Finding things to keep herself was distracted during those first crucial 48 hours after her birthday. If Leda and Joey suspected anything, they didn't say a word.
The answer to Kyle's question came one evening when she was borrowing his easel, pressing her worries into the canvas and letting colors grow from them.
She looked down at herself, touching her stomach tentatively and wincing. "...shit," she whispered, closing her eyes as tightly as she could.
She was barely a high school graduate. How the hell had this happened?
She knew that the waiting was over. Any longer, and she'd be lying to her parents. And there was no way she'd be able to hide this for more than twenty-four hours.
Freya carefully made her way down the stairs, conscious suddenly of how tightly she held the railing and how certain she was of her foothold before she descended to the next one.
Joey was right where she expected him to be. He'd learned everything one could learn from every exercise machine known to man, but he still loved to flaunt it, even at his age. "Hey...Dad?"
"What is it, Freya?" he called, never looking away from the screen.
"I have...I have something to tell you."
When he looked over his shoulder and saw her attire, his jaw dropped. "Freya?"
"I'm...I kind of have something to tell you. Like...you remember when Donald came over on my birthday?" Long, heavy silence. "Because, you see, we...things kind of got..." More silence. Freya felt like ripping her ponytail out. "...Dad, I'm pregnant."
He stared at her belly. "...well, that's a relief. I just thought you were getting really fat."
"Dad!"
"Hold on a sec, lemme get your mom."
"LEDA," he screamed at the top of his lungs as he hobbled toward the staircase. "Take a break from that damn laptop for once and get the hell down here! Your daughter has something to tell you!"
Even with the way that he was shouting, Freya wanted to pass out in relief. He wasn't angry. He wasn't. He was...even maybe...sort of okay with it? She exhaled and stumbled backward a step, touching her belly again and looking at it with a new sense of wonder.
When Kyle suddenly approached her tentatively, she looked up at him and smiled softly. "Hey," she murmured, as if the baby was already born and shouldn't be woken.
"Hey. Are you...okay?" he hedged.
Freya considered her response. She'd been crying herself to sleep every night. She woke up that morning with fresh tears on her cheeks. As much as she despised Donald for playing with her like that, for making cheap excuses just because he was a coward who didn't want to make things work with someone as young as she was, her body still longed for him, and her heart was still broken.
And yet at the bottom of it, she knew it was for the best.
"...yeah. Yeah, I think I'm gonna be all right."
Kyle leaned down and touched her stomach as well, his broad hand splaying over it and covering almost the entirety of her baby bump. He was already growing up so fast. He'd be an adult by the time her baby was a toddler. That was so strange to think about.
When he suddenly pressed his ear to her stomach, she snorted and began to giggle. "Kyle, it's way too early for that, I promise."
"Oh yeah? Well, maybe I've just gotta listen a little closer."
She smacked him playfully on the shoulder and grinned at him. "You're such a nerd."
But, she reflected, at least she had the support of her family. As Kyle grinned up at her, he looked more like a kid than he had even when he WAS one. Maybe...everything really WOULD be okay.
As they settled down that night, Kyle with his homework and Freya with a pregnancy book, she felt her hackles begin to lower for the first time in three days.
It wasn't until later, when Freya excused herself from the room to answer the door, that Kyle had a moment.
"HOLY SHIT I'M GONNA BE AN UNCLE!"
The figure at the door wasn't expected, not at all. Freya stared at Donald for a moment before she looked over her shoulder and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her. "What are you doing here, Donald?"
"I heard some stuff. Wanted to see if it was true." He looked down at her stomach, and Freya covered it with a hand protectively. How in the world he'd heard this fast, she had no idea. This town had so few secrets, however, that she found she really wasn't that surprised.
"...well. Now you know. So you can leave, and get the hell out of my life."
"C'mon, Freya, you don't mean that," he murmured, leaning close. "I know you better than anyone else on this planet, and right now you're scared to death that you're gonna have to do this alone."
His words rang so close to home that she sucked in a breath, desperately trying to stabilize herself. "That's what I'm feeling, is it?"
"I was your best friend since you started high school, wasn't I?"
Luke's face swam before her eyes, completely unbidden, and she narrowed her eyes at Donald. She found herself wondering what it might've been like if she'd spent her birthday night with Luke instead, tangling her fingers in his messy hair and feeling every inch of his skin, cold against her heat, as his eyes glowed in the darkness. As she looked into Donald's blue eyes, she knew it would've had a far different, and possibly far happier, ending. She lifted her chin proudly. "Donald, get the hell out of my sight, and never come back."
As he stared at her, she imagined for a moment that she saw a sense of hurt in his eyes. It was...incredibly unfamiliar, coming from the image of Donald she'd built over the past three days, the one who used her and left her shivering in her bed every night as her trecharous mind remembered every intense second of it.
But the hurt faded seconds later, leaving behind inevitability instead. Donald slowly nodded. "We had a nice time, didn't we, Freya?"
"We did. But you fucked that up royally." As he passed by her closely to descend the porch stairs, leaving her skin and her heart jumping with the heat radiating off of him, she rubbed at her arms and looked over her shoulder. "Hey, Donald?"
"Yeah?" he asked, pausing with one foot on the ground and one on the last stair.
"I hope you grow up one day."
He glared at her before he got in his car and drove away.
