SAM.
Sam woke with a start. It was Saturday—more than a week later—and his problems remained as they were. He was still broken up with Liar. He was still in love with Liar. Liar was pregnant. It was one p.m. It was his day off and he’d fallen asleep only two hours ago. Blargh.
Last night, after countless texts and missed calls, Liar finally deigned to come by House after work. Under Sam’s watchful eye she chugged gallons of water and walked back and forth to the bathroom to pee on six more sticks. It was both intimate and also very much not.
Period lateness check: four weeks and counting.
“Thanks a lot for buying the cheap ones,” Lorraine called out from the toilet. She had the bathroom door cracked open, and though they’d once been that couple where one person peed while the other showered, Sam looked away. He heard the flush.
“I get pee all over my hands with those things,” she said. Sam wondered how many pregnancy tests she’d taken over the years but knew better than to ask. It had taken days of badgering to get her to come over. She’d skipped the Planned Parenthood appointment and had so far failed to make a new one.
She washed her hands, lining up the results on the side of the sink.
“See, the good ones spell out ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant,” she said. “They’re digital or something.”
Sam hadn’t known there was such a thing as a good one when it came to pregnancy tests. He’d sprung for the two-for-three deal. Sam reasoned six meant better odds so they’d know for sure, for sure.
They waited and watched. It was surprisingly hard to tell. Of the six, five were positive with faint plus signs. The last was a dud. The little white window remained completely blank. No minus sign. Nothing.
“So, you’re pregnant,” he said.
“I guess,” she responded.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Pissed,” she said.
He nodded glumly.
“Like, how dumb is this?”
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and groaned.
“You really want to know how I feel?” she said after a while. “I want to break shit.”
“Come with me,” he said. Sam went behind the bar, grabbed his backpack from under the register, then led her through the kitchen and out the screen door.
It was an airless night.
Sam unzipped his bag and handed Lorraine his laptop.
She took it and looked at him quizzically.
“You said you wanted to break shit.”
He nodded at the gravelly parking lot.
“It’s backed up,” he said. “And broken. Put it out of its . . .”
Before Sam could say “misery,” Lorraine threw it on the ground by their feet.
Nothing happened. It lay there heavy and doltish.
She picked it back up, opened it, and this time pitched it farther.
“Fuuuuuuuck,” she yelled into the night.
It skittered yards away.
They walked over.
“You have a go,” she said, bending down to hand it to him.
Sam held the laptop above his head with both hands and threw it onto the ground, where it finally cracked. They chucked it and chucked it—working up a sweat—until the screen was totaled and the two halves came apart at the hinge. Lorraine took a photo of it and posted it on Instagram, tagging him.
After, without saying anything, they tossed the computer’s mangled carcass into a trash bag, threw in the pregnancy tests, and swung the bag into the dumpster.
“Did you get a new one?” she asked him, getting in her car.
Sam shook his head and yawned. He’d have to drop out of school and get a second job to pay child support anyway. Besides, the type of work he qualified for rarely required personal computing.
“Come by tomorrow,” she said, pulling him in for a hug. Her expression was unreadable.
At two thirty the next afternoon Sam took the bus over to Lorraine’s apartment, plugging in the pass code he knew by heart. When the gate rumbled open, he was notably relieved that not everything in the world had gone berserk.
She met him at the door, no makeup, hair up in a towel, barefoot in a pink-and-blue floral housedress. It was a punch in the gut. It was his private Lorraine. His favorite Lorraine. The Lorraine she was when it was just the two of them.
“You should’ve buzzed me,” she remarked irritably. She made him wait by the door, closing it partway so he couldn’t see in, and reappeared with a silver MacBook Air and a tangled power cord.
“Here,” she said, handing it over. The slender device struck Sam as strangely vulnerable. More expensive and aerodynamic than any computer he’d ever owned. Sam wondered if there was anything on it that he wasn’t supposed to see. Or better yet, something she’d deliberately left him to find.
“It’s wiped,” she said. “It’s got Final Cut Pro though. Photoshop, too, if you need that.”
This wasn’t what he’d expected. Not that he’d thought they’d leap back into bed if he came over, but this felt too close to charity. The worst part was that he wasn’t in a position to refuse it.
