Nobody taught me how to use a condom.

I did my best, but I kinda just guessed, to be honest. I was also drunk– probably too drunk. I’d never been drunk before, so I don’t really know. Nobody taught me how to drink either. It was my first time. First time drinking, first time using a condom, first time having sex.

So of course I fucked it up. Which is why I’m not surprised when Jameson Sparanorvik drags me into the band practice room Monday morning to tell me she’s pregnant.

“Are you sure?” I ask. Okay, fine, I’m a little surprised. But I’m fifteen and just found out I got somebody pregnant. My parents always thought it was going to be Logan who failed to beat teen pregnancy. I’m supposed to be the good son, the one who does what he’s told and doesn’t get in trouble. He certainly doesn’t get girls pregnant because he doesn’t know how to hold his liquor or use a fucking condom.

“I took five pregnancy tests. I’m pretty sure.” Jamie fumbles with the hem of her t-shirt, her lip pinched between her teeth. She’s a senior, in the same grade as my older sister Ella, but she sits next to me in art class. She’s pretty and sarcastic and easy to talk to, and she thinks I’m funny or nice or something, which is how we went from working on an art project after school to making out in her car behind the gym. And now we’re having a baby together.

Way to fast track your first relationship, Nate.

“Okay.” I shove my hands into my hair. “And it’s mine?” I bite my tongue, but the words are already out. Of course it’s yours, you idiot. You’re the one who had sex with her on the bathroom floor at Nina Burgelli’s party last Saturday. You’ve literally basically ruined her entire life because you just guessed how condoms work and, yeah, they should be pretty straightforward and the instructions are probably on the box, but you were too drunk to read, and, okay, sure, you probably shouldn’t have had sex at all when you were too drunk to read, but you weren’t thinking about that then. All you were thinking about was that Jameson Sparanorvik was one of the prettiest girls you’d ever seen and that she wanted to have sex with you and not Logan and that you better say yes before she realizes how much of a fucking loser you are and changes her mind and never talks to you again. Everybody knows teen pregnancy is worse for the girl than the guy, and you just had to go and indirectly accuse her of cheating on you. Now you sound like a dick.

This is why you don’t think with your dick.

Jamie scrunches her face up like she’s stuck between crying and screaming. “You’re the only guy I’ve slept with, Nate.”

I wish I could strangle my past self before he has the chance to say something so stupid that it makes her look like that. “Yeah, I know, I just– I’m sorry– I didn’t mean– Shit, shit, I’m so stupid. I just– I don’t– What do we do?”

“I don’t know.” A single tear falls from her eye, opening the floodgates. “I can’t have a baby, Nate.”

I hug her because I have no idea what else to do. She cries into my shoulder, her back bent at an odd angle to reach it. She’s taller than me, by like a whole head, which has never bothered me but I’ve always wondered if it bothers her. Maybe I’ll hit a growth spurt. I’m only fifteen.

I’m only fifteen. “We’ll figure something out,” I tell her, patting her back.

The bell rings. “Shit, I’m late for English,” she says, pulling out of my arms.

I’m late for Algebra, but how the fuck am I supposed to focus on learning the quadratic formula when I just found out I’m going to be a dad?

