Sweet Dreams, Sadie

THIRD TRIMESTER

I barely knew her, but I knew parts of her. I knew the slope of her nose in a grainy image of her profile. I knew the white pearls of her spine that were forming together. I knew the curled hands brought close to her puckered lips. I knew the feet that I was just beginning to feel brush against my insides. I didn't want that slope, those white pearls, that curled hand, those feet to know that each part of them was unintended, undesirable, derailing. And maybe that meant that it was best that I never caught more than a fleeting glimpse of her as someone took her away to someone else, someone who wanted her before she was even real.

But then I thought about that slope, those white pearls, that curled hand, those feet, and I wanted to know them. It broke something within me to think that maybe she didn't need me to know her. That maybe she might actually be better off if I didn't. "It just seems like every choice is the wrong one," I finally murmured into my ice cream as it melted, letting my spoon slip from my fingers and fall against the Styrofoam edge of the bowl.

He cleared his throat, almost nervously, and opened his mouth about ten seconds before he actually spoke. "Maybe not every choice," he finally said to me after a moment, letting out a lengthy breath through his nose that relaxed his shoulders but not his countenance as he turned to me, skin somewhat flushed and pupils flickering as they focused on me. "They have married student housing at my school—"

"Jameson," I interrupted.

"—and that way, I could at least be there and not have to leave school. I could graduate just like I planned and get a good job, give her a good life, and then she never has to worry about being a mistake or anything because not that much would change."

I rolled my eyes. "Not that much would change."

Now he rolled his eyes. "You know what I mean. Okay, so we would have kids sooner, get married sooner, but that's . . . that's not going to matter ten, fifteen years from now."

I closed my eyes for a moment, biting down on my lower lip, as I took in a breath that was scented with the stale fragrances of old and lingering cigarette smoke, the thickly sweet vanilla from the ice cream I held in my hand, the Styrofoam somewhat cold to my fingertips, and car exhaust. When I reopened my eyes, I turned away from him slightly to place the container of melting ice cream that had begun to drown the cookie dough and miniature chocolate chips in milky white, on the bumper of my parents' car.

"You say that like that was ever an actual thought," I told him, my gaze still focused elsewhere and away from him, at the white Styrofoam of my cup, the dent on the corner of my parents' license plate from when my father backed into the edge of the garage, the scattering of small, gray pebbles across the parking lot pavement. I kept my hair as a curtain between him and I, the strands protecting his eyes from glimpsing the blush that warmed the apples of my cheeks at the thought of him, at the thought of him thinking of me like that.  "It wasn't. We weren't even together. We aren't even together. And you definitely wouldn't be just barely proposing at eighteen if this," I continued, gesturing to my round midsection underneath the thin fabric of the sundress, "hadn't happened."

I let my hand fall against my bare knee, warmed and slightly sunburned, and felt his eyes lingering on me for a moment longer than my skin would allow without tingling, as if reacting to whatever was radiating from his irises, but it wasn't The Bump that he was looking at when he gazed at me. It was me. And it reminded me so much of that night last January that I cleared my throat, tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, and started fiddling with the spoon lodged in my melting ice cream.

When I looked at me out of the corner of my eye, he glanced down and kicked another pebble, and I listened to it skip across the pavement in the quiet stillness. "Yeah, I guess so," he murmured after a moment, something odd filling his voice, and then he shrugged. "I probably would've waited until I was nineteen."