Asking your boyfriend to let your ex-boyfriend walk around with his face on is never an easy thing to do. Not that that’s something a lot of people have to contend with on a daily basis. As I sat next to Ben on the couch downstairs, after the football game was over, waiting for him to respond to my request, I hoped I never had to ask another question like this one again.
“Do you really think this is a good idea?” he asked me, the expression behind his eyes telling me more than the question itself.
“Of course not,” I said, meaning it. “I think it’s a terrible idea. I think there’s a good chance that it will have devastating consequences that we will never recover from as a pack. I think someone might actually die because of it.”
Ben’s eyebrows
More people were out and about in downtown Whispering Hollow than I would’ve imagined. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so apparently, a lot of people had the week off. Of course, school still wasn’t in session, not only because of Fionna’s fire but also because it was a scheduled break for the holiday. A lot of students roamed the sidewalks, some of them darting into the diner or the donut shop, others window shopping the few stores that sat between those two destinations. Occasionally, someone would actually enter a store, but there wasn’t much to buy in Whispering Hollow, not that anyone our age would like anyway. Older people were interspersed between the teens, a few mothers with children, families, or older people, but most of them looked at the marauding teens like they were actually doing something wrong, other than being loud and acting like kids.Ben
Starla claimed she was unable to get a doctor’s appointment. While she claimed she could schedule one for mid-January, well after the deadline I had given her, she said not a single doctor qualified to determine whether or not she was pregnant was available before the day I told her she had to be out by.“So, you see, Harlow,” she said to me as we sat in the living room in Grandma’s house, “you’re just going to have to give me an extension.”I stared at her for a long moment before I reached into my pocket, pulled out my cell phone, searched for OBGYNs in the area, skipped right over the one I’d gone to see myself, and selected the second one, a Dr. Kemp in the next town over. “Try this one,” I told her.She looked at my phone and said, “I already did
I followed the “happy” couple into the waiting room of the doctor’s office. It wasn’t very crowded. Only a few overly-pregnant women and their husbands, as well as a couple of ladies who looked like they might be there for something else, or just to confirm their pregnancy, like Starla, sat in the chairs. Sam, wearing Ben’s face, looked around the room, uncomfortable, and took a seat as Starla approached the counter. I didn’t dare sit down since I had no idea whether or not someone would come and literally sit on me, so I stood next to him.Sam/Ben covered his mouth with his hand and whispered, “You here?”I put my hand on his shoulder, and he nodded slowly, knowing that meant I was. A few moments later, Starla came back and sat in the chair next to him, filling out all of the paperwork she could&rsq
Getting back into the truck to go home was a reversal of all of the steps I’d had to take to get there, except for Sam, wearing Ben’s face, was so angry right now, I was afraid he might forget that pesky fly was me and accidentally squash me, so I hung back in the corner of the backseat of the truck far away from his hands.Starla was crying as they made their way back to Grandma’s house. Sam/Ben said nothing, only drove, which I thought was remarkable because I fully expected him to start yelling at her immediately. He was doing a better job of remembering he was Ben to her than I’d thought he was capable of.It wasn’t until we had almost reached Whispering Hollow that Starla stopped crying enough to say, “Ben, I’m going to have to ask you a favor, and you’re going to have to promise me something, okay?”
“The enemy?” Sam asked, staring at his girlfriend through eyes that looked just like my boyfriend Ben’s. “What are you talking about, Starla?”“Listen, Ben,” she began, still wiping at her eyes with the leftover fast food restaurant napkin that he had handed to her a few moments ago. “The reason that I asked you to take me today was because I was afraid all of this would come out, and I thought you would be more understanding than anyone else would be. You always seem like such an even-keeled person. If I had known you were going to get this angry, I wouldn’t have asked you to be the one to take me to the doctor today.”“You’re acting like it’s some sort of a privilege that I got to take you to the doctor today,” he said, sounding absolutely more like Sam than Ben. Starla’
“Is that Starla?” Melanie whispered as the three of us girls heard a knock on the door.I nodded. “Yep. I’m sure she’s here to spew more lies.”“You never know,” Raven said, hopping up to go answer the door. “Maybe she’s here to tell the truth for once.”I hid a chuckle because, if there was one thing I was certain of, it was that Starla was not going to tell me the truth.“Hey, Starla,” Raven said, opening the door and sounding more welcoming than I would’ve been able to pull off. “How are you?”“Awful,” she said. “Is Harlow here?”I could see Raven through the
I lay on our bed with Ben for about an hour, neither of us even speaking for the better part of that time. He was content to rest there next to me, holding my hand, while we stared at the ceiling. When he did talk, it wasn’t to ask questions or to tell me what he’d learned from the run with Sam, only to make sure that I was okay.I wasn’t sure I was okay, so that was a difficult question to answer. I just wanted to take Starla and throw her as far away from me as I could so that I’d never have to see her again. I had known from the beginning, somehow, the second that I’d met her, that she was going to end up being trouble for me. Even though I’d avoided her at all costs, it was inevitable that she would come back around and end up being a major pain in my ass.Despite my agitation, I was beginning to get tired, and my eyes we
I knew what I was asking of Ben was a lot, and I shouldn’t even be pondering the possibility of requesting that he go through with what Sam had suggested. Sending Ben over to Starla, to try and convince her to tell Sam the truth, was too much. So, as my boyfriend came and sat down near me on the couch--not right next to me, as I would expect--I wasn’t sure if I should even tell him, not that he didn’t already know.“I don’t think this can end well, no matter what we decide,” he said, sitting down and folding his hands between his knees.“I know,” I agreed. “But… Sam wants to know who the father is. He deserves to know. We all do.”“I’m not sure the rest of us do,” Ben said, being pragmatic. “But I do agree that Sam deserves to