Ten minutes after he walks in, she speaks.
“So.”
She gazes at him. He fidgets. A moment passes. Finally:
“Yeah,” he mutters. He averts his eyes.
She lowers her head.
***
“Johnny, come on!” Ed shouted, banging on the door. “We’re gonna miss the movie!”
“I’m coming, Ed!”
“Are you really? I didn’t know girls did that—”
The door flew open with a crash, pushing Ed back. “Clearly, you’re not aware of a lot of things,” Johnny smirked, emerging from the apartment. She rolled her eyes at her boyfriend, who pouted as he rubbed his elbow. “It’s your elbow, Ed. You’re not gonna break it.”
“Actually, it’s possible to break elbows. They are, in fact, one of the most sensitive parts of the body,” Ed recited back to her, dropping his arm. “But mine seems to be stronger than most.”

“I’m glad, since no other part of you is particularly brawny,” Johnny teased, standing on her tiptoes to pinch his cheek.

Ed’s pout returned. “You abuse me, Johanna Freidrich.”

Johnny glared back. “You mock me, Edmund Merriworth.”

“Touched.”

“Touché.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Johnny grinned, weaving her arm through Ed’s. He beamed and bent down to kiss her cheek. Both smiling, they left the apartment complex.
***

“It’s been awhile,” she tries again. “You look different, Eddie.”

This time, he meets her eyes. “You do, too.”

“We’re both older.”

“Yeah.” Short and curt.

Johnny heaves out a breath. “Eddie, please don’t be like this.”

“Like what? What shouldn’t I be like?” Eddie’s ears redden. “I have absolutely no reason to be hostile towards you, do I?”

Her cheeks burn. “Eddie, please. I’m trying here.”

“So am I,” Eddie counters, icy as ever. “Guess we’re trying for different things.”
***

“You could at least try some self-restraint,” Johnny chuckled, pecking Ed on the cheek as she buttoned her shirt. “I honestly didn’t plan to do this tonight.”

“Seriously?” Ed snorted, zipping his worn blue jeans. “When your dads are out? Johnny, we’ve done it plenty of times when they were here—”

“Don’t remind me!” Johnny shuddered. “It was mortifying. Knowing they could’ve heard – f**king hell. I didn’t even get close to climaxing.”

“Well, I did.”

“You’re a guy.”

“Hey! That’s misogynistic.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “The term ‘misogynistic’ only applies to men’s treatment of women, dumb***.”

“That’s sexist.”

“Tell that to Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan—”

Ed cut her off with a kiss. “Alright, point taken. I’m a no-good misogynist, bent on oppressing women worldwide. Happy?”

“Nah,” Johnny grinned. “You’re not that bad. I wouldn’t date a guy like that.”

“No sex, either?”

“Definitely not.”

“What a sorry existence.”

Johnny let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah, sex isn’t half bad. Especially when my dads aren’t home.” A glimmer in her eye, she pulled Ed down for another kiss.
***

She searches Eddie’s face for signs of the boy she once knew. The boy with dark eyes lightened by their sparkle, whose quick retorts to all her remarks could crack her up or tear her down in seconds.

The wit remains, but not the sparkle. They don’t work well without each other, she decides.

She opens her mouth to speak – she doesn’t know quite what, she just has to say something – but Eddie beats her to the punch.

“You know what? You’re a f**king hypocrite,” he spits, trembling like a volcano before an eruption. “You abandon me, then you come back and lie to me, then you come back for real and tell me not to be angry? What the f***?”

He holds onto his seat as if for life, forcing himself to stay stationary. “It’s not fair. Okay, Johnny? It’s not. F**king. Fair. You don’t deserve any respect from me. You don’t deserve any love. You deserve a kick in the fucking stomach, but my parents raised me right, so I won’t give it to you.” Sitting tall in his chair, Eddie shakes his head. “I don’t know why I even agreed to come here. I mean – f***. I guess stupidity’s hereditary.”

Johnny swallows her heart. “I think you needed to get about 18 years of a lot of emotions out of your system,” she offers, the left corner of her lips just barely twitching. “You’re right, of course. I’m far from perfect.”
***

They stared down at the deceptively innocent stick. Its pure white hue chastised them for the tiny center image: a glaring plus sign.

“Oh god,” Johnny breathed, dropping the stick in horror. “Oh – oh god. I – oh god, oh god, holy f***, s***.”

“It’s – it’s okay, Johnny.” Ed gripped her hand so tight, Johnny knew he wasn’t just squeezing for her. “We’ll make it through. This will be okay. I promise.”

