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  She just shook her head at me, tears in her eyes.

  “Seriously. What’s wrong, Maggie?” I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “My boobs hurt. I can’t jump anymore. They ache,” she whispered.

  “Oh?” I said. “Should I ice them down when we get back to the suite?” That’s what guys on the football team do when a body part aches.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. She nodded, but I don’t even think she heard my words. Her eyes looked far away, even beyond the stands, like deep into the hills and past the trees and deer and cliffs, off into the deepest darkness of Wisconsin.

  “Okay,” I whispered. Then the football team came back on the field, and I cheered and cheered because I loved football.

  After the game Maggie said her boobs were fine. I didn’t have to ice anything. She was very uncomfortable and sweaty and weird though. She was also huggy, like she didn’t want to let go of me, which I liked, but it was pretty out of the norm for her. Usually Maggie stayed at the suite long enough for us to hang out and do it. Then she’d walk home by like ten thirty. But that night she stayed until 1:00 a.m., and we just talked and talked and hugged until her dad showed up and asked if she needed a ride home. Mr. Corrigan’s face was all gray, and there were these big circles under his eyes. It looked like he wasn’t too pleased to be awake, but he was wearing one of his jackets with the elbow patches anyway. Man, is that guy classy.

  Then Maggie went quiet on me for the weekend.

  She spent Saturday and Sunday at her big house, doing yard work and cleaning the basement and the attic and painting her and Mary and Missy’s bedroom. (Apparently I’d scuffed up the walls with my shoes during the summer.) So I didn’t get to see her.

  I didn’t get a glimpse of her again until Sunday night, when I visited her at Dairy Queen, because I figured she wouldn’t mind the company there.

  But at Dairy Queen she hissed at me. “You! You did this!”

  “What?”

  She pulled me into the men’s bathroom and told me her boobs hurt and asked me if I had any idea what that might mean. I told her I had no idea. Then she glared at me and called me a child.

  So I said, “I’m your boyfriend. I’ll take care of you. How about you come over after work, and we’ll ice your boobs so they don’t ache?”

  Maggie turned all cherry-slushy face again and threw me out of the store. I didn’t want to leave, but she threatened to call the police—kind of like her mom might do. So I limped home and got a big headache to go with my butt ache and my heartache because I was so confused.

  And then I got even more confused. Two hours later she showed up at my house in her family’s fantastic Subaru wagon and acted like nothing had happened at the Dairy Queen.

  “What was that about, Maggie?” I asked, standing at the door.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You were just being annoying.”

  “You would call the cops on me for being annoying?”

  She grabbed my ears and pulled me to her lips. “I’m sorry. I love you. Let’s just do it,” she whispered. So we did, and then she cried great heaving sobs.

  “What’s wrong?” I cried.

  “It’s okay. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’d better go,” she said between sobs. Then she left!

  After that she barely talked to me for several days, which made me sick to my stomach.

  Then on Thursday after school, I had a short football practice. It was the day before a game, so all I did was pack up the first-aid kit. Maggie’s cheerleading was canceled too, and we ran into each other outside the gym. She said, “Let’s go get naked.”

  I was all like, “Oh yeah? Really? Maybe…if you think you won’t cry for no apparent reason and then leave me and not answer my phone calls.”

  “Ha-ha!” she said like I was making a joke, which I wasn’t. “Let’s go!”

  When we got back to the suite though, she couldn’t do anything but take pees. She went like twenty-five times until she squealed, “Spotting! Maybe I’m okay?” Then she left again.

  I didn’t have a laptop or a smartphone or even a cell phone. Darius had one, but he couldn’t afford two, so I had to use the landline. But we did have the Internet. It was hooked up to my mom’s old desktop, which sat on our kitchen table so that both Darius and I had access to it.

  After Maggie left, I sat down at the computer and looked up hurting boobs and spotting, which I found out often have their root cause in the menstrual cycle. Maggie was having her “little friend,” which is what she called her period. Suddenly her crazy behavior made sense.

