Adela
I woke up at dawn for our third official date. The second date Chris took me back to his place and he was so sweet to me I disregarded the strewn clothes and four roommates, focusing only on his lips melted against mine. And now we were here, on the beach, and he was the picture of everything I’d always wanted, an orange surfboard beneath his arm and eyes that never strayed from me.
“You ready for me to teach you how to surf?”
There was something about Chris. Maybe it was the way he rocked his jaw side to side when he wasn’t talking or the creamy whites of his eyes or how I could imagine him as a toddler, gripping his mother’s pointer finger and leading her toward this ocean. I couldn’t help but want to be his. When I was with him, the pregnancy disappeared. The loneliness evaporated. Florida became a possibility for alternate universes, alternate endings.
I followed Chris toward the tide.
His tattoos covered his torso, and I didn’t normally like tattoos, but on him it made me want to graze the peaks of his body, the outline of his ribs showing briefly beneath a dragon and the words Only God Can Judge Me. When I asked him about the dragon, he said it was his protector, made him breathe fire when he was angry, and he told me it would help him protect me too. I think I might have blushed.
He was a good teacher, didn’t use a lot of words but would get on the board and show me where to place my feet, how to crouch and follow the white rush of wave, and then he’d give me his board and let me try. The first three times, I immediately fell backward and my spine hit the shallow bottom of sand, causing me to draw in a breath of hot salt water and cough it back up. Chris rubbed my back, his hand slipping closer to the horizontal stretch marks where my hips grew wide beneath my bathing suit. I giggled and moved away from him to try again.
The fourth time, I was able to get my feet farther up on the board and crouch low, and I felt the exact moment when the board started to glide along the wave, when it lifted me and I felt what it would be like to walk on water, just a layer of foam between me and it, and it was exhilarating.
Chris picked me up and twirled me around and I instinctively wrapped my legs around his torso and let him kiss me, let him kiss the scratches on my neck, let my body grow hot even in the crisp morning, before hopping off him. Part of me wanted to ask him to take me back to his car and touch me bent over in his backseat. But I also wanted him to treat me like I was special. I wanted him to talk to me about the ocean, about the fish. Only then could I let him know my body the way he knew water, the way we both did.
After an hour of catching and chasing, catching and chasing, the waves started dying down and he asked me if I wanted to see something and I said yes, even though Noni would be waking up and calling down for me to come eat breakfast now.
He took my hand, laced his fingers through mine the way I’d seen my friend Lindsay’s boyfriends hold her hand, so the sweat between our fingers grew sticky and it would hurt to pull apart. Chris led me up the sand to where the dunes made mountains between us and the road, and he helped me not trip as we climbed one dune and then wound down a path until we were standing in a little crater between two dunes.
It was cooler down there, hidden from the height of the sun, and Chris leaned his surfboard up against the tall side of the crater and pressed me to it, soft, careful not to mess up my hair. He kissed me, his hand still locked in mine, and I wanted to be close to him. I wanted to know him as deeply as the sea knew these dunes, perpetually chasing each other.
“We don’t have to do nothing,” he breathed between kisses. “I meant it when I said I wanted it to be special. For you.”
I leaned back and looked up at him. “This is special,” I said. “I want to.”
He asked if I was sure, which made me all the more so, and the next thing I knew his shorts were around his knees and he was pulling at the crotch of my swimsuit.
“It’s too tight,” I said. It made me wish I had a bikini.
“Take it off, then.”
I didn’t want him to see me so exposed, reduced to nothing but skin, even if he saw the small protrusion of stomach and didn’t know it wasn’t there a month ago and would only grow from here.
“Let me just change really quick,” I said, ducking from beneath him. I rifled through my bag and pulled out the dress I’d worn over my swimsuit on my way to the beach. I pulled it on and then carefully maneuvered the suit off until it was a wet bunch in my hand. I let it drop to the sand.
“You modest, huh?” Chris smiled. “I like that. Not a lotta girls are like that no more. You’re different.”
He still thought I was special, even when I didn’t own a bikini and I was too afraid to let him see all of me. I turned back to him and kissed him, not like I had in his car the first time. This time, I kissed him with force, like I wanted to devour him, because I did, and I reached between the two of us and felt him hard and he whispered how beautiful I was as he lifted me up and pressed me to the sand wall and did what no one else had ever done: before he burrowed himself inside me and grunted, before he told me to get on my knees, before he held a thumb to my windpipe, he took those calloused fingers and circled my clit, made my head swarm.
Made me sweat and want more and I almost couldn’t believe that it could feel like this, that this is what it was to be special, to be loved. He fingered me next, kissed me slow and then quick and then slow again, teased a nipple between his teeth. Not once did he try to lift my dress, though. He worked around the fabric, twisted it in his fist, grazed his arm against the hem as he touched me.
