It was a Friday night with nothing else going on, and Amy was hanging out at her friend Jill's house.
"Now that we're in the home stretch here, we should let loose a little," Amy said. They were both admitted to college, and sure to graduate high school.
"You mean like have affairs with older Casanova's?" Jill teased.
Amy laughed. Jill knew that Alonso, who had been her Spanish tutor, had become something more. Amy told Jill one version of it, anyway.
"I meant maybe we should raid your dad's liquor cabinet," Amy said.
"I can't," Jill said quickly.
When she didn't elaborate, Amy asked, "Not in the mood for a drink?"
A longer pause. Then Jill explained quietly, "I'm pregnant."
"What??" Amy's world came to a screeching halt.
Sure, this kind of thing happened to other girls sometimes, but that was other girls. Not girls like Amy. She'd had it drilled into her all her life that there was a narrow path to success in this world, and not a lot of room for error. And a teenage pregnancy would definitely count as an error. And an unforced error at that. It wasn't that Amy was ashamed of sex or didn't enjoy it herself, but...
"All you had to do is take precautions," Amy said. "It's so simple. How could you?"
Jill was supposed to be one of the good ones, like her. Sure, she'd been hooking up with Dave, but how could she be so stupid? Amy felt dizzy and nauseous herself.
"What the fuck?" Amy said, finding herself shouting.
"'What the fuck' is right," Jill said, blinking away tears. "I know it's a surprise, but this isn't something happening to you."
"Not happening to me? I'm losing my best friend!" Amy said, getting up off the floor. She couldn't sit still, not while this was happening.
"Maybe you are," Jill said. "I...I think you should go."
Amy rushed out, not because she needed permission or needed to be told, but because she didn't know how to handle this.
It was a mile walk home, which helped her unwind, but didn't really clear her head. If Jill was going to get an abortion, then maybe it wasn't that big a deal. But if she wasn't willing to drink, that meant she had other plans. Plans she must have been hiding from her. Amy wondered how long this situation had already been going on. How long Jill had kept it a secret from her already. She didn't think Jill looked pregnant yet, but now she wasn't so sure. She wasn't sure of anything. It had rattled her whole worldview.
When she went to school the next day, and it seemed like pregnancy was everywhere she looked. There were a couple girls with rounded bellies that stood out in the hallway. For girls that had already given birth, there was even a lactation room for them to use, repurposed from a supply closet. She saw a couple girls queuing outside it, waiting for their turn.
She had kind of taken it for granted that this kind of thing happened. But now it was hitting close to home, and it seemed almost like an epidemic that was catching. Amy had heard of "baby fever" where spending time around pregnant women made you more fertile. She started to fear that at some point the school as a whole would reach a tipping point, where there'd be no stopping the trend.
"What's your next story going to be?" Barb, the head of the school paper asked her, in school the next day. "Amy?"
"Oh. Right," Amy said, trying to refocus. "Have any of you noticed how many girls in our school get pregnant?"
"Sure," her classmate Bill said. "It happens, and we're a large school with a slightly higher than average rate of teen pregnancy, so there's definitely a few around."
"I...I just don't understand it," Amy said with frustration. She felt guilty about how she reacted to Jill's news, but Jill was avoiding her today, and Amy wasn't ready to make up yet. She realized she needed to work on herself first. "Like, how could you let that happen to you?"
"Not everyone 'lets it happen'," Maria said across the table.
"I know that rape is a problem, but most of the pregnancies around here aren't from that, or we'd see more boys getting charged."
"You can't know that for sure," Maria said. "It often goes unreported."
"I don't think it's as simple as you think," Bill said.
"Well I think it is," Amy said, trying not to get too wound up. "So I want to understand why it happens. I'm thinking, an interview series with girls who are pregnant or have been in the past."
Bard said, "Okay. It's a touchy subject, so tread carefully. I look forward to reading your piece when it's done."
After school, Amy went over to Alonso's house. He had been tutoring her in Spanish, up until she aced the AP exam and then finally gave herself permission to kiss him. That ended their tutoring relationship, and started the relationship they had now.
He answered the door in a bathrobe, and brought her in quickly. She'd been eighteen when they first kissed, but he was still self-conscious about being seen with her. And it wasn't like Amy was going to introduce him to her mother or anything. What they had was raw and physical. Except for the "raw" part.
In his bedroom, she took off her shirt, and he embraced her from behind, kissing her on the back of her neck as his hands reached around for her breasts. It made her breath catch every time.
He undid her pants as she leaned back, melting into him. She could feel his cock pressing against her from behind. She climbed onto the bed and paused on all fours, and asked, "Is this how you want me?"
"No foreplay?" he asked.
"I'm in a wild mood today," she said.
"Training wheels on or off?" he asked.
She reached down and fished a twenty dollar bill out of her pocket, and put it on the nightstand. This was part of their arrangement from the start.
He knew she was a virgin while he was...the exact opposite. He considered sex with a condom to be just practice for the real thing. And while he had enjoyed tutoring her, he wasn't going to tutor her for free. So when she wanted him to use a condom, she had to pay. She could hardly complain about the education he was giving her, but it was becoming harder to find the money.
Now when she felt him pressing into her from behind, she asked to double check, "Is it on?"