  The next day at school, I hugged her. “Of course your boobs hurt, and you’re spotting, lady pal. You’ve got your little friend.”

  Maggie hit me. “You don’t know shit from Shinola.”

  I figured she might be right. I might not know shit from Shinola because I didn’t know what Shinola was. But Maggie didn’t seem like she was in the mood to hear that, even if I was agreeing with her.

  That night we had a home game against Lancaster. Maggie was totally normal. She jumped and cheered and laughed while our team got our asses handed to us in the first half. At halftime she climbed to the top of the cheerleader pyramid. And right before the start of the third quarter, right before we received the kickoff, Maggie kissed me square on the lips in front of everyone.

  “I want you so bad!” she told me. But after the game, she called her mom to pick her up and take her home from the stadium. She said she was having cramps.

  Shit from Shinola?

  Later, I sat in my dark kitchen at mom’s old computer. I looked up shit from Shinola. It turns out Shinola is shoe polish that was very popular during World War II. I began to wonder if maybe a World War II ghost had invaded Maggie, and maybe that’s why her boobs hurt and why she had to pee all the time. I’d heard about similar cases on the TV show Ghost Adventures, which Darius likes to watch sometimes.

  Even later that night, I sat on my doughnut on the couch in the living room and read a biography of Thomas Jefferson, which had been assigned for English. Jefferson, it turns out, was a pretty crazy man, so I enjoyed myself, forgetting about the haunting of Maggie Corrigan’s boobs.

  About 10:00 p.m., the front door opened, and the smell of tainted fish and stale beer enveloped me as Darius stomped in, pulled off his fish clothes, and complained about the grease that was giving him zits.

  “Did you drink beer and then drive?” I asked.

  “Not your business,” he said before microwaving some nachos.

  When he finally settled down on the couch to eat, I asked, “Have you ever known anybody who’s been possessed by a spirit or maybe a devil?”

  “What? No.” Darius stuffed a bunch of chips in his face.

  “Maggie’s possessed, I’m pretty sure,” I said. “One minute she says she loves me so much, but like a minute later she’s screaming at me because I’m annoying—like so annoying that she feels the need to call the cops. And her boobs hurt. They didn’t hurt when we first started dating. And she has to pee a lot. And she cries for no reason.”

  Darius stared at me. He said quietly, “That’s funny.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was funny if you saw it happening,” I said.

  Darius blinked. He held chips in both his hands (unwashed hands, I’m sure, so the chips surely tasted like fish). He blinked some more but didn’t move. He didn’t jam those chips in his mouth. He just stared and blinked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I can hear what you do,” Darius said very quietly.

  “What do I do?” Fear bloomed in my heart because now Darius seemed haunted too. “What do you mean?”

  “You do it. You and Maggie Corrigan do it all the time. Again and again and again,” he said.

  “Right. We like to celebrate our love,” I said.

 
“Jesus Christ, Taco. Is she on birth control?” he asked.

  “No.” I laughed. “Why would she be?” As I tend to be delusional but not totally stupid, I began to think.

  “Oh shit. Are you using condoms?” he asked.

  “No. We’re not serious about it, okay? We’re just having fun.” Then I started to really think because that sounded like a very, very dumb statement.

  “Oh shit, Taco,” Darius said.

  “What? What are you saying?” Oh balls, dingus! I knew what he was saying!

  Darius sat forward, so a couple nachos fell on the floor. “I’m supposed to be the dumb one, Taco. I’m supposed to be the one who doesn’t understand causes and consequences—the one Mom said needs to take a big breath before I act because I’m liable to fall off a damn cliff without noticing.”

  “Well, you do have a certain history,” I said.

  “Haven’t you taken health class?”

  “I’m in health two this year,” I said. “Ms. Tindall thinks I’m smart.”

  “First thing we learned about in my class was pregnancy and how you get pregnant. You don’t have to want to get pregnant to get pregnant, dumb ass.”

