She opens the door with a forlorn expression. “Brooke, he’s calling. It’s been ringing several times. Do I answer?”

“No! No!”

“You look bad, but he told me to tell him the instant you needed him. Brookey, I think I should let him know—”

“No! Melanie, NO. Look, he can’t do anything. He needs to fight! There’s something he needs to do. Our baby and I will support him, not hinder him. Do you hear me?”

“Then at least let me take you to the hospital—you look like you’re being torn in two!” she says.

“Yes—no! I shouldn’t move around. I need to . . . rest. I am not . . . losing . . . this baby. . . .” I drag in a breath and shake my head; then I sniffle. “Please bring me my phone?”

She brings it over and I text him instead. My friends are still here. Maybe we should talk tomorrow?

Same time?

Yes, any time

Ok

Good night Remy

You too.

I set the phone aside and close my eyes as another tear slips free. He’s a good and a quiet guy and he doesn’t text, but I already feel torn apart from him. Deep breath.

“Help me pull the progesterone cream out of my suitcase?” I say out to the room.

Mel comes out to the bathroom and starts clapping like some fifth-grade teacher who’s had enough already. “Guys, playtime’s over, I’m tucking Brooke into bed.”

Kyle and Pandora clean up their snacks, and I’m embarrassed to look at them with my swollen face, but I can feel their concern as I come out and lie down on the bed. When they leave, I smear myself with the cream, getting it on my stomach, my thighs. Then Melanie comes out of the bathroom in an old T-shirt.

“It’s been forever since we did a pj party—I mean just us.” She grins and dives in under the covers with me; then she disappears and I hear her voice near my stomach. “And you? Didn’t you get the memo? You’re a fighter! Son of Riptide and Brooke! Show your mom and dad what you’re made of!”

I smile when she comes back up, and I close my eyes, feeling hopeful that our little baby is listening.

TEN

FAMILY VISIT

I wake up and smell something that, for once, does not make me nauseous. It’s sweet and fragrant and it invites me to take a good long whiff. I look around, and Melanie is going in and out of the room. Riptide red is splattered everywhere. Riptide-red roses are bursting open inside my room.

“Good morning, Juliet. Your Romeo sent these. They’re still unloading the rest off the truck. And I’m calling in to the gym that I already put in my hour workout.”

I smile and try to stand, but Melanie says, “Tut-tut! No standing. What do you need?”

“To pee! And to smell these, be still my fucking heart! Is this a note?” I pull open a note that’s nestled among the roses on my nightstand and my eyes well up when I see a song name. Melanie gathers a couple more notes and brings them over, and I open one to discover another song name. I haven’t heard these songs, but I’m already excited.

I give myself permission, because I’m pregnant and so fucking stressed, to have a little cry. Everyone knows if you hold it in, you get sick, and I don’t want to be sick. I want to be healthy—I want to give Remy a baby and a family. Something he has never had. So I cry. Then I text him, I miss your eyes. Your hands. Your face. Your dimples!

Then I take a picture of my room, so full of roses so that I can barely see my window, and send it.

That’s what I see now from my bed.

I then kiss my phone.

“You’re a dope!” Mel says as she brings the rest.

“So what, who cares?” I saucily return as I set my phone aside, because I know he won’t be checking it when he’s training, and he’ll probably train extra hard, so I go rub progesterone on myself again. I read that I can get a headache if I overdo it, but Melanie and I were on some forums last night reading that the cream stopped tons of women from miscarrying, and I want to put my name on that list.

I grab some books, set my laptop on the bed, and basically set up a mini office so that I don’t have to stand. I feel like my ovaries ache, but they’re not cramping, and I’m starting to wonder if this cream is really working.

I hear Mel finish with the florist and decide to skip my shower, merely because I don’t want to be standing up all that time, so I just find fresh clothes and change with caution.

Nora is supposed to visit during the day so Melanie can go to work, but instead of Nora appearing after Mel brings some fruit and cottage cheese for us to breakfast on, I get to hear Melanie call me from outside my bedroom, saying, “Brookey! Your parents are here!”

Melanie goes to let them in, so I edge out of bed, very attentive to how I’m feeling. I don’t feel any cramps, so I walk to the living room and immediately take a couch, and there they are, wide-eyed and shocked at me, standing and staring.

“Brooke.”

The way my mother utters my name fills me with dread.

And the moment I see both my parents, coupled with the way they say my name, I know they know. Grief settles over me when I absorb their normally bright expressions and realize they seem to have aged an entire decade. How can news of a beautiful baby age them like this?

“We would have expected it from Nora, but from you?” my mother says, and ohmigod, they do know. How come they know?

She sits down across the coffee table from me, and my father drops down at her side, arms crossed, glaring the glare he uses to intimidate his PE students.

They don’t speak for about three minutes. Which feels, under the circumstances, like an entire lifetime, and I’m so uncomfortable I don’t even know how to sit.

