Chapter 1
“Fuck,” Candice said. She held the pregnancy stick in her hand. The little white space showed a plus sign. “No, no, no!”
She grabbed the box off the top of the toilet tank and looked at the instructions again. She should have had her period already. She knew because she kept track in her planner writing a big “P” for period on the day that her monthly menstruation started.
Letting Mitch cum in her wasn’t a good idea. She knew it. She was a little drunk and when the condom broke, she said that it was fine. He’d been insistent and she caved a little. It’d felt good and afterwards she’d taken a shower. She hadn’t thought about it much then. She had never gotten pregnant before.
Now though it didn’t feel so good. She’d got the test at the pharmacy after she’d finished work. She hadn’t thought much about missing her period by a day or two; sometimes things came a little slow and she’d been working out a lot lately. Candice had read somewhere that working out more could alter your cycle. Then one day had turned into two and after more days had passed, she had finally decided to buy the pregnancy test once and for all.
She’d sat on the toilet and peed on the stick then set it facing up on the sink. She tried not to think too much about urine potentially being on her sink, after all there were bigger problems at hand. Candice had waited the necessary five minutes for the results to come in. She’d left the room and had turned on Home Alone.
Kevin McCallister, played by the young Macaulay Culkin, was just being miscounted by his family when the alarm on her phone rang. As Kevin woke up home alone while his entire family went on vacation, Candice was in the bathroom looking at the plus sign.
“Fuuuucccckkkk,” she said. She threw the stick into the garbage. It bounced in the small trash can. Her apartment was small, a one bedroom, and the sound of the pregnancy test slamming in the trash echoed in the room.
Candice looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t ready to be a mother. She wasn’t ready to be a parent. She should have taken a morning-after pill. She shouldn’t have trusted Mitch.
She turned on the water in the sink and splashed cold water on her face to wake herself up. She didn’t have anything to do until 9 a.m. tomorrow at which point she’d have to be at work again. Water dripped down her face and she massaged her cheeks. She pulled back the skin and leaned into the mirror. Small crow’s feet were beginning to form at the edge of her eyes. Everyone always told her that she had a young face. She’d inherited her father’s ageless face but wrinkles were starting to form.
She sucked in her cheeks and bit down on the flesh inside her mouth. Her teeth grated against the soft tissue and she could feel the inside of her mouth begin to bleed. She gripped the edge of the sink and leaned her head forward. Her forehead touched the cold mirror. A drop of water fell down her forehead and onto the mirror leaving a trail. It would smudge the mirror and leave a water mark.
She pulled away from the mirror and walked into the living room. The apartment was thirty-five square meters. She afforded it from her job as a copywriter for an internet startup. She’d been living in the Bay Area for ten years now, originally following her sister to the area. Pauline had moved back to Los Angeles to be close to her mom and dad but Candice had stayed. She’d stayed and made bad decisions.
She went and sat down on the couch. She began to zone out as the movie played on. She half paid attention as Kevin McCallister was spooked by Old Man Marley, the terrifying next door neighbor.
Candice stared at the TV and tried to think as the Wet Bandits, the villains of the movie, plotted to break into McCallister’s house and steal his family’s belongings.
She had to make the call. She had to tell him.
“Hello?”
“Yeah I’d like a large pizza to be delivered,” she said.
“Sure. Are you calling from 890 Wood Street?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Great. Did you want any toppings on that?”
“Can I get pineapple and jalapeño?” Candice asked.
“Sure. It should be about 20 minutes. We’ll give you a ring when we’re there.”
“Great.”
Candice hung up. “I’ll call him after I eat,” she said aloud. She was pregnant, or at least the pregnancy test, which according to the internet and to the box that stated it was 90% accurate, said she was. There was still a sliver of doubt though. It could be a false positive, she hoped.
She wondered what the etiquette was for her situation. Should she even tell Mitch? They’d been hooking up for the last few months, but it wasn’t like they did much more than fuck. Other than that, she didn’t know much about him.
She knew his body well though. He had a scar on his left ribs from having punctured his lung in a motorcycle accident when he was young. His first tattoo had been of a bird on his upper right shoulder. He’d gotten it when he was eighteen. It was faded and not well done. In the mornings, if he wasn’t hung over, which was rare, he did push-ups. She would watch as his elbows acted as levers and he sank towards the floor. He did 50 push-ups and 100 sit-ups. Afterwards he would take a shower. He didn’t brush his teeth before bed so Candice had bought him a toothbrush. He used it only occasionally.
