Play Me Backwards (26 page)

“What do you want to do about it?” I asked.

“Have it,” she said. “I don't believe in abortion, and I could never give it up for adoption. So I really, really need you to grow up in a hurry.”

I held her close and kept on dancing. The music seemed louder and louder, and my vision was going in and out of being blurry. I worried that I'd puke myself. But I held it together. What else could I do?

“I'll do everything I can,” I said. “I'll take the caddie job. I'll learn everything there is to know about golf and be the best caddie in the club by the Fourth of July. I'll work there
and
at a steak place or something.”

“And you're going to college,” she said. “So you can get a decent job that pays enough to take care of a baby. It probably won't be a job you
like
, but you'll just have to deal with that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

“I haven't told anyone else yet,” she said. “I'm not going to until, like, the last minute before I start to show. That won't happen until I'm at least out of high school, but I need you to start being a grown-up right this second.”

“I am,” I said. “I already am. My SATs are in the morning.”

“Then kick some ass. You're smart. You're
so
smart. I
know
you can do it.”

She hugged me tight, and we made it through the rest of the debutante ball. I mingled as well as I could, and didn't mention poop once. If I had, it would have just made me think of diapers, anyway.

I had never changed a diaper in my life.

I had never held a baby, that I recalled.

I didn't know anything about them, except that you don't go around pushing on the soft spot or dropping them on their heads, and that you probably shouldn't let them get a job in a restaurant when they're sixteen, because the kitchen and the smoking areas aren't safe environments for anyone under the age of forty. It would be like letting a kid join a biker gang. Back when bikers were tough guys.

But when reality was done lining itself back up in my brain, at least enough that I could think a bit, the first thing that wasn't baby-related to come to mind was the Satanic poem in the yearbook, and the text messages I'd sent.

I still wanted to fight.

If Christian kids had a right to pray privately in school (and they do—anyone who says prayer just plain isn't allowed is full of shit), then we had a right to worship Satan, too. Fighting for the rights of Satanists to express themselves in a high school yearbook may not have been
the
worthiest cause in the world, but if I didn't stand up for this,
that
would make me more of a bum than any amount of covering up stains in my car with duct tape ever did.

If I was going to be a dad, I was going to have to grow a pair of
nards. I was going to have to stop living like a bum and be a man.

And a man stands up.

We spent the rest of the night dancing and mingling, but not really saying anything to each other, let alone to anyone else. Just a lot of “Thank you,” “It's beautiful, isn't it?” and “Have you seen the view from these windows? You can see half the state.” On the car ride home I told Paige she looked gorgeous, and how she'd taken my breath away when I first saw her in the gown, and she smiled a bit but didn't really reply.

And when she was in her house, and I was back in my car, I turned my phone back on and saw that I had about fifty messages about the Satanic poem.

One nice thing about the SAT is that it's all just multiple-choice. There were no essay questions, and no real opportunities for me to write in a sarcastic response. There was nothing I could really do but give it my best effort.

I didn't sleep for shit the night after the ball, but I showed up right on time for the test with two number two pencils, proper ID, and everything else I needed. I took every brochure about colleges and trade schools and stuff that they had set up on the table outside of the testing room except for the ones for the army. I felt like I did fine on the test; you never know for sure or anything, but there weren't all that many questions where I just had to guess. I test well. It's why they had put me in the Gifted Pool in the first place. It sure as hell wasn't my grades. There's a difference between being smart and getting good grades. Everyone with bad grades knows that.

But I can't say I was focused on the test, exactly. The idea of Paige being pregnant was on my mind the whole time, and in between
sections, I was drawing pentagrams on the top corner of the desk and imagining what it would be like to have a whole bunch of Satanists marching through the halls of the school demanding a right to express their religion.

After the test Stan met me at Earthways, where he used a credit card to buy up every pentagram necklace and button they had in the store. They sold them for pagans, not Satanists (pagans never get sick of telling people that it's not the same thing), but they'd work just fine for our purposes.

I hadn't done anything more than send out a handful of texts when I first heard about the poem and the meeting, but while my phone was off, things had apparently snowballed. I'd never really imagined having more than a handful of people actually get involved, but from what Stan was saying, we could probably expect a small army on Monday morning. There were even a couple of local metal bands that offered to play a benefit show if we needed it—like, if the school should find out that Dustin wrote the thing and take action against him, and we needed to raise up a legal defense fund. I didn't think it would go that far, but it was nice to know that the resources were there.

Operation Satanic Youth Gone Wild was off the ground.

It was about midway through my shift on Sunday afternoon that Jenny came in. She helped herself to a pentagram from the box of supplies we'd set up on a table by the ice cream cake freezer, then leaned over the counter.

“I just talked to Anna on the phone,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She nodded.

I could handle talking about Anna a bit. The whole idea of going out with her ever again just seemed absurd now. That sort of thing just wasn't going to be a part of my life anymore.

“What was she up to?” I asked.

“She said she was in the process of breaking up with some idiot.”

“Yeah?”

A month or so before, hearing that Anna was dating someone else would have felt like someone twisting a knife around inside of my kidneys, and then I would have felt like an even bigger asshole than ever for feeling bad about her seeing other people when I was too. But now it just gave me a sort of numb sensation, like finding out a swing set you really liked at your old elementary school had been torn down. It was sad in a way, but didn't affect me much, really.

“Didn't you say she was always actually trying really hard to impress me back in the day?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Jenny. “She wasn't as . . . worldly . . . as she made herself out to be. Didn't she tell you she sat in on nude figure-drawing classes at the college where her dad taught?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She totally made that up.”

