“I didn’t tell you what?” I asked. His room was a mess, I noticed all of a sudden. Even though he was leaving for school soon, he hadn’t packed a thing, apparently. A sandwich that looked about five days old was sitting on his desk. I was pretty sure it was growing mold.
“That you’d never done it before.” He wasn’t looking at me. It was like he thought I was going to freak out. I think at that moment I wanted to, but I knew I wouldn’t ever let myself freak out in front of him.
“So what?” I said like it was no big deal. “Everyone has to have a first time at some point.” I wondered how he could tell. I guessed whatever I was supposed to have done, I didn’t do correctly.
No, I wasn’t experienced. Not at all.
Tommy Cray picked at a mosquito bite on his ankle, and then I caught him glancing at the clock radio by his bed. I saved myself some embarrassment and said, “I should be getting home.”
“‘Kay,” he said. He seemed relieved.
We’d hardly even kissed.
I told Tommy to drop me off a block from my house so my mother wouldn’t see his car.
He leaned over and gave me a quick peck before I got out of the Toyota.
“Well, good luck at school,” I said. I was desperate for him to say something sweet or romantic. Something to make me feel like maybe it had all been worth it.
“Thanks,” he said. “You should text me sometime.”
“Cool,” I said, and I got out of the car and walked home. Halfway home I realized I didn’t even know his number.
I didn’t tell Alice. I know. Half the reason I probably even did it with Tommy was because there was this weird little part of me that wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t some inexperienced virgin. Of course, after I did it with Tommy, I mostly felt like an inexperienced non-virgin, so I wasn’t sure much had changed. But the thought of telling Alice that I had slept with a guy who wasn’t even my boyfriend—just a guy who’d picked me up at the pool for God’s sake—was just too weird. Too embarrassing. Sure, Alice had fooled around with Mark Lopez under similar circumstances, but she hadn’t slept with him.
For days after it happened, I kept waiting for Tommy to call me or text me, and I kept walking around the house those last few moments of summer, staring at myself in mirrors and thinking, “I’m not a virgin anymore.”
He never texted me or called me.
But that’s not The Really Awful Stuff.
Not even close.
So what do you think happens to the girl from the Christian family who only does it once? Do I actually have to spell it out for you?
By the time I found out I was pregnant, Tommy Cray was a freshman at Texas Tech and I was a month and a half into my sophomore year at Healy High. Everyone was focused on the start of school, on who they were going to take to the first Fall Dance, on the likelihood of the Healy Tigers taking state … and I was trying not to throw up in my breakfast cereal every day.
It can’t be, I thought to myself. But it was. All those True Love Waits rallies my mother had dragged me to, all those lectures about saving myself for my future husband, all those reminders that Jesus prefers virgins … it was like some sort of ridiculous joke. Who gets pregnant from doing it one time?
But the answer was me. Kelsie Sanders.
One Saturday afternoon while my dad was working and my mom was taking my sister shopping for shoes, I walked down to Seller Brothers and stole a pregnancy test. All the cashiers know my entire family, so there was no chance I could buy one. I figured I’d already fornicated, so what was stealing a home pregnancy test going to do to me?
The two blue lines stared up at me like they were proud of themselves. They were so blue. There was no doubt in their existence. They were just there, proving the worst possible thing in the world.
I was going to have a baby.
I told nobody. Nobody. When I did it with Tommy Cray, my entire body went numb. But this was like my body didn’t even exist anymore. It was just my brain and those two blue lines. I was a zombie. I wrapped the pregnancy test in some toilet paper and hid it in the drawer of my nightstand. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror just like I’d done after doing it with Tommy. I stared at my dark brown hair and my even darker brown eyes. At the freckles on my nose. At the gap between my front teeth.
I was going to have a baby.
I mean, I had to. There was nothing else that I could even picture happening. Ever since I’d been a kid, my mom had been dragging me to the Women’s Care Clinic and Planned Parenthood on Saturday mornings and making me hold up pictures of aborted fetuses. Ever since I’d been a kid, I’d been told to pray for the souls of the preborn. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been taught that having an abortion is pretty much basically the worst possible thing that any woman could ever do ever. Ever.
After all, wasn’t I, Kelsie Sanders, proof of the power of Choosing Life? Hadn’t I, Kelsie Sanders, been an unplanned pregnancy? A surprise from God, as my mother liked to put it? A surprise that got her to dye her hair back to a normal color and leave Chicago and stop listening to bands with weird names?
So now it was my turn. Only I hadn’t even had a chance to get my nose pierced.
But I was going to have a baby anyway.
It was like trying to picture myself making dinner on Mars or speaking fluent Chinese. It was impossible, but it was the only option.
I thought about living in my parents’ house for the rest of my life. Me and the baby. Me and the baby in the wood-paneled den and me and the baby in the kitchen with the refrigerator that never stops humming and me and the baby in my teeny pink bedroom in the middle of the night, staring out the window at the stars and planning our escape.
All I could think was, I’m sorry, baby.
So, abortion was out of the question, and I wasn’t going to be one of those girls who can hide her pregnancy under a sweater for nine months and then give birth at the prom. So I did what I had to do. I told my mother. She made me take three tests in front of her. I literally had to pee in front of my mother. In between tests I took big swallows from a can of Diet Coke balancing on the bathroom sink. Each test my mother grabbed the stick from my hands, and I think some of my pee actually got on her at one point. She didn’t seem to care. She just reached down between my legs and took the test and stared at it, and then she ripped open another package.
“All right,” she said to me. She was weirdly calm. My mom was just never that calm. She quotes Jesus constantly and everything, but even having the love of the Lord inside of her hasn’t made her very relaxed. She still manages to snap at me constantly and criticize me all the time and get all tense with my dad, and even if she does stop to close her eyes and quote some Bible verse, my mom just isn’t a naturally calm person.