I’ve read a lot of the teen pregnancy stories on this site and it really bugs me that everything is a happy ending in them when I know for a fact that doesn’t happen in real life. So I’ve searched the internet and read some stories from actual girls who were teenage mothers and created this story. This chapter isn’t that long because it’s only the prologue.
I hope you like it.
Prologue:
Perhaps it all started two weeks before. On a rainy Tuesday the last week of March. I was stuffed in the corner, my head leaning against the soggy window stretched out on the classroom wall. In the room, there were two doors on either side of the right wall and he had entered from the one farthest from the front. The teacher looked up, smiled, asked his name, then pointed at the empty seat next to me, which he slided into and held out his hand towards me. I hadn’t been listening the first time he said his name aloud, instead I was more focused on the phone I had hidden underneath the desk.
“I’m Asher,” he whispered to me, “Asher Alston.”
I had slipped my phone into my pocket and placed my hand over his, which was cold and strong as he shook our connected hands up and down. I giggled and whispered, “Eva Buckley.”
A few minutes later, while the teacher-a bald black man in his mid-thirties and eyebrows that could easily be mistaken as caterpillars by the name of Mr. Jacobsen-was in the middle of talking about the ancient Mayans, Asher slid a paper over to my desk. It was folded into ninths, with one of the flabs tucked under a fold. I tried to open it quietly, but things never seem to go the way I planned. The paper swatted against itself and made a sound loud enough for the entire classroom to look at me. I remember smiling and making some excuse involving the notes on the leson that laid flat on my desk. Mr. Jacobsen went back to his lecture.
Asher’s note read: First day’s already boring. Wanna show me around town after class? I’ll bring my umbrella.
I turned my head and looked at the window behind me, which echoed the sound of the raindrops. My mind was already sketching Mr. & Mrs. Asher and Eva Alston on everything it could see. I grabbed the nearest pencil and used my free hand to cover my reply as I wrote it, then folded the paper up exactly as he had and handed it back to him. My reply was only one word. Yes.
After the bell rang and Mr. Jacobsen’s class was over, Asher took my hand in his and lead me out the back door of the school and navigated our way through the rain. He took me to to his car, which was much smaller than I expected, in the middle of the parking lot, which lacked the parking pass that hung from the other vehicle’s front mirrors.
Once we inside the car and the school was way out of sight, I turned to him and smiled, saying, “Do you do this with all the girls you barely know?”
“I don’t know, do you do this with all the boys you barely know?” was his reply.
“Answer my question first, I’ll answer yours.”
“We can change that you know,” he smirked and I raised my eyebrow as a way to say what?, “Barely knowing each other. I mean, I already know you are a master at texting in class but a failure at passing notes. But that’s not really deep, isn’t it Eva Buckley, but we can change that.”
I liked the way he said my name. No one had ever used my full name like that before, other than my parents. “Okay, Asher Alston, what do you want to know.”
“I wanna know everything you don’t want me to know.”
“Like what?” My best friend Lyla always teased me about being an open book. There wasn’t that much about me that I didn’t allow people to figure out. I waited for Asher to give more details on his question, but he never did. Finally, I sighed and replied, “My middle name is Gretchen. Eva Gretchen Buckley. I know, horrid, but it was my grandmother’s name and there’s nothing I can do about it. Um. Pisces and born in the year of the tiger.”
All he said was, “Deeper, Gretchen, I know you can dig deeper.”
And after a thinking for a moment, I said back, “Family life is like one you’d find out of a movie. Parents had an ugly divorce back when I was 12. So now I have father I don’t get along with and brother who took his side over my mothers, but overpaid step dad and a fake-tanned stepsister with a full ride scholarship to wherever she pleases. Virgin. I hate bacon. That’s as deep as I can get. What about you? What do you not want anyone to know?”
My eyes wandered to the road, where we passed a green sign informing us that Boston was only 32 miles away. I lived in small town Massachusetts, in a city northeast of the capital city on a tiny peninsula that jutted into the ocean. It wasn’t much of a place; it wasn’t much of anything.
“Impossible,” Asher muttered. I thought he was talking about me being a virgin, which had slipped out of my mouth when my mind was on my step sister, Virginia (because that, ultimately, was the state in which she was conceived, step dad seemed to mention it way too many times for my liking), but instead Asher added on saying, “Nobody hates bacon.”
“Your turn Alston, answer my question.”
I meant the same question he’d asked me, but instead he answered the only other question I’d asked that day, “No, I don’t do this with every girl I barely know. Only the pretty ones. You know we can fix that one thing about you.”
“The bacon thing?”
“Well, that too, but the virgin thing.” He smirked. I could tell he was joking, so I chuckled and told him to try again in a few weeks.
He turned the car to a back road that I could only imagined stayed unused for most of the year and parked the car. We spent the rest of the day making out in the back of his tiny car.
Thinking back on it, perhaps we moved too fast. I hadn’t even known him for an hour and our faces were already up close and friendly. And the few weeks I told him didn’t last long. It was less than two weeks later when the clothes came off and he was ontop of me in the basement of his unfurnished house. The brand new carpet left scratches on my back, the little fabric of it stuck in my hair. He told me he loved me.
Now, looking back on this day, these details are important to me because that was all I had left of him.