“Huh.” I said. “See, I've imagined her as this artsy genius girl, and I guess that she really wasn't. I always thought she was pretty awesome, but it was all probably just in my head this whole time.”

“No, fucker,” said Jenny. “She wasn't perfect, but you somehow saw her as the kind of person she
wanted
to be already. And she saw you kind of the same way. She saw stuff in you that most people didn't.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. Can I have a free milk shake for my words of ancient Chinese wisdom?”

“You're Japanese.”

She giggled. “But ‘Chinese wisdom' sounds more like it'd get me a milk shake.”

“And you're, what, third generation Iowan?”

“Just give me a milk shake.”

I made her a one—the proper kind that required ice cream, milk, and a blender—and thought for a minute about what she'd said about Anna seeing me as the kind of person I
could
be, not as an eighth-grade dork, which is what I was.

Paige saw what kind of person I
could
be too. She just saw a different possible version of me than Anna had, I guess. A more responsible version—the kind who had a job with a 401K and wore shirts with collars on them. And what she saw was the person I was going to
have
to be now. Becoming that person was going to be a much bigger test than the SAT. The SAT just seemed like a game in comparison. A formality. Nothing.

I didn't go into the back room once during my entire shift.

But all through the day the groundwork for a Satanic rally was being laid around me. Edie and Jill, her girlfriend, came in with a boxload of  T-shirts they'd ironed Satanic phrases onto.
PROUD AMERICAN SATANIST, RELIGION IS THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES, I SOLD MY SOUL FOR ROCKY ROAD
, stuff like that. Stan put them in the back room with a sign saying they were free to anyone who promised to wear them to school Monday. I didn't think we'd get many takers, but when I got off work and went to get my jacket from my locker, I saw that half the shirts were gone. The idea that we might actually
get a pretty good rally going, maybe even a regular student riot, made me feel proud.

The feeling I got from working on the rally was the one thing that made me think that I could handle the whole thing with the baby. That I could rise to the occasion if I had to.

Mostly.

On the other hand, I knew that raising a person, and paying for it, was a whole hell of a lot harder than talking kids into wearing funny T-shirts to school.

After work I bought Paige a pregnancy test at Kum and Go (which, of course, I thought was a hilarious thing to do) before our scheduled outing to Hurricane's. She saw it on my dashboard when she got in the car.

“You better not have bought that anyplace where people might know who you are.”

“It was at a Kum and Go.”

“They have pregnancy tests
there
?”

I shrugged. “Surely you can see how people would mentally link pregnancy to a place with a name like that.”

She socked me in the arm, but she smiled a bit as she looked at the box.

“Those Kum and Go guys
know
us. Whoever sold it to you is going to know about it.”

“I was almost sure it was going to be that one guy who looks like a pirate when I went in. It wasn't anyone I recognized, though.”

“They all probably know each other. If my parents find out because a gas station clerk congratulates them, I'll never talk to you again.”

It should have occurred to me that even if they knew
us
, they didn't know who Paige's parents were. But at that moment it felt like one more thing to get all paranoid about.

We sat there in silence, staring at the blue box on the dashboard like it was a gun that one of us was going to have to fire at the other sooner or later.

And it had to be Paige. She was the one who had to pee on the thing. That gnawing feeling in my guts was strong enough to dissolve a couple of my internal organs now; I could only imagine what she was feeling. And she wasn't used to feeling like she was in huge trouble, like I was.

“You want to take it now?” I asked.

“Hell no. Not in my house.”

“You want to take it at Hurricane's?” I asked.

She shook her head emphatically. “I am
not
going to be sitting around Hurricane's holding something I peed on.”

“Well, you throw it away, don't you?”

She shrugged. I had to admit it seemed like it would be weird to throw something that monumentally important away, but you don't go around keeping stuff that's got pee on it, do you? I wondered if my mom took a pregnancy test when I was first conceived, and if she still had it sitting in a scrapbook someplace. She
would.
I was lucky it wasn't framed on the living room wall, knowing my parents.

“Ice Cave?” I asked. “Then you could put it in a plastic bag or something, at least.”

“Under no circumstances am I pulling my pants down in the Ice Cave.”

“I meant in the bathroom. I wasn't, like, thinking you'd pop a squat on the couch.”

“Same answer applies.”

“Where, then?” I asked. “Some bushes?”

She shrugged. “I don't really want to know yet. I want to hang on to the uncertainty for a bit longer.”

“Fair enough. I don't think I could bring myself to pee under this kind of pressure, if it was the guy who did it.”

“Nope.”

We drove along the rest of the way without really saying anything, then ended up just sitting in the Hurricane's parking lot, staring at the box. I should have at least put it in the glove compartment.

“My parents have extra rooms,” she said. “I guess the baby will live with them while I'm in school.”

“It could stay with
my
parents too,” I said.

Paige looked off into the distance for a minute, then said, “It'll live at my house.”

I didn't fight with her.

We went a few more seconds not talking, while I tried to get my head around all of this stuff. Every few minutes I'd think of something else that hadn't occurred to me before, like that I was stuck with Paige's family now, if her dad didn't use a butcher's knife to end my life prematurely. Neither of us was talking about getting married (though I wouldn't be surprised if her parents were still the sort who thought
that
was the right thing to do in this situation), but no matter what happened with us, I'd be seeing her parents and Autumn at birthday parties, school events, and all sorts of shit like that for the rest of my life.

I was going to get a decent job. I wasn't just going to let Paige's parents pay for everything. I wasn't going to be beholden to them. Just taking a job at their country club was bad enough.