“We should meet after school,” she says, opening the door. “I have track,” I mutter, staring at a chip in the keyboard leaning against the wall. “I’ll pick you up after.” “Okay.” The door shuts behind her. I crack my head against it before I follow.
~~~
I think I’m gonna throw up.

Coach Husk yells at us to run faster, push harder, but even though I can feel my feet hit the asphalt still wet from the late March rain we woke up to, I’m falling behind. When he gets in my face, screaming, “I know you can run faster than that, Macson!” I almost scream back that I’m a fucking idiot who got my kind of girlfriend pregnant and all I want to do is run faster, run away, but I can’t because she’s pregnant and I made her that way and she’s waiting for me in the parking lot.

Practice slowly becomes a little better because I start to focus on breathing and matching my arms to my legs until I reach the end and Coach claps me on the back, saying, “I told you you could run faster than that, Macson.” I gasp out breaths that burn my lungs, my hands on my knees. I’m too scared to speak in case I vomit into the puddle my reflection stares back at me from.

Logan’s waiting outside the school when I leave the locker rooms. He rolls down his passenger’s side window. “Get in, loser!” he yells.

I gesture toward Jamie’s green Audi. “Jamie’s bringing me home.”

“What? Just get in! I’m already here!”

I shake my head and walk to Jamie’s car. I hear Logan’s car door slam behind me. “What the fuck are you on, Nate? Just get in the car! Nate, get in the fucking car!” He grabs me by my shirt right as I reach for the passenger’s door handle of Jamie’s car. She’s inside, and she waves when she sees me. She jumps when Logan slams me against the car parked next to her. “What the fuck’s wrong with you? I used gas to get here and pick you up, and you’re going to be a little shit just so you can bang your girlfriend?”

“We live ten minutes away, and you were already here for baseball,” I say. Jamie’s door slams.

“It doesn’t fucking matter! You’re still being a little shit!” He grabs my collar.

“Logan! Let him go!” Jamie grabs his arm. He shoves her out of the way, and she hits her shoulder on her car window.

“This isn’t about you!”

“Hey, don’t touch her!” I stop thinking, and I punch my brother. Right in the face. It feels like I broke my hand.

He just stares at me, his mouth twisted in a snarl. “You think you’re hot shit because you’re dating a senior, but you’re not,” he says. “She’s a slut, and you’re just fucking pathetic.” He walks back to his car and speeds out of the parking lot.

“Are you okay?” I ask Jamie.

She nods, rubbing her shoulder. “You?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” My heart is beating so fast I think it’s going to explode. I get into her car, and she grips the steering wheel. Logan’s words beat in a rhythm to match my heartbeat. Fucking pathetic. Fucking pathetic. Fucking pathetic.

“I’m not a slut,” she says.

I slouch in the seat, my knees cramped against her dashboard. “I know.” Fucking pathetic. Fucking pathetic. Fucking pathetic.

“And you’re not pathetic.”

The words keep pounding anyway, like sneakers on asphalt, and I don’t really believe her.

“Okay.” I pull up my hood so she can’t see that I’m about to cry. Fucking pathetic. Fucking pathetic. Fucking pathetic.

“Any ideas on what we should do?”

I shrug, then shake my head, then let my head fall against my knees. “No,” I admit. Fucking pathetic. Fucking pathetic.

“Yeah, me either,” she says. She sighs. “We should tell our parents.”

I groan. “Yeah,” I finally agree.

Fucking. Pathetic.
~~~
When I open the door, I can hear Logan in the kitchen, telling my parents how much of a little shit I am. Jamie drives away down our street. I think about running out and throwing myself in front of her car, not that it would kill me at that speed. But maybe it’ll put me in a coma. The whole family’s in the kitchen, waiting for dinner. Mom always yells for everyone to come down before it’s actually ready, calls it family time. Ella is sitting sideways in a chair, her feet balanced on the table and a book with the side profile of a boy screaming birds into a red sky on the cover held over her face. Penny sits at the counter next to Logan, fitting facts from the book open on the granite in front of her in between his complaints.

“Dad, did you know that “cerebellum” comes from a Latin word that means “little brain”?” Penny says. Dad shovels the lettuce from his cutting board onto the flat side of his knife and drops it into the salad bowl. “I didn’t know that.”

“Mom, you have to talk to him,” Logan says. “Make him pay for my gas.”

“The cerebellum is only ten percent of your entire brain–”
“Just take the five cents from his sock drawer,” Ella chimes in from the table.
“I’ll talk to him,” Mom says, stirring the contents of the crockpot.
“–but it has over half of all the neurons in your brain,” Penny says.

I was not using that part of my brain last Saturday, I almost say. I don’t know how I’m gonna do this.

“That’s very cool, Penny.” Dad begins tossing the lettuce with the other vegetables in the bowl.