When he finally leveled his pelvis to mine and pushed, it only burned for a second. And after that second, I started to like it. Not for the feeling exactly, but for the way he nuzzled in my neck as he thrust, for the way he kept one hand always laced in mine, even after he came into the sand, even after he pulled away.
“You’re perfect,” he breathed. I wished we were in a bed so I could curl into his chest and fall asleep. I wished we could stay there forever.
Chris pulled his shorts back up. “Don’t want your grandmama getting mad, though. Lemme take you home.”
I picked my wet swimsuit off the ground and put it in my bag, painfully aware of the sand in my ass crack and the fact I had no underwear, but it didn’t matter because Chris didn’t stop liking me after I let him have my body. He lifted me up out of the sand crater like a small child and held my hand the whole way back to his car.
The drive was short and I didn’t know when I’d be able to sneak out and see him next, so I had to ask the question I’d been working up to, just in case this really became something.
“Do you think you’d ever want to have kids?”
Chris’s eyes were locked on the road, but one hand stayed in my lap, still wrapped in mine. He cleared his throat. “Actually, I got kids. Two, but their mama’s crazy and we’re not together or nothing, don’t worry.”
Two kids? He must have had them when he was my age, one after the other, and I didn’t know if I should be upset or relieved, if this was a sign he was mature enough to be a father or a sign he was not mine to have, that he already had a family of his own. I wasn’t angry or even comforted by the idea of him already having kids. Instead, I was jealous.
I tried to sound casual. “How long were you with their mom? You must’ve been young when you got together.”
Chris shrugged. “Not that young. Twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one?” My whole body contracted at once, seized and held itself as I knew the question I was about to ask was not one I wanted answered. “Chris, how old are you?”
He glanced over at me and then back to the road and I couldn’t figure out what his face was saying. Was he as scared to tell me as I was to know?
“I just turned twenty-seven.”
Twenty-seven. I let my head fall back on the seat and stared ahead. Cement, gravel, dirt. Weeds and willows. I let the landscape change and felt myself morph with it. Fear, rage, disappointment, the tug of hope. I knew I had every reason to never speak his name again the moment I left his car, but when I looked back over at him and the glare of the sun dancing on his temples as his gaze moved back and forth, from me to the road, me to the road, I realized I didn’t want to.
He was quiet when he spoke. “I thought you knew.”
I nodded, leaned over, and kissed his cheek. “Of course I did. I just thought you were twenty-six.” It wasn’t true, but I wanted to see the sadness melt from his face. I wanted to forget it had happened and think instead of the way he touched me in our cove of sand.
“I’m sure you’re a great dad,” I said.
He pulled up to the community center, where he would drop me off.
“I think so. But I wanna have more kids. With somebody more like me, you know?” He smiled, earnest. “I’ve got no doubt you’d be a damn good mama, Adela.”
And for the first time, I thought, yeah, maybe I would. Maybe his dragon would come out and create a barrier between the world and us, our family. Maybe his age meant all of this was even more possible, that he could be mine and I could be his and we could make a family that was ours. I could cook the fish he caught and follow him deep into the ocean, stand at the height of the wave and be unrelenting, beside a man who would love me despite it all. Maybe he was exactly what I’d always hoped for.
“You ready, sweetie?” The doctor raised the wand up so I could see its full length and my legs snapped shut at the sight of it.
My parents insisted I go to the obstetrician every four weeks of the pregnancy, and I’d spent the first weeks in Florida arguing with Noni about not wanting to see the only ob-gyn in the county, since I knew that he would tell somebody who would tell somebody and next thing I knew, the whole school would think I was just another one of the Girls.
It took weeks for Noni to be able to find an appointment and take the day off to drive me all the way to Tallahassee for it. I was just happy to get out of school early so I didn’t have to deal with Emory staring at me, her pupils quivering and begging me to talk to her.
But I didn’t know they were going to hold up this long wand and tell me that it was going to go inside me.
“Can’t you just rub it on my stomach?” I asked, squeezing Noni’s hand.
The doctor, a middle-aged white woman with the biggest lip fillers I’d ever seen, smiled softly, which made her look like she was about to cry or burst out laughing, and said, “We won’t get a very good picture this far along if we don’t go in transvaginally. Mm-kay?” And, just like that, she pulled a latex glove over the wand so the other four finger holes just flapped around at the bottom and lubed it up, putting my feet in these little holders, lifting under the paper sheet she’d given me, and then sticking that rubber glove wand directly inside me.
I grunted and Noni whispered, “It’s not like you haven’t had nothing up there, Delly, just relax.”
