The first thing I want you to know is that none of this is your fault. Ha, you can legitimately have the last word in every argument, you can use the excuse we’ve all been using with our parents since we were thirteen: ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ In your case, you don’t know how true that is. It feels weird, writing to something that exists but doesn’t yet, if you know what I mean. At the moment, I am just creeped out by the fact that I have two heartbeats. That’s what the doctor told me when he put the stethoscope on my stomach. He said, ‘Can you hear that, Kim, you have another heartbeat down there, listen, can you hear it?’ his eyes shining dopily with awe over the miracle of life. Hell yeah I could hear it, it was going a million miles an hour, like my own heart when I found out the news. Shit, I thought, this baby’s going to have skyrocket-high levels of anxiety at the rate its heart is pumping, and then I wondered whether it was genetic, whether I had already passed on my own hang-ups and sink-downs, and I said to the doctor, ‘It must be really stressed out,’ and you know what he did? He laughed at me, the bastard, and patted me on the belly like I was the baby, and said to me, ‘That’s its normal heartrate. Their hearts beat faster because they are just so much smaller.’

Your grandma, sitting in the chair next to me, wasn’t laughing, wasn’t infused with the miracle of life, even though she was supposed to be. She just stared at the ultrasound screen with a face that was like, well, at least it’s got arms and legs and a head in the right place; and then every time she looked at the doctor it was with a face that was like, Doctor I had nothing to do with this. And then driving home, she’s at me.

‘Why couldn’t you have kept hanging around with those smart Asian girls at school? Nancy would never have got herself into this mess.’

Yeah, Nancy Lim. Your grandma always told me Nancy was fugly. Mum said God had spared Nancy with looks but had knocked himself out giving her brains, which was why her head was so massive. ‘Such a strange big head on that small body,’ Mum used to comment, and I would see-saw from malicious conspiring glee to being resentful of my mother for her pettiness. I looked at Mum from the corner of my eye. Her hands were tight on the steering wheel, like she was manoeuvring a tractor instead of our old Camry that Dad left behind, and I could feel the rays of her anger even before she began speaking.

‘So stupid,’ she spluttered, ‘throwing away your future like that. Do you think you will now have happy ending with the boy?’

I almost laughed out loud. Your grandma’s accent made her ‘happy ending’ sound more dodgy than it was. She kept yelling at me. I had learned long ago not to interrupt one of Mum’s tirades; it was no use. It was like going underwater with waves above you. Sometimes you just had to let the waves pass before you could rear your head again, otherwise you’d just be hopelessly fighting a force beyond your control. ‘You think he’s going to stay around? No, he’s the sort who never want something like this to happen. He’s the sort to marry a Nancy.’

I didn’t say anything ’cause I knew your grandma was so obviously, blindly wrong. As if Luis would get with, let alone marry, Nancy! Aside from the fact that she looked like a walking cranium with her body only there to carry that cerebral matter from class to class, she was the first one I told about you ’cause I could trust her not to turn this into even more of a show than it already was. The others — Cassie, Nhi and Michelle — they were pathetic. I knew they’d be all squealy and OMG, OMG, OMG ’cause this would be the most exciting, terrible thing to have happened to them since Michelle’s parents took her to Vietnam to get that secret cosmetic eyelid surgery ’cause she was underage for the operation here, and then she came back with one eyelid smaller than the other. Yeah, those girls were great at commiserating in misery, but this was not their terrible thing. It was mine, and I knew Nancy would not try to take ownership of my issue and be all drama queen about it.

So I gave her seventeen bucks and she walked into Chemist Warehouse and came out with the test, and we did it in the toilets at Footscray Library, and the test came out with strong traces of you you you in the two blue lines, and I said, ‘Oh shit.’ And Nancy didn’t say, ‘Don’t worry it will all be all right,’ or, ‘Maybe it’s wrong,’ and she didn’t pat me and she didn’t make me feel better. I hated her a little bit then and wished I had told the others, because I knew that at least they would have surrounded me with the bullshit reassurances that a girl sometimes just needs to hear.

