Dear X,

I’m just going to lean into the letter thing. I hope that’s okay. I mean, if it isn’t, I guess you could stop reading these. If you even are reading these, assuming they’re not sitting in a dusty box somewhere. I don’t know.

What I do know is it’s prom night tonight, and I’m thinking about all the girls at my old school with their dresses and their corsages and their dates, and that makes me think about Dawson. But I know I wouldn’t have gone to prom with him, even if I hadn’t ended up here.

I hate that I’m thinking about Dawson, obsessing about him even though things are so over between us. It feels weak.

Everyone’s moping around here today. I don’t know if it’s prom or something in the water. People have been giving me a wider berth than usual since I punched Amber, and I’m fine with that. She got a black eye, and I did feel a little bad about that until I remembered the way she asked me if I even knew who the father of my baby was. Which makes me want to black her other eye.

Anyway. We’re all kind of down. Heather’s still gone. Brit’s especially moody—I could hear her crying from pretty much anywhere in the dorms this morning. It’s not her fault, though. This is not how she thought she’d end up. She bought into the myth where the prince comes and carries you off into the sunset. You grow up watching movies like The Little Mermaid, where Ariel is sixteen, and she’s even an entirely different species from the prince, but it all works out for her anyway. Happily ever after. Love conquers all.

But here’s good old reality: if you’re in a relationship when you’re sixteen, everything is probably not going to work out. There’s too much after when you’re sixteen. Ever after really doesn’t have a chance. Happily ever after is a joke.

I want to rewrite Little Mermaid so Ariel shows up on Eric’s doorstep and says, “Hey, you know that time when you ‘kissed the girl’? Well, I’m pregnant with our fish-tailed baby. So man up, Eric. My dad doesn’t have a shotgun, but he has this huge trident, and he thinks we should get married.” But then the next thing she knows, Eric’s on the fastest ship out of town. Poor poor Ariel.

Clearly I’m jaded. I’m sitting here all knocked up, and there’s no Prince Charming in sight.

Still, I want to emphasize: it’s not your fault, either.

I went to the Sub that night. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? It turned out (and I can’t believe I didn’t automatically get this) that SUB stood for the Student Union Building at a college. I showed up at nine thirty, so he wouldn’t think I was too into it, and there were handmade signs directing me to the basement, where music was wafting up from a little theater. It was crowded—standing room only. I walked in and there he was, the blond guy from the Pearl Jam concert, sitting up on the stage with his guitar. His voice, which I didn’t get to properly hear at Pearl Jam, instantly gave me goose bumps, this slightly smoky, half-whispered melody, like Dave Matthews with a touch of Eddie Vedder. He saw me right away, caught my eye, smiled. He has great lips—I’ll give him that, this little smirk that once upon a time could make me weak in the knees.

I’d had boys look at me that way before. I am, like I told you before, fairly average in the looks department—average height, average weight, kind of flat up top but then I’m only sixteen, right? But I have nice eyes, or so I’ve been told. I wonder if you’ll get my eyes or his. Like I said, you’d be better off if you end up looking like him. He’s boy-beautiful. He knows it, too, he knows every time he’s up there on the stage, crooning away, smiling that little smile, and he brushes the hair out of his eyes and glances out at some girl in the back of the room, she’s going to swoon.

I wasn’t any different. My breath caught every time he met my eyes.

The music was good. I wouldn’t have fallen for him if the music wasn’t good. At least I had some standards. And he was clever with the lyrics:

You think you know what I’m about.

You think you’re going to ferret me out.

But you forget I’m the fox, girl, you’re the hen.

From here it’s only a matter of when.

You’re probably thinking I should have known, right? He wasn’t exactly trying to hide who he was or pretend he was something else. I liked that about him, actually. He seemed more mature than the high school boys I was surrounded by all day—more certain of himself. He seemed like he knew what he wanted.

And right then, it seemed like he wanted me.

I stood in the back and swayed to his music, smiled at him when he smiled at me.

After his set was done he came over and stood in front of me, grinning.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You came.”

