Page 18 of Just Say (Hell) No
“No.” Ella had lost some of her bravado. She had one elbow on the marble kitchen bench and was pleating her school jumper between her fingers, stretching it out of shape.
“Where does she think you are?”
“At your house. With Caro.” Marko’s youngest sister, still at school and still at home.
The call could wait fifteen minutes, then. “Does she know you’re pregnant?”
“Yes.Itoldyou. And she’s doing her drama llama bit all over the shop, no worries.”
Marko wasn’t quite sure where to go next, so he started with the easy one. “So. You’ve been seeing some bloke, and…”
She gave a huff. “Well,obviously.Julian Mafutoa, but it’s not like he’s the love of my life. And before you get excited and start waving your hands in the air like Mum—he didn’t pressure me, or anything else Mum thinks. She thinks men are evil, that they’re all out to get you, just because my dad was a loser. She gave me all thesewarnings.It got really old.” When Marko didn’t answer straight away, because he was still trying to work out exactly what to say, she said, “It was my idea, all right? I’m the one who said we should go ahead. With Julian.”
“Have I ever waved my hands in the air?”
“No. But you never know.” She was giving him some side-eye like she expected him to leap from his stool and start shouting.
“Not happening now, either,” he said. “But I’ll say this. Birth control’s a thing, in future.” There. Something he was sure of.
“He said he heard it didn’t feel good.”
“Condoms, you mean.” When she nodded, he said, “It feels just bloody fine. Is it exactly the same? No. But if it’s a choice between doing it or not, a man’s going to take doing it with a condom over not doing it every single time. It feels good enough, trust me. And if you don’t want to use them, you go to the doctor, get birth control, get tested, and stay exclusive.That’sthe choice. Not use them or don’t. Especially as I’ll bet it wasn’t just the one time.”
She’d got over her distress, because she wasn’t pleating her jumper anymore. Instead, she had her arms crossed. “Thanks. You’re super helpful. Because you used them every single time whenyouwere sixteen. That’s why everybody gets to lecture me. Because they were all socareful.Andperfect.”
“No,” he said, and got a pang of pure terror.Wasthere a little somebody running around in the world with his eyes? He’d been more careful once he’d been playing professional sport, of course, after he’d been given The Talk a time or two. Or a hundred. “It could’ve happened to most of us, I reckon. So when did you find out? And how far gone are you?”
She shrugged, not looking at him. “Four months or so, the doctor said, but I guess I find out later. I thought that couldn’t be it, because Julian didn’t, you know, finish. But then I couldn’t button my skirt for ages, and it was getting worse, so I thought I should check.”
“And you did check, I’m guessing.” He didn’t tell her that “I’ll pull out” were theotherthree little words that girls should take with a grain of salt. She’d probably sussed that out by now.
“Well, yeh,” she said. “Of course I did. I wouldn’t come all the way up here fornothing.I took the bus to Timaru on Sunday, because I thought, well, this isn’t going away, but maybe I just got fat, or cancer or something. I got one of those kits there. I couldn’t do it in Tekapo, could I, not with everybody seeing me buy it. So I did it in the ladies’ at Pak ‘N’ Save, and then I went to New World and tried there, in case the first test was from a faulty batch or something. And then I rang Caro and told her, and she said we should tell your mum, because she’d know what to do, and she wouldn’t throw a wobbly likemymum, but I didn’t, because I wanted to check first. And anyway, I know what the choices are. Not like there are so many of them.”
“To check…” he said slowly.
“So I wentbackto Tekapo,” she said, “and I went to Julian’s house, and we went for a walk, you know, and he wanted to go to the same place as before, to do it, but I said ‘Wait,’ and told him. He said maybe it was wrong and I should check again, and I said I didn’tneedto check again, because I’d already checked twice, and he said, ‘My mum and dad are going to kill me,’ and then he said we’d talk later and buggered off. So that was that.”
The kitten was curled up asleep in Marko’s lap, and he had one hand over her to keep her from falling off, but he wasn’t feeling tender. He was feeling fairly murderous, in fact. Cowardly bastard. “Wrong fella, then,” he said, when he had himself under control again.
Finally, he saw the shine of tears in Ella’s dark eyes. “Igetthat he was scared,” she said. “But can’t he see that I’m scared, too?”
“Yeh,” he said. “He should’ve. He should.”
He put an arm around her and pulled her into his chest, and she laid her cheek against him, took a deep, wavering breath, and said, “It’s just… a bit hard, you know?”
He ran a hand over her back. She didn’t pull away, but her shoulders only shook a few times, even after a journey that must have taken all day. Buses and a plane and buses again, and holding those fears inside for weeks. He felt the woolen fabric of her school jumper under his fingers and thought,She’s still just a baby herself.Even though she could fool you on that. Too much adulting required, living with Jakinda. One person allowed to do the drama, and it wasn’t Ella. It had never been Ella.
He’d been sixteen himself when she’d been born. He only realized now how young he’d truly been. In the months and years that had followed, he’d been aware, now and then, of an urgent, quiet conversation between his parents, but had been consumed with his own concerns like every other young bloke. Until he’d learned what it was all about.
It had been windy that night. He remembered the eerie feeling as the wisps of cloud were driven across the face of the full moon, and the bleakness in the air that said snow was coming. And he remembered the silence.
He and his dad had driven nearly three hours, down from the Southern Alps and across the Canterbury plain, without speaking. His dad because he was coldly, quietly furious, and Marko because he was a hot mess of feelings and was trying to conceal it. They’d ended up in the outskirts of Christchurch at a shonky little house with doors made of the cheapest plywood, and locks that wouldn’t take more than a boot to burst.
He could still feel the smoothness of the cricket bat in his hands, the wood so familiar and yet so oddly heavy. He could remember the fear, too, that had gripped his shoulder muscles and tightened his fingers around the bat, and the coppery taste of it in his mouth.
Not the fear of being hurt. The fear of failing. Of not being able to hold Drake off if he came bursting through that door. Or worst of all—of freezing at the critical moment.
He remembered, too, how glad he’d been that his dad had been there. What a relief it had been to know that even if he failed, even if he froze, his dad wouldn’t. Not possible.
