One Shots: Alicia — Part Five

One

The belly changed how I moved through school. Not just the fact of it — the weight, the recalculation of corners and desks and the bathroom stall that had never been tight before. The way my body had found its own center of gravity and I was just along for it. Twenty weeks, then twenty-one. I’d stopped counting when I stopped being able to pretend the counting was doing anything.

I knew which teachers knew and which were pretending they didn’t. I knew which kids were kind and which weren’t and which had simply absorbed it into the background the way schools absorbed things. It had stopped being interesting to most of them. Nate’s girlfriend, pregnant, keeping it. That was the fact. The fact had settled in and around me and become just the way things were.

Kayla walked with me between second and third period. She’d been doing this since October — appearing at my locker, adjusting her schedule without saying she’d done it. She didn’t bring it up unless I did first. That was what we’d arrived at without discussing.

That Tuesday Kayla looked at me for a moment before saying anything.

“You seem really calm about all this.”

“I’m not.”

“I know.” She shifted her bag. “That’s kind of what I mean.”

She didn’t say anything else. We turned the corner and she went to her class and I went to mine and thought about what Kayla had almost said on the other side of that.

Nate came over after school. My parents said yes to this now without being asked — the same way they’d stopped asking questions about certain other things, the same way the whole situation had been absorbed into a new kind of ordinary. He was the father. He should be involved. Those things had been said aloud and then they became just the way things were.

We were alone in my room. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on my belly without asking because that was what he did now. The belly was real under my shirt — not ambiguous anymore, not could-be-anything. His hand went there the way it went to the same place every time.

“Does it move much?”

“Sometimes. More at night.”

He nodded like he was filing this away.

He was less tentative than October. He’d learned what I needed around the pregnancy — which positions I’d steered him away from, which were fine, what I needed him to do with his weight. He’d paid attention and remembered. I hadn’t had to say the same thing twice. This was a thing about Nate.

I was on my back, my hips tipped at the angle we’d worked out together. He held himself up so his weight stayed off me and I could feel the effort of that — his arms steady, the care he was putting into it even in the middle of it. He moved slowly and deliberately and I was aware of the ceiling above my bed, the crack that ran toward the light fixture that had been there before August. I was aware of the pressure and his breathing and how carefully he was holding himself back.

He found a rhythm. He stayed in it. I kept my face toward the wall.

When he finished he stayed close, his hand going back to my belly. I let him. The afternoon light was doing something specific to the ceiling.

“Do you think it’s a girl?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“I think it’s a girl.” He said it like he’d been sitting with this.

The twenty-week scan had been the week before. The tech had asked if I wanted to know. I’d said no.

Then his hand went still.

Under his palm — a slow push from the inside. A roll. The baby moving the way it moved in the dark, unhurried, toward whatever had pressed against it from outside.

Nate didn’t say anything. I felt his breath stop. His hand stayed flat and he went very still, the way you go still when something catches you off guard and you don’t want to scare it away.

The baby moved again. Slow, dragging.

“Was that—” he started.

“Yeah,” I said.

He let out a breath. Not a word. Just that.

I was looking at the ceiling. His hand pressed flat and whatever was inside pressed back and I was looking at the crack that ran toward the light fixture and listening to the sound of him not having words for it.

He put his cheek against my shoulder. His face was wet against my skin. I felt it and didn’t move.

I looked at the ceiling until the afternoon went.

Two