Hall of Infinite Doors
The next week flies by in a flurry of rumor and agitation. It seems the news of your pregnancy has gotten around a little - curiously more of a topic of interest among the girls than the boys - and you receive both support and insult in equal amounts from your peers. It actually surprisies you; people you've never known and barely even noticed come forward to tell you they understand and consult with you on your future. At the same time, you lose a sad amount of friends - people who you've known for years but who just don't want to have to deal with the responsability of supporting you right now. It's a strange time where everything seems to be in flux, drunk on the constant sense of newness you experience as you hunt for a job and become accustomed to the changes your body is going to face.
After a lot of looking, you find a job after school at a chain coffee shop. You aren't going to be paid more than minimum wage, and you definitely don't want to be doing this forever, but the hours are precisely what you need. For the first time in your life you find yourself with money - real income that you constantly need to resist spending. It's hard, and as time goes on, it only gets harder.
As the weeks to by, the stress seems to just constantly pile up. You feel constantly sick and weak, and always just a little tired and off balance - and your mother says that's just going to get worse. Your schoolwork doesn't stop, and you find you have less time to work on it than you used to. Your grades begin to suffer, and you have to stay up later and later each night just to keep them from falling further. You never seem to have time to do what you want to do anymore. Even the doctor who your mother takes you to, now that your pregnancy is further along, tells you that this constant stress might have adverse affects on your baby, but what else can you be expected to do?
You never had any illusions that having a child would be easy. Your mother and your father both made great strides to show you this, but now that it's actually happening you don't feel like you can cope. You feel trapped by your decision - caught up in something that, more and more, the world tries to tell you that you're just not equipped to handle. You need release.
Now that a bit of time has passed and the rumors of your pregnancy thoroughly saturated the school, you've become an object of attention from certain boys. They don't have a good reputation. They're barely older than you and seem constantly drunk; they always get into trouble both on and off school property; they constantly hit on girls and have a bad reputation as, well, man-sluts. At the same time, more than a few of them are impossibly good-looking - even before your current situation you've given them more than a passing thought. You're tired of being seen constantly as this proto-mommy figure. Maybe for the last time, you want to be a woman once more.
After a lot of looking, you find a job after school at a chain coffee shop. You aren't going to be paid more than minimum wage, and you definitely don't want to be doing this forever, but the hours are precisely what you need. For the first time in your life you find yourself with money - real income that you constantly need to resist spending. It's hard, and as time goes on, it only gets harder.
As the weeks to by, the stress seems to just constantly pile up. You feel constantly sick and weak, and always just a little tired and off balance - and your mother says that's just going to get worse. Your schoolwork doesn't stop, and you find you have less time to work on it than you used to. Your grades begin to suffer, and you have to stay up later and later each night just to keep them from falling further. You never seem to have time to do what you want to do anymore. Even the doctor who your mother takes you to, now that your pregnancy is further along, tells you that this constant stress might have adverse affects on your baby, but what else can you be expected to do?
You never had any illusions that having a child would be easy. Your mother and your father both made great strides to show you this, but now that it's actually happening you don't feel like you can cope. You feel trapped by your decision - caught up in something that, more and more, the world tries to tell you that you're just not equipped to handle. You need release.
Now that a bit of time has passed and the rumors of your pregnancy thoroughly saturated the school, you've become an object of attention from certain boys. They don't have a good reputation. They're barely older than you and seem constantly drunk; they always get into trouble both on and off school property; they constantly hit on girls and have a bad reputation as, well, man-sluts. At the same time, more than a few of them are impossibly good-looking - even before your current situation you've given them more than a passing thought. You're tired of being seen constantly as this proto-mommy figure. Maybe for the last time, you want to be a woman once more.