Quad Squad

  That Guy

  Andrea never even told him. Mike had to find out from somebody else. Somebody he didn’t even really know. He was walking between classes when two girls he barely knew came over to him and asked, “Can we ask you a question?”

  And he said, “I guess, like what about?”

  And one of them said, “Did you get Andrea pregnant?”

  And he stopped walking, and looked at them, seeing them for the first time. They were kind of opposite, one tall and thin and full of acne and the other short and kind of round, but right in that moment he was thinking only that he wanted to kill them both.

  “That’s what people are saying,” the round one said. “That she had to have an abortion.”

  He stared at her, trying to understand who the hell she was and what the fuck she was saying. “Go … away,” he finally said, really quiet.

  “What?” the skinny one asked.

  And the other one said, “Is this, like, too personal?”

  And Mike gave her a look, just this look of death, and they finally kind of got it, and they for some reason both looked surprised that he was pissed, and then they took off.

  He felt like he was going to puke. He went home early, gave his parents some excuse. Then, later, once, he did puke. Not exactly puke, like nothing came out, but it felt like he was about to, all hunched over the toilet and feeling awful.

  He didn’t even know what to say or do. He had no one he could ask, or talk to.

  He thought about what to do for a long time. It was crazy. It was like -- he had never even really thought about that. Obviously, he had kind of thought about it that night, after the football game. But to tell the truth the whole incident had gone so quickly and really if everyone was being super honest, it hadn’t been that fun because he had been thinking about Maya during it. And later, when he was at home, he realized that Andrea had been, too -- thinking about Maya.

  It was okay, him and Andrea, like there was physical pleasure and everything, but it was also kind of weird and lame. Nothing like that you imagine of love and everything like that was had happened between him and Andrea. Nobody said afterwards that was wonderful or I’ll never forget this moment or any of that movie shit. Nobody looked in anybody’s eyes. It was basically too dark in the park to see much, anyway. They barely kissed before.

  Not that he was so stupid he didn’t know that girls get pregnant when you don’t kiss a lot but then have sex, but it seemed like what they had done was just such a really minor, stupid thing that somehow didn’t count. Like, the next day they hadn’t even said anything to each other. He had texted her once something like hey how’s it going, just to be cool about it, and she had texted back something like, I’m just fine, don’t worry about it. So he hadn’t.

  They weren’t going out or anything. They weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. They weren’t even really friends.

  But now it was killing him. Was he that guy? He never wanted to be that guy.

  He spent a whole bunch of time, days, maybe weeks, lying in his bed and trying to think of what to do.

  He never wanted to be that guy, he was the exact opposite, if people really knew. He never wanted to be the guy who got a girl pregnant and then took off. He wanted to be the guy -- he was the guy who stuck around and did the right thing and took care of his responsibilities.

  Except he wasn’t being that guy. He wasn’t being any kind of guy. He was hiding in his room and playing Minecraft, which he hadn’t even touched in like three years but right now was the only thing he could manage to do.

  It could, he sometimes thought maybe, all be bullshit. The girls that told him, they could have just made it up. But then also, she could have gotten pregnant and not gotten an abortion. Maybe it was just because of the accident, she had just been in the hospital for car accident reasons, like Tim and Maya had been.

  But he didn’t think so, not deep inside. People make up a lot of stuff, but how do two girls who don’t even know you find out that you got someone pregnant? Like, it wasn’t right.

  He wanted to text Andrea, but what was he supposed to say? Hi, how are you? That would be such fake bullshit, and so inadequate compared to what was going on, or supposedly was going on.

  No way he could text anything like, hey were you pregnant? Was it because of me? Did you get an abortion? That was just disgusting, to even think about asking that in text.

  Or he could say, hey, can we meet, but then she would say no. Guaranteed. Like, she had already had weeks to text him and she hadn’t, and she could have herself asked him to meet or asked him to help pay for the abortion if that was how you did it, but he didn’t have any money, and he really didn’t want to kill a baby, even if people said it wasn’t doing that, but he didn’t want to have a women’s rights fight about it, but he didn’t want her to have it either actually, and shit, shit, shit. Everything sucked.

  He was crying a lot nowadays. Just sitting and playing Minecraft and crying.

  He could maybe ask someone else, someone in the old squad. The Quad Squad, what a laugh. A squad has your back when things get bad. Instead Tim had turned into a fucking psycho with a knife and Jerry had supposedly done something that made Sabrina freak out and she had left town and Maya and Rachel weren’t talking to him.

  So what now?