“Watch out for that machine, it destroyed my Channel pajama’s last week.” She looked up, eyes big, her hand poised over the open washer. Of course, I didn’t have Channel pajamas, I didn’t even know if Channel made pajamas, but if they did, this girl would have a set.
“Were they the new ones? With the silver embroidery on the cuffs?” Bingo. I nodded.
“How awful. I swear this school refuses to spoon out any money for, like, decent amenities.”
I poured a capful of blue detergent into the machine and slammed it shut.
“Didn’t you, like, move here from Vegas or something?” I asked, as I casually walked over to the soda machine and slid my coins into the slot.
Jessica nodded. “Yea, I, like, needed a change. I came here for a semester to try it out, but then I met my boyfriend and decided to stay.”
“Who’s your boyfriend?” I jabbed the button that would give me a Coke and bent at the knees to retrieve it from the bin.
Her face changed when she said his name. I hated her for it.
“Caleb Drake. He’s on the basketball team. He’s a really cool guy—total gentleman.”
Her voice was unbelievably annoying.
“Yeah? That’s hard to find, guys now days are such…..” I was trying to find the right word, the kind she would use, “stupid jerks,” I smiled.
Jessica nodded at me, her graceful eyebrows furrowed. I felt the denture-paste pull. She was accepting me into her “preindship.”
“Literally, I’m never letting him go. I’m gonna marry this boy.”
I hated it when literally was used for non-literal things. I popped the tab on my soda can and returned her grin.
Over my dead body…. literally.
Florida was wet. The forever blue sky was wearing chunky grey clouds like accessories. It had been like this for a week and I was sick of seeing umbrella’s bobbing all over campus. I decided to take my textbook to the student lounge to study. I tucked a few snacks and my reading material into a bag and headed out the door scribbling a note telling Cammie to bring me dinner from the cafeteria.
I took the elevator down a floor and headed west toward the quieter of the two study lounges in my building. The room was dingy and smelled like dirty socks but it was hardly ever occupied and I kind of liked the leftover ambiance of the place. I rounded a corner and saw a familiar blonde head framed in the window. Jessica. I was about to offer my most cheery ‘like hello’ when I noticed the droopy way she was holding her shoulders. They were crying shoulders. I was very familiar with this scene. I looked around cautiously. Blondes in distress were never alone. There were usually friends, comforting, patting, reassuring…
The hallway was empty. I took a step forward and stopped. Maybe they had broken up. Hope tickled my chest and I swept it away annoyed. There was no use getting ahead of myself.
“Jessica? Are you alright?” I placed a hand on her shoulder and she turned to look at me with wet doe eyes. There was a collection of soggy tissues lining the windowsill. I wondered how long she had been hiding out here.
“Hi,” she said weakly, her voice hoarse.
“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”She turned back to the window and dabbed at her nose. She was quiet for a long time and I shuffled my feet wondering if she had forgotten I was there. I was about to say something when she started sobbing.
“I…. sob...think…hiccup—sob…that I’m…gasp—hiccup…pregnant…”
I let the news sink in. She had toned down her crying and was mewling softly into a tissue. I evaluated my position, her position, and his position. Things were looking shitty for all of us.
“Okay,” I breathed. “Have you told him yet?”
“No.”
“Does anyone know?”
She shook her head.
“My…sniff…parents would…disown me and …I’m so scared of…gasp…losing him.”
“Of course.” I sounded sympathetic, and part of me actually was. A part so miniscule it made an atom look like a fist.
“What are you going to do?” I plucked the dirty tissues from the sill and tossed them in the trash.
“There’s nothing I can do. I….I have an appointment on Saturday but I need someone to take me and I don’t want to tell any of my friends, you know? I’m still pretty new here. I don’t want them to look at me differently.” I highly doubted they would. The semester before Jessica arrived two of her closest preinds were rumored to have undergone the same procedure.
“Why don’t you tell Caleb? He would understand. I mean he’s halfway responsible for Pete’s sake.”
“Noooo,” she grabbed onto my arm and looked at me with her big eyes. “I told him I was on birth control…and I meant to start taking it again, I’ve just been so busy—school and him… I never thought this would happen. I was so careful about everything. I have no one that I can trust.”
She attached herself to me then; arms wrapped around my neck, head face-down on my shoulder. I realized with discomfort that she was hugging me, looking for some kind of consolation. I patted her back the way I would a smelly person and detached myself.
“I’ll take you.”
“Really?” she wiped away the wetness on her cheeks leaving scars of black mascara. “You would do that?”
“Of course. I’m removed enough from the situation. You won’t have to get your friends involved, and Caleb will never have to know.”
“It’s on Saturday at seven,” she replied grasping me in hug that was so desperate I flinched. “Thank you so much, Olivia.”
Now there was a surprise. After all the talking we did that day while tending to our clothes, she had never once asked my name, not even after I asked hers. Popular girls surmised that everyone knew who they were. Duh! Jessica Alexander. Don’t you read the school paper? Jessica had no reason to know my name.
“I don’t remember telling you my name,” I smiled at her.
“Everyone knows your name. You’re the girl Caleb missed the shot for right?” I felt the shock right down to my red painted toe nails. How could I forget my fifteen minutes of fame? My sour run with popularity? I shrank back suddenly feeling self-conscious. That had been a dark, dark time in my life.