  “I know that,” I said. But what started to play on repeat in my mind was, “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.”

  “Is your girlfriend trying to get pregnant?” Darius asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “You idiot!”

  “I know,” I whispered.

  Oh, dingus, did I know. In health class during freshman year, we learned about sperms and eggs and…oh shit. I knew it all. And given the fact that Maggie and I were doing it like monkeys, you would think that I’d have considered the possibility that my seed would find a perch in her misty jungle. For whatever reason, doing it didn’t seem the same as having sex. But sex is sex! It’s what people and animals do to make babies.

  “Tender boobs, spotting, mood swings, peeing,” I recounted.

  “Maggie Corrigan is pregnant, you idiot. What the hell are we going to do?” He looked down at his nachos. “My cheese is cold! Shit!”

  “Just microwave it,” I said.

  “I’m too overwhelmed to get up!”

  So even though I was the guy with the broken butt and the potentially pregnant girlfriend, I was the one who stuck Darius’s nachos back in the microwave to melt his cheese again.

  Of course, I wasn’t thinking about his cheese or my butt. I was thinking about Maggie.

  After I delivered the heated-up nachos to Darius’s lap, I moved my doughnut to the kitchen table to research early signs of pregnancy. Ms. Tindall had indeed covered all this in my freshman-year health class.

  I was dumbstruck. I stared at sad Darius, who had passed out (from beer probably), his greasy nachos on his lap. I thought and thought and thought.

  I thought some more.

  And even some more.

  Until deep into the dark night, when Darius tipped over and snored on the couch, covered in those nachos. He and his beer drinking made me sad. I pictured Darius when he was a little boy, before beer, playing in the sandbox behind the mullet house. Mom was in her lawn chair, soaking in the sun next to him, and I pictured me as a baby bouncing on Mom’s knee as she sang me hippie songs about bullfrogs and butterflies and how they get born and reborn. And then I thought about Mom covering me in her motherly kisses and Maggie covering me in different kisses, but they were still love kisses, real kisses that made my heart sing hippie songs, important kisses. And as the night got darker and deeper, I got excited because I love life. I love parents, and I love Maggie. I thought about how I wanted to make a good home for a baby because my family was all broken and sad at the moment. But I wasn’t sad, and Maggie wasn’t sad. Mom was gone but not sad. And you know what? I was Taco, right? I knew that I’d be a great dad, the best dad! I could pass on my mom’s amazing lessons to a baby! Oh yeah, I got so, so, so warm and happy.

  Maggie and I are going to have a kid! I bet she even planned for this and that’s why we never discussed protection and why she wanted to have sex all the time.

  Sure, I knew. The timing sucked in some ways. Teenage parenting limits your ability to…rent a limo for the prom or whatnot. Okay, there’s more to it than that, but me and Maggie? We were a team, weren’t we? We could be a real family. I wanted a real family. I still want a real family. I love families! And Maggie? There is nobody in the world I’d rather be up shit creek with than her. We could make lemonade out of this lemon, right?

  Yes!

  Family.

  Chapter 4

  I don’t drive. Mom was diagnosed the day after I got my permit, and I decided I wanted to spend time with her rather than learn how. I don’t bike because bike seats make my business end sore even when I’m in top condition. Due to my coccyx situation, which had by mid-October gotten a little bit better, biking was a total no go. And so on that epic Saturday morning, I set out by foot.

  When I have full range of motion, it takes me about twenty-five minutes to get from my house to the Corrigans’ home. But I hadn’t run or really even walked any distance in seven weeks, so I made slow progress up and down the hills of Bluffton. It took me nearly an hour to get to Maggie’s. Of course, if I hadn’t run into Brad Schwartz and Akilesh Sharma on Main Street, it would’ve been more like forty minutes.

