“Oh, okay.” I tried to hide the disappointment in my voice, but I knew I was probably failing. “Well maybe we could video chat alter tonight-”
“I have to go, Chelsea.” He said quickly, his voice edged. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
Um, okay.
*****
Except Jake didn’t call the next day, or the day after. And on the third day, when my phone still wasn’t ringing, and after I’d restarted it five hundred times to make sure it was actually working, the dark clouds closed in.
Somehow, something had gone wrong, and the worst part was I didn’t know what that was. I sulked in my room that whole third day after last talking to him, trying to puzzle things out in my head and see if I could see what I’d said or done. Had he pieced it together from my “I have something to tell you later” comment about what was up? Had he guessed what my not-so-little secret was and decided he wanted out? I mean, I still wasn’t totally sure what Jake and I were, even if I knew - or at least was pretty sure I knew - how I felt about him. But it wasn’t like I could hold him to me with a baby or something. That was something psycho girls did, I wouldn’t be that type.
But, I wanted him, and I wanted us to be an “us”.
I just hoped he did too.
*****
“Honey, whats wrong?”
I’d always thought that mothers had an intuition and a type of sixth sense that I would never understand. Of course, right then, I wondered if maybe I would someday in soon; say, in nine months. I smiled into the phone, sprawled out on my bed and watching the snow fall down on the city of Boston outside my dorm room window.
“It’s nothing, mom, just tired is all.”
“Classes? Oh, you’re not getting stressed about midterms already, are you?”
“No, mom, it’s really nothing.”
Of course, mom wasn’t buying it. “Boy?”
More like “man”, I thought. And then, the tears started to fall, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop them.
“Oh, honey!” My mother’s voice soothed me over the phone, but the thought of whatever was happening with Jake and him not calling me back by then had me sniffing back tears nonetheless.
“If he’s no good for you, honey, he’s no good; okay?”
Oh, mom, you have no idea how wrong he is for me.
“No, it’s not that, mom, it’s just…I think maybe I thought it was something it wasn’t.”
I could hear my mother tsk over the phone. “Well, it sounds like he doesn’t deserve you then, sweetie.” She sighed. “Well, I know you always make good choices, so I know you’ll be okay, honey.”
Oh, right; good choices. Good choices like losing my virginity to my way older neighbor, and not using protection, and - oh, by the way - getting pregnant with his child. Those kind of good choices?
“And honey?” My mom cleared her throat. “As long as you’re being safe.”
“Mom!”
“Look, Chelsea honey, why don’t you come home this weekend?”
I brushed the tears out of my eyes and shook my head. “Oh, I can’t-”
“Why not? You’ve got that free day on Monday, honey.” My mom chuckled. “I checked the campus website, you know.”
I laughed, which was more of a sniffling sound than actual laughter at that point.
“We’ll fly you home and everything, how does that sound?”
“No, mom, I couldn’t ask you to do that.”