Page 115 of Be Your Anything
We both burst into giggles again, that persistent headache still throbbing through me.
“Oh, god, why did we drink so much last night?” I say, though I instantly regret it. All I did was open a door for us to talk about—
“Duh—fucking Lucas. Showing up to tell us Remmy’spregnant!?Are you fucking kidding me?”
I huff out a laugh, unable to hold it in. “What a mess.”
“A mess? Everything that happened between Lucas and Wyatt and Hannah was a mess.This…is not a mess. This is a fucking baby that is going to blow this town apart.”
Crossing my arms, I think it over.
We’re lucky to live in a time that’s slightly different than the one our parents lived through, when having a child ‘out of wedlock’—a term I absolutely hate—would constitute either forced marriage to the baby’s father or being cut off from the family.
But I can’t imagine what Remmy’s going to go through when she has to tell her parents. Her mom is old-world Colombian, very strict, and that semi-hypocritical type of religious that’s superstitious about crosses and the Virgin Mary.
“How do you think the Wallaces are going to handle it?”
Paige makes a face that mirrors how I feel. I can’t imagine whatthatconversation is gonna look like.
“How areyouhandling it?”
I purse my lips and stay silent for a minute, really thinking it over, because even though we talked about this at length last night, we were also wasted.
In reality, I haven’t decided how I feel about it yet. Or maybe I have, but it isn’t one feeling. It’s a handful of feelings all competing for the right to be expressed.
The nice part of me is sad for Remmy and worried about what this will mean for her, for her family, for what she wants for her life. I hurt for Lucas, wondering what it would be like to find out the person you’ve been in a relationship with for so long is having someone else’s child.
But there’s also the part of me that feels like some of this is karma, like Remmy deserves some sort of consequence for sleeping around when she could have been with Lucas, or that it serves him right to want to stay with someone who leaves him in the end.
So it’s a mixture of sadness and vengeance and frustration and disappointment and just an overwhelming wish that we could all go back in time. Back to the age when this kind of drama wasn’t as common or as likely. When it was just stupid games with a bottle and a pair of dice.
I wish I could go back to that day at the surf competition, the first day I realized how I felt about Lucas, and tell him exactly what he needed to know.
And then when we got older, I wish I hadn’t been so willing to throw my sense of direction, my moral compass out the window just because he was willing to give me a little bit of attention.
Wishes don’t really help, though, so I keep those to myself.
“I’m upset. Obviously,” I reply. “I don’t know how to feel.”
“Are you going to talk to Lucas about whatever he came over here for yesterday?”
“What’s with all the questions?”
“I just want to know what you’re thinking.”
“Well, I don’t know what I’m thinking. I can barely think about anything with this headache,” I reply.
There’s a pause.
“Why? Doyouthink I should talk to him?” I ask, watching Paige closely.
She bunches her lips to one side, thinking it over. “I mean, the feminist in me says to tell him to fuck off and move on.”
“I like her.”
Paige giggles. “I know you do.” But then she sighs. “The other part of me, though… I mean, even if things are weird and awkward and even if he seriously fucked up beyond forgiveness, he’s still our friend Lucas. We still grew up with him and he’s still the guy who held your hand when your dad left.”
I stare blindly at the counter, wishing all of this were easier.
