“Well, we’re not going to my house. My mother is in and out of there all day long.”

“We could go to my house. My mom is at work and my dad is back in the hospital.”

“Do your parents have any condoms?”

“What?” He stared at me. “Ewww. I can’t believe you said that.”

“Well . . . if no one has any, then you’re going to have to buy them. I am not going to have sex with you without a condom.”

“I know, I know.”

I looked at him and felt a stirring of interest. “Do you even know how to use a condom?”

“Yeah. In sex ed, they showed us with a banana.” I’d been absent that day so he pantomimed pulling something over an imaginary banana, and that made me crack up.

“I don’t know,” I said to him. “What if we did it, and it didn’t work out all right, and then we weren’t even friends anymore?”

“I’ve been thinking about this, and that’s one of my arguments for why we should do it. We’re good friends, we’ll always be good friends, and if it goes badly—like if we don’t like it or something—we can both laugh about it. That’s what we’re so good at—laughing at things.”

“Don’t you think we should be like crazy in love so we can get through it?”

“Get through it!” he said. “Do you think it’s going to be something bad? I think it’s going to be awesome, and then we’ll have it all out of the way so that when we end up with other people someday, we’ll already know what to do. For once in our lives we’ll be ahead of the curve.”

So we drove to the CVS, and he went in—I refused to go with him—and then he came right back out and said it was too horrifying. He knew people in there. One of his mom’s friends was buying shampoo right that minute, in fact.

So we didn’t have sex that day, and I remember feeling a bit disappointed when he took me home. I mean, if it had really been important to him, couldn’t he have worked up even an iota of courage?

So—and now we hit the tragic part for Jeremy and me—two weeks later he sauntered over to me at my locker and said out of the side of his mouth, “So, schweetheart, I got the goods. I ordered us some condoms by mail order, you see, and they came yesterday and somehow we’ve got ten boxes of the stuff. Enough for the rest of our lives.” He pretended to smoke an imaginary cigar.

The thing was, it was two whole weeks later, which is forever when you’re seventeen, and everything had changed. I had, against all odds, somehow been plucked from high school obscurity by a guy who was so out of my league that it was pathetic. Brad Whitaker, a guy that Jeremy and I had spent much of the semester making fun of, had asked me out! Never mind that I had had zero action before this point, now I was on the verge of achieving something approaching coolness. And, as I carefully explained to Jeremy, I was in love.

Jeremy was devastated, which I felt terrible about. We had an awful scene, and he said I was making a humongous mistake, that I was a traitor to the cause of irony and sarcasm and normal human intelligence, and by the way, good luck dating a guy who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Also—he couldn’t resist pointing this out—he’d bought a lifetime’s supply of condoms for me, and now what was he supposed to do with them? Sell them to Brad Whitaker?

Sure, I shot back. Why don’t you do that?

I was in that dopey state of first love, first passion, and so I was immune to Jeremy’s pain. I just wanted to get away from him. I was on the brink of one of life’s great moments, and why did he have to make me feel so guilty?

Later that week, I lost my virginity in Brad Whitaker’s bedroom while his parents were at work, to the soundtrack of the Backstreet Boys. I remember feeling slightly confused by the sweaty intensity of sex, all the writhing and the pushing, the way it felt more like an athletic event than what I’d been picturing from the passionate kisses in movies I’d seen. Jeremy and I could never have pulled off something that was this dead serious. We would have laughed ourselves sick.

Still, I was proud of myself for not complaining about the pain and the disappointment and also not minding the fact that, overall, Brad Whitaker didn’t really care anything about me. I just did what you do in those times of your life when you’re trying to make yourself be something you’re not: I stepped up my game, tried harder, shortened my skirts, wore my hair in a side ponytail (you’ll have to trust me that this was übercool), and took to lowering my eyes and holding my mouth in such a way that I looked charmingly bored.

It didn’t really do any good. Brad turned out to be a heartbreaking narcissistic toothache of a guy, and he forgot that guys are supposed to take their girlfriends to the prom, and he took some other girl instead. I got to be the Wronged Woman and everybody felt sorry for me, and my mother said, “You should have stuck with that Jeremy Sanders. Now there was a nice guy!”

So, great. Just great. He’s moved back home.

Cheers.

TWELVE

MARNIE

A week later, I’m at Natalie’s house painting a mural on a wall in the nursery, having decided that a scene with a budding dogwood tree, a rolling green hill, and a garden of purple tulips would be just the thing to welcome little Amelia Jane to the world, once she makes up her mind to get here, that is.

Natalie has been in the kitchen reorganizing her spice cabinet, but when I look up, I see her leaning against the doorway of the baby’s room, holding on to her belly and squinting at the wall. I do not think she really likes this mural. Her idea was to paint the baby’s room gray. Gray! Can you even imagine what that might do to a newborn’s psyche?

“Would you do me a huge, huge, huge favor?” she says.

“Drive you to the hospital because you’re now in labor?”

“Stop it,” she says. “Believe it or not, I have to go to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned, and I honestly don’t fit behind the wheel anymore. So will you drive me?”

“How is it that you have an appointment for teeth cleaning now? What if you were in labor? What if you’d already had the baby?”

“I know,” she says. “My appointment was actually for three weeks ago, but the dentist went on vacation, and they needed to reschedule.”

Natalie does not look so good as she gets into the car, tipping herself way back so that she can maneuver her huge stomach without banging it into the dashboard.

“How’s it going?” I say.

“Shut up.”

I start the car and fasten my seat belt. “Oh, Ameeeeelia? Did you hear what your mother just said to me? Don’t be scared to come out, baby. She’s really a very nice lady. It’s just that you’re pressing on some of her vital organs, sweetheart.”

Natalie bares her teeth.

I turn the car around to head out to Roosevelt Boulevard, and I’m surprised when she yells at me that I’m going too fast and that there are dips in the road I’m not feeling, but they’re there and they are KILLING HER. I slow down obediently.

And then she says, “OW!”

“Nat. Are you about to have this baby?”

“No,” she says. “These are Braxton Hicks contractions. Fake.” She takes a deep, ragged breath.

“Because I’m just saying, since we’re already in the car and all, maybe we should go to the hospital.”

She doesn’t even answer that, just lies back with her hands on her massive belly and looks like she’s in the most amount of pain a human has ever endured, doing little puffing things with her mouth.

“Does it hurt . . . a lot?” I say. We pass a lumberyard and a row of shops. “I could pull in here, if you want.”

“Please. I’m concentrating. This is not pain. We don’t use the word pain. There is some . . .”

“Some what?”

“Marnie. Please. Be. Quiet.”

We finally get to the medical building—a low-slung little stucco building with banana trees and azalea bushes planted out front—and I pull up to the door and get out and come around to help her. But she waves me off and then—just like that—she loses her footing and she falls down on the pavement with a loud smack.

“Oh, no, no, no! Oh my goodness!” I cry, and I bend down to help her. “Don’t move. Let’s see . . . oh crap . . . did you land on your stomach? Did you hit your head?”

“No, I didn’t hit my head. Calm down, will you? That was my purse making that noise.”

She’s lying on her side in the flower bed, her head resting on a big old palm frond, looking up at me through her same old calm-as-anything Natalie eyes. She’s not frothing at the mouth or bleeding or giving birth. She’s just Natalie, lying there as if she meant to. Then she starts trying to pull herself up and can’t.

“Here, maybe you shouldn’t move. Really, Nat. It could be you broke something.”