said.
“I couldn’t,” Cleo said. “I couldn’t even say it out loud.”
She finally had what she wanted: Monica was here with her to talk to her about being pregnant. She could have cried or screamed or told her that she was so scared all the time, that she felt like they were making every single decision wrong. They weren’t living in a movie. Things weren’t going to work themselves out offscreen and result in a cute baby. There was going to be blood and fighting and a lot of crying. She knew that much. But she couldn’t say any of that to Monica. What she’d really wanted was her old friend before they’d fallen apart. Now she had someone who looked familiar but felt sort of strange. It was almost better when she was gone altogether.
“It’s pretty messed up,” is all she said.
Monica started to come by the apartment more often. Sometimes she brought an orange or a bag of licorice or a gossip magazine, like little offerings. Most days they ended up sitting side by side on the couch, watching bad reality TV.
“You know,” Monica said one day, looking at Cleo’s stomach, “you’ll get used to people staring. Or not used to it, but it won’t bother you as much after a while. Like when you get a haircut and it feels so different, you feel the missing ends, and then one day you wake up and it’s just your hair again. It’s like that.”
“It doesn’t feel like that,” she said. She knew that Monica was trying to help, but what she wanted to say was that being pregnant was way worse than being anorexic. She wouldn’t say that, of course, because it sounded horrendous. But still, she thought it.
And it was true. There were things that college professors were used to. They were used to kids getting drunk, or getting overwhelmed, or failing a test and then crying. They were used to girls like Monica getting pulled out of school and returning a semester later. But they weren’t used to seeing pregnant seniors wander around the campus. They could barely look at Cleo. When it finally became clear to her economics professor that she was pregnant, he started avoiding her eyes when he taught. The staring was bad, but it was worse when people pointedly didn’t look at her, when they just avoided her altogether, fixing their eyes on the air around her.
CLEO WAS READY FOR THE SCHOOL YEAR to end, ready to be away from everyone her age that was celebrating and talking about where they were going to move. They talked about Manhattan and Boston and Chicago and San Francisco. Sometimes they changed their minds just because they felt like it. They were going to live on the East Coast and then decided to try the West Coast. Why not? They had choices. They could do whatever they felt like. She was moving into the basement of her boyfriend’s parents’ house in a suburb of Philadelphia. Was a sadder sentence ever said?
She and Max had both agreed to move to the Coffeys’. She didn’t want to, but what other option was there? Where else were they supposed to go? Even if Elizabeth had wanted them, her apartment was way too small, and it was still too hard for her to really talk about the baby without causing a fight of some kind. The last time they’d spoken on the phone, she’d said, “You have to understand, I just feel like I failed as a mother, Cleo. To have you pregnant in college is a nightmare and I can’t help but think it was my lack of parenting.” Cleo wasn’t sure if this was supposed to make her feel better, but it certainly didn’t. Then Elizabeth said, “I should have never let you go to that school,” like that was the cause of all this.
She and Max also decided to get married, although that still seemed not quite real. Max had brought up marriage the day after he’d woken her up with McDonald’s on her pillow. The fight was over, but they were still talking carefully to each other, stepping out of the way when the other walked by, saying sorry and please more often than normal.
They were both in bed, but not sleeping. Max was on his computer and Cleo had her eyes closed, a book resting on her stomach. Max cleared his throat once and then again and again, until Cleo opened her eyes.
“I was thinking,”