cold outside, the start of winter, so July seemed far away, which comforted Cleo. They bought a calendar on the way home, the kind that you hang on the wall, because it seemed like they should have one, and they hung it up on a nail in the kitchen, and circled July 15 with a red marker. In the circle, Cleo wrote, DUE DATE.
“Well, there it is,” Max said. They stood and stared at it.
“Yep. There it is.”
WHEN SHE WAS FOUR MONTHS ALONG, Max started telling people. “We can’t just wait until your stomach starts to get huge,” he said. He told his friend Mickey first, and then his friend Ben, and then more and more people. And those people told other people and Cleo figured that a few days after Max first told Mickey, the whole school knew. She didn’t tell anyone. Who would she tell? Her old roommates that seemed to be thriving without her? Could she really call up Monica and tell her that she was pregnant, that she’d fucked up? She could just imagine Laura and Mary when they found out, sitting on the futon and saying to each other, “I knew it was a mistake for her to move in with him. I knew it. She’s getting what she deserves. It’s only fair.”
Cleo felt like people stared at her wherever she went on campus. She felt like as soon as she passed, people whispered to each other, or pointed her out to the friend they were walking with. There she is, that’s the pregnant girl, can’t you tell, her butt looks huge.
“You sound paranoid,” Max said.
“Well, I’m not,” she told him.
CLEO AND HER MOTHER WERE ON e-mail terms. That’s how she put it to Max. They had tried to talk on the phone once more, and Cleo had ended up screaming while her mom said, “This is not the kind of conversation I want to have,” over and over. E-mail was better for both of them, they agreed. Maybe they’d just stay on these terms forever. Maybe Cleo could just e-mail pictures of the baby to her when it was born and then when the baby was old enough, it could start e-mailing with Elizabeth, have its own online relationship with its grandmother. It would be like they were all virtual people, like they were bodyless and floating in cyberspace.
MAX WENT WITH HER FOR the first ultrasound, even though she kept telling him that he didn’t have to. It was so weird, that before she was pregnant, the thought of having Max in the room while she went to the gynecologist would have been disgusting, silly really, and so strange that no one would ever allow it. But now that she was pregnant, it wasn’t just common but it was expected? Max was supposed to be there while she put her feet in the stirrups.
“Well, we can see the baby here,” the doctor said. “And it is just one baby.” The thought of its being more than one baby had never even occurred to Cleo.
“That’s it right there?” Max asked. He pointed to the screen.
“It looks like a little doll,” Cleo said. “Or a peanut.”
The ultrasound technician froze the screen and told them that she’d print out some pictures for them.
“Can we get an extra copy?” Max asked the technician. “I want to send one to my mom.”
“Really?” Cleo asked.
“Yeah, I think she’d like to see it. She’ll probably hang it on the refrigerator or something.” The thought of a picture of the inside of her uterus hanging in the Coffeys’ kitchen made Cleo feel strange. But Max seemed excited, so she let it go.
They hung the ultrasound on their own refrigerator, and whenever Cleo went into the kitchen, her eyes went first to the picture, and then to the calendar that hung on the wall. And each time she glanced back and forth, between the calendar and the grainy ultrasound picture, she thought about how they were that much closer to that little baby’s actually being a baby and coming into the world. As if she needed reminding.
CHAPTER 15
Weezy had a high horse. And she could get on it whenever she wanted. Maureen used to always tease her, when she’d go off on other people’s behavior. “Uh-oh,” she’d say. “Giddyup! Here comes the horse.”
Even when she was younger, her parents used to act like Weezy thought she was too good for people. “Don’t get too big for your britches,” her father would say.
It was