Forever for a Year(95)

Fuck. I’m free. I think.





83

Carolina names a baby

I would have named a girl Isabella. I don’t know what I would have named a boy. Maybe Scott. I know this is my dad’s name and I hate my dad! But I also love him. I love him but I want him to be different. So maybe if I had a boy, I could have named him Scott and then made him to be a better person than my dad. I don’t know. Is my dad a bad person? I don’t think so anymore. I should say I don’t know. It’s all so complicated. Like, I’m such a good person, right? I think so. But I cheated on Trevor. I wasn’t married! I didn’t do it, like, a hundred times! But I still cheated. Trevor’s my soul mate, I know he is. Which is even more important than your wife or husband, so … Never mind. I’m just trying to say that I might have named a boy Scott. Especially if my dad died in a plane crash or something before the baby was born. Then for sure.

*

I can’t believe for twenty-four hours I thought I would have a baby. It’s so weird because I suddenly feel sooo young again. Like such a little girl. Like I don’t know anything again. Like I don’t want to get married or have babies until I’m sooo old. But for a couple days, especially the night after I told Trevor, which made it so real, I thought I was going to be a mom. I thought I was this adult woman. Like you see on television. Like, as old as my mom. High school and being popular and even school and college and everything any kid thinks about ever felt so, so, so, so silly. Oh my gosh, so silly.

Now that I know we’re not pregnant, I guess I care about school again. I do. But I care in such a different way. I like it because it’s fun and easy and simple. It’s not, like, this huge life-or-death thing anymore. I’ll still try really hard, I will, but it will just be different.

I might never have a baby or get married. I really do want to be a CEO and a great leader, and I just know if I had gotten pregnant, that wouldn’t have happened. How many teenage moms grow up to be super successful and on TV and respected? I don’t know one. Maybe there is. But I think it would be on their Wikipedia page. And I’ve never read about one.

I mean, yes, okay, maybe I’ll want a baby and a husband someday. But only after I’m successful for sure. But if you made me choose right now between having a baby now and NEVER having a baby at all … gosh … yeah, I would choose never. I’m too young to be old.

*

So after I had my period and Trevor and I went back to being just boyfriend and girlfriend and not stuck-with-me-forever soul mates because of a baby, something changed in him. Probably in me too. But something changed in how he looked at me. Maybe it was everything. You know, Alexander and our parents and the almost-baby, but he didn’t look at me with those eyes anymore. Those eyes that just looked like they never looked at or even thought about another girl.

At lunch, I could see him look at other girls. Not like in that creepy sex way like Alexander. But just for an extra moment. Just that tiny little moment that told me I wasn’t everything to him anymore.

“Do you wish I dressed like her?” I said one day when Trevor watched this sophomore Penn Vadire enter the lunchroom.

“What are you talking about?” he said, even though he knew exactly what I was talking about. I mean, how could he find both me and Penn attractive? She looked like she should live in New York with her leather jacket and her black jeans and her high-heeled black boots and her dark eyes and her thin arms and her sultry everything. And I was none of that. I was just, you know, me.

“Forget it,” I said, because I didn’t want to think about it for even one more second.

All through April and most of May, he still acted like the best boyfriend ever. We would text “I love you” almost as much as ever. And I totally believed he still loved me. But, you know, it was different.

Trevor came to my soccer games. (I made varsity. So did Kendra. Peggy didn’t make varsity. She played with the freshmen and kept saying soccer was a waste of time.) Trevor and I would still see each other at least once a weekend. You know, go into his basement. We didn’t have sex as much. I mean, we still did. (And ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS with a condom.) But it wasn’t as much. I actually liked it more than ever, but Trevor … I mean, he still liked it and stuff. Obviously. He’s a boy. But you could tell he didn’t love it so much he would die without it like before. That’s another reason I knew Trevor was … I don’t even want to say it.

And Trevor would go out with his friends more. I mean, when we were first falling in love and in the winter, oh my gosh, he would never choose to hang out with boys instead of me. But now, he’d say, “The guys and I are going to a movie,” or “Just gonna play video games over at Licker’s.” And I wouldn’t be invited. Not that I would want to go, but I guess I would have liked to be invited.

It made me start hanging out with Kendra more. And the other soccer girls. Peggy and I still weren’t really friends anymore. I mean, we would talk a little. But it was always about soccer or school. Never about boys. Never about our feelings. Never about anything that best friends would talk about. When I think about how we spent our whole lives as the best friends ever, it makes me sad. But when I look at her as just high school Peggy, I can’t be sad. I don’t think we would have been friends at all if we met now. Weird. So weird. But it’s true. It’s like the bubble that only Trevor was inside. Peggy was now two bubbles away. Never mind.