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  “That is crazy! You’re awesome,” I told her. “You should talk.”

  “No.”

  “I talk to everyone.”

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t understand how you can like people so much.”

  “People are the best,” I said. “They’re funny and great. Curtis Bode’s brother isn’t the only one who can draw, you know? Andrew Reinstein isn’t the only nerd on the block. There are basketfuls of nerds drawing great pictures right now as we speak. You gotta meet them! You gotta talk so you can meet all those weirdos!”

  Emily’s eyes got watery. She smiled that giant smile of hers. “Maybe I’ll try a little harder,” she said. “Or maybe I’ll wait until college.”

  “Do whatever you feel in your heart,” I said.

  “You mean that un-ironically, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You just made my point,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “Glad to be of service.”

  Before she left, Emily Cook kissed me on the cheek. It seemed like a sister kind of kiss, so I enjoyed it. She didn’t show up during my Thursday night shift, which bummed me out.

  On the day before New Year’s (people call that New Year’s Eve), I got my first paycheck and opened a checking account. The lady at Mound City Bank told me I had a savings account too, which I knew because it was my swimming pool money, but I asked her to keep this new account separate out of respect for Darius’s wish that I use that pool money for college. I try to be a good brother to him, and honestly whatever swimming pool money was in there wasn’t nearly enough to help us anyway. Then with a little cash I kept out (I got paid like $330 total, which seemed like so much!), I ordered pizza from Steve’s. Darius and I ate like kings. We watched all the Jason Bourne movies. Darius, who was in a pretty fine mood considering everything, jumped up and started kicking and punching the air in the middle of one of the movies and said he thought he could probably be like Jason Bourne if he joined the military. This was the kind of crap he’d say to me when we were little kids back at the mullet house. It was fun to see him so jacked up.

  The next day Dad showed up. He and Darius went to his hotel, and they had a bunch of drinks. Dad didn’t invite me to go with them, but before they left, he asked if I’d taken care of the baby situation.

  “Yup,” I said. “Doing it.”

  “Doing what?” he asked.

  “Taking care of it,” I said.

  “Good. You’d better…or else.”

  “Or else?” I asked. “Why does everybody say or else?”

  “Because they all want to kick your ass,” Dad said. “They’re just looking for the right excuse.” Then he said, “I checked with Nussbaum, and legally you can live here by yourself since you’re seventeen, so don’t worry about that while Darius is away.”

  “I know,” I said. “I checked already.”

  Dad looked at me for a moment. “Good,” he said. Then Dad was gone.

  Darius went to jail the next day. We said good-bye while Dad waited in the car. I told him I’d come up and visit. He told me not to. Then I slept all day. Then I worked. Then I slept.

  Then it was the end of Christmas break. Not a bad break, all things considered.

  Chapter 26

  Maggie Corrigan showed up at my house before school on Tuesday, our first day back. I’d gotten off work at the hospital a few minutes early and had just arrived at the house myself. Maggie rang the bell and then entered without me opening the door. (I was in the bathroom reapplying deodorant when the bell rang.)

  I met her in the living room. She wore the biggest Christmas sweater in the whole world and a scarf and a hat. She looked like some kind of bundled Santa elf who was probably pregnant but maybe just really thick and powerful through her midsection.

  “Holy shit! What are you doing here?” I was so happy to see her, dingus.

  “I had Mary drop me off for school at seven. I told her that I had a cheerleading meeting, but I lied. I had to see you. I thought about you the whole break.”

  “Me too. I mean, I thought about a lot of stuff, including you,” I said.

  “Oh?” Maggie’s face grew sad.

  “All the good stuff was about you, all the productive and good… Wait. Wait here. I have to get something.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. She still looked sad.

  I ran back into my room to get the envelope.

  I’d spent the better part of a Christmas break morning crafting a letter of highest quality that I meant to give to Maggie at school, but with her standing right there, I couldn’t wait to hand it off. She opened it and read it.

