“Are you nervous?” I ask her.
“Yeah.”
“It's not supposed to hurt much. I looked it up.”
“Yeah, not that really.” She squirms a little. “There's just the whole mess of hormones and everything, and I'm worried that later-Josey's going to start getting all convinced that this was the wrong choice and won't listen to past-Josey who knows that it wasn't.”
“Uh-huh.”
She looks up at me, squeezes my hand. I think it's the first time she's really looked at me all day. “You wouldn't do it, huh?”
“If I got pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
“I don't know,” I say, even though I do, really, because she doesn't need to hear that. “It's easy to say when it's just hypothetical.”
“Maybe not,” she says. “It's not like if I ever thought about it thought I would keep it. Hypothetically I was always making the same decision. Maybe you would too.”
“Do you believe in heaven?” I ask her.
“I don't think so.”
“Okay,” I say, “Well if you did, I think...I think the thing is, the idea of someone...there's like a threshold for how terrible dying can really be, if heaven's there.”
“It doesn't feel like someone dying,” she says. “And I don't think it would to you either, you wouldn't be talking about how great heaven was if your mom was dying or something.”
“You're being kind of...combative.”
She puts her head back. “I'm sorry, I know. I'm not trying to be, though.”
“Why does it matter what I believe, anyway?”
“I just don't want you to hate me.”
“I don't hate you.”
“I don't want you to hold this against me forever,” she says. “Even if it's not in like, an angry way, you know? I don't want you to look at me forever and remember this thing that I did and how you think I...killed someone.”
I'm quiet.
“Shit,” she says. “You're going to do that, aren't you?”
As much as I hate to admit it, I don't know. It's possible that I will, and that extremely sucks for the both of us. But that's not really what I'm thinking about right now.
“You just talked about us having something forever,” I say.
She adjusts herself a little on the table and doesn't say anything. I rescue the sheet where it's slipping off.
“Did you mean to say that?” I ask her.
“I don't know.”
“I'd rather resent you forever then have to not think of you at all,” I say.
“But I don't know if I'd chose that.”
“Yeah, but you don't know that you wouldn't, either.”
“It kind of creepily feels like we're choosing a relationship over a fetus right now.”
“Except that's not what's going on.”
“I know,” she says.
“And that's not really even something that's on the table.”
“Because there's not a relationship.”
“Because there's barely a fetus,” I say. “Not in a few minutes, anyway.”
“I just wish I knew what this meant for us,” she says.
“Josey. Did you ever consider that's, like, in no small part up to you?”
She says, “I want this to mean something. I've been talking this whole time about how this is some simple little procedure, and it's not that I'm having doubts or that I even think that that was wrong, so much, it's just that I want to walk out of this feeling like something's changed. Like I've learned something. Like somewhere in this this happened for a reason, because otherwise it was just this shitty hiccup in my life.”
“What would be so bad about that?”
It would mean I'm just crashing around making mistakes and doing things for no reason,” she says.
“You're not the first person in the world to accidentally get pregnant.”
“I just still can't believe this is happening,” she says. “I'm here in the fucking stirrups and I can't believe this is happening.”
I brush her hair off her forehead. “I know.”
“It's so wasteful,” she says. “These past two months or so, it's just wasteful.”
“So it's wasteful,” I say. “It's two months. You've got a lot of two months.”
“Yeah, that's probably what the fetus thought.”
I blurt out a laugh. “You are terrible.”
“Hey, if there were ever a time for abortion jokes.”
“I'm pretty sure it would be any time other than right now.”
She smiles at me. “You might be right.”
“So we had a bad last couple of months,” I say. “Not everyone in the world did.”
“Yeah, but I don't care about them, I only care about me.”
“Should I report that back to the food bank?”
She smiles again. I'm making her smile. We're both making her smile, really.
“So what are we going to do with the next couple of months,” I say.
“Hopefully get into college.”
“And if you get into college, then what, we get back together?”
She shrugs, with one shoulder, and I can tell in a second that somewhere that was always her plan, whether or not she knew it. I wonder if Theo knew that. I wonder if I did.
“You know that's messed up, right?” I say. “That you'll break up with us partly because of a baby that's not all yours but get back together based on a college thing that happens to just you.”
“I didn't break up with you because of the baby,” she says.
“Still, determining our lives based on your college decision is pretty damn selfish.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You do. And you know how you know that?”
“Because I don't only care about me,” she says.
“Exactly.” I tug her hair a little, like Theo does. “So stop pretending you do.”
“And with that, she vacuums out a baby.”
“Eh.” I pull up a stool and sit down next to her, still holding her hand.
“You can say a prayer if you want,” she says.
“I don't have to.”
“You can.”
“Okay. I'll try to think of a good one.”
“I'm not not
