1. Bernadette

If I had known what kind of trouble it would get me into, I think I would have never gone to that party.

It's been two months now, and really, it should be far from my mind, but I can remember every detail with vivid clarity.

It was the day of the party my ‘friends' were pressuring me to go. More than just pressuring me, my best friend at the time, Savannah, had practically dragged me to her room and thrown her most revealing clothes at me.

"Come on, you're never any fun," she'd said. "You need to get out for once, you know, experience the world before you leave college and become a boring office worker."

I had no intention of becoming an office worker, but that was beside the point. I had been so eager to please at the time, not wanting my friends to think of me as boring or no fun.

The only reason they thought that in the first place was because my mother was so strict about what I did and how hard I studied. She wanted me to succeed so badly, she pushed me to make sure my attention was only ever on my schoolwork. She had warned me against parties, so I hadn't been to any before that night.

But now, I was set to graduate within the month, and time was ticking if I wanted to do anything like a normal college student before I graduated.

On any normal day, I would have refused my friends, pushed off their nagging and told them that they could go have fun without me. But they had been pestering me for weeks now about how little fun I was, how much I still had to learn about the world, and other things that I should have known were nothing but nonsensical ploys to get me to behave how they wanted.

So when they sprung the fact that they wanted me to come with them to a party that night, it should have been no surprise. And I should have known to say no, that me coming to that kind of party would only end in disaster.

But I wanted so desperately to be someone that they liked, so I said yes. I wore the revealing outfit that Savannah told me to wear, and I felt mischievous as I slipped it on with nothing beneath it.

"Ooooh, girl, you're definitely going to get some dick in that," said Georgia, Savannah's roommate and another of my supposed friends as she entered the room.

I raised my eyebrows, looking at them both with confusion. I had been a virgin then and had never gotten a "dick" in my life. My mother would have killed me if I had, and I had come under the assumption that I never would until I was married.

But we're all wrong sometimes, and that had been one of those times.

"Who said anything about that?" I asked, feeling a little cornered.

"Come on, Bella, don't you want to experience things before you graduate?" Savannah pressed. "You just can't graduate college a virgin."

"Plenty of people do."

"But not people as beautiful as us," Georgia said, flipping her long locks of hair over her shoulder. "Just think of the shame, to graduate without being wanted like that. You're certainly beautiful enough to get a dick down there by some hot stud. You really should consider it."

Savannah nodded in agreement. "And there wouldn't be so many opportunities after college, and the guys certainly won't be as hot either. Think, Bella, do you want to die a virgin?"

I shook my head.

"Then, Bernadette Liu—" Georgia's use of my full name made me sit up straighter. It reminded me of my mother. "—listen to us, and stop being so damn uptight!"

"All right," I hesitantly replied, and let them finish making me up so that I could attract "the hottest guys at the party."

You can imagine how nervous I was as we headed to the party, now that I knew that their plan all along had been to get me to lose my virginity that night. The party was at some frat boy house that was notorious for their rowdy parties and lots of drinking.

I had never really been comfortable with getting drunk, either, even though I was past the drinking age at that point, but as soon as we entered the house Savannah shoved some fruity cocktail into my hand, smiling at the boy who was manning the bar and hissing at me to drink it up.

The reason the parties at that particular frat boy house always got so rowdy was because they were especially good at mixing drinks so that you couldn't taste the alcohol in them at all, but they were still very strong.

This spelled out certain doom for me, as I had not one, not two, but three mixed drinks.

By that point, I was feeling free and uninhibited, but I still wasn't so drunk as to do anything too crazy or black out.

Once Savannah and Georgia noticed that I was properly inebriated, they pushed me in the direction of one of the nearest hot frat boys, whispering in my ear that it was now or never.

I was still sober enough to smile up at him and say hello, but it was clear from the way that he was looking at my body that he didn't care about anything that I had to say at all.

I had tried to get him to engage in some sort of conversation with me, but he was impatient, and it wasn't long before his hands were all over my body and he was steering away to some private room at the party.

Because I was drunk, and I felt such pressure from my friends, I didn't say "no" as all of this happened, but I wish I had.

Truthfully, I hadn't said "yes" either, but that didn't matter to this boy. My skimpy dress and the fact that I was wearing no panties were enough of a confirmation for him that I wanted this as much as he did.