“Obviously.”

“You liked it, right?”

“You didn’t tell me it was your band.” I didn’t want to fawn all over him. I still had a shred of dignity. But I couldn’t stop smiling. It was embarrassing, how much I was smiling. My cheeks hurt with it.

“Come on. You liked it.”

“It was all right. You’re . . .” I looked up at him. More goose bumps. “You’re pretty good.”

“You’re pretty.”

Damn. Nobody had ever talked like that to me before. It felt like being in a movie, like something that was already written out for us to say. I was pretty sure I was blushing. But I tried to be confident.

“You’re pretty, too,” I said. “And you can really sing, can’t you?”

He took that in stride. “Among other things. You want to get out of here?”

“Okay.”

He nodded to his drummer and took my hand, and the next thing I knew, we were back at his dorm room, where he told me he wanted to . . . listen to records.

“Records?” I repeated stupidly. “Like, vinyl?”

He laughed this husky laugh. “It’s the best sound.” He gestured to where, crammed between the bed and his desk, he had this little table with a record player on it.

That’s when my obsession with vinyl officially started. That night. He had this amazing collection—not just the alternative stuff like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, the White Stripes, Radiohead, but classics like John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix and Billy Joel.

He was so hot. Sitting on his bed, listening to the music, he’d tilt his head back and sing along, and goose bumps would jump up again all along my arms.

Here was a person who loved music as much as I did. I’d never met anybody like that.

And, as I mentioned, he was hot.

So. At one point we were sitting on his bed, listening to Leonard Cohen’s low, gravelly voice sing “Hallelujah,” the sound so completely pure pouring out of the record player. He was right about the sound. I had my eyes closed, letting the song wash over me. Then I heard Dawson make this pained noise, this sigh, and when I opened my eyes he was so close I could see the blond tips of his eyelashes.

“Hi,” I murmured.

“You have amazing eyes,” he said. “They’re so blue.”

He kissed me. Then he kissed me again, harder, and kissed me again. And again. And again. He had this little bit of stubble, which was gold like his hair so you couldn’t see it unless you were up close or the light hit his face a certain way, but that night we kissed so much that his stubble scratched up my chin. It was raw and red, after.

We didn’t have sex, if you’re wondering. Not that night. That night we listened to music. We talked, a little. He told me that he was a singer, yes, and he could play guitar (at one point he pulled a blue Stratocaster from underneath the bed and played me a bit of “Purple Rain”) and he had dreams of making a record of his own someday, but he was also an actor, a painter, and he wanted to try writing a screenplay about his life.

Because his life so far was obviously interesting enough to base a movie on.

“You’re a Renaissance man,” I said, which he seemed to like.

I talked about concerts I’d been to. Because I couldn’t think of anything else that was comparatively interesting.

But mostly we played records and made out. We might have gotten around to sex, actually, (it was getting hot and heavy) but at some point the door opened and another guy came in, an Asian guy with shaggy hair and a Star Wars shirt.

I have to admit, the first time I ever saw him, I wrote him off as classic nerd.

“Oh,” the guy said, frowning the second he laid eyes on me. “Sorry. There’s not like a sock on the door or anything.”

Dawson sighed. “This is my roommate, Ted.”

So no, no sex that night. I probably shouldn’t tell you about the sex, anyway. No one wants to hear about their parents getting it on. Even if we’re not your real parents. You know it happened. I know it happened. You’re the proof.

It was my first time, though, that first time with Dawson. It was a few weeks later, on Christmas break, when most of the students were back home and the dorms were perfectly quiet. And we did use protection, that first time. Or at least I thought we did. I asked, “Uh, do you have a condom?” and he said, “Sure,” like I’d asked him to get me a glass of lemonade or something, like he was being a good host, and then he put one on. But when it was over, the condom wasn’t on anymore. And I was too busy trying to understand my own body, the way it had hurt (it hurt more than I expected it to, although my friends warned me it would hurt), how his bare chest felt against mine and the roughness of his hairy legs tangled with my legs, a whole new world of sensations, to ask him about the missing condom.