“Shut up, Ella,” Logan snaps. “He punched me, Dad. Shouldn’t you ground him or something?”

Ella continues to give commentary. “You probably deserved it.”

Penny spins on her stool and spots me standing in the kitchen doorway, my mouth sour and my fists crushing my sleeves inside my sweatshirt pockets and my gut suddenly speeding after Jamie. “Hi, Nate,” she waves. I wave back, giving her a tight-lipped smile.

“How was boning your senior girlfriend?” Logan asks.

“Logan!” Mom chides.

“We didn’t–” My tongue swells. I want to run away. Maybe if I start now I can make it to Canada before they catch me.

“Nathaniel, what’s this about you punching your brother?” Dad asks.

I shrug. My knuckles smart. “He shoved me into a car first.”

“Because you were being annoying!” Logan says.

“Mom, Mom, guess what?” Penny says, excitedly pointing at her book.

“What, Penny?” Mom responds absently. “Logan, that’s not an excuse to shove your brother.”

“The human brain isn’t fully developed until you’re in your twenties. That’s so old.”

My brain’s not going to be fully developed for at least five more years. How am I supposed to raise a kid?

“Mmhm, Penny,” Mom says. “Why are you late, Nathaniel?”

She only calls me Nathaniel when she’s mad or concerned, which are basically the same thing. “Jamie drove me back.” She and Dad exchange a look. “How is Jamie?” Dad asks.

“She’s pregnant.”
The entire kitchen stops like a movie paused. Even Penny stops chattering. Ella drops her book on her face. “Ow,” she says, restarting reality.

Mom laughs forcefully. “That’s not funny, Nathaniel.”

“Nope, it’s not,” I agree.

“You can’t be serious.”

I sit at the counter between Penny and Logan. “Completely,” I say.

“How– When– Where–” She buffers like a scratched CD.

I drop my head in my folded arms. I answer her unfinished questions backwards. “Nina Burgelli’s party. Last Saturday. We were drunk. We did it wrong. I don’t know.”

“How do you do it wrong?” Ella gets off the chair and stands behind me.

“Are you married now?” Penny asks with her simple ten-year-old logic.

“Is it yours?” Logan asks.

“Shut up,” I tell him.

“Wait, Jamie’s in my grade,” Ella says. “Isn’t she eighteen? Isn’t that illegal?”

“She’s seventeen,” I correct her.

“But you’re still just a freshman, and she’s a senior. That’s weird.”

I just groan into my sweatshirt sleeves.

“You got a girl pregnant?” Mom shrieks. “Nathaniel Marcus Macson, what were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Probably that she was hot and his dick was hard,” Logan says.

“Logan Noah Macson, do not make me ground you too.”

“What’s a dick?” Penny asks.

“She’s going to graduate this year,” Ella says.

“Mmhm,” I say.

“You were drinking?” Dad asks. “When did you start drinking?”

“Saturday,” I say.

Logan leans over to Penny and whispers loudly, “Penis.”

“My baby brother got somebody my age pregnant,” Ella says with disgust.

“Apparently,” I say.

“You’re going to take responsibility,” Mom says.

“Sure,” I say. My voice feels small. Lost under everybody else’s, drowning under questions I don’t know how to answer.

“What?” Penny asks, staring at Logan with her eyes widened to the size of the spoon in Mom’s hand. Mom looks like she’s considering smacking my butt with it like she used to when I was a little kid and threw tantrums over the bowl my cereal was poured in.

“Can you have a baby in college?” Ella asks.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Protection doesn’t always work,” Dad lectures. “Abstinence is the best birth control.”

“I know,” I say.

“It’s a bit late for that now, Dad,” Logan says.

“You better get a job so you can help pay for this baby. We’re not going to just do it for you,” Mom says.

“Okay,” I say.

“She said yes, right?” Ella asks, gripping my shoulder. “You both said yes?”

“Yeah,” I say. I remember that part. I think.