I love my parents. I don’t like hurting them. I’d wanted to tell them the good news, face-to-face, that I’m in love and that Remington and I are having a baby. The last thing I want is to make them feel let down, to treat this as the tragedy that they seem to be taking it as.

“Hello, Mom and Dad,” I say first.

I shift and shift until I plant my elbow on the couch arm, put my head in my hand, and curl my legs under me, but even when I’m finally comfortable, the tension in the air could be cut with an axe.

“Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Dumas,” Melanie says. “I’ll let you have your family reunion   and check in with my job.” She looks at me and makes the sign of the cross to ward off vampires, then she tells me, “I’m back at seven. Nora texted that she’s on her way.”

I nod, and then there’s an awkward silence in the room.

“Brooke! We don’t even know what to say.”

For a moment, I really don’t know what to say either, except “I really want this baby.”

They both give me that look of disappointment parents have been giving their children for eons.

But I won’t let them make me feel shame.

I felt shame when I tore my ACL. My father said sprinters didn’t show those kinds of tears, but I did. I fell from grace with them after that, and now I can sense that I’ve fallen even further.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I wanted to tell you in person, but it seems somebody already did.”

“Nora,” my mother says. “And she’s worried about you—all three of us are. She tells me she had to learn it from somebody else? How could you hide something like this from us? Let me tell you that despite you being somewhat mature, you were always too sheltered from boys. Boys . . . they just use and discard . . . especially when something inconvenient happens. Nora says this boy is known to be a troublemaker and linked to all kinds of problems?”

I am reeling from the way Nora’s presented Remy to them.

If I weren’t sitting down, I swear I’d have fallen on my butt.

My betrayed, stupid, foolish butt.

So it seems that Nora is home, acting the perfect princess, doing what’s right after my boyfriend helped her out of the worst relationship in the world and could have died saving her ass.

Her betrayal rips through me with such force, I can’t even talk for a moment. Hell, if anyone should know what kind of a man Remington is, it should be Nora!

“The father of my baby is not a boy. He is a man.” I clutch my stomach when it begins to hurt under their accusing gazes. “And we, this baby and I, are not inconveniences.”

My father has not said one word. He just sits there, looking at me like I’m a gremlin that got wet and turned ugly and has to be contained.

I feel like there’s a continent between us. Like I am going north, and they are determined that south is the best path for me and will never, ever be happy that I went the opposite way.

“But Brooke, this is so reckless and so unlike you. Look at you!” my mother says in complete agony and despair.

“What?” I ask in confusion. “What’s wrong with me?”

Then I realize I probably look like shit. I haven’t slept. I’m worried to death I’m losing this baby. I don’t want to be here. I haven’t showered and my face is swollen from all my tears.

“You look . . . depressed again, Brooke. You should stop wearing that athletic gear, now that you’re no longer a sprinter and put on a dress . . . brush your hair. . . .”

“Please. Please don’t come here and hurt me. You’re saying things you don’t mean to say because you’re confused. Please be happy for me. If I look depressed it’s because I’m dangerously close to losing this baby, and I want him, I want him so bad, you have no idea.”

They stare at me like I have lost it, because I’ve never, ever, opened myself up like this, and I feel so misunderstood and so unloved and so hungry to be comforted because I hurt inside. My hormones are out of whack and I am feeling angry because I am here instead of where I want to be. I am here, misunderstood and judged, instead of with him, loved and accepted.

I don’t even know how to tell them they’re being unfair to me, but I’m trembling as I suddenly get to my feet, go get his iPod, and set it on the speakers I have in my living room. Then I just click PLAY and raise the volume high, letting a song speak for me. Orianthi’s “According to You” begins, a little bit angry and rebellious, describing something of the tumult I feel, how they see me one way, as less than perfect, but he sees me another way, as beautiful and strong.

“Is this how we deal, like a teenager with loud music?” my mother yells.

“Turn the volume down now!” my father yells.

I turn it down, and for a moment, just focus on this silver iPod, which to Remy and me could be a journal, or a microphone, or any other way of expressing any other thing. “You don’t understand.”

“Talk to us, Brooke!” my mother says.

When I turn, they look as forlorn as I feel. “I just did, but you’re not listening.”

They are quiet, and I drag in a breath, trying to calm down, even with all these hormones rioting in me. I want them to know that I am no longer a young girl. That I am becoming a woman, so I tell them. “I’m seven weeks pregnant. Right now, his little limbs are forming. And I say ‘his’ because I think it’s a boy, but it doesn’t matter, because a girl would be wonderful too. While we speak, his heart is growing stronger, and he’s generating about a hundred new brain cells per minute. In two more weeks, his heart will have divided into four chambers and all its organs, nerves, and muscles will be kicking into gear. He will have a nose, eyes, ears, a mouth, everything already formed, inside me. This baby is his. His and mine. And it makes me so, so happy you have no idea.”