Sometimes now I want to drive over and ask him: Where was the condom?

I didn’t ask him. I kept going to see him, week after week, and for a while we were what I’d call happy. Dawson was like a drug, and I couldn’t stop taking him over and over. I went to one of his improv nights at the college, and he was the best actor on that stage—so clever, so quick on his feet. He snuck me into the art studio to see a painting he was working on. It was a self-portrait where there were two Dawsons, back-to-back, one painted in red and one in black. He wrote a song for me. It was called “Blue” and compared my eyes to the ocean and the sky when it storms and a chunk of turquoise and the wing of a mountain bluebird.

I thought he was so imaginative. So cool. So perfect.

I thought I was in love with him. I really did. I did that pathetic thing where I wrote our names together in the margins of my notebooks at school. I smiled when I thought about him. I started looking into applying to the same college, even though he’d be a senior when I was a freshman, but still. I wanted to be around him, however I could.

But, for all that, we never talked about what was going on between us. We didn’t label ourselves. We didn’t make commitments. We made out. And hung out. I thought that meant we were together. I was his girlfriend. At least I thought I was. Which felt special. Which felt right.

I had to pause to get lunch. Nothing sounds good these days. Sometimes even the idea of food makes me barf. I should be over the pukes by now, as I’m in week twenty-one of this sucktastic adventure called pregnancy, and morning sickness is supposed to peter off around week sixteen or so, according to the What to Expect book they gave me when I got here, but I still throw up pretty regularly. At home I stopped eating very much, but I can’t do that now. The people around here check in all the time to make sure we’ve received the proper nourishment. And snacks. They are all about snacks here. Melly has this theory that the way to ward off morning sickness is to eat a grape like every ten minutes. “The trick is to never let your stomach get empty,” she says. It worked when she was pregnant with her kids.

Anyway, Brit was crying in the lunch room. I grabbed an apple and a hard-boiled egg and went to hide in my room so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. I wish I could help Brit. I do. Out of all of us, she’s been screwed over the most. She’s so young it’s shocking that she’s pregnant. I mean, when I was thirteen I didn’t even know about sex. Her baby daddy is a grown man. A married man. Her coach. A pervert. He belongs in jail. These people—the adults: the coaches and mentors and tutors and parents, they’re supposed to protect you. But they don’t. They always seem to end up doing more harm than good.

It was quiet back at the dorms. The other girls were all at lunch.

Sometimes when I’m hanging out here by myself, I think about the way these rooms used to be forty or fifty years ago, crammed with pregnant girls. I try to imagine four girls in this little room, four beds squashed into this space where now there’s only one lumpy twin bed and a built-in desk and a dresser. Four girls gathered around the little sink in the corner where I brush my teeth, which I hate doing lately, because my gums bleed. It’s like a horror movie up in here every morning and night. Four girls would be pretty crowded. But there’s strength in numbers, too.

So where was I? Oh yeah, Dawson. The missing condom. The days I thought I was falling in love with him. The regrettable song about how blue my eyes are. And now you.

Which brings me to about three months ago, when I sat in the hall outside his dorm room again, waiting for him to come back from play practice or choir or the art studio or wherever he was, because he was always out somewhere. It was the day after Valentine’s Day, I remember, and I hadn’t heard from Dawson in a couple weeks. I’d come to tell him about my little problem. Our little problem, I should say. I was leaning against his door, my knees tucked up to my chest, and every now and then I’d touch my stomach in complete disbelief, thinking about this weird little thing growing in there—this thing that was going to mess up everything. (No offense, X. I was pretty wigged.) And I thought, at least if he knows about it, we can decide what to do together.

Hours passed. He didn’t come. It was like ten p.m., and this was a huge problem, because I had a newly imposed “oh my God you’re PREGNANT, you obviously need boundaries” ten p.m. curfew on school nights, and I knew my stepmom was going to use me breaking the rules as yet one more reason I wasn’t qualified to be a member of the family. That and I had to pee.