“We expected more from you, Nathaniel,” Dad says.

“Is Nate gonna be a dad?” Penny asks. “How can you be a dad if you’re still a kid?”

I want to scream. I want to scream that I already know that I’m a disappointment, that I have to take responsibility, that it’s my fault, that I screwed it all up. I already know all of it. Every thought in my brain has been running around screaming like someone just fired a shot in the mall and nobody knows where it came from. I pulled the trigger, and now I have to figure out how I’m gonna convince everyone it wasn’t a real gun even though it looks and sounds and feels like a real gun. But it’s not a real gun, I swear. I didn’t mean to pull the trigger. I just didn’t know how to load it right, and now I’ve made a mess of everything.

I run away. I jump off the stool, open the door, and sprint down the driveway. I don’t know where I’m going except for away, so far away I eventually spin things back and start all over. If only superhero logic worked in real life. I’d take the mood-killing minute to read the instructions on the box. I’d tell Jamie I wasn’t ready yet instead of kissing her back. I’d keep watching Collin and Theresa battle on the PlayStation instead of following her up to the bathroom. I’d drink pop instead of taking that shot that pushed me over the edge. I’d tell Mom and Dad to lock me in the bathroom so that I never could have managed to sneak out and get in her car and believe her when she told me I was different.

Of course I was different. No other guy she’s been with has gotten her pregnant.

The feeling that’s been twisting in my gut since the practice room erupts out of me and I keel over and vomit. It pools in the pothole between my feet, turning the black water yellow and chunky. I hack and spit, but the lump remains stubbornly lodged in my throat. I flop back on the rough asphalt, starfished and staring at the cloudy sky. I don’t know how long I’m watching the clouds shift into the shape of my future, but I’m rudely interrupted by a car tire stopping by my hand.

Mom blocks out the sky like an eclipse. “Nathaniel? What are you doing?”

“Dying.”

“Don’t talk back to me, young man,” she says. She looks at the pothole between my open legs. “Did you throw up?”

“Morning sickness.”

“You’re not the one who’s pregnant. You can’t have morning sickness,” she says with a huff. She missed the joke entirely.

“I ran too hard,” I correct myself.

“Get out of the middle of the road and get in the car. We’re going home.” I search her face for the answer the sky couldn’t give me. “Do you think I can be a good dad?” She sighs heavily, her fingers pinching the bridge of her nose. “Just get in the car, please.”
~~~
With the combined babbling efforts of Logan and Ella, everybody in our Wisconsin small town high school knows by Friday. The whole town will know by Sunday. Church is the kindling gossip needs to start the forest on fire.

Jamie won’t talk to me. She even switched seats in art class. I wait by her car after school, hoping to catch her before I have to be at track practice. She scowls when she sees me, swallowed in her baggy sweatshirt. “Leave me alone, Nate,” she says, opening her car door.

“Wait.” I block the door with my hand. If she wanted, she could slam my fingers black and blue. “Please. I know I messed up, but I can’t fix it if you don’t tell me what I did.”

She cuts me a glare. “You don’t know?” “Maybe, but I need you to spell it out for me just to be sure.” She rolls her eyes. “I told you to tell your parents, not your family.”

I’m so stupid. I forgot there was a difference. “And now everybody knows. Everybody already thought I was a slut, but now they’re convinced and it doesn’t matter what I do, I’ll always be the girl who got pregnant two months before graduation. With a fucking freshman.” She spits it as if my age is my fault, as if she didn’t know how many years I have under my belt before she took off my pants. “People keep sliding notes in my locker, all the girls are mad at me, and all the boys keep asking how much I charge. And now I can’t get an abortion because if I do I’ll be a slut and a baby murderer. I’m supposed to go to college in the fall. Maybe I can push back a semester, but I can’t go to college with a baby. This is my future, Nate, and it’s going down the fucking toilet.”

And I’m the one who flushed it.

She keeps going, but I barely hear her. I’ve ruined her future. She was going somewhere, she had plans, she was going to grow out of the confines of this town. And I caged her. She shared the tower she had built with me, let me look around, and I took a giant club and smashed it to pieces. She’s crying, and it’s all my fault.

“I can’t take care of a baby.”

“I’ll take care of it.” The words spew out of my mouth like the vomit yesterday, splatting on the road between us.

She stops and looks at me. “What?”

“I’ll take care of it,” I repeat. The decision settles like a stone in my stomach. “As soon as it’s born, I’ll take care of everything. I’ll raise it, take it to the doctor, change its diapers, pay for daycare, all of it. You won’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. And I’ll even help as much as I can until it gets here. Anything you need, I’ll do it. I know I can’t take it back, but I’ll do anything I can to fix it. I promise.”

“Really?” Hope shines in her eyes.

The promise settles around me like chains, but there’s also something freeing about knowing where I’m going. “Yeah.”

She squeals and hugs me until I can barely breathe. “Thanks, Nate.” Then I can breathe again, her car starts, and she’s gone.
~~~
I thought telling Mom that I got someone pregnant was going to be the scariest moment of my high school experience, but this definitely tops it. She looks ready to smash my head in with the hammer in the toolbox within arm’s reach. I took her and Dad into the garage to tell them so I only had to deal with two people instead of five.

