Two Blue Lines (Crossing The Line #1) (2 page)

But, still now, I’m twisted up like a pretzel, wondering what will happen if Reed ever finds out the truth. This baby might not be his.

The Miracle of Demon Genetics

M
el and I waited almost two weeks to tell our friends. I mean, really, how do you digest something like that, much less tell people? That makes it real, doesn’t it?

A baby.

Jezus.

In our miniscule little beach town outside of Freeport, Texas, this kind of thing hardly ever happened. Okay, well, it
happened
. Just not to us. And in Brazosport High School, where our graduating class next year would be less than three hundred kids . . . yeah, we were gonna be news.

So, for two weeks, we spent every day staring at each other in a shock-induced haze, just sort of pretending it wasn’t real. Each lost in our own personal hell. Mine, because it was just one more day of feeling guilty for what we’d done. Pissed off. Worried about the future. Wanting her and not being able to have her—talk about a Catch-22. I wanted her but I shouldn’t.
That’s what got us into this mess in the first place, you idiot!

Oh, not to mention I was going to be a father. Holy shit.

But, for Mel, she’d had enough after another run-in with her mom over an upcoming visit with her grandparents, who she always said made her feel uncomfortable because she was adopted, and treated her different than the other grandkids. Even her brother, Chris. But, then again, he was her parents’ biological child.

No more procrastinating. It was time to come clean. We sure couldn’t wait until she was showing . . . or delivering!

We were having our first dry run with my best friend, Jonah, who neither of us had seen in a few weeks. For some reason, Mel was skittish when I mentioned telling him, but she relented. Probably sensed I needed to get this off my chest.

I gripped Melissa’s hand in my clammy palm as the three of us sipped melting Icees and walked the sand dunes of Surfside one Saturday afternoon, me between them.

“You told your parents yet?” he asked, his face downturned. Serious.

“No,” I answered for both of us. That was a hurdle we’d yet to figure out how to leap. Honestly, we were scared shitless and Mel was hurting on a level I had yet to breach.

He nodded, his concentration on a piece of seaweed at his foot. “So, what’re you gonna do? You gonna keep it?”

The wind whipped up, whirling Mel’s ponytail around her shoulder like a loose rope. I swallowed, trying to form a coherent sentence, but Mel jumped in, her voice slightly shaky. “Yes, we’re keeping it! Of course we are. Why would you even ask that?”

I turned to study her. I’d never seen such vehemence in her eyes before. Where had that come from? I knew she felt at loose ends, wishing she had that “I was chosen” security of other adopted kids, but honestly, I’d been too afraid to have the conversation with her now that we were in a position to choose that destiny for ourselves. And I couldn’t help but wonder when had the baby come to mean something more to her than an end to our childhood? A reason to fear our parents? An unknown, scary, amoeba-like ‘it?’

Because I sure didn’t feel it.

All I seemed to feel lately was confusion, fear, and a carefully masked, simmering anger. It was all so unfair.

Jonah looked just as taken aback. He held up his free hand in mock surrender. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just asking. You guys are only sixteen. You’ve got your whole lives ahead of you.” He let his arm fall limp. “Just thought you might’ve considered . . . I dunno, other options?”

Mel stopped and stared at the water. “I did. We did.” She caught my gaze, her eyes never meeting Jonah’s. “But I couldn’t do that. I won’t do to this baby what my parents did to me. And abortion is just . . . No. I can’t. This baby is innocent.” Her last words rose on the sea air like a prayer.

I swallowed against my dry throat.
What about us?
I wanted to scream. Aren’t we innocent?

We were silent a while as the ocean pushed and pulled along the shore. A gull cried mournfully overhead, mirroring my pitiful, pained thoughts. I toed the sand and chanced a quick glance at Jonah to try and puzzle out what he might be thinking. Did he think I was a complete dumbass?

The breeze lifted the hair from his forehead as his dark eyes caught mine. I saw nothing but sympathy mirrored back.

Relief rushed through me in a dizzying wave.

He understood.

We both glanced at Melissa’s downturned head then our eyes clashed again. We knew. We both knew. Thanks to Melissa’s demons, my life . . . hers . . . would forever be linked by whatever concoction genetics and DNA had created that fateful night in the backseat of my ratty, hand-me-down Toyota.

“So adoption’s out, huh?” Jonah asked when we were alone at my house the next day.

I flopped down on my bed and stared up at the Misfits poster on my ceiling. “Looks like it.”

“Did you even ask her?”

“Kinda.” I turned and looked at him, still frustrated with her refusal to consider it. “Sorta. I hinted, she blew me off. But I can’t just come out and say, ‘Hey, Mel, I know you just found out you’re pregnant and all, but you wanna give our baby to complete strangers?’” I rolled my eyes. “That wouldn’t go over well. You know how she feels about adoption.”

