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After the doctor’s appointment I drove to my mother’s apartment.

“Hey, Noodle,” my mom said.

“I’m eight weeks pregnant, it turns out,” I said, flopping down on the couch. My mother looked down at me for a long time.

“You want to keep this baby, don’t you?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She went into the kitchen. I heard the crack and hiss as she opened a beer. She came back into the room.

“I like your nails,” I said. They were new. A kind of radioactive-looking yellow.

“If you keep this baby,” she said, “I’m not taking care of it. It would be your baby.”

“I know,” I said, genuinely baffled. I would never give the baby to my mother.

“Goddamn it,” she said, pacing back and forth in front of the TV with her beer.

“Mom, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”

“I just... I thought I did so good! You were in college! You were gonna be somebody!”

“Who was I going to be?” I asked. I had a sudden image of my mother pressing her idea of who I was onto the actual me, like

an acrylic nail, this big mask-shell of a face on top of my actual face.

“You know what I mean. You were gonna have a career and, like, do things!”

“What things?”

“I don’t know,” Shyanne said. “Whatever you wanted!”

I stayed silent. Mark, Becca, my mom—they kept insisting I had all these options, and I could never figure out what those options were supposed to be. In high school I’d met with my guidance counselor, Mr. Ricci, exactly two times. The first time he told me I could apply for scholarships and financial aid and gave me all these forms to fill out. The second time he seemed to have no memory of me and said my only hope was transferring to a UC. I’d enrolled in Fullerton College, except the whole first year I hadn’t been able to get into a single class I needed for transfer credit; they all filled up almost instantly. So I’d done a whole year of basically fluff humanities credits that would never transfer anywhere. Everyone kept telling me I would lose so much by having this baby, but it didn’t feel like I’d be losing anything at all.

“I’m dreading telling Kenny,” Shyanne said, resuming her pacing.

“Why on earth would you dread telling Kenny?”

“He’s religious!” she hissed. There was something very velociraptor about the way she was stalking back and forth.

“So... wouldn’t he be glad I didn’t get an abortion?”

“No, he’d be appalled you’ve been whoring it up in the first place! Teen mom? I mean, Margo, we would never tell him if you

had an abortion!”

“I have to be honest, Mom, I cannot bring myself to care about what Kenny thinks of me. Plus, I’d be twenty by the time the

baby’s born.”

“He could wind up being your stepdad!”

I found this unlikely, though it seemed mean to say so.

“Kenny is great,” she said. “Kenny is amazing.”

“Okay,” I said, “yes.”

“It will be fine,” she said. “I’ll just kind of imply that Mark took advantage of you. It wasn’t really your fault.”

I did not intend to leap to my feet, but I did, and then I didn’t know what to do when I got there. “Mark did not take advantage

of me,” I said. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Of course you think that. You wouldn’t have done it if you felt he was taking advantage. But he’s a grown man, honey. There’s

things you won’t understand about it until you’re older.”

I was so mad that the bottoms of my feet ached and I also really had to pee, so I went to use the restroom. My mom had this big poster of the Eiffel Tower in her bathroom and little French soaps; the whole room was Paris themed. I was thinking how stupid it looked and how annoying she was as I washed my hands with the little soap, rough and spastic like I was peeling potatoes, and then I realized she probably desperately wanted to go to Paris, and she probably never would. I looked in the mirror and could suddenly see how I looked just like her, a knockoff Shyanne, my eyes set a little too wide. Both of us had stupid faces, pretty and sweet; faces that seemed to imply there was nothing inside us at all.

When I got back to the living room, she was sort of draped on the couch in a sitting position, like someone had let the air

out of her. I lay down so my head was in her lap.

“When I got pregnant with you,” she said, idly stroking my hair, “I was so scared.”

“Why did you keep me?” I asked. It had never really made sense. It was a one-night stand; she hardly knew my father. They’d

met at the Hooters where she worked. She didn’t even know his real name, only his ring name, Jinx. Because in his first match,

his opponent dropped dead before he even touched him.

“I didn’t know he was already married,” she said. “He didn’t wear a ring—none of them did, you could lose a finger, but I

didn’t know that then. It was really intense between us, and I thought maybe... I don’t know. Maybe, you know? It felt

like my destiny, like he was The One.”

