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Buffy
Hey there, Long Horn Elite, I have some tea.
Half a dozen responses came in, telling her to spill it.
Buffy
Need promises that it doesn’t leave this group.
They all promised.
Buffy
Our newest wanna bee isn’t sick with a tummy bug; she’s 100% knocked up.
All the members of the “Long Horn Elite” chimed in, wanting to know how she knew.
Buffy
She’s two weeks late.
Aside from her knowing my cycle being disturbing as fuck, and the fact it was true, what followed made me physically ill. I mean, it was probably the fact I was pregnant that made me throw up, but the things these bitches said were brutal.
I broke up with Leland on Thanksgiving because I was not going to end up being the bitch at home, raising children and allowing him to become the man who resented me for it.
The breakup … awful. I was hurting someone who was the best person—aside from Mom—who I had ever met. He was my best friend. We had promised each other that we would never be mean to one another, and if we did, we’d make nice—in a different way than we had previously, of course. Hell, even our parents thought what we were doing was mature and the right thing for each other.
I believed I knew my date of conception—Halloween. He’d come up and stayed three nights and insisted we attend the parties that I would go to if he weren’t here. We wore three different couples’ costumes for the three different parties that we’d be attending. My “friends” raved about how they envied how close we were. We were “goals.” They all wanted a baseball player of their own. I made damn sure they knew he wasn’t an option. Leland Locke was mine, and I was his.
I loved him so much that I never wanted him to resent me, so I had to let him go.
What I didn’t want to let go of was our baby.
I did the math, and the longest I could wait to have an abortion was January 26th.
I returned from winter break with an appointment already made for the following week. But I didn’t have to wait that long. On January 18th, it all came to a painful end while I lay in my lofted bed, curled into a ball.
I called the clinic the next day, and they wanted me to come in. After bagging up my linens and the blood-soaked mattress topper, tossing them, I drove to the clinic, where they did an exam. What I endured after, I can’t even think about, but it solidified that I’d done right by Leland Locke because he was going to be an amazing father one day. I wanted that for him.
That night, Buffy left her phone unattended for her goodnight snog, and I didn’t hesitate to snoop. She’d told the Long Horn Elite that even his baby didn’t want to stay with me. And the twats picked actual dates for when he’d publicly post with the girls that they knew he’d been fucking this whole time.
The nighttime crying stopped, and I made the choice never to listen to that song again. Then the physical and emotional pain turned to numbness. It was Valentine’s Day when Leland was tagged in a post at a fundraiser with his first model draped on his arm. It was Valentine’s Day evening when Madeline DeMond won the bet and pooled money. And it was February 15th when I turned to the boyfriend of the biggest twat in my so-called friend group, Buffy. Didn’t even have to fuck him; just batted my eyes, and he dumped her ass. After that, living with her was obviously intolerable, so I packed my shit and moved into Billy Jacob’s, my bi-curious best friend, room for the rest of the semester and played cock tease to Buffy’s ex, Connor Doyle, for the whole damn time. The rest of the semester, I went down that entire list of the Longhorn Elites and fucked up their perfect little lives in some way.
Zero regrets.
He remembers “Our Song,” and I totally forgot about it.
Marks
Axel’s there. Get some sleep. Meet at eight-thirty at Wags.
I close my laptop, set it down, stand, and then stretch as I watch Cora sleep, allowing myself to wonder what my child would look like today. I can only imagine what it has been like for Chloe.
I feel like a fool that she was under our nose this whole time—well, sort of. She’s listed as a student, so I didn’t consider it, which will never happen again. I am elated that we’ve found her and that she’s safe.
But now, having dug into her social media, I see how easily it would have been for someone to manipulate her. She’s sweet and trusting, which is beautiful and sad, so fucking sad that we have to train ourselves and others to be aware that scum like this is out there, build that wall, throw on armor, guard ourselves and our hearts. Gone are the days when “it takes a village” applies. The borders are no more. Gone are the days when women could be women; God forbid you to appear soft and sweet. Femininity makes you vulnerable.
I suppose it’s a good thing I can’t have a child. I’d be sleeping under their beds, in their classrooms, and in the bushes when they went to a sleepover. Anyone who looked at them I’d be doing background checks on. I would never sleep.
