Non Pratt - Trouble

“You two slept together.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

I stare at him, but his eyes are narrow and sharp and ready to cut through my soul.

“Why are you doing this?” I whisper, the words catching on my tears as they come out.

“Why are you?” Jay says, but there’s no sadness in his voice that I can hear. Just anger.

I have no answer to this and I look at him, tears flowing down my face. Does he know how much he’s hurting me? Can’t he see?

“It’s Dad’s birthday and you’re saying all this. Why, Hannah? Why would you do that to Dad?” Jay’s warming up now and I can hear he thinks this is going to work.

“Jason—” Robert puts a hand on his arm, warning him to stop, then turns to me. “If this is a joke, it’s not very funny.”

Even though I’m dreading it, I manage to meet his eyes. They’re hard and bright, like Jay’s, but they’re not unkind, just lost, disappointed in me for making up such lies about his beloved son.

“It’s not a joke,” Aaron says. Robert and Mum look over at him as if they’d forgotten he could talk. “Hannah slept with Jay and now she’s about to have his baby.”

Jason looks at Aaron with loathing. “You’re not going to listen to him — he’s just trying to worm his way out of it, isn’t he?”

Mum and Robert glance at each other. They might have a hard time thinking Jay’s the father, but they’d have a harder time believing this is Aaron’s idea.

“The due date is the eleventh of June. I” — Aaron glances at me apologetically — “got to know Hannah properly in October.”

“These things aren’t accurate…” Mum says, but she goes out to the kitchen and fetches the calendar, flicking back through the months. I watch when she flips from October to September, but Robert’s not looking at her, he’s looking at me.

“When?”

“Jay’s leaving party,” I say quietly, wanting not to meet his eyes, but knowing I’ve got to.

“She’s lying! Hannah’s slept with loads of boys.” Jay’s almost shouting.

“That’s not true,” I whisper.

No one else hears Hannah say that it isn’t true. But then she says something that we all hear:

“You were the first.”

And I feel her gripping my hand so tight that my fingers turn cold, but I’m squeezing back, telling her that I’m here for her.

Jay was her first?

I never realized.

All I can feel is Aaron’s hand in mine as I look at Jay struggle to understand what I’ve said. He didn’t know. How could he, when the girl in his bed was pretending, the way she’d been pretending all summer — to her friends in the park, the boys she pulled? The way she’d pretended to her best friend.

“It’s not true!” Jay’s voice is loud with indignation and I want to slam my hands to my ears and shut out the noise. “Tell them about the others.”

No one says anything. We’re all looking at Jay, who’s looking at me and at Robert and Aaron, across at Mum. Beside me, Aaron says quietly, “‘Others’, Jay?”

Robert looks at Aaron and then at Jay, his face pale as Mum walks back over to me, the calendar open on September, finger resting on the nineteenth, the night of Jay’s party, eyes wide with a question she doesn’t want to ask.

At last Robert says something.

“Others?”

Jay doesn’t seem to understand. So much for university education.

“You slept with your sister.”

“Stepsister,” Jay tries to say, but Robert isn’t listening.

“You slept with Hannah!” Robert’s shouting and when he steps across the room Jay actually flinches, but it’s Hannah his father reaches out to, a hand on her shoulder. “She’s fifteen. You slept with your—” This time he can’t even say it — the horror is insurmountable.

Jay starts, “I didn’t—”

The look Robert shoots him stops Jay’s protest dead. His father turns to look at me. “And you? October…” His eyes widen as it dawns on him. “You knew all along.”

I want to shake my head. I want to say no. “I didn’t know it was Jay until—”

What is it that I’m going to say? But I don’t get the chance to finish the sentence.

“You need to leave,” Robert says, quietly.

I look at Hannah, her eyes tear-glazed and swollen, but it’s her mother who answers.

“You lied to us, Aaron.” Eyes as anguished as her daughter’s. “How could you? You must have known this would—”

“It’s not Aaron’s fault,” Hannah tries, but it was never going to work.

“Get out.” Robert once more. “This is a family matter. You are not family.”

And I leave, walk down the road to where my mum has been waiting in the car. We say nothing as she pulls away and I rest my head on the glass, thinking of the way the family I’d become a part of threw me out of their brood.

It’s done. I’m no longer the father of Hannah’s baby.

It’s important to give people space. I understand that, which is why I have only sent one text, one email and called her mobile once. No reply. I draw the line at calling her house phone; I don’t want to risk speaking to Paula or Robert. Or worse, Jay.

Whether I get through or not, I don’t for a second doubt that Hannah knows I’m here for her. But what Hannah needed was the father and now, finally, she’s got him. If Jay’s still around, does it really matter where her best friend is?

Mum has put my life on lockdown until something is worked out. I don’t know how taking my phone away and disconnecting the Wi-Fi is going to help, but no one in this family is thinking straight at the moment. For some reason Mum seems intent on stopping me from talking to Aaron — as if he’s to blame for any of this.

When we get to school that afternoon, Mum tells me that she’d prefer it if I waited in the car before my exam.

“Why?”

The sigh she lets out sounds as if she’s so tired of talking to me that any more words will drain her completely. “I don’t want you distracted.”

Mum watches me watch Aaron walk past with Gideon. How can I describe to her — to anyone — how I feel? Aaron’s not someone who churns me up the way Jay does — he calms me down, keeps me sane. Can’t she remember how hard it was when we fell out in the holidays? Doesn’t she know that seeing him look at me as he walks past, hurt that I’m not getting out and waddling over, is breaking my heart? Worse — it’s breaking his. Will he know that I think about him all the time, when I’m meant to be thinking about a thousand other things?

He is my best friend in the whole wide world.

Surely he knows that without me sending a text?

But Aaron’s not like me. If he were in my seat, he would unclick the seatbelt, swing open the door and run across the tarmac, shout my name and tell me, to my face, that I am his best friend. Just to remind me. Just in case.

But I’m not as brave as Aaron. Despite my track record, I cannot bring myself to disobey my mum. Not on this one.

All I need to know is whether she’s OK. That is all.

Even as I tell myself this, I know that I am lying. I need to know whether she needs me because I still need her. Hannah and her baby are a part of my life now. I don’t want them to slip out of it.

I’m the last person to take my seat in the hall. I look over at Aaron, but he is looking at the clock. I look at the paper on my desk and the pens and instruments I’ve brought with me and I look at the back of the person in front. You can see her bra through the top she’s wearing — the slightest hint of back fat nudging over the top of the elastic. I run the flat of my fingertips up my own back, as if I might be scratching it, but I can’t tell what my back looks like. For all I know I could have a full-on back boob to match the pair at the front.

I look at Aaron again, taking in everything about his face, the lashes, the lips, the scar on his jaw that I now know came from a night he would rather forget — from a life before this one. I want to tell him about my communications blackout. I have screamed, I have cried, I have punched the wall — I could show him the grazed knuckles — but I have not been able to escape.

“If you set foot outside this house without my permission, you will not be allowed back.” And I can’t risk that being true — for my baby’s sake, not mine. I haven’t even been allowed to see Gran in case she smuggles Aaron in for a meeting. Instead I had to watch as my paranoid mother called her and told her what had happened. I was crying with shame — why couldn’t she have let me tell her? Eventually Mum handed me the phone.

“Hannah? Are you OK?” Gran sounded worried.

“Not really.”

“Do you remember what I said? That you’re a brave girl and I love you?”

I’d thought she was about to tell me that she was taking it back, but she didn’t.

“I should’ve added that you are the strongest girl I know. The strongest person. Remember that, love. This’ll sort itself out and I will be here for you as soon as your mother comes to her senses, which she will. She always does.”