A new life, a new beginning

Lou’s POV

I sat on the edge of my mattress in our small apartment, after I washed myself clean from my humiliation, my damp hair dripping onto my shoulders. My white t-shirt and jeans were in a plastic trash bag by the front door. I did not want to wash them. I wanted them out of my sight because looking at the fabric made my stomach muscles tighten with violent nausea.

I was furious. My hands shook so much that I could barely tie my sneakers. I felt a hot, constant pressure behind my eyes, but I forced myself not to cry anymore. The tears I had shed in school were enough. I refused to waste any more water from my body on Jaxon Ryder or the people who couldn't stand up to talk about the wrong but were there to record my shame.

Yet, despite the absolute anger filling my chest, a small, stubborn part of me kept listening to the sounds outside. Our apartment sat on the ground floor, right next to the gravel parking lot. Every time a car drove past the window, my head snapped up. Every time tires crunched on the loose stones outside, my heart rate increased rapidly, and I stopped breathing for several seconds to listen.

He knew exactly where I lived. He had driven down this street dozens of times over the past five months. He knew that the third wooden step leading up to our door creaked loudly when someone stepped on it. He knew my routines. I had blocked his phone number and his social media accounts within ten minutes of getting home, ensuring no text or call could get through to my device. But blocking a digital signal did not stop a person from walking up to a physical door and knocking on it.

I sat there for three hours, staring at the brown wood of our front door, waiting to see if the handle would turn. I wanted him to come just so I could look at his face and see if he had any real words left in him, or if he truly was the silent coward I saw in the hallway. But the afternoon turned into evening, and the evening turned into a cold night. The only sounds were the distant traffic from the highway and the heavy, uneven breathing of my grandmother sleeping in the next room. Nobody came.

Two weeks passed. I did not go back to Crestwood High. I called the main office and informed the secretary that I was experiencing a family medical emergency and needed to complete my final assignments from home. They sent the remaining worksheets to my email address. I did not care about graduation anymore, I only cared about survival. I increased my hours at the bakery, taking every morning shift from four in the morning until noon, and kept my weekend shifts at the public library.

My body began to fail under the strain. I noticed the changes slowly. My limbs felt heavy, like I was moving through thick mud every time I tried to walk across the kitchen. Then came the nausea. I blamed it on the stress, on the fact that my mind constantly replayed the image of Tiffany Hale holding that white milk carton. Every morning when the smell of fresh yeast and hot grease filled the bakery air, my stomach would heave, forcing me to run to the employee restroom to spit into the toilet.

On a Tuesday morning, exactly fourteen days after the incident in the hallway, I was working the back counter at the bakery. The air was hot from the large industrial ovens, and the thermometer on the wall read eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. I was lifting a fifty-pound paper sack of granulated sugar from the floor to pour it into the mixing vat.

As I straightened my spine, lifting the heavy bag against my stomach, a sudden dizziness hit the back of my head. The white walls and the silver metal counters blurred together into a grey mass. My ears started to ring with a loud, high-pitched tone that blocked out the sound of the mixers.

My fingers lost their grip on the paper sack. The bag hit the floor with a loud thud, splitting open and spreading white sugar across the linoleum. I tried to reach out to grab the edge of the metal table to stabilize myself, but my arm felt completely weightless. My legs gave out beneath me, knees hitting the floor first, and then my side slammed against the ground. The darkness took over my eyes completely, shutting down my thoughts.

When I opened my eyes, the sharp scent of antiseptic and alcohol filled my nose. I was lying on a narrow bed, a bright fluorescent light shone down from the ceiling directly into my eyes, causing a sharp ache behind my forehead.

"Lie still, Lou," a voice said from my right side.

I turned my head slowly. Martha, the owner of the bakery, was sitting in a plastic chair next to the bed. Her apron was gone, and her face was lined with deep worry.

"Where am I?" I asked. My throat felt completely dry.

"The community clinic," Martha said, reaching out to place a warm, rough hand over my knuckles. "You fainted right next to the mixing vats. You hit your shoulder pretty hard on the way down, and you wouldn't wake up for nearly thirty minutes. I called an ambulance."

Before I could answer, a woman in a white lab coat entered the room holding a small metal clipboard. She looked at Martha, then at me, her expression serious and professional.

"Miss Bennett?" the doctor asked, walking over to the left side of my bed. "I am Dr. Vance. The paramedics said you experienced a sudden syncope episode due to physical exhaustion and low blood pressure. We ran a standard blood panel to check your iron levels."

"Am I sick?" I asked, my voice rising slightly. I could not afford to be sick. An additional medical bill would ruin the small amount of money I had saved in my drawer at home.

Dr. Vance set the clipboard down on the small table. "Your iron is low, which explains some of the fatigue. But the primary cause of the faint, combined with the elevated hormone levels in your blood, is different. Lou, you are pregnant. The lab results indicate you are approximately six weeks along."

The words entered my ears, but my brain refused to process them for several seconds. I stared at the small silver pen clipped to the doctor's pocket.

"That is impossible," I said clearly. My voice sounded thin in the small clinic room.

I stopped speaking because the memory of three weeks before the incident came rushing into my head. It happened on a rainy Friday night. Jaxon and I had been sitting in the back seat of his SUV, parked in the dark lot near the old reservoir. He had been quiet that night, holding me tighter than usual, telling me how much he hated the pressure his father put on him to be perfect. We had crossed a line we hadn't crossed before. It had been gentle, private, and entirely real.

