This Is So Not Happening

I knocked on the glass door. The curtain was pushed aside. Chloe looked like shit. Her light brown hair was stringy around her face, hanging half out of a ponytail. Her nose looked double its usual size. I’d never seen anyone’s eyes so puffy. Not even my mom’s after my grandma died.

“What’re you doing here?” she said as she opened the door a crack.

The word “pregnant” was lodged at the back of my mouth. Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant. I cleared my throat. “I saw Hammond.”

“Oh.”

She walked away, letting the door swing open. I followed her inside and closed it as quietly as possible. Chloe went to her queen-size bed—which was covered in crumpled tissues—and sat on the edge. She was wearing gray sweatpants and a white tank top. She didn’t look pregnant. In fact she looked ski

Maybe she had lied to Hammond for some reason. But then, why did she look like her dog had just died?

Chloe picked at her fingernails. I pushed my hands into my pockets. An hour could have passed like that; I had no idea. It definitely felt like one.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked finally.

“Is it true?” I demanded.

Chloe nodded, looking down at the wood floor. “It’s true.”

My heart shriveled up and died. She sounded like she was drowning. Like there was water clogging her throat.

“How do you know it’s mine?” I asked.

Her head popped up. Her mouth was open in this sort of ugly, silent cry of pain. Part of me wanted to take it back, but it was a valid question, right? I mean, right?

“How could you ask me that?” she blurted, standing.

“Chloe, come on. I know you and Will Halloran were, like, a thing this summer. And—”

“Oh, so now I’m a slut or something?” she cried.

My mind reeled. This was not going well.

“No! It’s just … I don’t know what you did with him. And we used a condom! How could it possibly be mine?” I said, turning out my palms.

“Well, I guess it didn’t work,” Chloe replied, crossing her arms over her flat stomach and pacing away from me. “And Will and I, we never had sex.”

I scoffed. “Yeah, right.”

“Oh my God! What’s the matter with you?” she demanded, bending at the waist. “Did you just come over here to make me feel like shit?”

I was pretty sure I’d never heard Chloe curse before. And she was looking at me like she wanted to spit in my face. I took a step back and tried to think. Tried to figure out how to make sense of this without being even more of a jerk. But I had to know the truth. This was too important to just crawl away with my tail between my legs. She’d gone out with Will for at least a month. At least. And I knew he’d been over here in the middle of the night a couple of times. I’d seen him through my window, sneaking off. Was I really supposed to believe she didn’t give him any all that time, but all I had to do to get in her pants was show up on her doorstep once?

“You are unbelievable, Jake,” she said, pushing one hand into her hair as she walked back and forth from her flat-screen TV to the end of her four-poster bed. “I haven’t seen you or heard from you or gotten even a text from you since that night and now you come over here and accuse me of being a lying whore?”

My jaw hung so low I swear it scratched against the wool on her pink throw rug. “I didn’t … I just—”

“You’d better not tell anyone I was going out with Will,” she continued, her voice gaining strength. “Because if you do, I’m go

I pressed my lips together. There were a million questions in my head. Desperate, awful questions. But I couldn’t ask a single one of them or I knew she’d take my head off again. But I couldn’t just stand there and say nothing, could I?

“So what are you … I mean … what are we … supposed to do?”

Chloe’s scrawny arms fell limp at her sides. She looked away. “I don’t know.”

And then she burst into tears.

“My parents are going to kill me,” she wailed. “Hammond hates me. You hate me. I can’t deal with this. I just can’t.”

I hated watching girls cry. My arms twitched to hug her, but I hesitated a second. Was hugging her a bad idea? Would she think I wanted to be her boyfriend or something?

Suddenly Ally popped into my brain and I wanted to run. Get the hell out of here and never look back. But that wasn’t an option, was it? I lived right across the street. We went to the same school. We had the same friends. It was either man up now, or commit to being the biggest asshole in Orchard Hill.

I took a step toward Chloe, and she basically fell against me. My arms wrapped around her small shoulders. She was so little I probably could have wrapped them around twice.

“It’s go

She sobbed into my shirt. “What are we going to do?”

My whole chest tightened. We. She’d said we. We were a we now, no matter what. And there was going to be a baby. She was going to be Mom and I was going to be … I was going to be …

Run, man. Run now.

I gritted my teeth and didn’t move. “I don’t know. But we’ll … we’ll figure it out.”

Chloe held on to my shirt and cried and cried and cried. I stood there and stared over her head at the double doors to the hall. The doors to freedom. I wished I’d never stepped foot in this room in my life.

ally

As soon as I shoved open the door of the Dunkin’ Donuts, the air-conditioning blasted the hot humidity of the outside right off my skin. A

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

I couldn’t even believe she’d finally answered her phone, but I guess dialing her ten times in fifteen minutes was some kind of record. And then, when I’d told her I had serious news, she’d been, in her words, “mildly intrigued.” Of course now that I was here, I wasn’t sure I could tell her, or that I even should tell her. But I needed to talk to someone and even though we hadn’t spoken since our stupid, drunken—on my side, at least—fight the first week of August, A

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. She picked at her black nail polish. Her look had gotten slightly Gothier since the last time I’d seen her. She’d cut her hair into a straight-banged bob and wore cat-eye eyeliner. Her shirt was black and baggy, but her skirt was baggier, and her legs were covered in holey fishnets. There were about a million colorful bracelets on each of her arms, the ones that had gotten supertrendy over the summer.

“Nice collection,” I said, nodding at her wrists.

“I’ve started stealing them from little kids,” she deadpa

I managed a laugh. “Ah.”

“So what’s your news?” A

I cleared my throat. “It’s about Jake.”

A

“Kind of,” I said, ignoring the twinge of a

Doughnut clogged my dry throat and I coughed, showering the table with ci

“I’m sorry. Could you repeat that in dough-free English?” she requested.

I chewed, then swallowed with a significant amount of discomfort. Kind of felt like a rock going down my throat and lodging itself in my esophagus.