Catch Twenty-Two (Westover Prep 2)

“I’m not hungry,” I mutter, but I grab the strap of my backpack anyway and follow behind her.

“But the baby is.”

My mind replays my placing my journal in my bedside table over and over on the way to school. My focus is so absent, more than once Piper reaches across the console of her car and lifts the Pop Tart I’m holding to my mouth. It’s like sawdust in my mouth, tasteless and dry, but I eat it anyway.

“You have a lot going on,” Piper says as we pull into the parking lot at school.

I huff. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“Your mom is due home tomorrow, and you need to talk to Zeke before she gets here.”

“Talking isn’t going to solve anything.”

“You need to know where his head is at with this whole thing,” she argues.

“His head is with Bronwyn and the football team. He doesn’t care about anything else.”

“You don’t know that.”

But don’t I?

He’s avoided me as much as I’ve avoided him since his attempt to talk to me the night he found out about the baby. His routine hasn’t changed a bit. Hell, he threw a party not twenty-four hours after finding out. That doesn’t exactly lead me to believe he’s feeling any responsibility toward our situation.

“You’ll talk to him today,” Piper urges. “Promise me, Frankie.”

The car is in park and while she’s staring at the side of my face waiting for my agreement, I lock eyes on the front of the school.

“Today, Frankie,” she repeats when I don’t answer her.

Tears once again threaten. “What if he tells me he doesn’t care? What if he tells me he isn’t interested in being a dad?”

I turn to look at her, wanting to let my own tears fall when I see some begin to glisten in her own eyes.

She shakes her head as if she’s rejecting the idea, but she’s my best friend and knows I don’t need lies and assurances right now. “Then you’ll know, and you can work out a game plan from there.”

“This baby changes everything.” I drop my eyes to our joined hands, uncertain of when she even pressed her palm to mine.

“Of course it does, but that doesn’t mean that all of those changes are bad.”

“I was supposed to go to college and fall in love, find a great job and have kids in my late twenties. I wasn’t supposed to be the teenage cliché getting pregnant my senior year of high school.”

“Your path is different now, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t have all those things.”

I want to let her words sink in. I want to have as much faith in myself as she has in me, but that’s impossible right now. I feel lost, like a lone survivor of a plane crash with no survival skills to draw from. I don’t know how to navigate this alone. Even being a disappointment to my parents, I should be able to sit down and talk with them, knowing they’ll have my back and best interests at heart.

I don’t have any of that.

I have her and that’s it.

“I can’t have a baby and go to college. It’ll be too hard.”

“Hard doesn’t mean impossible, and me, you, and Dalton can all have different class schedules. We can take turns babysitting. We’ll make it work.”

An incredulous chuckle escapes my lips. “Dalton would not be interested in helping me with a baby.”

She gives me a soft smile. “Dalton helps me because it makes me happy and helping you makes me happy. Have you forgotten that he punched Zeke twice for you?”

She wraps her arms around me before I can answer.

“Think he’d be interested in sister wives?” I joke.

She laughs against my hair. “Not a chance.”

We both climb out of her car, and I do my best to hold my head up high even though I know my face has to be a wreck from the stress and tears of the morning. As we walk into school, I keep reminding myself that the stress of not knowing what Zeke’s plans will be over once I have a long conversation with him this evening.

Today will be just like every other day at Westover Prep, and anticipating a few nasty looks from Bronwyn and my heart breaking a little more at seeing Zeke with her hurts, but it’s manageable. Then we step inside and the atmosphere is just off.

More people than usual are standing around the lockers, and as we pass several lean in and whisper to their friends. I can tell they’re all waiting for something. Dread sits heavy in my stomach, but I try to ignore all of them. Piper and I have both been down this road before. How everyone is acting right now is very reminiscent of what the first three years of high school were like.

I look around for Dalton, waiting for him to pop out from somewhere and break my best friend’s heart, but he’s smiling as he makes his way down the hall, completely oblivious to the strange charge surrounding us.