  Sharma is one of my good buddies, but he’d been visiting relatives with his parents all summer and was mostly taking college classes (instead of wasting his giant Sharma brain in high school), so we hadn’t spent any time together for a while. He was pretty concerned about the state of my butt. He was all, “How could such a weird injury even take place?” So to show I valued his place in my life, I took the time to explain how it happened, even though I was monkey-jacked to discuss our baby with Maggie.

  No, dingus! I did not tell Sharma and Brad the good news. I’m a gentleman. I sort of believed Maggie planned for this baby. (She had to be smarter than me, right?) But I wasn’t positive, and I didn’t know for sure if Maggie even knew she was pregnant. Certainly I wouldn’t be the one to let the mouse out of the sack with the general public.

  After I left my good buds behind, I walked the last couple of autumn tree-lined blocks to the giant home inhabited by that blessed Corrigan family filled with blond girls. I figured that Mom and Dad Corrigan would be less than thrilled by the developments at hand (pregnant Maggie), so I calmed myself and thought, Don’t just blurt it out! Don’t just shout it out to the whole Corrigan world! I was excited, so it was going to be hard.

  I found Mrs. Corrigan, Misha, and Molly raking leaves into a giant pile near the raised tomato bed where my butt had nearly met its death.

  “Top of the morning to you, Corrigan ladies!” I called.

  All three turned to me and stared. It was the first time I’d been to the house since the accident. I wasn’t surprised by the reception. How would you feel if you saw the person who nearly fell to his death standing in the very yard in which you were now playing with leaves? I didn’t blame any of them for my trouble, so I put on my most gracious face.

  “How are you all doing this fine fall day?” I asked.

  Misha smiled. “Want to jump in my leaf pile, Taco?”

  “It’s my pile too!” Molly squealed.

  “No—no jumping,” Mrs. Corrigan said. “I imagine Taco’s here for Maggie.”

  “Right you are, Mrs. C. Maybe I can play with you girls another time? Anyway, I’m still a little sore from falling off your house.”

  “That was forever ago,” Misha said.

  “Maggie! Come out here!” Mrs. Corrigan hollered at the house. “Maggie!” The whole time she shouted, she kept her eyes on me like I might disappear if she blinked.

  Finally Maggie showed up on the front porch. Even though it was almost noon, Maggie was still wearing her nightgown, and her hair was
all twisted up into a rat’s nest, like she just pulled herself off her pillow.

  “Hey there, Mags!” I waved to her.

  “Hey,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “Can I come in? I have some big news.”

  “No,” Mrs. Corrigan said. “You can’t. I…Maggie’s father is in the middle of an important project. Why don’t you and Taco take a walk around the block? We’ll be having lunch soon. Then we’re going…we’re going to Dubuque to the mall. To see a movie, so don’t be long.”

  “We’re going to Dubuque?” Molly asked.

  “Yay!” Misha said.

  “You have ten minutes,” Mrs. Corrigan said to Maggie.

  “Okay,” Maggie said. She padded down the steps in her bare feet and began walking down the sidewalk, away from the house.

  “Hey, wait up!” I said, but she kept walking.

  “Ten minutes,” Mrs. Corrigan called after us.

  When I caught up to Maggie, she said, “What are you doing here? Can’t you take a hint ever, Taco? You know my parents don’t want you around.”

  “Sure. There’s some bad blood, but here’s what I figure: The more you know me, the more you love me. Am I right?”

  Maggie looked up as she walked. She smiled a little. “That’s been my experience, yeah.”

  “So maybe I should come around more so they get to know me too.”

  The smile slid off Maggie’s perfect face. “No, that’s not a good idea. I’m grounded by the way. I’ve actually been grounded for a while, but my parents don’t know what time cheerleading practice ends, so I can come over.”

  “Wait. What? Why are you grounded?” I asked.

  “Duh, I stayed at your house until one in the morning, and Dad had to come to get me. And he had to wait while I put on clothes.”

  “Aha,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t want to add to your burden.”

  “You’re my girlfriend. You should be able to share your stuff with me.”

  “No, but—”