“And you just made this decision by yourself? You didn’t think to talk about it with us?”

“Yeah.” There’s no point in not being honest.

She turns away, her fingers pinching her eyebrows together. “And I thought Logan was my trouble child.”

It was one mistake! I want to scream at her. Yeah, it was a big mistake, but I’m trying to fix it. That’s better than most people, right? At least I’m trying to fix it. It was my fault, and I’m owning up to it. I’m taking responsibility. Isn’t that what you wanted?

“How exactly are you planning on making this work?” Dad asks.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“This isn’t something you just figure out as you go along.”

“You just described being a parent,” I say. “That’s literally what you guys did.”

“Yes, but we weren’t children,” Mom says.

“I’ll just grow up faster then.”

“This isn’t like a puppy, Nate,” Dad says. “You can’t just say you want one and then hand it off to us to take care of when you figure out it’s too much work.”

“I won’t.”

“Let’s just put it up for adoption, okay?” Mom begs me. “Then neither of you have to ruin your futures.”

“No.” I’m a little surprised by the fierce protectiveness behind the word. “I want it. It’s my kid.”

“Please think about it, Nathaniel,” Mom says. “You can’t change your mind once you decide to do this.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She grabs my shoulders. “You’ll think about it?”

“Sure,” I tell her, but I’ve already made up my mind. I already made a promise; I can’t just take it back now. Not when she looked so happy about it.
~~~
Coach Husk pulls me aside after track practice. He rubs his palms on his pants as he walks with me around the track. “Hey, Macson, I heard about the– you know.”

“Me becoming a dad?”

“Yeah, that.” He clears his throat. “I heard you’re going to be taking care of it yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“The girl doesn’t want to?”

I flinch at the accusation in his words. My shoulders come up to my ears. “She’s got plans a baby doesn’t fit in.”

“What about you? What about your plans?”

“I don’t really have any plans.”

“So you’re just going to throw away your entire future?”

“Can’t throw away what I don’t have.”

He kicks at a rock. “The woman should take the baby in these situations. It’s their fault stuff like this happens to kids like you.”

I stop. “She’s a kid too.”

“Well, yeah, but–”

“No. No but. You’re not involved in this situation, and you don’t know enough about it to speak on it.”

“I just don’t want to watch you throw away your entire future.”

“I’m not throwing away my entire future. It’s just going to be different.”

“You’re a good runner, Macson. Don’t throw that away for– for this.”

“I don’t want to quit track, but if I’m going to stay, how I do it is going to have to change. Besides, it’s not something I ever saw as my future.”

“But it could be.”

I barely stop myself from rolling my eyes. “How, Coach? Am I gonna go to the Olympics? You and I both know I’m not that good.”

“You could be, if you worked at it.”

I shrug. “I’d rather work at this.”
~~~
I get a job working in a nearby shoe warehouse, fitting shoe boxes in bigger boxes like puzzles and sticking on price tags. School, track, work, repeat. Luckily, my freshman year wraps up after only a month of this. Jamie got her school in Florida to allow her to enroll a semester late. I work as much as I’m legally allowed and mow lawns outside of that. Fall sneaks back in, and I have to switch my schedule to fit school.

