November 15th: I think you've found you even missed yourself.

“I... I can’t.”

Silence.

“Alice? Did you hear me?”

I hear her inhale sharply. “I heard you.”

“I thought I could count on you,” she says softly.

I sigh. “You can, Alice, just... Not for this. Not for something this big.” I stare at the wall. “Alice, I can’t be a father. I’m... I’m too young to be this old.” Finally, those words fit.

“X, how am I going to face people? How am I going to tell my mother? How is the school going to react when I start showing and word gets out that it’s my English teacher’s kid? Don’t you get it?” Her voice is shrill, pained. “X, you’re all I have left!”

“Alice... It’s not that simple.”

“If it were yours... You would stay,” she says quietly.

I groan. “Alice, it’s not mine. It’s Henry’s. I have never had sex with you. This is not my child. I know that it’s not my child. And I can’t give up my future and change the course of my life completely for a baby that isn’t mine!”

“Don’t do it for the baby, then!” she shrieks. “Do it for me!”

I wind the cord around my fingers. “It’s not that simple. Can I say that again? You can’t simplify it into that! This isn’t some little favor, this is fatherhood, this is the rest of my childhood and all through my twenties and most of my thirties just taking care of a kid that isn’t even mine.” I sigh. “That’s too much to give up, for me. I have to work, I have to earn money, I have to buy my mother a nice house, a good house where the plumbing doesn’t break where she can be happy... After everything she’s done for me.”

“Your mother would understand,” Alice whispers hoarsely. “She raised a child who wasn’t hers. Why? Because she loved the mother.”

“Alice, you’re not my daughter!” I exclaim. “This is completely different from what happened with my mother and Mari! Mari was going to be a single teenage mother –“

“And so am I!”

I stare at my hands.

She sighs. “X, I can’t do this... Not alone...”

I grip the phone. “You’re not going to be alone.”

“Are...” I can almost hear her smile. “Are you serious? You’re... You’re really going to do this? You’re really going to help me?”

“Yeah,” I say softly. “Of course I am.”

I gently return the phone to its cradle. I barely hear the click before the tears start.

* * *

I chew my oatmeal silently, eyeing Manuel over the top of the newspaper. He stabs at his burnt grilled cheese with a fork, his eyes focused on the floor.

“Are you going to eat that?”

He shrugs, not looking up. “Probably not. But even the smell of char is better than the smell of that shit.”

“Hey, oatmeal is packed with fiber and other essential dietary –“

The phone cuts me off. “I’ll get it,” Manny announces, leaping from the table and running to the phone. “Hello?”

He looks over at me. “You haven’t called here in forever. No, he’s here. I don’t know. Of course he remembers you.”

I raise my eyebrows. Manny holds up a hand and continues to talk. “You’re not pregnant too, are you?”

“Manuel!”

“Just asking,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You remember Alice? Creevy? He knocked her up. I don’t really know how – guy like that is kind of his own birth control.”

I grab the phone out of his hands. “Hello? Ignore the brat. Someone gave him the delusional impression that he’s hilarious.”

“Nah, I’ve missed the twerp.”

I blink several times in succession. “Wha... Is that you?”

“Yeah. It’s me.”

I inhale sharply. “Wow. It’s been a long time.”

“Tell me about it.”

I sit down heavily. “Are you just calling to catch up? Or is there something...”

She laughs. “Actually, I’ve been wanting to tell you something... For awhile now.”

Oh, shit.

* * *

“Ty?”

“Amazingly enough, yes, it is Ty. You can kind of expect that when you call my cell phone. Just to let you know.”

I roll my eyes. “Asswipe. Look, guess who just called?”

“Jesus? Jennifer Anniston? Oooh, no wait, I have this one... It’s those adorable giant pandas from the DC zoo.”

“Oh, aren’t you a funny one,” I say drily. “But no.”

“Then who was it?”

“Amy.”

He whistles. “Holy mother. Thought we’d heard the last of her.”

I nod. “Same here. But evidently, long-distance charges aren’t enough to keep her away.”

“So why the hell is your psychotic ex-girlfriend calling you, anyway?”

“Because she’s a stalker.”

He groans. “New information, please.”

“She wanted me to do something for her. Surprised yet?”

He sighs. “Oh yeah. Should I be sitting down?”

“Maybe. It actually is kind of offbeat.”

“Hit me.”

I crack my neck. “She’s on the ninth step.”

He coughs. “You must be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“Amy? Holy shit.”

“She called to apologize. Evidently I’m on her list. She asked for your number, too. She’ll probably be calling you soon.” I laugh quietly. “I think she has a lot of people from around here on that list.”

“What’s she climbing for?” he asks.

“Co-dependency.”

Ty laughs to himself. “Color me surprised.”

“You want to know the crazy thing?”

“Tell me this crazy thing.”

“She says she’s moving back.”

He whistles. “Why would she want to move back here? Doesn’t she remember what things were like before?”

“I think she wants to prove us wrong,” I say quietly. “I think she wants to prove to herself that she can change our minds.”

* * *

I find Alice by her locker, her face pale, her eyes rimmed in red.

“You okay?” I ask, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She shakes it off. “How would you feel if you ate a small weasel, hair and all, doused in mustard and fake nacho cheese sauce?”

“I take it you didn’t really eat that,” I reply, my stomach turning.

She rolls her eyes. “I might as well have. I’ve been up since two. Heaving. You ever heard of morning sickness?”

I nod.

“Yeah, well, this little shit here prefers to make me sick in the middle of the night.” She yawns and throws her chemistry text into her locker. “Enjoyable as this kid is, I think it takes after its father.”

“Henry being a problem?”

She shrugs. “It’s kind of hard to be a problem when you don’t involve yourself in the situation. He hasn’t said more than ten words to me since I told him.” She slams her locker shut. “And I can’t exactly force him to pay attention. And besides, what would I tell him if he did want to be involved? ‘Sorry, you can’t, X is taking care of your kid, don’t worry about it’? I don’t think so.”

I put an arm around her. “X is going to take care of it, okay? You’ll be fine.”

She buries her head in my chest. “You are such a dick.”

“Win me over, why don’t you.”

“Let me finish,” she mumbles. “You’re such a dick, but I love the shit out of you, Xavier Gonzalez.”

I rub her back with one hand. “Who needs Henry, right?”

“Me. But I’m going to cut the pitiful act and pretend I don’t care that my baby’s father wants nothing to do with him,” she moans.

I kiss the top of her head. “He’s not the baby’s father.”

She pulls away. “What the hell are you talking about? This kid is definitely his. I wasn’t having sex with –“

I press a finger to her lips. “Let me finish. He’s not the baby’s father. Father has a lot more to do with love than sperm.”

“Do you love me, Xavier?” she asks, peering up with me between matted blonde strands.

I smile. “Like, duh.”

She rolls her eyes and smiles at me, tucking her arm around my back. “You are such a dick.”

I laugh. “But you love me.”

She shrugs. “Like, duh.”