So I started to cry a little (I’m not a big crier, but the hormones were going strong, and things seemed bleak in the moment) and when I looked up again, there was that guy Ted staring at me.

I got to my feet. “Have you seen Dawson?” I mumbled, wiping at my face.

“I think he’s doing a tech rehearsal for Hamlet. Uh . . . come in.” Ted unlocked the door and gestured for me to go into their room. He was still looking at me like I was a grenade that had been tossed in his lap, like I was going to explode.

Maybe I was.

I went in. It was better than sitting out in the hall. As I passed the closet I caught sight of myself in the full-length mirror. I had raccoon eyes from the crying and the mascara. My face was all broken out. I looked about the same as I felt.

“Here.” Ted handed me a tissue. I sat on Dawson’s bed—where all the trouble had started—and blew my nose. Ted was messing around with an electric kettle and rustling through drawers, until the next time I looked up, and he was holding out a mug of what looked like tea.

“I don’t have milk,” he said. “Sorry.”

For some reason I started laughing. I get like that when I’m upset, like when it’s the worst possible time to laugh, it bubbles up from nowhere, and I can’t stop. It’s inappropriate—I mean, I laughed at my grandmother’s funeral, and I loved my gran. This time was worse. This time I laughed so hard my sides hurt.

“Thanks,” I said after I calmed down. I took the tea and drank deeply, the hot liquid warming all the way from my throat into my empty stomach. I clutched the mug in both hands, warming them, too.

“You want a Pop-Tart?” Ted asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s cherry.”

“Okay.”

I hadn’t had a Pop-Tart in years. My stepmom didn’t allow that kind of unhealthy shit in the house. It was delicious, coating my tongue with a sweet greasy cherry-flavored film. I wolfed it down.

Ted sat on his bed across the narrow room. He didn’t seem to know what to say to me in this definitely-awkward situation.

“So he’s in Hamlet?” I said after I was done stuffing my face. I brushed crumbs off Dawson’s red-and-blue plaid bedspread and tried to wipe the mascara out from under my eyes.

“I guess so. It’s all he talks about.”

“Is he Hamlet?”

“No. Freshmen play the smaller roles, I think,” Ted said. “He’s like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern or one of those.”

I nodded.

“Do you want to listen to some music?” He knew from his other encounters with me that I liked music. That was probably the only thing he knew about me.

“Sure.”

He didn’t try to play any of Dawson’s records. He put on a Green Day CD that he played using his computer. I listened, more out of politeness than anything else. Green Day isn’t my thing. But Ted was nice. He’d gotten a haircut since that first time I’d seen him. He was wearing a shirt that read Q: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

I still don’t know the answer to that question. I never read the back of his shirt.

“You’re into computers?” I asked.

“I’m a double major—math and physics. But I want to work with computers. I’m good at code.”

“Cool.” I had no idea what code was, but okay.

“What do you want to do?” he said.

“I’m not in college,” I said.

“You don’t have to be in college to want to do something with your life,” he said.

I threw up. I didn’t really have any warning, so I just leaned down and barfed on the tile floor, trying to miss the comforter. Instead I got a pair of black Converse sneakers that’d been sitting next to the bed.

Ted jumped to his feet. He was gone for a few minutes and then back with a stack of brown paper towels from the bathroom. He got on his knees to clean up the puke, but I tried to stop him.

“You don’t have to do that. I can—” The smell hit me, and I vomited again. Less, this time. But still. I wasn’t making it better.

I sat back on the bed, sweating. Ted quickly wiped up the floor. It was mostly Pop-Tart. I don’t think I’m ever going to eat another cherry Pop-Tart for as long as I live. He left again for a minute and came back with an actual mop and a bucket and mopped the floor.

He was so nice.

“You’re so nice,” I said. “You’re like the nicest boy I’ve ever met.”

“How many drinks have you had?”

“I’m not drunk.” I shook my head as he started to make some more tea. “No, thanks.” It might be a while before I drink tea again, too. “I’m okay.”

