The Bad Boy's Little Pumpkin

No, It's Not a Prank

I walked out to the waiting room, where my mom and Apple were sitting. Their heads were both buried into their phones. Mom looked up and I turned around the photo of the ultrasound.

None of this made sense. Mom was laughing. Even she thought this was a joke. Apple snapped her head up. Her jaw was about to hit the floor.

"Nuh-uh," she said.

"You're really...." Mom's hand went to her face. "You can't be."

"See, I told you that you guys should be using condoms, but your smart ass always told me you didn't need them," Apple said.

The people sitting around us in the waiting room started staring. Mom noticed.

"We can talk about this in the car. Let's go," she said.

I scheduled my next appointment, which was my twenty-week scan, where I'd find out the gender. My head was still spinning. I was a cheerleader with a hot boyfriend and a nice house. The parents I had cared about me. I had a partially-blind pet fish who was super cute. I always felt larger than life, like I had it all.

Now it seemed as if everything caught up with me. How? How is this happening? I kept going over those words again and again in my head.

"You need to tell Kevin," Mom said out of nowhere.

"Okay, got it," I said.

"When are you due?" she asked.

"November twentieth. I'm sixteen weeks right now."

"I can't believe it took you this long to catch it," Mom said.

Apple chuckled to herself. "I could."

"Sush," Mom said to her. "You didn't have any symptoms. In that sense you were lucky, but now we have a lot less time to prepare."

"How did you know I wanted to keep it?" I asked.

"Because through my rearview mirror, I can see the way you're looking at that picture. I'm also your mom. I know you two better than everyone else."

I looked down at that little baby in the photo and smiled. That was really mine. It was so unexpected and so out of nowhere but I was so happy.

I never knew I wanted to be a mom or have a baby until I looked at that picture in my hands of the tiny child inside me. Hopefully Damien wouldn't flip out over it. He didn't seem like the "dad" type, like Kevin, my stepdad.

I opened up my contacts and selected Damien's name, which was surrounded by heart emojis, then started writing out a text.

Hey, lmk when you can come over. Gotta tell you something.

When we got home I walked over to my stepdad's studio, which was our old office that he converted. I'd basically known Kevin most of my life. He met Mom when we were ten. He was a YouTuber at a comic con with his partner and best friend, Carter.

Mom was taking photos for her photography studio. She always had a lot of cosplayers asking for photo shoots. Her and Kevin bumped into each other and it was happily ever after. They got married and we moved into Kevin's big ass house. Apple and I were sharing a bedroom before, so it was a big upgrade.

I could hear Kevin talking through the door. He did all kinds of stuff on his channel, and it sounded like he was doing a reaction video right now.

"It's like you took a pile of shit and somehow made it into an audio file, then released this song!" he said.

I knocked. He kept on reacting. I knocked harder. I heard him put his headset down on the desk and then the sound of his chair wheeling over. He unlocked the door and opened it, trying to give me a smile. Reacting to popular pop songs really sucked the life out of him.

"What's up, Kinz?" he asked.

"I gotta tell you something."

"Did everything go okay at the doctors?"

"Uh...yes and no." I held up the picture of my ultrasound. "I don't have an ovarian cyst like they thought. I'm actually pregnant."

He let out one of his big, deep belly laughs. "This is such a great prank! Here, I'll roll back over to my desk and you wait outside the door. This will be absolute gold for views. We'll do this whole thing again and I'll pretend I'm freaking out."

"Kevin, I—"

He closed the door and told me to knock. His viewers were really going to get a kick out of this when I explained that it wasn't actually a prank.