Jonah sat heavily and sighed. “Yeah, I guess. But just because she’s unhappy about being adopted doesn’t mean it has to be the same way for your kid. I think they do things differently now where you can pick who you give your baby to and stay in touch and stuff. At least I think that’s what my cousin Hannah did.” He shrugged.

“Huh,” I said noncommittally.

If only it were that easy . . . but I was the only person who knew the true depth of Mel’s pain when it came to being adopted. The nightmares. How she agonized over not being able to talk to her parents about, well, much of anything. How she felt she could never live up to Chris’s Golden Boy perfection. How she dreamed of finding her biological parents one day. How she felt abandoned, unwanted, unloved . . . no matter how much her parents and I told her different. And as cozy as Jonah’s plan sounded, I knew she’d never go for it. She believed with all that was within her, and maybe had since her birth, that a baby belonged with its real parents. No. Matter. What.

Not that I agreed. I was kinda seeing the beauty of
not
having a kid. But who was I?

I could talk until I was blue in the face, trying to get her to see reason—we had no jobs, no money, no education—she didn’t seem to be thinking about any of that. ‘We have love,’ she’d said the one and only time it came up, though for some reason I saw guilt behind her eyes.

“So, Noah finally ships out for boot camp next week,” Jonah said, changing the subject, his solemn voice broadcasting that he didn’t like this subject any more than me.

“Yeah. Finally, huh?”

He glanced at me and nodded. “Damn straight.”

His older brother had always been a real prick, tormenting us whenever he got the chance. But he was especially cruel to Jonah. And the sad irony of that was that they looked so much alike, they were like twins—one good, one evil. Hopefully the Army would straighten him out. At least it would get him out of our hair.

Weird thing was, Jonah’s family had been the epitome of
dysfunctional
for as long as I’d known them. I thought back to what he and I learned about my mom’s family three years ago. How neglected she was—making her all the more empathetic toward Jonah—how she’d nearly drowned at my favorite beach when she was a toddler, only to be saved. By Lettie. Sometimes I thought Jonah understood the best, living the nightmare he lived. But they’d both come out good people, so there was hope. I really thought it was a miracle that the rest of his Biblically named crew hadn’t turned out as rotten as his big brother, Noah. But they were acting like he’d won the freakin’ Nobel Prize because he’d joined the Army. They even threw a big party when he signed the official papers a couple months ago.

Mel and I had gone, but that had been a mistake. The King family was only covering up their crap in streamers, balloons, finger food, and a keg, giving Noah the chance to act like a drunk prick. Fun times.

In the hubbub, I got separated from Mel and Jonah for a while, and found myself nearly in a fight with one of Noah’s prick friends when he started mouthing off about Jonah. When Mel and I finally caught up with each other, she was super pale and tired. She just wanted to go, and frankly, so did I. We left without saying bye to Jonah. I tried to call him later and he said it was no biggie—his brother had only gotten drunker and meaner and the party went to shit anyway. Poor Jonah.

Thank God dickhead Noah was leaving. I hoped the drill sergeant put a boot up his ass.

But now I had bigger worries.

Bigger worries than douches like Noah, or school, or fights with Mom. But were they bigger than me? I had heard how “gifted” I was my whole life. Above average. Smart. “Old for my age,” whatever the hell that meant. I guess I was just mature. I sure wasn’t feeling it now. I felt like an angry kid.

A kid.

About to have a kid.

I sat up as reality crashed in, and stopped short when I found Jonah studying a photo of the two of us from three summers ago. The most momentous summer of my life. Until this one.

“You still have this?” He lifted it with a half-smile.

“Sure.”

“That was a crazy one, huh?”

I looked closer at the picture of us grinning like loons over the simple white cross at the site where we’d started our adventure that summer. Finding Lettie’s bones—finding out she was a hero—changed my life in so many ways. “Sure was.”

He huffed out a laugh. “Shitload of fun, though.”

It felt good to laugh along with him for what felt like the first time in days. “Yup. It was.”

But the laughter quickly faded when the doorbell rang, and a moment later my mom called out, “Reed! Melissa and her parents are here!”

June 13
th

The cat’s out of the bag. Mom found me puking this morning and finally figured it out. She’s pissed and hurt and barely speaking to me.

I’m glad she didn’t ask too many questions and assumed this baby is Reed’s. It’s gotta be! I refuse to think anything else. But I feel like such a dirty liar. A frightened child.

It’s bad enough I can’t speak the truth because I’m so afraid . . . what if it really is HIS baby?