His hair was light brown and he had a large nose. He didn’t wear glasses but he needed to and would often squint at her. His chest was caved in and he told her that he spent most of his high school years trying to correct it.
Candice had been attracted to him enough. He made her laugh, occasionally, with bad jokes, mainly puns. His voice, one of the more attractive parts of him, was soft and smooth. It reminded Candice of melted butter. It was rich and added to everything that he said. She wasn’t sure what she liked more, him or his voice.
On their first date, they’d had coffee. He’d shown up 10 minutes late and on a café racer. The bike, as Mitch went on about it, cost him $10k. He’d worked two jobs to purchase the bike, although he never told her what two jobs he did.
“It has a ride by wire throttle,” he said. “Traction control that can be switched on and off. A slip-assist clutch. And look at the way it looks, it’s absolutely beautiful.”
The two had sat at a coffee shop that was all white in the interior for forty minutes. He talked about his motorcycle for twenty minutes and then had switched to his next favorite subject, pizza.
“I never much liked Lanesplitter’s,” he said. “They are inconsistent and the interior of the restaurant is a bit drab.”
“You like Pizzaoila better?” Candice had asked.
“That’s too pretentious. Who wants to spend $20 for a small personal pizza? Yeah it has figs on it with cheese from the Himalayans but do goats from the mountains really create that good of feta? I don’t think so.”
“Do you ever make your own pizza?”
“No. I always order out. I have a list. I’m making my way through it.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a complete list of all the pizzerias in the Bay Area. I got through Berkeley already. I’m going through North Oakland now. I get at least two pizzas a week. It’s basically the only thing I ever eat,” he said.
Candice had sipped at her latte slowly as Mitch had gone on and on about pizza. The perfect crust, the perfect cheese, the perfect balance of topping to cheese ratio. He then went on to talk about his shrine to pizza in his apartment. He’d framed several pizza boxes and a few articles that he’d written about pizza for his personal blog. He’d never been published anywhere else for his food reviews.
After nineteen minutes of an almost nonstop monologue about pizza, he asked her if she wanted to go back to his place.
She nodded.
The backseat of his motorcycle was small. He’d brought a spare helmet.
“I knew that you would come home with me,” he said. “Girls love a man with a motorcycle.”
The helmet was a half helmet, the kind that just covered the top of the head. It didn’t seem very protective and Candice worried what would happen if they got into an accident. She imagined her face being pulled apart as Mitch sped down the streets and headed for East Oakland.
Mitch lived in a small apartment near Lake Merritt. He said he’d been there for ages. She felt a little better about going to his apartment after seeing how clean it was. His bed was made with military precision and he talked about how he did a thorough cleaning every week: scrubbing the bathroom, sweeping and mopping the floors, and changing the bed linens.
There was the pizza shrine along with his computer. He told her that he spent a lot of time at his computer doing research.
“What do you research?” Candice asked.
“Everything. You can never know too much. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how the earth is actually flat,” Mitch said.
“What?”
“Yes,” Mitch said. “I’ve been checking out the Flat Earth Society site. Did you know that weather patterns are created by the land itself? For example, rain shadow. That’s where somewhere on the eastern side of a mountain range the area is deprived of rain. The clouds are forced upwards by the mountains blocking their path and becoming cooler and denser. Other weather patterns are created by where you are on the earth. The tropics are humid because they are surrounded by water which is constantly warming and evaporating.”
“Umm, that’s interesting,” Candice had replied.
The sex was mechanical but pleasurable enough, and that’s how it had all started. She saw him once a week or so, usually at his place, sometimes hers. She was never sure if she liked him or didn’t like him or how exactly she felt about him, but he fit into her life for the moment.
Now she was definitely not sure how she would fit him in her life.
***
As she ate her second slice of pizza, it began to disgust her. The cheese had started to stick to her mouth and it seemed too greasy. The sauce was too sweet. The toppings weren’t balanced correctly. It was all pineapple then too much jalapeño. When she bit into it, the front part of the slice was floppy and drooped. The crust was rubbery and she had to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone to get through it. Her stomach still rumbled with hunger when she was done with the second slice, but she could eat no more.
She had a decision to make. She would have to call him. That was the right thing to do. She had to tell him that she wasn’t keeping the baby. She picked up the phone and looked down at it.
His number came up quickly in her phone. The weeks of use made him seem more prominent. She dialed the number and thought to herself, what should I even say?