not going the whole time,” Max said. “Just for a few days.”
Cleo figured that was better than nothing.
With Max gone, the apartment was so quiet. Even when she walked outside, the town felt empty, since all the seniors were gone. Before he left, Max went to the grocery store and bought Cleo enough food that she would have survived a war. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched him unload frozen pizzas, boxes of cereal, macaroni and cheese, and soup. It made her start to cry, watching him pile up all this junk food for her, and she had to turn and go into the bathroom so she wouldn’t bawl in front of him. These hormones really were a bitch.
Secretly, Cleo had been sort of looking forward to her time alone in the apartment. She realized that it would be the last time ever that she’d really be all by herself. After graduation, they’d be at the Coffeys’ and then there’d be a baby. And while that was hard to imagine, hard to think that it was really going to happen, she knew enough to be grateful for this time.
She watched marathons of old TV shows, and stayed up well into the night, then slept past noon and ate huge bowls of cereal. She read stupid books and ate ramen. And after two days, she felt like she was going out of her mind. She’d started to have nightmares about the baby, where she forgot it someplace and left it behind. In one, she was buying shoes and Weezy came up to her and screamed at her for leaving her baby in her purse. Cleo was confused as to how the baby had gotten there in the first place, and tried to say so, but couldn’t get the words right. She woke up sweating.
She had wanted time alone, but now she wanted Max. She felt desperate for him. She wanted someone else to be there when she woke up to tell her that the baby wasn’t even there yet and to assure her that she didn’t (and wouldn’t) leave it in a purse. She couldn’t help but imagine Max at the beach, drinking and talking to girls. Every night, she thought, Please, God, don’t let him make out with anyone. Please, God, don’t let him decide to leave me.
When Max came home, Cleo almost knocked him over. She sat with her legs on his lap while he told her about the week and who got really drunk, who hooked up, who threw up all over the floor. Cleo laughed at these stories, so happy to have him home. They talked into the night, and Cleo kept her leg linked around his in bed. She wanted to make sure that he was really there. What had she been thinking, taking him for granted? Was she out of her mind? This might not be what she had imagined, and this certainly wasn’t perfect, and maybe she was wearing a ten-dollar ring from Walmart, but Max was still the best thing she had in her whole life at the moment, and she couldn’t forget that.
GRADUATION WAS LONG AND HOT, but the upside was that in her robe, Cleo looked like she was just chunky and not necessarily pregnant. The downside was that both of their families were there, and they were all together for the first time ever.
Weezy and Elizabeth had been in touch and even met up for lunch a few months back. It was a strange thing to imagine, these two women getting together. Cleo waited for her mom to call and ridicule Weezy, to make fun of her coddling ways, how she talked about her children like they were all still toddlers. But she never did. She actually seemed to enjoy her. It was amazing how much an accidental pregnancy could bind you together against your children.
Weezy made the two of them pose in front of trees and buildings, with their caps on, then with their caps off, holding their diplomas, and just standing. She tried to make the two of them throw their caps in the air, which was when Max put his foot down. Then she made Cleo pose with Elizabeth, and then they took pictures of the whole Coffey family. “I’ll get you copies,” Weezy told Elizabeth. Elizabeth just nodded. Cleo was pretty sure she didn’t even have a camera with her.
After the ceremony, Cleo and Elizabeth ran into Monica and her family. Cleo