“Okay? Okay? How the f*** will this be okay? I – Ed, we’re 16! We’re f**king children, we can’t have children! How – oh, holy f***, I don’t even care how it happened, just f***.”

“You swear even more when you’re upset, you know.” Ed pushed a strand of hair back from Johnny’s face. “Good thing I swear even less. We’ve got an okay balance.”

Johnny stared up at her boyfriend for a moment before flinging her arms around him. Hot tears streamed down her cheeks. “For all I make fun of you, thanks for being the best guy I know, Ed,” she murmured, burying her wet face in his neck. “Just… thanks.”

“No problem,” he muttered back. She felt his hot breath against her ear. “I mean, I love you, so. Yeah. I love you.”

Johnny lifted her head up. They had never exchanged The Words before. She searched Ed’s eyes, double-checking and triple-checking for sincerity, and then kissed him, long and slow. When they finally pulled apart, she smiled. “I love you, too, doofus.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

Johnny snorted. “Your humor is so bad, it’s good.” She paused. “What’re we gonna do about this baby, Ed? I – I’m pregnant. There’s a kid growing inside of me.”

Ed wrapped an arm around her. “I promise you with 320 percent sureness that we’ll do something.”

“Ha.” Johnny sniffed. “Guess even I can’t argue with that. We’ll do something.”
***

“There’s nothing you can do,” Eddie insists, his back straighter than a ruler. “It’s too late. Just – you should just go.” He bows his head. “Yeah. You should go.”

Johnny leans forward. “Do you really want me to?” No response. “Because if you really, honestly want me to, then – I will.”

“Of course I want you to!” And now the blue linoleum chair is knocked behind him, tossed aside as easily as a broken toy. “I hate you! Our entire relationship, or whatever the f*** you’d call it, was a sham! You’re just a lie, and d’you know what? I f**king hate you for it. I hate you.”

He’s trembling with rage, like a tear on the cusp of falling. Johnny wants to catch him in the palm of her hand, the boy with those eyes and that wit. She shakes her head slowly. “You don’t mean it,” she says, looking Eddie straight in the eye. “You’re speaking from anger. Please don’t deny it, Eddie – you can insult me in a lot of ways, but you can’t say I don’t know you well. I’ve known you for longer than anyone.”

“F*** that.” Eddie snorts in disbelief. “When you met me doesn’t mean s*** when you haven’t been around for the rest of my life.”

Johnny’s insides boil and before she can stop herself, the pot’s lid springs off. “Now, that’s not fair,” she hisses, eyes narrowed and gaze sharpened. “I deliberately tried my hardest to be in your life! I could’ve done so much less. Do you know how many deals I made, to make sure I could see you? I did the best I could—”

“You took the easy way out—”

“Easy? You think it was easy?”
***

“You son of a b****,” Johnny muttered down to the red, wrinkled baby in her arms. “That hurt.” She stroked his cheek, one of the only parts of his skin not covered by the hospital’s blue blanket. Babies really did have the softest skin.

She wished the baby would wake up. She wanted to see his eyes. Even if he had the same baby-blue orbs as most of the world’s newborns, she still wanted to see them. For whatever reason, she felt like if she looked him in the eye, he might remember her later.

“Miss Freidrich?” A nurse walked into the room, her white garb much less obnoxious than it had appeared during Johnny’s labor. “Timothy and Olivia Pryce are here to see you.”

Johnny went cold, but nodded. “Of course. Let them in.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added, “Could you bring in Edmund Merriworth, too, please?”

The nurse nodded and left, to be replaced only seconds later by a hand-holding couple in their mid-thirties. The man’s shock of blond hair contrasted sharply with his wife’s brunette locks; his eyes were dark, versus her own light orbs. Yes, Johnny thought, surveying them. Timothy and Olivia Pryce looked different enough that her son would see himself in their figures somehow.

Ed came in last and promptly darted to Johnny’s bedside. She grinned at him. She hadn’t let him into the delivery room during the labor; he hadn’t seen his son yet.

“He’s healthy,” she whispered, nodding towards the tiny child in her arms.

Ed gulped and nodded. “Yeah. He is.” He reached his hand forward tentatively. “Can – can I touch him?”

“Sure – as long as Mr. and Mrs. Pryce are okay with that,” Johnny replied, looking towards the pair of adults who hovered steps away.

“It’s fine with us,” Olivia Pryce smiled. Johnny grinned back. Olivia was her favorite of the couple.

“Thank you,” Ed responded, and then leaned down to touch his son’s hand. He inhaled and exhaled, slowly. “Wow. Babies really are soft, huh?”

“My thoughts exactly,” Johnny breathed back, never looking away from the baby. Her baby. The child made from her, who grew in her, who now slept in her arms so peacefully. “Weird, right? Marketing isn’t actually all lies.”

