UNFAMOUS [BOOK ONE] (A Wattpad 'Featured Story')

Ch. 8 | 16 & Pregnant

* April 2011*

 I shift in the passenger seat of Nate’s GTi, watching countless houses, trees and people whoosh past me, not taking any of it in. Choice FM plays quietly in the background providing a slight distraction from my guilty thoughts; did I do the right thing?

I couldn’t handle the fact that I was pregnant in the first place; a baby was the last thing I wanted, I mean I’m still a child myself (no matter how much I try to convince my mother otherwise) and a baby was far too much responsibility. The moment the nurse confirmed that I was in fact pregnant with my 17 year old boyfriend’s child, I made the decision that brought me to where I am today. I had an abortion.

I made the choice to kill my child and now I am being driven back to my home so that I can sit and mull over what I have done by myself, because from the look on Nate’s face, he doesn’t want to join me.

Just before they wheeled me off to the theatre, Nate had clutched my hand with this desperate look in his eyes.

“Baby, is this is what you really want? I mean, if you’re having any second thoughts you can back out. Ri, you don’t have to do this. We’ll figure it out,” he’d said with soft desperation. “I’ll be here to support you, you won’t be doing this alone Rio, I promise.”

I couldn’t even look at him because I knew that if I did, any resolve that I had left would crumble.

The whole process from finding out I was pregnant up until this moment is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever been through. When I initially discovered I was going to be a mum (after a series of pregnancy tests to double, triple and quadruple check that the little positive sign on the stick was correct before I sought out a professional opinion) the first thing I did was curse. I glared at it trying to wish it away, foolishly hoping that perhaps if I stared at it long enough that the positive sign would turn into a negative, but of course it never did. I was quiet for over an hour, sitting alone on my cold tiled bathroom floor holding the latest result limply in my hand, trying to stay calm.

I knew the instant that I saw that I was pregnant that I didn’t want it; how the hell was I meant to raise a baby when my mum was still raising me? I don’t even have a job!

I’d decided that I wasn’t going to tell my mum about this; she would kill me and then she would tell my family and family friends and they would kill me. That’s a whole lot of killing! I didn’t want to be the topic of the latest gossip and have to sit through lectures and then have people judging me and dictating what I should and shouldn’t do.

I told Tyson first and it was him who made me tell Nathaniel. As scared as I was of telling my mum, at the time, the prospect of telling Nate was even more frightening because I was afraid that it would scare him off. Those are generally the stories that you hear when teenage girls reveal to their teenage boyfriend that they are pregnant -the boy gets freaked and walks out on her -but Nathaniel wasn’t like that. When I first broke the news to him he smiled…up until I told him I didn’t want it.

Nate was barely speaking to me, appalled that I’d even contemplate killing our baby. I’d assured him that we’d have our whole lives to make another one and that I was only 16 and wasn’t in a stable position to raise a child. He didn’t want to kill this one, but he supported my decision anyway because it was what I wanted and he loved me and he only wanted me to be happy. I wasn’t willing to do the same for him because in 9 months it wasn’t him that was going to be waddling down the road with people young and old judging him, writing him off as another statistic, and from what I had heard about the pain of child birth, I was really going to have to be up for it to push a fully formed human out of my you know what.