“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” he mumbled.
“I upgraded,” she said. “Keep it as long as you want.”
That was Lorraine’s other secret side. While she was all too happy to cadge free drinks off his dirtbag friends and split cheap slices of pizza, most of the time it was an act. Lorraine’s lifestyle was heavily subsidized by her parents. She moved out of Twombly after freshman year and her parents continued to pay her rent even when she landed a job. Her mother bought all of Lorraine’s clothes from Neiman Marcus with the help of a personal shopper. The first time he’d spent the night and took a shower at her house, Sam spotted the price sticker left on her shampoo—$38. He’d put it back and used soap on his head.
Keeping up while they were dating was out of the question, and Sam had no idea what was expected from him as the father of her child. Not only was there nowhere to put a crib in his room, but he didn’t even have a car. And the prospect of walking six miles each way with a Babybjörn strapped to his chest made his testicles want to retreat into his body.
After he left Lorraine’s he walked home through Sixth Street to see if anyone was hiring. Calling his old friend Gunner about a barback gig would have been easy enough, but Sam didn’t want to explain his absence or his sudden need for cash.
Sweat slid down the back of Sam’s denim-clad legs. He would’ve loved to wear basketball shorts and flip-flops, resembling every carefree numbskull roaming the streets with status headphones, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Shrimping man-toes were an insult to nature.
Sam was tired. Lorraine’s laptop hit the base of his spine with every footfall.
The computer probably cost more than his life. Which made a kind of sense since it was decisively more capable than he’d ever been. The most money he’d ever made was eleven dollars an hour. He tried to enjoy the afternoon air and the meditative qualities of walking and failed.
Instead he considered the cost of diapers.
One time Liar sent him to the store to buy tampons and he was stunned by how expensive they were. Diapers had to cost about the same. Except that a period was a week a month, so you could space them out, but a baby needed diapers pretty much constantly for years.
Christ, he had to relax. Sam let his mind drift and panned out to orient himself on Planet Earth and reassure his brain that things were going to be fine.
His brain had other ideas.
Okay, so if Lorraine was pregnant, it could also mean . . .
SHE COULD HAVE HERPES. WHICH MEANS THAT EVEN IF SHE’S NOT PREGNANT SAM COULD STILL HAVE HERPES BECAUSE PAUL DEFINITELY HAD HERPES.
Thanks, brain.
He walked past the old Marriott, where his mom used to work. It consistently struck him as funny that his mother spent any time in the hospitality business. Brandi Rose Sidelow-Lange was a piece of work. She had what in the old days they’d called moxie. Sam inherited his smart mouth from his mother, and like a snake eating its own tail, it only served to drive her crazy.
Once upon a time, though Sam never knew it, Brandi Rose had been a different person. Infinitely less pissed off. This was evidenced by a photo in the living room. The frame was blue and white with a sunflower on the bottom corner and featured his mom at sixteen, grinning with a Texas Elite Princess Pageant sash draped over her shoulder. Her hair a shiny brown and wearing a knee-length navy dress, Brandi Rose waved. It was a beautiful photo made more so by how happy his mother appeared. Mostly, though, it was displayed in the front room as a trap. Anyone who mentioned it would get the same bitter rejoinder.
“Well, that sash ain’t first place,” she’d point out, ice cubes clinking in her Long Island Iced Tea. “Bitsy Sinclair won. Her daddy, Buck, owned nine car dealerships from here to El Paso.”
According to Brandi Rose, rich people got everything.
“Second place is just about as good as first loser,” she’d continue. “I only did it for the state scholarship anyway. Fat lot of good that did me.” Clink. Clink.
His mother’s response to Sam’s happy addition would be more of the same. Tirades about how shit rolled downhill and how she had to be the one to take care of everything. The accusations would then turn to his father, which led right back to her dissatisfaction with her son. The rejection stung on all counts. Sam was a carbon copy of his father. Though despite the evolutionary wisdom that babies resemble their dads so they’d stick around, Caden Becker was immune to the charms of his tiny doppelgänger.
