Page 2 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

“May I remind you of your hamster named Lewis.”

“I was eleven…” His sentence was cut in half by a disgruntled huff, and Amy couldn’t help but smile. A lot of things had changed, but when Kai was frustrated, he still sounded just the same as that eleven-year-old boy. A huffy little engine, ready to take off.

“Amy,” he said, sounding stern. “I am actually kind of busy, believe it or not. So what is it you called for that was worthy of duping my poor assistant?”

Amy was glad they weren’t on a video call right now because she visibly grimaced. Putting it that way, she suddenly felt just a little bit ridiculous going to all this trouble to talk to him. But still… her anxiety about the reunion had her talking regardless.

“Are you coming to the reunion tonight?”

Silence followed before Kai answered. She kept throwing him curveballs, apparently.

“The what?” he asked, sounding genuinely oblivious.

“The high school reunion thing.”

“They still have those?”

“Yes, and ours is tonight. They even sent out proper paper invitations to all of our year group.”

“Yeah, and my assistant probably threw it out because she’s good at her job,” Kai said with a snort. “Why would I go and hang out with all of those people? Why would either of us?”

It was a fair question. High school hadn’t been fun for either of them. They might have known each other since they were little kids, but it was the hellscape that was high school that had bonded them together in a solid friendship. Both of them had been… different. Just different enough that they were excluded from the general populace from the outset, left to eat lunch in their own little corner, that sort of thing.

They were two kids from the poorest part of the already poor part of town, both of them too smart for their own good and beating the popular kids out in their fields with little to no effort. Kai in math and business studies, getting showered in scholarship offers from places like MIT for his obscenely good grades. Amy in track, where she got the same offers but turned them down only because food was where she really wanted to focus. And, no surprise, there weren’t really any scholarships or offers for someone who was into home economics. Kai had weathered the storm of their high school years fairly well, mostly just getting ignored by people, but for some reason that they had never really been able to figure out, Amy had always been the direct target for bullying. So it was an eternal mystery why she’d ever thought agreeing to cater the reunion had been a good idea.

“I was going to go, actually,” she said, stamping down the nerves in her gut. “Wanna go with me?”

“Do you want an honest answer?”

“I mean, it sounds like I’m going to get one.”

“Well… no. No, I don’t want to go with you. Because why on earth are you going to our high school reunion? Like, are you feeling okay? In the head?”

“I’m feeling just fine.”

“Then what on earth possessed you to actually accept and go to this thing?”

“I may have agreed to cater it…”

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone, and Amy braced herself for the speech she knew she was about to get.

“Amy,” Kai said, with all of the gravitas of a priest at a funeral. “Why?”

“A job is a job?” she said. But even now it came out sounding like a question rather than a confident statement.

“Are you that desperate for money?”

“No, but also, it’s money, so I maybe took the job without thinking through the psychological effects.”

“Amy, you know if you needed?—”

“Don’t offer me money, Kai,” she said sternly. “You know I don’t like it.”

He sighed on the other end. Ever since his tech company had hit meteoric success after innovating face and voice recognition software (or something, a lot of the lingo still went over Amy’s head), Kai had constantly been trying to give her money, to help her out, to “ease her load” as he so often put it. Accepting favors like that from anyone, even Kai, made Amy’s skin crawl, and she’d said no every time. She hated to admit it, but it was one of the reasons that they’d started to drift apart. It was something they’d never stopped being able to butt heads over.

“Anyway,” she said, moving briskly on from the same old argument. “We’ve established I’m insane and a sucker for punishment. So are you coming along?”

She hoped with every fiber of her being that he said yes, that she could manifest the answer into existence, but there was another pause which really didn’t bode well for the answer he was actually about to provide.

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