he’d gotten older, he’d stopped coming to her for help with the nightmares, claiming that he didn’t deserve it, and Lacie hated the fact that her brother was hurting so close by and she couldn’t do a damn thing to help him. Maybe having a baby to care for would help him feel better, though. Give him something to focus on outside of himself.
But would Lacie be able to properly take care of a child? At some point, she knew it would be more of a proper person than a helpless little animal. Granted, she didn’t remember a great deal of her own childhood; she knew that he and Oswald had been pretty terribly abused prior to becoming Baskervilles, but she had put all that out of her brain and couldn’t really remember it anymore. It didn’t matter to her, not really—except now it meant that Lacie couldn’t even look to her own past experiences to figure out when a baby changed from a helpless little animal to an actual human person. She couldn’t ask Jack—Jack would probably say something about all people being animals when you got down to it, and anyway why would the baby matter as an individual when it wasn’t Lacie—and she couldn’t ask Levi—Levi would say something about seeing what would happen if you raised the baby as a human pet and nothing more—and she couldn’t ask Oswald—it would only distress him further—and she couldn’t ask Oscar—Oscar was of the opinion that all babies were people, which was just patently untrue.
Lacie continued this internal debate over the next couple of days, until Jack finally managed to break into her house in an attempt to get himself unblocked.
“Lacie! Hi!” he said, grinning, as he crawled through her window late one night. “How’re you doing?”
“I’m pregnant, you knocked me up, Nii-sama is going to kill you,” Lacie replied. “How are you doing?”
Jack beamed at her, and Lacie raised one skeptical eyebrow at him. “I’m doing great!” he said. “What’s the baby’s name? Is it a boy or a girl?”
“It might end up worm food,” Lacie said. “I haven’t decided if I want to keep it yet, and anyway, a good chunk of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.”
“It would be tragic if you had a miscarriage.”
“I might not even have the chance,” said Lacie. “I haven’t decided if I’m keeping the baby. I might get an abortion, you know? Pregnancy is hard on the body, and I don’t know if I would be a good parent to the—”
“If you get an abortion I’m killing myself,” said Jack. “Right here, right now.”
“Do it, coward,” Lacie shot back. “Right here, right now. I’m still deciding. If you do it, and I choose to keep the baby, I’ll just get child support from your dumb brother. But if you try to control what decision I make I won’t even wait for you to kill yourself, I’ll cut you down right here and right now.”
This wasn’t entirely true, though that thought didn’t approach Lacie until after Jack had left, leaving behind a few more “suggestions” that she ought to keep the baby. Jack was a dear friend of hers, even though he had something deeply wrong with him and they all knew it, and Lacie didn’t want to lose that friendship. She had told herself earlier that she’d ice him out the minute he did something stupid like show any desire at all for her—any real desire, that was, none of his usual playacting—but now he’d shown some sort of desire for her, or at least something she was carrying in her body, an action she could take, and Lacie—didn’t want to push him away.
Maybe it had something to do with the dreams; like Oswald, Lacie had begun having odd dreams when she hit puberty, though she could never remember them when she woke up, and they never distressed her as much as they distressed her brother. Meeting Jack, though, had been like meeting one of those dreams up and walking about, and she’d liked him immediately, and even though there was something very, very wrong with him, his presence alone was reassuring to her. He wasn’t Levi-crazy, unpredictable and scheming and ready to hurt you as soon as help you if it entertained him, and he wasn’t Oswald-neurotic, bottling everything up and taking everything onto himself, crying in the night and refusing to let Lacie help him. Jack was his own kind of crazy: he didn’t care about anyone other than himself, but he pretended he loved Lacie for his own amusement, and it was such a fun act.
Maybe the baby was the first person outside of himself that Jack had ever loved. Maybe that was why he’d ignored Lacie’s request and kept pushing her to keep it. If this baby was something Jack already loved—and if it might help Oswald—
Jack didn’t love anyone, was the thing. Not Lacie. Not Oswald. Not even Oscar, who would do anything for him. And Lacie had already been thinking that a baby might be good for Oswald, maybe, and Jack had threatened suicide if she got an abortion.
Lacie didn’t know if she would be a good mother. She didn’t want to bring a baby into the world just to fuck it up like she and Oswald had been fucked up. She didn’t want a baby, period—she still thought having a pet would be nice, but there came a point when you couldn’t treat a baby like a pet anymore and Lacie had no idea when that point would come.
If you get an abortion I’m killing myself.
And a baby would probably be good for Oswald.
And Lacie wasn’t that selfish, that she could let the guy who was potentially her only friend, who had fucked her as a favor in an empty bathroom and who had bought her tickets to fucking Universal on her birthday and who pretended to love her die because she didn’t want to give up nine months to grow something inside of her, when Lacie was already so used to growing things in her body that maybe weren’t supposed to be there, actually. And—and did it really matter that Lacie didn’t want a baby, didn’t want to be a mother maybe ever and definitely not at seventeen, when she had a friend who might literally die if she didn’t? It wasn’t Jack’s fault Lacie had gotten pregnant—it was Lacie’s, for not taking enough precautions around the bad, bad sex they’d had.
Fine, then. She’d have the baby, name it after Oswald because he deserved that, and hopefully not fuck over her life and another too much in the process.