So I shut my eyes and let the feeling subside to a slight pressure, and I tried to picture myself in the water, started counting strokes. One, the delicate blow of bubbles with every breath. Two, the sweet sting of my rotator cuffs swinging in a butterfly. Three, Chris’s face as I came up for air on that surfboard.
Chris had probably been in a room like this one, with some other girl, when his children were so small they could only be visible by a stick shoved deep inside that girl. I got so lost in the water and Chris and wondering what this other girl whose children he’d fathered was like that Noni had to squeeze my hand and whisper, “Look,” for me to flash open my eyes.
On the screen, the doctor was pointing to a black hole in the white static of the image, and inside that hole there were three white blobs. She froze the screen and dragged a cursor across the two connected blobs, turned to me with her lip fillers flipping up in her smile like a duck, and said, “There’s your baby.”
“That thing? That’s a baby?” It just seemed too inconsequential, too fuzzy, to be a real human.
“Yes, sweetheart. Your baby,” the doctor said.
I pointed to the other white blob above the ones that were apparently my baby’s head and torso. “What’s that thing, then?”
“That’s the yolk sac. It’s what’s feeding that baby and keeping it alive until it grows a placenta.”
The doctor kept taking pictures at different angles, muttering measurements as she inputted them into my chart, and then she found the heartbeat and let me listen to it, but that wasn’t what got me, wasn’t what stilled everything else and rushed through me like the howl of wind a car leaves behind as it barrels down the road. And I was standing in its wake, cold. Like I’d been in the water for hours, my skin pruned, and my body made of soft flesh and crevices eager to break open at a too-harsh touch.
It was not the heartbeat that did this, but that third white blob and the deep black surrounding it. All the nausea coursing through me had meant nothing until now, when it became evidence of my body constructing not only that little thing that would probably become a baby but my body creating this other small thing that had channeled me and the spasms of my body into keeping something alive.
I thought of those three yolks I’d punctured and poured down the drain weeks ago and wondered if my little yolk sac would run yellow if this doctor split me open. And that black around it was my own body of water, floating this would-be baby around inside me, and as small as I felt in the ocean, I wondered if this would-be baby felt small inside me too. I knew it didn’t feel anything yet, but it would, if I let it, if I didn’t try to stop it. If I cared enough to want to hear one day how it felt to exist in my body’s sea.
“I know you said you didn’t get your period regularly, so we were estimating based on the presumed date of conception, but it’s looking like this baby is measuring a little small at about seven weeks right now instead of eight, so the new due date looks like it’s going to be May fourteenth, 2024. A good birthday, don’t you think?” She started typing this up and then printing the little photos from the screen. “Are you thinking of names yet? I know it’s early, but some people already have ’em picked out.”
I squeezed Noni’s hand tighter. “Uh, no, I’m not sure that I’m even going to have anything to do with it. You’ll name it, right, Noni?”
She looked down at me. “Whatever you want, Delly. You don’t gotta know right now. Let’s wait till you big, hmm?”
Big. Yes, I was going to get big. I was going to get so big I wouldn’t be able to hide it from anyone at school or Chris or myself, even. And, at some point, I was going to have to make a choice and that choice would change so much, and the moment the doctor handed me the photo of my three blobs, I burst out sobbing. She pursed her lips and left us alone in the room so I could pull on my panties, but I didn’t move. Noni scooped me into her chest and said, “I know, baby. I know.”
While Noni went to the bathroom, I waited for her outside the car and dialed Lindsay’s number. Lindsay was my closest friend back home in Indiana, and even though we’d only texted a few times since I got to Florida, I still thought of her like that. My best friend. The person you call when you panic. Lindsay didn’t pick up until the last ring and then, just when I was sure she wouldn’t, she answered.
“Del? Why are you calling me? I’ve, like, literally never talked to anyone on the phone who wasn’t, like, my mom. Do you want to FaceTime? I’ve got an hour till practice.”
“Um, I can’t. I’m waiting for my grandma.”
Neither of us said anything for a minute. I listened to the sound of running water that I realized was Lindsay peeing and then a flush.
I broke the silence. “I’m having, like, the worst week. Will you just tell me something, distract me? Like has Violet been made captain yet? Has David said anything to you about me?”
Over the past weeks, I’d been scrolling my phone and looking at the photos of people in my class posting homages to the summer, bikini shots at hotel pools, and sunglasses hiding all traces of difference in their faces. I hadn’t posted since my last swim competition in July, and I wished I had something good to post, something that would feign normalcy without giving me away. But Dad was clear: no one could know I was in Florida. They’d told the school I was going on an opportunity abroad after Coach said it would be best for my athletic career if we kept this to ourselves.
