Emergency Contact(23)

They waited and watched. It was surprisingly hard to tell. Of the six, five were positive with faint plus signs. The last was a dud. The little white window remained completely blank. No minus sign. Nothing.

“So, you’re pregnant,” he said.

“I guess,” she responded.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Pissed,” she said.

He nodded glumly.

“Like, how dumb is this?”

She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and groaned.

“You really want to know how I feel?” she said after a while. “I want to break shit.”

“Come with me,” he said. Sam went behind the bar, grabbed his backpack from under the register, then led her through the kitchen and out the screen door.

It was an airless night.

Sam unzipped his bag and handed Lorraine his laptop.

She took it and looked at him quizzically.

“You said you wanted to break shit.”

He nodded at the gravelly parking lot.

“It’s backed up,” he said. “And broken. Put it out of its . . .”

Before Sam could say “misery,” Lorraine threw it on the ground by their feet.

Nothing happened. It lay there heavy and doltish.

She picked it back up, opened it, and this time pitched it farther.

“Fuuuuuuuck,” she yelled into the night.

It skittered yards away.

They walked over.

“You have a go,” she said, bending down to hand it to him.

Sam held the laptop above his head with both hands and threw it onto the ground, where it finally cracked. They chucked it and chucked it—working up a sweat—until the screen was totaled and the two halves came apart at the hinge. Lorraine took a photo of it and posted it on Instagram, tagging him.

After, without saying anything, they tossed the computer’s mangled carcass into a trash bag, threw in the pregnancy tests, and swung the bag into the dumpster.

“Did you get a new one?” she asked him, getting in her car.

Sam shook his head and yawned. He’d have to drop out of school and get a second job to pay child support anyway. Besides, the type of work he qualified for rarely required personal computing.

“Come by tomorrow,” she said, pulling him in for a hug. Her expression was unreadable.

At two thirty the next afternoon Sam took the bus over to Lorraine’s apartment, plugging in the pass code he knew by heart. When the gate rumbled open, he was notably relieved that not everything in the world had gone berserk.

She met him at the door, no makeup, hair up in a towel, barefoot in a pink-and-blue floral housedress. It was a punch in the gut. It was his private Lorraine. His favorite Lorraine. The Lorraine she was when it was just the two of them.

“You should’ve buzzed me,” she remarked irritably. She made him wait by the door, closing it partway so he couldn’t see in, and reappeared with a silver MacBook Air and a tangled power cord.

“Here,” she said, handing it over. The slender device struck Sam as strangely vulnerable. More expensive and aerodynamic than any computer he’d ever owned. Sam wondered if there was anything on it that he wasn’t supposed to see. Or better yet, something she’d deliberately left him to find.

“It’s wiped,” she said. “It’s got Final Cut Pro though. Photoshop, too, if you need that.”

This wasn’t what he’d expected. Not that he’d thought they’d leap back into bed if he came over, but this felt too close to charity. The worst part was that he wasn’t in a position to refuse it.

“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” he mumbled.

“I upgraded,” she said. “Keep it as long as you want.”

That was Lorraine’s other secret side. While she was all too happy to cadge free drinks off his dirtbag friends and split cheap slices of pizza, most of the time it was an act. Lorraine’s lifestyle was heavily subsidized by her parents. She moved out of Twombly after freshman year and her parents continued to pay her rent even when she landed a job. Her mother bought all of Lorraine’s clothes from Neiman Marcus with the help of a personal shopper. The first time he’d spent the night and took a shower at her house, Sam spotted the price sticker left on her shampoo—$38. He’d put it back and used soap on his head.

Keeping up while they were dating was out of the question, and Sam had no idea what was expected from him as the father of her child. Not only was there nowhere to put a crib in his room, but he didn’t even have a car. And the prospect of walking six miles each way with a Babybj?rn strapped to his chest made his testicles want to retreat into his body.

After he left Lorraine’s he walked home through Sixth Street to see if anyone was hiring. Calling his old friend Gunner about a barback gig would have been easy enough, but Sam didn’t want to explain his absence or his sudden need for cash.

Sweat slid down the back of Sam’s denim-clad legs. He would’ve loved to wear basketball shorts and flip-flops, resembling every carefree numbskull roaming the streets with status headphones, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Shrimping man-toes were an insult to nature.

Sam was tired. Lorraine’s laptop hit the base of his spine with every footfall.

The computer probably cost more than his life. Which made a kind of sense since it was decisively more capable than he’d ever been. The most money he’d ever made was eleven dollars an hour. He tried to enjoy the afternoon air and the meditative qualities of walking and failed.