And who would have cared anyway if I had said no? My friends would have called me a coward, and I would have run home crying. But maybe that really was better than the situation I was faced with at the moment.

Because that night two months ago when I had lost my virginity led to this moment now, sitting on my bed in my mother's house, still no job, and a slip of paper in my hand that confirmed that all of my worst fears had come true.

I had always had an incredibly regular period. So when it skipped, I was surprised and concerned. And when it still didn't come after over a month of waiting, I had known that something was off.

So last week, I went down to the convenience store and purchased a pregnancy test. I had meant to take it right then, as soon as I had purchased it. But I just couldn't bring myself to, especially not in the bathroom of the convenience store.

So instead, I had taken it home with me and hidden it somewhere I knew my mom wouldn't look. And it had sat there for a week until I had finally decided that enough was enough, and it was better to just check and be done with it so I could figure out what I was doing next with my life.

And in the bathroom, that test had revealed that my worst nightmare had come true: I was pregnant.

Pregnant with the child of someone whose name I did not know, who I probably couldn't even track down if I tried, and whose face was seared into my mind as more of a nightmare than any sort of good dream.

I didn't know who to go to for support, either. My mom would freak, and she had every right to. She had done her best to prevent this from happening to me, and still I had failed her. And I worried that, in her freak out, she might kick me out of the house or give me some glaring ultimatum that neither of us would recover from in the end.

Even my ‘friends' from college were hardly really my friends. In all likelihood, they would say it was my fault, or laugh at me, or just stop talking to me entirely.

Though, that wouldn't be all that different from how things were at the moment. Since we no longer saw each other at school, and I had never been the fun one anyways, they had no reason to keep in contact with me.

Occasionally there would be a message or a social media post, but I got the sense that it was more for keeping up appearances than anything else.

My lesson had been learned. I couldn't count on them as friends, or to steer me in the direction that was best for me.

That left only one option: Lucas.

Lucas was my childhood best friend. He was five years older than me, but somehow that had never mattered. We had gone to the same combination elementary and middle school, back before his family had moved out of our neighborhood, and he had always protected me.

Then, right when he was about to graduate from middle school, his family had become suddenly rich, and they had moved. After that, Lucas went to a private high school, but the two of us stayed in touch as best we could throughout that time.

My mom had never trusted him or his family. She had been utterly convinced that they were doing something shady, and when they became rich suddenly and unexpectedly, it only made her suspicions stronger.

She allowed the two of us to remain friends only because she knew how much he meant to me, but she often cautioned me against him, and when we became older, she stopped letting me go over to his place. He always had to come over to ours.

My mom was a strict woman, but she meant very well. She was a strong black woman, and her own family had been very strict. She hadn't always been so hard on me, but after my father, her one love, died when I was nine, she became that way because she wanted to protect me.

I missed him a lot. He was always smiling, the soft edge to her sharpness. He dulled the pain she felt from being unable to truly follow her dreams, as she needed to work to support us and he always knew exactly what to say whenever I was struggling with something.

I had a feeling that he would have known what to say in this situation, too.

If he was still here, he would have been the first person I would have gone to, and he would have known what to say to my mom so that she wouldn't freak out.

But he wasn't here anymore, and so I was out of options except for Lucas.

Lucas was already out of college. He had been a very studious learner while he was away at business school in New York and had started a small tech company when he came back that quickly became very successful.

And while he was still protective of me, it wasn't nearly to the level that my mother was. Besides, he couldn't kick me out.

So, I dialed him up, holding my breath as I waited for him to pick up the phone.

"Bella? What's up?" he said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I liked it when he used my nickname. It just sounded so nice on his tongue, more than anyone else's. He had been the first one to come up with it when I was tired of how long my name was and had trouble thinking of other things that people could call me.

"What about Bella?" he had said, and I had easily agreed because it was beautiful and sounded like the name of a princess, and I liked the way that he said it.

"Lucas, I need to talk to you," I said.

He must have heard the concern in my voice, the absolute terror that I was feeling at the situation I was in, for his tone immediately changed.

"All right, of course. Do you want to come over?"

I nodded, and then realized that he couldn't see me. "Yes."

"Then come over. I'll be waiting for you."

"Okay." I took a deep breath and then hung up the phone. Hopefully, everything would be all right.