Sweet Dreams, Sadie

THIRD TRIMESTER

He told me that he had told his parents a couple of days after the graduation party, that he was staring into a bowl of milk soaked cereal one morning and was listening to the mingled sounds of his parents' conversation about what to have for dinner that night—his father wanted baked macaroni and cheese, his mother grilled chicken—and the local news on a small television they had mounted in their kitchen, reporting all of the latest accidents causing traffic on the highways, and he just blurted it out, in the middle of a macaroni and cheese versus grilled chicken debacle.

He said that they were shocked at first, stunned silent for a moment so all he heard was a broadcaster remarking that no one had been hurt in the three-car collusion—and Jameson wished that only the same could be said then for him as well—and then kind of laughed. His father thought that maybe he had been playing a prank on him, explaining to him about how he knew that these kids liked to set up hidden cameras in their house and prank their parents with fake pregnancies announcements and then post them on YouTube. He even said that his dad looked in a potted plant for a strategically placed phone or camera or just some kind of proof that, yes, this actually was a prank for YouTube.

It wasn't until he had pulled the sonogram image from his pocket and pointed out my name in the top corner that they actually believed him and started to get angry. He said that his father kept asking him financial questions, inquiring of whether or not he was still going to school, if this pixelated and grayish blur was something I was planning on keeping. He said that his mother was quieter, more emotional, almost crying as her gaze alternated between the television and the ultrasound image. She just asked him what he was going to do. And now, with him beside me, as I leaned against the bumper of my parents' car in the parking lot of a local ice cream parlor called Scoops!, halfheartedly smoothing the tip of my hot pink spoon against my melting cookie dough ice cream, I wondered the same thing, just not out loud.

The sky behind the rooftop of the building appeared as if it had been smeared with a paint brush after having been dunked in a combination of orange and pink paint, the clouds swirled together in a way that reminded me of the strings of cotton candy I glimpsed a couple of weeks earlier. And he was leaned against the bumper of my parents' car as well, biting his teeth into the waffle cone of his chocolate and vanilla twist, a slight streak of melted ice cream collecting on his wrist, and I kept waiting for something, a confirmation for either one of the thoughts that had been overtaking my mind ever since I left that graduation party.

But instead, I just listened to the sound of him chewing on his ice cream cone while I glanced over my shoulder at the sound of a girl laughing behind me, one of the girls who had been behind the counter and who had scooped my cookie dough ice cream for me, and she was on the phone. She told a boy on the other line named Koby or Kolby that she would come pick him up in a minute.

When I looked away, Jameson was now looking at me, holding only a small stub of his ice cream cone. "Do you . . ." He cleared his throat, kicked his shoe at a pebble on the ground, and then continued. "Do you know what you're going to do?"

I speared the rounded hot pink tip of my plastic spoon through a hardened and cold ball of cookie dough in my ice cream, swallowing down the words that I hadn't completely pieced together, fragments of feelings that I felt at different times, each one contradicting the one before it. "I don't know," I finally settled on after a moment of silence had passed, only the sound of the engine of the car of the girl parked behind us to focus on.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jameson nodding as he scraped his thumbnail down the edges of his waffle cone. "Sometimes, I think I know. I see a pair of little shoes with straps and sparkles, and I think that I want to see her wearing them. But then I look at the price and I think that if that's how much it costs to buy shoes then what about everything else? And then, that makes me think about everything else, like not just the money stuff. Like, what if I end up like one of those teen moms living in a trailer parker who never leave the trailer park and drink too much cheap beer to forget about the fact that I gave up everything to have a baby, to have her, and then resent her for it and make her wish that she had never been born. I mean, this derails everything and what if she grows up her entire life knowing that?" I swallowed again, darting my burning and blurring eyes away from me and attempting to focus them on the bright hue of my plastic spoon for a moment, and tried to keep my breathing slow instead of ragged and thin like how it threatened.