This Is So Not Happening

“All righty, then! That’ll do it! Lot of sugar will always get ’em moving.”

She went back to pushing the wand around, humming what sounded like “Joy to the World.”

The baby kicked out a leg and I laughed. “Go

Chloe stared at me. Her lip was kind of trembling and she looked pale.

“What?” I asked.

“I just …” she said, her voice wet.

“What?”

There was a long pause. A long, long pause filled with nothing but beeps and clicks and humming.

“Nothing.” Then she looked away again, chewing on her thumbnail.

Oooookay. But I knew better than to press it. Chloe had been all over the place with her emotions lately.

“Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked the tech.

“I don’t want to know,” Chloe exclaimed, so loud my heart stopped for a second.

The woman smiled and looked a little sad. “We can’t tell that yet anyway, hon.”

I cleared my throat. “Oh.”

The baby lifted its hand to its mouth.

“This is so cool,” I heard myself say under my breath.

Chloe gave me this look, like she didn’t know who I was.

“Isn’t it, though?” the humming lady said.

She gave me one of her huge smiles, and this time I couldn’t help smiling back.

jake

The day I had been dreading was already here. SAT score day. I wished I was one of those kids whose parents were so busy they had no idea when these things were happening, but I wasn’t. My mother’d had it circled on the calendar for weeks, even before our big baby a

“I’ve already got the website booted up,” she said, clinging to her coffee mug.

Ironic, right? This was a perfect example of why I wanted to get the hell away from here and go to college—the fact that she was so effing obsessed with me getting into college that she wouldn’t leave me alone about it. At least I think that’s irony.

“Can I get something to eat first?” I asked, putting my duffel bag and backpack down on the floor. We won, by the way, thanks for asking, I wanted to add, but didn’t. My mom had never been much for what she called “back talk” and these days it made her nuts.

I hoped whoever my baby’s parents ended up being, they would be cooler than mine.

“It’ll take thirty seconds, Jake,” she said, turning sideways to let me through the doorway. “Let’s just get it over with.”

“Fine,” I said with a huge sigh.

I tromped past her and over to the computer, flopping down into the chair, which was four inches too high for me. My knees hit the granite-topped desk, and I reached over to lower the seat. The chair let out a hiss as I dropped down. My mother put her cup down and pushed up the baggy sleeves of her even baggier gray sweater. Her diamond bracelets clicked together as she leaned over my shoulder and pressed her hand into the desk next to the mouse pad.

I so didn’t want to do this with her here. This past summer I’d had an SAT tutor, and my last couple of practice tests had been pretty good. My mom was so excited about those scores that she actually started looking at me differently. Like she was proud of me for something other than sports. I knew that I was about to let her down big-time.

Or maybe not. Maybe Chloe was right and miracles do happen. Maybe some of what I’d learned over the summer had made its way onto the test sheet without me realizing.

“What are you waiting for?” my mother said.

A time machine? I thought. Maybe my future self was about to come back to rescue me from this moment. Of course if he was go

I slowly typed in my password and hit enter. Our state-of-the-art super Mac lived up to the high-speed hype. I hadn’t even blinked before my numbers were right there on the screen.

My low numbers. My just-as-low-as-last-spring’s-dismal-ass numbers. My heart dropped so fast I slumped a little. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It was even worse than I’d thought.

Now I was hoping that whatever the baby got of mine, it didn’t get my stupid-ass brain.

“Oh my God,” my mother said. She stood up straight, put one hand over her mouth and the other on the kitchen island, and stared at the screen. “Oh my God, Jake.”

“Mom, it’s not that bad,” I said lamely.

Her eyes got scary-big. “Not that bad? Are you seeing something here that I’m not seeing?”

“I could get into a state school,” I hedged, spi

“A scholarship? You haven’t scored a goal all season, Jake!” my mother said, raising her palms.

Oh, so she was paying attention. Joy.

“What about swimming? And lacrosse?” I said.

“Great! That’s just great! Let’s wait until May and just see what happens!” my mother ranted, pacing around to the other side of the island. “What happened to you, Jake? You were doing so well this summer!”

“I’m sorry, okay!?” I snapped, shoving myself out of the chair. “I kind of had a lot of things on my mind that day.”

The color drained out of her face as she braced her hands on the countertop. “Things? Like Chloe?”

“Yes, like Chloe,” I replied. “Like Chloe and the baby.”

She hadn’t said the word “baby” once since finding out. She just called it “it” the few times she talked about it.

“Well, that’s just fantastic!” she shouted, throwing her hands up. “I hope you’re proud of yourself, Jake, because you can forget about college now.”

I opened my mouth to respond. Because lots of people went to school with scores like mine. They just didn’t go to schools like Fordham, where my dad had gone. Where my parents wanted me to go. But I couldn’t get a word in. My mother was on a tear.

“You can forget about playing college sports, you can forget about getting a good job. You threw away your entire future just because you couldn’t keep it in your pants!”

My jaw dropped open. Even my mother looked stu

She recovered herself quickly, though, and looked me in the eye. “Go to your room!” she shouted. “You’re grounded until further notice.”

“But Mom—”

I’d just gotten ungrounded.

“Go!” she screeched, pointing toward the stairs behind me.

I rolled my eyes, but turned around and went. I didn’t want to be anywhere near her anymore anyway. I snatched my bags off the floor of the foyer and took the stairs three at a time to my room, where I slammed the door as hard as I could. Then I flung both bags at the wall and let them drop with a thud. Standing in the center of my room, I tried to regulate my breathing. I tried to tell myself everything would be okay. That it would work itself out somehow. But one thought kept repeating itself in my mind.

Just because I couldn’t keep it in my pants. Just because I couldn’t keep it in my pants.

ally

I was beaming nonstop over the standing ovation and the third curtain call when I burst into the backstage area with the rest of the cast. Everyone was laughing and shouting—whooping it up, screaming out their relief, exhaling the last of their nerves. The performance had gone off without one hiccup. Well, unless you count the fact that Puck had his wings on backward for the first act and kept knocking trees and bushes over with them. But I couldn’t believe I hadn’t forgotten a single line—that I hadn’t tripped over my gown once, or slid off that fake rock I had to sleep on—something I’d done way too many times in dress rehearsal.