And you know what Nancy finally said when she decided to open her mouth? ‘Abortion is legal in Victoria until up to twenty-four weeks.’ WTF?! If I didn’t believe she was seriously aspergic I would have whacked her one. But because since Year 7 I’d convinced myself Nancy had undiagnosed Asperger’s (you know, Asian parents don’t believe in that sort of stuff, so they never got her checked out), I knew she was just trying to be helpful. ‘Nancy, we’re Catholic,’ I managed to say before the toilet door swung open and I shoved the pregnancy stick in the paper-towel bin.

We walked out of the library loos, and of course Nancy didn’t understand me ’cause she was one of those ‘fake’ Catholics — her father only got her baptised so she could go to St Dominica’s. The first day she rocked up to school, hanging around her neck outside her school-uniform jumper was a massive brown rosary with a swinging cross at the bottom. Her dad probably made her wear it. ‘Hey yo, pimping for Christ!’ I called out, and she turned as red as the sacred heart, bless.

Who knew that we’d end up hanging around after school at the library together — she was there to study, I was there mostly to kill time until Mum finished at Diamond Rose Fashions, where she worked selling nylon jumpers and viscose bridesmaid’s dresses to Vietnamese women who all looked a little like variations of LaToya Jackson. Soon we formed a group with the other three girls from our school and my mum was real pleased that I was spending time in the library instead of loitering in Highpoint Shopping Centre with the boys from St Andrews.

Little did your grandma know, hell little did I know, that Nancy had a cousin, Luis, who was hot as. Looked like the lovechild of a Korean boy-band singer and Disney’s Aladdin. First time he came up to Nancy and asked, ‘Whatcha doing?’ I felt a stab of envy — come on, he was approaching Nancy? Why would he hit on her when, come on, yours truly was there, helllooo.

Mum, still driving, interrupted my meanderings down memory lane. She was still going on about how Luis was going to abandon me for Nancy and her ilk, yadda yadda yadda.

‘They’re related, Mum,’ I retorted. ‘That’s sick.’

‘Those Chinese,’ your grandma replied, ‘it’s nothing new, they all marry their cousins anyway, it’s their way of keeping money in the family.’ My mum, so racist.

It wasn’t like Nancy was rich or anything, it was just that she wasn’t so povvo like us. Your grandma made interesting choices: instead of spending $2000 on tutoring fees for me like the rest of the good Asian parents, she spent $2000 on my orthodontist. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I wasn’t grateful for straight-as teeth, but priorities, you know. Mum was also always going on about me eating her out of house and home with my appetite, about me gaining weight and being ‘unwanted’, about me looking sloppy when I went out. Everyone wore hoodies, but she expected me to wear the sort of shit she sold at the shop, like, a lime-green blazer suit with a maroon sequinned top beneath, for crying out loud!

I swear, I’d been disappointing your grandma ever since I was a baby and didn’t make it into the Bonds Baby contest. She was so sure I would win because she thought I would be the only ‘mixed’ Filipina-Australian baby. Poor Mum, little did she know about the Eurasian Invasion, all those other charming mixed-race babies who probably stood a better chance because their mums knew how to do tasteful and didn’t enhance their onesies with hand-sewn sequins spelling out ‘BEAUTYFACE’.

Well, turns out I didn’t need the sequins, that I’d walk out in public and people would see the obvious. Not trying to be up myself or anything, but kindly old men in parks would say, ‘Bless your eyes,’ which I didn’t find creepy, and men in business suits would stare at me on the train after school, which I did. Creepy as. And of course, the St Andrews boys, they loved me. You’d think a face like mine would be able to make it into the popular crowd at my school, but those girls were all stuck-up bitches. You know, the types to only shop in places where you’d come out with a cardboard bag with ribbon handles and lots of tissue paper on top, for one frickin’ T-shirt. I couldn’t imagine what they’d think of Diamond Rose Fashions. Ha! They were all wusses with colour, in every sort of way, even the token Vietnamese and the Sri Lankan girl in their group. They didn’t dare dress in bright brights, and they didn’t dare date in any shade darker than white.