“Yeah,” Ed replied. “Really fu – phenomenally strange,” he amended, glancing over to the Pryces.

“One of the many miracles surrounding a baby’s creation,” Timothy Pryce said sagely, his posture ramrod-straight. “We want to thank you, Johanna, for letting one of God’s children survive despite your circumstances.”

“And thank you, Johanna, for letting us raise him as our own,” Olivia added, tears in her eyes. “We truly cannot thank you enough for that.”

Yeah. Johnny definitely liked Olivia more.

“Of course.” Was Johnny’s smile as hollow as she felt inside? The baby stayed motionless in her arms, but she felt ever more conscious of him, his warmth. “The agreement remains, right? I’ll be able to visit him as his—”

“—babysitter, yes. But not as his birth mother,” Timothy affirmed, the arch in his eyebrows emphasizing his last point. “He will not find out your identity unless he asks for it.”

“And I will not give my identity unless one of you asks me to.” The baby felt heavier in her arms. “I understand.”

“The same goes for me, right?” Ed asked.

“Yes, Edmund,” Timothy nodded.

“Good. Thank you.”

A silence fell over the room. Finally, Olivia spoke. “We – we would like to take our son now, Johanna.”

“Your – your son.” Johnny’s mouth went dry. “Right. Of course.” She shifted in the bed. “I can’t move very well here, I’m a bit constricted. Will you – come take him from me?”

“Of course.” Olivia Pryce could not hide the eagerness in her face. She stepped forward and gingerly accepted the baby from the sixteen-year-old.

Johnny waited for the child to wake up, to scream and cry, to reject his adopted parents and only calm down when back in her arms. She had seen that scene in movies and TV shows alike. Surely, they had to come from some basis of reality.

But he stayed sound asleep.

“Oh, good, he’s a sleeper,” Olivia breathed, rocking the boy back and forth. She smiled down at him, hugging him closer to her. Timothy put his hand on her shoulder, the proud father. “Our sweet little Edward.”

Both Johnny and Ed’s heads shot up. “Edward?” Johnny asked. “That’s what you’ve named him?”

“Yes,” Timothy replied, looking down at his son. “After the holy Saint Edward the Confessor.”

Johnny chose to ignore the religiosity. “Another Ed,” she said instead. “How ironic.”

“You’re telling me,” Ed muttered at her side.

“It’s okay,” Johnny said, squeezing his hand. “We can call him Eddie.”

And then the next few minutes seemed to pass in seconds. With a whish of empty pleasantries, the Pryces left, their new son with them. Hollowness passed through Johnny, replaced by confused, replaced by overwhelming sorrow in just seconds. No. No. She would not cry. She closed her eyes.
***

“I couldn’t raise you as a mother, so I didn’t, but you loved me as a babysitter,” Johnny reminisces, her voice too sharp for the happy memory. The cooing baby with her dark curls and Edmund’s chocolate eyes. The delighted claps when she pushed him on the swing at the neighborhood park. The chubby toddler who finally said “I love you” back.

“You adored me,” Johnny remembers, and he doesn’t adore her anymore, and it makes her want to cry. “I may have kept some things from you, but I tried my best to love you.”

“Seriously? You lied to me for my entire life.” Eddie is tall and thin now, with curls cut short. For the first time, she can see more of herself in him than just their hair. They have the same heart-shaped face, the same bump in their noses. “How is that love?”

They have the same anger, too, and the same roughness. “I was doing what was best for you!” Johnny protests, desperation coloring her voice for the first time. “I was 16 years old – two years younger than you are now. And if you say you’re ready to raise a kid, you’re lying. You wouldn’t be ready, and I sure as hell wasn’t. Timothy and Olivia”—and here, she praises herself inside, because her voice betrays no tremble—“gave you a better life than I ever could’ve.”

Eddie stays silent. Taking advantage of his contemplation, Johnny leans forward. “But I – I’d like to be in your life now,” she asserts softly. “If you’ll let me. I can’t be a mom to you, and I won’t try to be, but maybe I can be a friend.” She lets the corner of her lips turn up ever so slightly. “I’m not that uncool for someone my age, right?”

But Eddie doesn’t laugh softly, that glimmer of possibility returning to his eyes. He stares at Johnny, impassive, and stands up.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he says, eyes averted again. “Not right now. And I’m not sorry about that.” The bluntness strikes Johnny like a sharpened dagger.

And then an exchange of empty pleasantries, and then he leaves, his lack of sparkle permanent. Johnny stays in her seat, clings to it for dear life, and closes her eyes. This time, she may cry.