Even with all the lurking I’d been doing, I couldn’t figure out any real information: Who was dating who now? Was Violet excelling without me? Had David thought of me last week and decided I might have been worth more than a single fuck?
Lindsay’s voice went high. “Um, well, I’m not really sure, but, uh, you should probably know that people are talking about you. I mean, people have just been coming to me asking if it was true, that you were, you know.”
“That I was what?”
“Del!” Lindsay’s tone implied it should be obvious. “You know, that you’re…with child, or whatever.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t thought about Violet telling anyone else. Or maybe Lindsay had told. Or Coach. It could have been anyone, looking for some good gossip to pass the slow midwestern days. I was instantly humiliated, maybe even more than I had been when I threw up in the pool in front of Chris.
“I told them it wasn’t like you were one of those Jefferson High girls, you’re not ghetto like that. And I tried to explain that it wasn’t very feminist of them to put all of it on you, ’cause it’s David’s fault too, but David says he’s not even the dad.”
I didn’t think I cared until she said it. But it punctured right through me, and I felt all my feelings leak from a hole in me that couldn’t be patched.
I’d thought David was going to be my first love. Some days, I still thought he was. I didn’t have a lot of extra time, outside training and swim practice and school, but whenever I caught a single moment of breath, I thought about David. His hair all rusty brown, his eyes golden green, his smile clumsy. I memorized his class schedule and lingered in the halls between periods just to run into him. He barely even looked at me, until I went to the only non-swim party I attended in all of high school.
It was the squishy center of summer and me and Lindsay went to her ex-boyfriend’s house because he was throwing a rager for all the kids who weren’t vacationing or doing summer programs. I didn’t drink or smoke or anything, so I stayed back on the edges of the party while Lindsay ran wild. By midnight, the only people left in the living room were me, David, and some freshman boy I didn’t know. David and the freshman were playing a football video game on the TV and David beat the freshman. He threw down the remote and got up to get a drink. That’s when David looked at me.
He was high, I could tell because his golden-green eyes looked like they’d been dipped in the soapy liquid kids blow bubbles out of. You look good tonight, he said. My hands sweat cold. You want to go upstairs? I nodded. David took me to Lindsay’s ex’s parents’ bedroom. He laid me down on their bed and when he said he didn’t have a condom, I shrugged and said it was probably fine. I only got my period a couple times a year anyway, and I hadn’t had it in three months. He smiled down at me and said, You’re cool, you know. I kissed him and thought I was in love.
Now I wasn’t sure if I was stupid or if, maybe, we would’ve ended up together if it wasn’t for the pregnancy. It was humiliating to think he might know, though, that he might be out there wishing he could take that night at the party back.
“David knows?” I asked.
“How could he not? Adela, don’t be dumb, you knew what was going to happen when you decided to have a baby at sixteen.”
“I didn’t decide to do anything.” Lindsay was always doing this, blaming me for things, eager to know my secrets only to turn around and judge them. I didn’t want to get pregnant. I guess I just didn’t do enough to prevent it. “Well, you can tell them all I’m having a great time here. I live right on the beach and I actually met a guy. So David can go around saying he’s not the dad all he wants. I have someone who I’m sure would kill to be my kid’s dad.”
I was sure Chris would too. Especially if he found out when it was too late for him to have an opinion on it. He already had kids, what was one more?
“Really? Who?”
“His name’s Chris. He’s more…mature.”
“Oh.” Lindsay was mad, I knew because she started clicking her tongue. “Well, I should let you get back to your mature life.”
I listened to the silence, thinking she’d retract it and apologize, but she didn’t. “Fine,” I said. “My new friends are waiting for me anyway.”
I hung up first so Lindsay couldn’t, and even though I hadn’t planned on seeing any of the Girls again, now I felt desperate for someone who would understand, someone who would know what it means to have just seen that little yolk sac and be changed in the aftermath.
Noni arrived back at the car and we both climbed in and got back on the highway. After an hour of listening to her old-school radio, I spoke.
“Can we make a stop on the way home?”
“Where you wanna go? I don’t got no McDonald’s money on me right now.”
I shook my head from the passenger seat, where Noni said I could ride just for this one trip. “Will you take me to Emory Reid’s house?”
When I knocked on Emory’s door, I was ready for her grandparents to answer, to explain who I was and charm them if I needed to, but neither of them showed up on her porch. Emory came to the door instead, without Kai, the first time I’d ever seen her without a baby strapped to her, and she immediately started pushing her greasy hair away from her face, her roots growing in dark brown, her forehead squirming, and I didn’t have the words, not yet, so I handed her the little photo of the ocean in my body and, this time, when Emory reached for my hand, I didn’t hesitate. I let her take it.