As much as it broke his heart, Sam knew his old man was a loser. Granted, he was handsome, tall, dark, with a gleam of wicked about the eyes and Sam had inherited his father’s ease around strangers and his rangy bearing, but that’s where he wanted the similarities to end.
The last time Sam saw his dad, the elder Becker was stumbling right in front of Tequila Six, looking alarmingly well preserved for his lifetime of hard partying. Rumor had it that he and the old bass player of his band had gotten an apartment in the rundown town houses off Mo-Pac favored by Austin’s newly divorced bachelors, but to Sam his father looked homeless. He was wearing a torn ThunderCloud Subs sweatshirt and appeared to be muttering at a couple of sorority girls, who swerved from him without interrupting the flow of their conversation. Sam walked briskly in the opposite direction. He hadn’t considered the inevitability of running into his old man if he got a second job at a bar. Sam knew he wouldn’t deny his father money if he asked for a loan he had no intention of paying back. If anything, Sam figured his dad was a step up from his mom, who stole it.
Thinking about his parents upset him, and when he blinked he felt the horizon lurch abruptly. He took a deep breath. He should have eaten something before leaving. Or else he should have gotten some sleep instead of obsessing about whether or not he and Lorraine should get married.
Marriage was useless anyway. Nothing more than a bogus contract to ensure all parties wound up disappointed. At least that had been the case for his mother. Before this talk of houses with pools and good school districts with Mr. Lange, Brandi Rose had known better than to expect anything from the world. The rash of consolation prizes didn’t help. They reminded Sam of a military air-drop, except instead of humanitarian aid with food or cash, both of which they lacked and needed, a sixty-inch flat-screen TV would appear at their door. Or a Blu-ray player without any of the overpriced discs they couldn’t afford to buy. There were designer clothes, two boxes labeled ARMANI, containing a white cashmere coat and sweaters. For his fourteenth birthday Sam received a pair of silk pajamas from Calvin Klein that was missing only a big, fat Cuban cigar to complete the cartoon tycoon Halloween outfit.
Then came the weepy phone calls behind closed doors. Brandi Rose removed her emerald wedding ring. It was around the time she ceased communicating with her son, as if it had somehow been his fault. A wall of radiant rage was erected between them.
Sam pulled at his T-shirt. Good Lord, it was hot. The only shade was directly in front of the bars, and he didn’t want to get close enough to smell the tang of dirty bar mops and the sweet oakiness of whiskey. Sam’s head swam. He didn’t want to drop out of school and become a washout like his dad. This was a terrible idea. He had no business working at a bar or near one. Whatever swirl of ingredients that made both his parents such devout drinkers hadn’t skipped a generation.
He peered down the road. Miles to go. Sam’s vision wobbled violently and his knees hitched beneath him. Sam had passed out once, in fifth-grade gym. He’d hung slack in Coach Tremont’s arms and could hear her talking about his bird bones though he couldn’t lift his head. It was humiliating.
His arms felt leaden at his elbows, and when he formed fists to prove to himself that he could, the effort unnerved him. His hearing became muffled, sounds dropping out completely before returning. Sam examined his surroundings unsteadily. So many strangers. His heart pounded. A sharp pain pierced through his chest as his breath caught in his throat. He pictured himself as a voodoo doll being pierced by a large spike. There had to be somewhere for him to sit down. Cars. Banks. Bars. Restaurants. Food trucks.
Can twenty-one-year-olds have heart attacks?
Sure.
Babies have heart attacks.
Babies.
Could his unborn baby have a congenital heart condition? Yes. Would Sam have to wait for the bus at three a.m. to rush it to the hospital while it died? Most definitely.
Don’t call it an “it,” he reminded himself.
The pain in his chest was unbearable. He had to call someone. But who? Sam’s list was pathetic, starting and ending at Al and Fin. The list of who he absolutely couldn’t call was more impressive—Lorraine, his mom, Gunner, everyone else in the world.
Sam peeled off from the beery marauders, staggered to the nearest curb, and collapsed.
There were other people on the curb, and the bespectacled redhead he’d almost crash-landed into glared and scooched as if he were a plague-stricken hobo. He went to pull out his phone to call 911, but his jeans—his stupid hipster jeans—were too tight. He saw stars and then he died.