Mom begrudgingly helps me pick out baby stuff. She almost looks excited while she helps me pick out onesies with dinosaurs on them and formula and diapers. Dad builds a crib without me asking, and I walk in on Mom painting it with tiny airplanes and cars. My room morphs into a nursery. I study baby-raising books more than textbooks. I’ve never gone to the library this much before. The librarian recognizes me by name now, and she gives me parenting advice while checking out my books, telling me that she raised her first daughter while still in high school and how impressive she thinks it is that I’m taking responsibility as the father. “That’s hardly ever how it goes,” she says. “Especially being a dad all by yourself.” Sometimes thinking that makes me feel like I’m gonna throw up.

The legal stuff makes my head spin, but we sort through it. It helps that Jamie and I aren’t fighting over stuff. And that her recently divorced parents are supportive of both our choices, in a way mine don’t know how to be. I think they’re just happy I’m taking most of the responsibility, so they want to make it as easy as possible for me to take the burden from them.

“I think we should name him Riley,” Jamie says at a doctor’s appointment a month before she’s due. “Or Tyler. I like those.”

I can’t stop myself from grimacing. “Alright, fine,” she says. “You pick his first name, and I’ll pick the middle. Then he’ll be a sandwich.”

“Huh?”

“He’ll have your last name, so the names you give him will be the bread, and the name I pick will be the filling. Sandwich.”

I don’t really get it, but at least his first name won’t be Riley. “Okay.”

I become a dad on December 26, 2001. We had a scare on September 11, while the towers were crashing, but he decided to wait a couple months more. I guess he just preferred the idea of being one day away from the second coming of Jesus over popping out as the World Trade Center toppled. Still, he very obviously has a flair for the dramatic.

The day the baby is actually born, there’s a snowstorm warning but no snow, and Jamie hates me the whole time. The hospital already knows about our situation, but Jamie originally said she wanted to meet the baby. The doctor tries to hand him to her, and she takes one look at his red, squished face and grimaces. “I don’t want it,” she says. She looks at me. “You take it.”

They bring me to a different room, and they show me how to hold him and how to feed him with the bottle. “Do you want your parents?” the nurse asks. I shake my head. “Let us know if you need anything,” he says before he leaves.

“Okay,” I say. I think. Or something. It doesn’t matter, because there’s a whole life in my arms and I helped make him and he’s breathing and now I have to keep him that way. I think I’m gonna throw up. He sucks on the bottle and snuggles against me with a small noise, and I know with everything in me I would do anything to keep him safe and happy. Fuck the Olympics. This is my future.

His hand can barely close around my finger. “Hi, Adam,” I say, soft because I’m scared I might break him. He’s small and bald and squishable, looking at me with big blue eyes. “Hi, I’m your dad.” And I actually believe it.

Three days pass, and I bring him home. Jamie is supposed to leave for Florida in a few weeks, and she hasn’t seen Adam since he was born. That’s okay; it was part of our deal. I don’t really want to share him anyway, not if she doesn’t really want him.

My parents already met him in the hospital, but my siblings are waiting at the door when I get home. Even Logan takes a turn holding him, and I have to convince him to give him back.
“Is he always gonna be bald?” Penny asks, his hand wrapped around her finger while he’s wrapped in my arms.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“What’s his name?” Ella peers over my shoulder, and he stares at her.

“Adam Riley Macson,” I say proudly. My mistake, but the good kind of mistake. A mistake like chocolate chip cookies. My kid.

“Nate,” Logan says. “Your kid’s initials spell A.R.M.”