Anyhow, once I established that Luis and Nancy were related, and I got talking to him, that was that. He was so smitten! He was so shy! Truth is, he’d probably been a dweeby kid, probably only come into his hotness in the last six months or so, and with no other girl to reflect his true image back to him except for cousin Nancy, he had absolutely no idea. At first we spent the afternoons in the library just talking crap, you know. ‘Oh you’re from St Andrews, do you know Edwin Patamisi?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah in Year 8 that arsehole squeezed a whole tube of wasabi in my Coke can when I went to the loo. Why?’ He looked at me accusingly. ‘Did you used to go out with him?’

I didn’t know why I brought up Edwin Patamisi, except that perhaps maybe once or twice I might have kissed him. He was cute, in an Italian-Bieber kind of way, but he was dumb as. ‘No!’ I protested. ‘I have better taste than that. Come on.’

‘Anyhow,’ he continued, ‘I brought a water balloon filled with fish sauce to school the next day and put it on his seat before he sat down.’

I had to admit, that was pretty funny. I opened up my schoolbag because I usually got hungry at around this time after school. Brought out my illicit stash of Milky Ways, and handed one to Nancy. ‘Do you want one?’ I asked him. And suddenly, we were having this spontaneous little party at the back of the library, such sad losers. He unwrapped one after the other, eating five in less than five minutes, before he looked at a wrapper and commented: ‘Hmm, “Fun Size”. How can anything this small be considered fun?’ And I had no idea where Nancy got this cool, hilarious cousin from, but suddenly after-school study sessions at the library didn’t seem so boring anymore.

Although Luis was really, really smart, the thing that made me fall for him was that he could recognise that I was, too. He laughed at my jokes, and he listened to what I had to say about stuff. We pretended to study together for about three weeks, then gave up. Out of the goodness of our hearts we decided not to distract Nancy from her schoolwork anymore and nicked off to Footscray Park to — well, let’s just say, engage in some self-selected extracurricular activities. Your grandma and his parents were the sort that were so strict that we spent the first month together behind the native flora section, just lying there on top of one another, in our school uniforms, like slugs, breathing, barely even moving, trying to meld ourselves into one person. So calming, so comforting. One whole month! See, your dad and I weren’t making the beast with two backs, as Shakespeare calls it, right away. Give us credit. We had some class.

Then I figured out I was ready, or as ready as I’d ever be, and finally looked forward to going home to our flat after school, having the two whole hours before Mum got home to ourselves. Before Luis, I hated that place, it was the place where I felt Dad gone most deeply. When he pissed off, Mum just left all his stuff back at our old rental, and only took what we owned. Turns out, according to her, we owned stuff like the knives and spoons and forks in the drawers and even the half-opened packet of Toilet Duck flushables. Ha! To be honest, it didn’t feel as good as it did in the park, which was all gentle and dreamy. I was worried my mum would unexpectedly come back. Anxiety kills libido, you know. We rushed it the first time, and afterwards we felt kind of spent. The sort of emotional low you’d get if you’d just scoffed down a litre of ice-cream ’cause someone was going to yank it away from you in twenty minutes.

But the more time Luis spent at my place, and the more I realised Mum wasn’t suddenly just going to come home from the shop and pounce on us, the more relaxed we became. We became more experimental. Suddenly, a kiss would make me feel as if I were going down a roller-coaster with popcorn in my stomach. I mean this in a good way. I am saying it got better and better. Anyhow, we were pretty smart, we used protection and all that. Most of the time.

And that’s how you came to be.