I would be happy to share this with him, but now, I know the truth, Jaxon didn't like me, I was just a bet to him. He would be happy to get rid of me.

Oh God! How? More than anything, the timeline matched perfectly. I was carrying his child.

"Are you certain?" I whispered, my fingers clenching the blanket beneath me.

"The blood test is one hundred percent accurate," Dr. Vance said gently. "Your human chorionic gonadotropin levels are very high. I need to prescribe you some prenatal vitamins, and we need to discuss your options moving forward."

Martha let out a small gasp beside me, her hand tightening around mine, but I did not look at her. I looked at the white ceiling tiles above me, counting the tiny black dots in the plaster to keep myself from screaming.

An hour later, Martha drove me back to my apartment. She did not ask me who the father was, and I did not offer the information. She simply told me to take the rest of the week off with pay and handed me a small plastic bottle of vitamins she had purchased at the clinic pharmacy.

I walked into my apartment and closed the door behind me. My grandmother was sitting in her rocking chair by the television, her eyes milky and unfocused as she watched a game show with the sound turned off. She did not realize I had been in the hospital. She did not realize anything at all anymore. Her dementia had progressed to the point where she forgot my name at least three times a day, often calling me by my mother's name instead.

I walked into the tiny bathroom, locked the door, and leaned my back against it. I placed both of my flat palms against my lower stomach. It felt completely normal, flat, soft, and unchanged. But inside, a tiny group of cells was growing into a human being.

A human being who belonged to me and to Jaxon Ryder.

I thought about his silence in the hallway. I thought about the way his feet had remained rooted to the floor while Tiffany poured that milk over my head. I thought about the fact that fourteen days had passed, and he had not sent a letter, had not knocked on my door, and had not tried to find me at the bakery. He had simply disappeared back into his wealthy world of large houses, expensive cars, and popular friends.

The truth was very simple, and I understood with cold certainty that Jaxon was never going to come. He had been caught in a lie, his pride had been damaged in front of the entire student body, and he had chosen to run away rather than face the consequences of what he had done to me. If he couldn't even stand up to Tiffany Hale to defend my dignity, how could he ever stand up to his wealthy, strict parents to admit that he had gotten the poor scholarship kid pregnant? He would never accept this child. His family would probably offer me money to make it go away, or they would use their expensive lawyers to call me a liar.

I let out a long breath through my nose. The anger inside me changed. It was no longer a hot, loud emotion, it is now solid and cold.

I did not need him. I did not want his money, his excuses, or his late apologies. But as I stood in that small, damp bathroom, looking at my pale face in the cracked mirror, I realized something else. I needed this baby.

My mother had abandoned me when I was five years old, leaving me with a grandmother who was now losing her mind day by day. I had spent my entire life feeling like an extra piece of furniture in other people's lives, trying to be small and invisible so I wouldn't cause trouble or cost too much money. But this child inside me was completely mine. It did not know about the difference between the rich side of town and the poor side. It was real life, and I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything else.

But to keep this baby, I had to change everything.

I unlocked the bathroom door and walked out into the kitchen. I grabbed a small yellow legal pad and a blue ballpoint pen from the counter. I sat down at the table and began to write down numbers.

My current savings: four hundred and twelve dollars in the drawer.

My weekly income from the bakery: two hundred and eighty dollars.

My weekly income from the library: one hundred and fifty dollars.

Our monthly rent: six hundred dollars.

Grandmother's medication: five hundred and ten dollars a month.

The math did not work. It had barely worked before, but with a baby coming, it was impossible. The cost of diapers, baby clothes, medical checkups, and food would push me completely under the surface of my debts. Furthermore, I could not continue to leave my grandmother alone in the apartment for twelve hours a day while I worked. Twice last week, she had left the gas stove running without lighting the flame. It was no longer safe for her here, and it would definitely not be safe when I had an infant to care for.

I stared at the paper until my eyes blurred. There was only one solution.

I needed to move my grandmother to a professional care home. There was a state-subsidized facility in the neighboring city of Oakhaven, about forty miles away. I had researched it months ago when her condition first began to worsen, but I had rejected the idea because the thought of leaving her with strangers made me feel terrible. But Oakhaven was a much larger city than Oakwood. It had more factories, larger commercial bakeries, and higher starting wages for workers.

If I moved my grandmother into the Oakhaven care home, the state would cover a significant portion of the cost based on her small Social Security check. It would free me from the constant fear of her burning the apartment down while I was at work. More importantly, it would allow me to move into a smaller, cheaper single room in Oakhaven and work longer hours, perhaps even double shifts at a factory or a hospital, to earn the money I needed to support myself and the baby.

I stood up from the table, my decisions firmly locked into place. I walked over to my grandmother's chair and knelt down on the worn carpet in front of her. I took her thin, wrinkled hands in mine. Her skin felt like dry paper, and her fingers were cold.

"Grandma," I said softly, looking up into her vacant blue eyes.

"Yes, clean the dishes, Marie," she murmured, using my mother's name again.

"Grandma, it's Lou," I said, my voice thick with emotion, though I kept my face steady. "We are going to move to a new place. A nice place where people will help you every day. And I am going to get a new job."

She did not understand. She just nodded her head slowly, her jaw moving as if she were chewing on nothing, her gaze drifting back to the silent television screen.

I stood up and walked back to the kitchen to find the phone number for the Oakhaven facility. I had a lot of work to do. I had boxes to find, clothes to pack, and an entire life to dismantle before anyone in school could find out what had happened to me. I was going to disappear from this town completely, and I was going to do it alone.