  January 3

  To: Ms. Maggie Corrigan

  From: Mr. William (Taco) Keller

  Dear Lady,

  I write this letter to make it fully known how much I adore you. When I see you cheer or dance, I am likely to fall over because your excellence and energy are the perfect complement to my own. There are many things I love about you—your sense of humor, that you call me “man” when you’re talking to me, your sheer speed when running, your righteous anger when placed in untenable situations, your knees (they look great), your eyes that communicate both love and hate like laser guns, your tenderness when I got hurt and my brother was arrested, your steadfast dedication to our love in the face of resistance from your parents. What could they know of our love? They are not part of this thing between us.

  And now that you’re having our baby, I will love that kid with the same fierce loyalty I have for you. I will climb cliffs and dive into shark-infested oceans to show that kid I’m its dad for life. Because of my own home troubles, I value family more than most. I hope you are feeling well, and I hope you’ve been making regular doctor visits. And I can’t wait until the baby is born so we can live like the family we already are in my heart.

  I have enclosed a check for $50 and will give you $50 every two weeks to help you take care of any hair- body- or spiritual-related expenses that you might have. I do this because I am yours and you are mine.

  Love always,

  William (Taco) Keller

  Maggie read the letter, and she got really teary. She grabbed my ears with her hands and pulled my face into hers. She said, “I want to take you out for pizza with this check. That’s a spiritual-related expense, man, okay?”

  “How about you and me get some pizza before we go to our first baby class next week?”

  Maggie sighed. “I read your email. But do we really need to do that? My plan is to take a billion drugs and try not to remember I’m having a baby when the time comes.”

  “No, we have to do it for…for ourselves. They’ll teach us how to clean and feed and take care of our baby. I don’t know how to do that.” I didn’t tell Maggie that I was also insisting we go to this class because it would keep us out of legal hot sauce with her parents. Maggie didn’t need that kind of stress while in her delicate state, dingus. That’s what I told myself.

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “I’m in. I’ll do this for you, okay? We’re going to do this thing right.”

  “Thanks, baby,” I whispered.

  It was like old times, except new, dingus. We walked to school, holding hands through our mittens, showing our love to the whole world. It was super icy out, so we did some running and skeetch sliding on our shoes. Maggie Corrigan is one of the best shoe skiers I’ve ever seen. She slid all the way down the hill on Kase Street, probably like two hundred yards, and she was going easily forty or fifty miles per hour. By the time we got to school, we were in the best mood ever. We were having the time of our lives being who we were—Taco and Maggie, the best couple in the state of Wisconsin. We were riding the Good Times Express, a fantastic, luxury love train.

  When we entered the commons, everybody stared at us. Everybody looked at Maggie’s giant reindeer sweater, wh
ich may or may not have been hiding the fact she’s pregnant. But who cared? “Let’s be pregnant,” I whispered.

  “We are,” Maggie said. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let them figure it out for themselves.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  That day was awesome. Mags and I walked the halls, heads held high. People acted weird toward us. Like they were confused why we were back together. We walked hand in hand and made out between classes just like we had last spring and during the fall. But nobody shouted, “Get a room!” or, “More tongue!” like they used to. Instead they all stared at us, at that giant Santa reindeer sweater, which Maggie wore every day that week.

  You know, in many ways it was a great week. There was a basketball game Tuesday night, and I played the bass drum in the pep band like I was a mountain gorilla on a bender. Due to my shift at the emergency room, I hadn’t had more than a ten-minute nap in, like, thirty-four hours, so I sort of was that gorilla. Maggie cheered in a sweater that stretched across her belly. We didn’t really talk at the game because we didn’t want adults to see us in action. Teachers saw us together during school, but whatever.