At this point in my story, you’re probably thinking ewww. You may also be wondering why your dumb-arse mum didn’t get the morning-after pill. Well, why question your miraculous existence arising from my deep-seated sense of embarrassment? Truth was, even though I googled the shit out of how to obtain it, there was no way I could show my face around all those Footscray pharmacists to ask for it. They all knew all the other traders, and news was bound to reach your grandma. I thought of catching a train to go to a pharmacy in a different suburb, or even the city. But you know what? I didn’t end up doing it. I convinced myself that certain things would never happen to me.

And at first, nothing was actually happening. I wasn’t getting any fatter, I didn’t feel like having a vom every morning, I felt fine. The only difference was that I hadn’t got my period in a month, then two. Turns out I was two and a half months along when Nancy bought me that test. Then I let a few more weeks slip by because still nothing physical seemed to be happening, and you know, the whole denial and fear thing, it’s very powerful. It paralyses you. Also, some secret deadly curious part of me wanted to see what would happen next — you were a bunch of cells, and then an idea of life to me, and I wanted to see whether this idea was real — and some shit-scared part of me didn’t want to do anything or make any decision, hoping it would all go away.

But no, now I have two heartbeats. Creepy as.

I was scared of telling your grandma most of all. When I did tell her, man, did the proverbial excrement hit the fan in such a massive dump that I’m still scraping it from my hair and fingernails (and when the metaphor wears off, you will have arrived, and then it will be literal! Fun!).

Mum went ballistic. She ranted and hollered and cried and took off her Homyped flat shoe, the shoe she had been standing in for eight hours that day at work, and threw it at me. I ducked. She took off the other one and chucked that at me, too. ‘After all I have done for you!’ she wailed. ‘You do this to me! What a waste! What a waste!’

I had had enough. I calmly picked up my bag, my public transport card, and nicked off to Nancy’s. Nancy’s mum was sewing a whole stack of little light-blue shorts when Nancy let me in and we walked through the living room, which was filled with half-opened cardboard boxes and cardboard fashion labels. She gave me a shifty sideways glance, like I was evil incarnate come to corrupt her daughter. I looked down at the carpet and saw all the snipped-off threads, light blue against the dirty tan carpet. All those masses of swirls, loops and lines, rising to fill my eyes like artificial worms, like the floor was warm and alive with a million tiny veins. For some reason, they grossed me out. Really grossed me out. ‘I’m going to vom,’ I croaked to Nancy, and she dashed me to the bathroom, and for the first time in this pregnancy, I had a big, long vomit and cry. ‘They won’t let Luis anywhere near me!’ I wailed to Nancy. ‘They won’t let him near me ’cause they didn’t want us to keep it, those fuckers!’

Of course I knew those fuckers were his parents, the folks I had never met because they didn’t want to meet me, not unless I followed their course of action. They took away his mobile, but he still found ways of getting in touch. The last time I had heard from Luis, he had texted me, R U OK?

Ya. R U?

Yes. I want to C U.

OK. Where & when?

Ftscry Lib. Wed 4 p.m.

I showed Nancy the texts and asked her to be my decoy, in case Mum wanted to interrogate me. When I left Nancy’s and got home it was quite late. Mum had left dinner on a cold stove for me; she was already in bed. I was relieved. I didn’t want to see her. I avoided her most of the week by staying behind at the library.

Wednesday arrived, and I rocked up at the library in my school uniform. I wasn’t a mindless moron, but I had secretly been pinning my hopes on Luis. He was smart, I was smart, we could pull through. I could support him through school and vice versa. Also, Luis was nothing like my dad. He wasn’t going to piss off on me.

So, your dad also rocked up in his school uniform. Saw me and his eyes widened a little. I think he was surprised that I still looked the same, that I wasn’t already a massive heifer in a mumu. After the exchange of babe-I-miss-yous, he launched straight into it. No fingers gently touching, no crying together, no hands-on-the-tummy-prelude-to-intimacy shit that you read about in those pregnant-teen books with symbolic birds on the cover.

