Worth the Trouble ✓

14 | manual labour

SUKI FINISHES THE MATH TEST before anyone else in the class.

She took half an hour to do an hour's worth of work. Then she slid her paper onto the teacher's desk and asked to go to the bathroom in a sotto voice. She took her bag with her.

It's only because I'm her boyfriend that I can detect the tremor in her voice, even as a whisper.

Something's wrong.

I wait a few minutes to dispel suspicion and act with languid carelessness. Even though I haven't given every question a solid effort, I strike off my last answers and hand the test in.

When I walk out of the classroom, bag on my shoulders, I list places Suki would have gone. The library is too open since there would be students in their study period there. I push open the door to the nearest girls' bathroom and stick my head in, hoping it's unoccupied by anyone other than my girlfriend.

"Baby?" I call quietly, observing one locked stall.

A moment's silence passes.

I wonder if some random girl is in there taking a dump and I just rudely interrupted.

Then the door swings open and Suki walks out, eyes rimmed red. She sniffs. "What— what are you doing here?"

She's been crying. I grab her into a breathless hug. Her face fits perfectly into my chest, and her arms wrap around my waist.

"Comforting you, apparently. What happened?"

"I don't need comforting," she insists, even as she buries her head closer to my heart. "It's just hormones. Baby brain."

Yes, the infamous hormones. Apparently, pregnancy brings with it bouts of horniness, sadness, happiness, anger, jealousy—all in the same ten minutes. Suki was more emotional about the prospect of being emotional than she was actually emotional.

But it seems to have hit her, right now.

"I— I couldn't do the test," she begins shakily. "I stared at all the questions, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out the answers. Even though I knew it was easy because I'd done countless examples of those types of questions just last week." Her voice raises in pitch, ringing clear like a bell. "My freaking brain. It's not working. Not like it used to."

As a witness to all her after-school study sessions, I know firsthand that she works so hard for the skills that are now slipping away. First she decides to wean ballroom out of her life, and now she can't do maths. All things she loves. All things she's losing.

I don't mean to say that she should trade the baby for algebra — heck, even I wouldn't do that. I'm just terrified that more and more of her hobbies, skills, and commitments are going to join the pile of things Suki threw out. I wonder if this one kid growing inside her will be worth it.

"It's okay, baby." I nod and smile wearily, though she can't see my face. Nod and smile. The mantra is engrained. "This will pass. Symptoms come and go."

"Yeah. Like hurricanes come and go. Equally destructive, too," she whines into my chest. Her breath warms my heart even as she dissolves into tears again. "Wow. Sorry. That was melodramatic. I've been getting overly emotional, too, like—"

Her weeping steals her coherence, and Suki resigns herself to sobbing into me. I rub my hands up and down her back for several long minutes, tortured. I hate that she cries. I hate that I can't always stop it.

Eventually, the tears subside and Suki raises her face to me. Her dark brown eyes swim with the recent moisture, shiny like marbles. "Thanks, baby. I'm glad you're still around. You make all my bad days better."