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His eyes widen. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“She’s sixteen. She has her whole life ahead of her, as do you. A baby is a huge tie. And even if she doesn’t want one, her parents might pressure her to have an abortion because of that.”
“They can’t! You can’t kill a baby just because you don’t want it!”
“Ah, Rangi, come on, man. Don’t go down that road. You have absolutely no say in it, so you need to keep those thoughts to yourself, do you hear me?”
He stares at me, breathing heavily. “It’s my baby, too.”
“It’s not a baby, it’s an embryo, and then at nine weeks it’ll be a fetus, and it stays that way until it’s born. Then it’ll be your baby, and you’ll get to do all the fun stuff like change nappies and pay child support. That’s how it works.”
He glares at me. “I don’t care what you call it. It’s alive. It’s still murder.”
Irritated now, I point my fork at him. “Stop it, and grow up. It doesn’t matter what you or I think.”
“Do you agree with abortion?”
“Our personal thoughts are irrelevant. We don’t get to have an opinion on this.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s her body. She’s the one who’d have to go through nine months of pregnancy. Who’d have to breastfeed it, care for it, and have her life turned upside down for it. Whatever happens to you, the effect it would have on her would be tenfold. So you don’t get to influence her. It might feel unfair, but your role in it is over. It’s the way it is, and part of being a man is learning to deal with it. Do you understand?”
He stares at his breakfast, chest heaving. Then, gradually, the fight goes out of him, and he flops back in the chair, covering his face.
“This fucking sucks,” he says from behind his hands.
“Yeah.” I pile the sausage, bacon, and a fried egg onto the toast, slap another bit on top, then bite into it like a sandwich. “Welcome to adulthood.”
He lowers his hands and stares moodily at his Coke, then eventually sits up and continues eating his breakfast, copying me and making a bacon and egg sandwich.
“Are you going to tell your dad?” I ask.
“I might as well wait if she’s going to get rid of it,” he grumbles. Then he sighs. “He’s going to fucking kill me.”
I nod sadly.
“Will you be there?” he asks. “When I tell him?”
“Ah, bro. It’ll just make it worse if he knows you told me before you told him.”
“I guess.” He picks at the bacon. “I hate that he’s like that with you.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Was he like it when you were kids?”
“Not so much. He was just your typical bossy older brother. He thought I was a pain in the arse. It was when I went to Greenfield that he really found it hard.”
“You don’t talk much about that,” Rangi says.
“It makes your dad angry, so I don’t tend to speak about it.”
“You went there when you were fourteen, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What made you go?”