‘Why didn’t you let me know sooner?’ he asked. His eyes seemed different. Harder. His parents had put him through some serious degree of hell.

‘Why? So you could tell me to get rid of it?’ I retorted. Oops. Who knew I was raging beneath? This wasn’t going well, but I pushed on. ‘I’m not getting rid of it.’

‘I’m seventeen, Kim. This is my last year of school. I’m really stressed out. My parents are saying I’m never going to get into optometry now. What about the other options?’

We’d been through this already. All the bloody adults counselling me, asking me if this is what I really wanted, did I understand the responsibilities of having a child, yadda yadda yadda. Of course I did, which was why I was so depressed and miserable. There was no movie or book about this for me — it was either some newspaper tragedy about yellow girls who looked like me who were molested by their basket-eyed uncles, or Juno. As much as I wanted to be a wisecracking, smarmy sweetheart about this, I was not.

We had both sat together at the sexual health clinic, having this discussion after I told him the news, and when it was over and I refused to budge, his parents decided he couldn’t see me again. They’d never even met me, didn’t want to meet me, probably just imagined me as some cigarette-sucking skank loitering around Footscray Station in a Supre outfit, out to lure their glory boy.

This was the first time your dad and I had been alone since I found out about you, but we were fully clothed, no longer funny to each other, but suddenly too familiar in that terrible sick-to-death-of-you way.

‘Why do you want this baby so much anyway?’ he asked me, almost accusingly, as if I were the sole person responsible not only for having one in the oven, but for baking that cake, too. I looked into his stony eyes and immediately, with a vicious force that was almost visceral, wished it was anyone else’s but his. At least that dumb arse Edwin Patamisi would have been more loyal.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted a baby; it was the thought of getting rid of the baby that filled me with more fear and anxiety and guilt than anything else in my life. Maybe the childhood fear of the wrath of God. I used to roll my eyes at those precocious girls with braces who did serious school reports on issues such as being pro-life or pro-choice, those moralistic morons who never had to make such a decision ’cause they weren’t getting any action until they were twenty-five.

But having two heartbeats, the thought of getting rid of one was horrible as.

It seemed now that having made a choice, everyone was treating me like some kind of naive imbecile. I knew I could not deliver you, like a pizza, to Jennifer Garner to take away to a cheesecake-coloured room. It was then that I realised — when bad shit happened, Luis lost all backbone. I could see the cogs behind his eyes, calculating, turning, working out the best way to minimise damage to his precious future. He was going to force me to do what his parents wanted. He was scared of them that bad. Whereas Mum, well, I wasn’t scared of her, had never been scared of her.

Don’t get me wrong, we were never the Gilmore Girls. But at least she stood by my decision. Once she stopped being pissed off at me and giving me the silent treatment for a week, she started yelling at me non-stop and telling me how stupid I was. She was kind of transparent, your grandma, doing Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief to the book. That was two months ago.

And now she was in the car, still going through the stage of anger, driving me home from my ultrasound. ‘Do you want to know if you are having a boy or a girl?’ the doctor had asked, and just as Mum was about to open her mouth I quickly said, ‘NO THANKS,’ and the doctor asked, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘YES, and please don’t tell my mum either.’ My mother was incredibly mad, of course, said she had a right to know, and got all huffy and left the room, just as I thought she would. So predictable. Then I turned to the doctor and said, ‘Yeah, I wanna know. Tell me now.’ After I found out, I left the appointment and thought I’d find Mum outside in the waiting room, but she was actually in the car, sitting there, livid. I got into the passenger seat and could feel gales of anger radiating from her, hot enough to perm hair, which was probably the secret reason her hair always looked like Ronald McDonald’s.

As Mum drove, she went on and on about that no-good Luis, all he cared about was his own self, asking me to get rid of it. ‘Those Chinese, they’re used to doing this sort of thing because of the one-child policy in China. Nothing to interrupt Luis’s grades, oh no!’