“You don’t seem okay,” he observed.

No shit.

“I’m pregnant.” I don’t know why I came out with it like that. Maybe it seemed easier than making up an alternative explanation.

Ted sat down. “Oh.”

“Yeah. I need to talk to Dawson.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“You could go to the theater and find him. I could walk you.”

“I don’t want to interrupt him. It’s kind of a big conversation to have. And I should do it in private, don’t you think?”

“Right. Well, he could be back anytime. You can hang out and wait.”

“Thank you,” I murmured. I lay back on Dawson’s bed and curled onto my side. Green Day was still playing. “Good Riddance.”

“I hate this song,” I breathed into Dawson’s pillow, and then I was asleep.

When I woke up Dawson was there.

“What the hell happened to my shoes?” he wanted to know.

“Hi.” I blinked up at him, disoriented. Ted was nowhere to be seen. The clock on the nightstand read past two in the morning. The parents were going to murder me. Or not, it occurred to me, as murdering me would also be murdering an unborn child, and that would be a PR nightmare. I smiled.

Dawson looked tired. He had dark circles under his eyes. But then I realized it was stage makeup.

“I don’t usually come home to find girls in my bed,” he said. “Not that I’m complaining.”

He pulled his shirt over his head and made like he was going to get into bed with me. I scrambled to sit up.

“No, I—”

He kissed me, then pulled away and frowned.

“Was it you who puked on my shoes? Those are my lucky shoes. I was wearing those shoes the night of the Pearl Jam concert. When I met you.”

“Maybe they’re not so lucky,” I said weakly.

“Oh my God, babe. Are you drunk?”

“I’m sixteen,” I said. “Why does everyone assume I’m drunk?” There had been a few parties, maybe, a few instances where I was not my best self, and that was mostly to blow off steam and give the finger to my straight-laced parental units. But I didn’t make a habit of it. I’m not a total lush.

Dawson shrugged. “I got drunk when I was sixteen.”

“No, I’m . . .” I took a breath. This was big. What would he do? What would he say?

I was about to tell him, I swear. But as I was looking into his face—that perfect face that was staring at me so unknowingly, so trustingly—I couldn’t do it to him. I couldn’t watch his expression when he realized how this was going to mess up everything. No offense, X. But it was. It kind of already had.

“I have to go,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean to be here so long.”

“What? I just got here. Why did you—”

“I thought we could hang out tonight. I didn’t know about the dress rehearsal. And I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I have to get home.”

“Okay.” He walked me to my car. He kissed me. It was the last time he’d ever kiss me. But I didn’t know that then.

I got in the car and rolled down the driver’s side window.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

He smiled. “Not if I call you first.”

When I got home everybody was asleep. No one gave me a lecture or threatened my life or anything. The house was perfectly silent. I got into my pajamas and washed my tear- and mascara-streaked face and lay down in my bed. Then I mentally beat myself up for a while. Stuff like:

How could you not tell him?

What, you can spill the beans to the roommate, but not the actual guy who needs to know?

He deserved to know.

He had to know.

I had to tell him.

So I went to my desk and wrote him a letter. It wasn’t a long letter. Not like this one is turning out to be. It basically said: “Sorry, I didn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know how. I’m pregnant. I think I’m having the baby, but we can talk about it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Call me.”

This letter writing thing’s getting to be a habit.

I put the letter in an envelope I took out of my dad’s office, addressed it to Dawson’s college mailbox, stole a stamp, and stuck it in the morning’s outgoing mail.

Can you guess what happened next?

He didn’t call me.

Shocking, right?

I got the message, though. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Or you. We are on our own.

I guess that’s going to be a lot for you to process. Maybe you don’t want to know any of it. Maybe you want to stay out of it, too. And I couldn’t blame you for that. But now you know the story of your not-parents’ star-crossed love affair.

In with a bang, out with a whimper.

Did he break my heart? A little. Yes. But that’s how it goes. You live, you learn. Better to have loved and . . .

Whatever.

Peace out, X.

Yours truly,

S