  On Wednesday after I slept like a zombie, Maggie and I made out in the school foyer by the auto shop. Her belly pressed against me. It hadn’t before, so it was sort of weird. And I worked like a madman at Nussbaum’s that night because there was a lot of new filing. I worked so hard that I passed out on the floor of his office and only woke up at 3:00 a.m. Then I walked home, terrified through the ghost hour and feverish cold.

  On Thursday, I slept in calc and in English, and Maggie and I made out while people stared at us. Our plan was working great! Except Emily Cook wouldn’t talk to me, and Mr. Lecroy pulled me into the choir office on Friday afternoon and begged me to come back to the musical.

  “The munchkins are just so uninspired,” he said. “Please. All is forgiven. We just need you back.”

  I walked out without saying a word because I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming. Just like I wasn’t sure if Mr. Edwards had screamed at me in calc or not, but probably he had.

  All I knew was that Maggie and I were back together and that we were going for it. And wasn’t that great? Wasn’t that perfect? I’d written her a letter. I’d given her a check. I was being a man. So what if I was super dizzy and I fell down in the hall twice because my leg muscles were tired? Still…weren’t these the greatest days ever?

  That’s what I thought, although I was very tired.

  Chapter 27

  Maggie gave Mary the same excuse so she could come over before school on Monday the next week, but that was all that was the same. Everything else was different. Maggie didn’t look at all happy in her peppy Santa reindeer sweater.

  I wasn’t the same either. I was in my underpants under my covers when she showed up. I wanted to stay in bed for the rest of my life.

  The weekend had been totally exhausting.

  First Nussbaum and I had worked all day Saturday because he had a big accident case going to court in Lancaster the following week. He got me reading law books and photocopying cases and highlighting important parts of the decisions, which was sort of fun, but it took a lot of concentration.

  Secondly, on Saturday night, Sharma came over, and we did calc for three hours. Sounds fantastic, right? Not so fantastic because Sharma was sad. He said, “Remember when we used to watch movies and drive around town with Brad? We’d go eat subs up on the Big M?”

  “Yeah. Good times,” I said. “Very good times.”

  “Or remember when your mom made each of us our own pizza and we had a Ping-Pong tournament that lasted all night?” Sharma asked.

  “That was three years ago this spring, right? We sure had fun, man, even though Darius smashed our Ping-Pong balls at the end,” I said.

  “Now all we do is your homework when we hang out. It’s not that fun.”

  “It’s pretty fun,” I said, trying to sound as if today was the best day ever.

  “Not really,” Sharma said.

  On Sunday, I met Nussbaum at 9:30 a.m. for a doughnut at the Piggly Wiggly. I walked there in the snow because Nussbaum said he couldn’t pick me up. We worked until 5:00 p.m.

  I tried to do homework after work. (Nussbaum—that sweet man—decided he could drive me home after we got done with our lawyering.) But nothing Sharma had showed me the night before made sense anymore. It was like Sharma’s calc lessons hadn’t sunk into my brain at all.

  Then I did my Sunday shift at the hospital. But what should’ve been a good time to read Romeo and Juliet for Mrs. Mullen turned into blood central. Four middle school kids went sledding over at the golf course—in the damn dark! And they smacked into a big oak tree. They were screaming and broken, and their parents were freaking out. Dr. Steidinger and Dr. Anderson both had to come down to the ER because we had two wicked concussions, a broken forearm, and one girl with a fat lip from hitting her teeth into the back of another kid’s head.

  Anyway, I ended up playing with all these little brothers and sisters in the reception area until, like, 1:00 a.m., which was fun, except when they all got super tired. This four-year-old girl fell asleep on my lap, and she put her little hand on my chest. Her wrist was so tiny, and her forehead was so small. She really looked breakable, which scared me. I got super sweaty and itchy, and the itching wouldn’t stop, so I couldn’t really sleep when I got home.

  By the next morning when Maggie showed in her Santa reindeer sweater, I was so wiped out, so dead to the world, dingus, I would have slept through the day. So it was good she showed up because I had to go to school. There was a major test in calc (not that I could remember how to do any calc).