Then she sighed. ‘But life is life, no matter how hard it may be. You’d rather have it than not have it.’

Some days I looked at my mother like she was an illiterate third-worlder who couldn’t adapt to a new country.

This was not one of those days.

Sometimes, my mum got things.

‘You don’t need Luis anyway,’ she conceded.

This is your dad she was talking about. I thought about how after my dad left with the other woman, Mum decided she could not let us live in his house anymore, even if he had abandoned it to move interstate with the younger version of her, ‘the fresh-off-the-boat version’, as she bitterly put it. I remembered how she made us move, then she went out and found a job, even though after having me she’d never worked outside the home. I thought that after Dad left, her entire personality had changed from being the sweet, indulgent mother who was always there after school with maruya and ice-cream, to this nasty, bad-tempered grump without a good word for anyone. I had been so stuck on this idea of her that I barely noticed that every time I came home after school — even when I snuck Luis into the house — she’d always left a snack out on the kitchen counter for me: tamarind balls, leche puto, those American Hershey’s lollies she always bought from the Filipino store that tasted a bit like brown crayons.

And then I thought about your dad — cowardly bastard — and realised that at least my dad stuck around until I was in my early teens. At least my dad had his priorities straight. Sure, he prioritised another woman over us, but at least that was a human being and not his frigging ‘career’. I hoped to God that Luis would not get into optometry, but I knew he would.

I knew how your dad’s career would pan out — he’d work long and hard and then in his mid-twenties his parents would suggest a docile, career-oriented dentist to him and they’d get married and make lots of money and take their kids on holidays in Europe. They’d do the shit we were meant to do together, the three of us. Every once in a while they’d write us a cheque — the two of us — for child support, the bare legal minimum. Oh yes, his parents would make sure of that — he had told me his dad was an accountant.

‘We’ll raise this baby together. You can stay in school. It’s only one more year to go.’ We were almost home and my mum was now looking more exhausted than angry. I guess all her ranting wore her out. ‘There’s no way you gonna be a drop-out like me.’

I didn’t think anyone would want me back at school, but Mum told me that she had spoken to the principal, Mrs Avery, and she was going to help me finish my high schooling no matter what. I had no idea that Mum thought or cared that I was smart. I’d always presumed she saw my looks as my currency through life.

I looked at Mum in her glittery rayon shirt and black slacks, her fake pearl earrings and diamante brooch. She wore everything carefully and treated her clothes better than those businesswomen on trains treated their designer coats and handbags. Her hair was still as black as her pupils, and it dawned on me that she was still only forty.

This was crazy as, but I began to imagine a future where I would be one of those single college mothers you always see in brochures, balancing a baby on one hip and a latte in the other, with a swag of books in a neat leather case across one shoulder. I would be the campus MILF, ha-ha.

‘It’s not that easy, you know,’ Mum said, as if she could read my mind. ‘But believe me, studying is so much better than working. You wanna study for as long as you can.’

‘But what about your job?’ I asked her.

‘I can work part-time. If I look after your kid, I can claim carer’s allowance. It’s not as much as I am making at Diamond Rose, but I am getting crap pay there anyway.’ I had no idea your grandma had been thinking so much about this, planning out practical things already. I wasn’t so sure about Mum raising you part-time. I didn’t want her to do shit like enter you in beauty pageants. But then again, she was gonna help me stay in school, so maybe those days of vicarious glory were over for her, too.

I knew one thing there and then — that neither me nor your grandma wanted the kind of future for you where you’d see us working crappy retail jobs and looking for people like your dad or my dad to save us. We’d show you that your dreams are boundless, whether you have straight teeth or not.

We arrived home, and I unbuckled my seatbelt. Stared straight ahead, and right after she turned off the engine, I said to Mum, ‘It’s a girl.’

I was going to tell her anyway. I just didn’t want her to control everything.

Mum also stared straight ahead, not saying anything, but out of the corner of my eye, I thought I noticed a small twitch of a smile.