  I had no Taco sauce to give, but Maggie needed my sauce. She sat down on my bed as I blinked awake, and she said, “My mom is a total succubus.”

  “A succubus?” I mumbled. “Isn’t that a supernatural sex demon?”

  “Well, she’s not that, but she sucks, okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to be more awake. “Moms are the greatest people in the world, but they can suck when they’re not on their ‘A’ games.”

  “She’s never been on her ‘A’ game,” Maggie whispered. She lay back next to me, her pregnancy bump this weird hill in front of us. “She was hating on me all weekend, as if this baby thing was new news. She just kept staring at the bump and telling me I did this to myself.”

  “Wow. She really sucks,” I said.

  “Yeah, and I have really bad acid reflux, man. Mom told me I deserve it because I ate myself sick.”

  “That’s not polite. You don’t eat too much,” I said.

  Maggie sat up and stared at me. “She meant you. She said acid reflex is what I get for eating Taco. She said that nobody’s dumb enough to eat Taco and think they’re not going to get sick.”

  “You didn’t eat me,” I said. Her mom confused me so much.

  “She said I’m as stupid as a Taco,” Maggie said.

  “Jesus,” I said. I was starting to fall apart. I couldn’t take it. “I’m not stupid. What the hell? I’m really not. I’m smart, and I’m nice and try really hard all the damn time! Can’t she see that? Is your mom blind? Is she just a hate-filled witch who can only see awful shit?”

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said. “I don’t think she’s right about you or anything.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I think so. I don’t know! I feel so sick!”

  And then both Maggie and I started crying. I don’t know exactly why Maggie was crying. But I was so tired, and I missed my mom, who told me how great I was. And I was mad that Maggie’s mom hurt my feelings so much. I always liked being a Taco before I met Maggie and her mom. I loved me.

  On the way to school, we didn’t do any skeetching, but Maggie slipped backward and hit her butt on the ice. I picked her up and
carried her for about ten feet until I slipped. She fell on top of me, and we both lay out there on Kase Street on the ice and cried.

  Then we started laughing because it was pretty funny too.

  “It’s like we’re both having strokes, man,” Maggie said.

  “Yeah. Like when Darius took one of mom’s Vicodins and a bunch of NyQuil. He fell down the stairs because his body didn’t work.” We both laughed and did our best to climb back on the Good Times Express. “We’re going to be okay, okay?” I whispered to her.

  Maggie nodded. She kissed me. “Okay.”

  Except the tracks for the Good Times Express stopped at school. Everybody stared at Maggie and the rising cake in her oven. It was as if they all got the memo at the same time.

  Pss pss pss pss.

  “Taco,” Maggie said. “They’re all whispering about me.”

  Pss pss pss.

  “Nah,” I said.

  “I’m not ready,” Maggie said.

  “It’s okay. We can’t keep it a secret. They’re all going to see at some point, you know?”

  Maggie started crying again and took off running like a pregnant gazelle. I ran like a dad gazelle after her, but even still, I couldn’t keep up with the girl. She shot straight into the girls’ bathroom. I started to go in, but Ms. Tindall, who was standing outside her classroom across the hall, was all like, “Taco! You go in and you die.”

  I stopped in my tracks, exhaled hard, and said, “I know. You’re right.”

  “You’d better believe I’m right,” Ms. Tindall said.

  Two minutes later the bell rang. I shouted at the door, “See you in English, okay, Maggie?”

  She didn’t reply.

  Maggie did show up to English. When she walked in, I saw what everybody else saw. Her belly was popped up, not down like when somebody gains weight. It was as baby as baby gets. Mrs. Mullen cocked and mouthed, “Whoa.”

  Maggie smiled. “Surprise! I’m pregnant! Take all in!” She posed and smiled. Then she took the seat right next to me.