The tenderness of her hope and the obviousness of her naivete were too much. I rushed to move on. “What was Dad even like

back then? He’s so serious now it’s hard for me to picture. Even the idea of him being drunk.”

“Oh, believe me, your daddy could drink with the best of them. I don’t know. He had those dark eyes that kind of sparkled.

And he was on so many steroids his traps were huge, and he didn’t tan. He was so pale and big, he looked like a milk-white

bull.”

“Mom, I was asking about his personality!”

“I was getting to it! He was a gentleman. Probably from being Canadian. He was always kind, but he was a heel in the ring,

so you didn’t expect it. He was a listener, he liked sitting back and letting other people talk.”

“I can see that,” I said. I had never known my father as a wrestler. By the time I was making memories, he’d already herniated two discs in Japan and started managing Murder and Mayhem. He managed them in the everyday sense of booking their matches; they were rare free agents amid the Monday Night Wars. But he also played the character of their manager on TV because Murder and Mayhem weren’t great talkers and Jinx was a genius at promos. I assumed he stopped using steroids after he got hurt because he lost a lot of weight, and the older he got the skinnier he seemed to become. With the largeness of his frame, in his almost skeletal thinness and shaved head, he’d begun to resemble a hairless cat.

“How did you guys—like, how did you tell him?” I’d spent surprisingly little time imagining all this.

“Well, one night they all came into the restaurant drunk off their asses about one in the morning. And after my shift, he

took me to his hotel room, and I told him. He was really happy about it. It was weird. He couldn’t stop smiling and touching

my tummy. He told me then that he was married, and that kind of broke my heart. I was crying, and he said, ‘I’m really glad

I met you.’ And I realized I was glad I’d met him too. So we just made do with what we had. When he was in town, we’d see

each other. I knew he had to save the big money for his wife and them, I always knew that. But he really did come through

when he could, I believe that. I don’t think you should count on Mark being the same. And probably a lot of people would say

I was dumb for doing that, but you know, I always loved him.”

This I had known. It was obvious, horribly so. Whenever he came to town, she doted on him, constantly offering to make him

a sandwich, get him a glass of water. It was a steel cage match for his attention, and I always lost. The few times I’d won,

when Jinx had shone that laser beam of love on me, were painful in a different way. One year he was in town for my birthday

and took me to a steak house. I was thirteen and absolutely did not like steak, but he took me out for this fancy dinner,

and when I got home, Shyanne wasn’t even mean about it, she was crushed. He stayed in a hotel that trip instead of our house.

He sometimes did that, and I never knew exactly why or what it meant.

“You chose to keep me,” I said. I could hear the faint ticking of the carbonation in her beer.

“I did. But there were other times, later, when I chose different.”

I was silent. I had not known that. It made sense, though.

“Do you think things happen for a reason?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think you’re just scared to admit you want to wreck your life.”

“You think it will wreck my life?” I asked.

She stroked my hair. “Yes, Noodle, it will ruin your life, for sure. But sometimes ruining your life is the only thing you

want.”

I knew she was talking about deciding to keep me when she was pregnant. About the gray area she and Jinx had spent their whole

lives in, the bittersweetness of making do with another woman’s husband. The way I would scream and chatter when he came in

the door, begging him to suplex me before he’d even set down his bag, and her coming out from the kitchen, wiping her hands

on a dish towel, having tried to cook some weird retro dish, tuna casserole with raisins in it, meat loaf covered in ketchup.

She would snap at me and tell me to give him some space, offer him a beer as I clamored to tell him about school. And when

he’d leave again in a few days, the apartment would be so quiet, and we wouldn’t know how to talk to each other exactly, like

we were embarrassed of ourselves and how we had behaved.

“I ruined your life,” I said, not a question. I just wanted her to know that I knew.

“You ruined my life so pretty, Noodle.”

I didn’t say anything, only lay there on the couch with my head in her lap. She petted my hair, skritched my scalp with her

acrylic nails.

But there had also been the two of us laughing and eating popcorn, her loopy handwriting on notes she left in my school lunches

that she pretended were written by the cat. Our arms moving in perfect synchrony to fold a fitted sheet. The day we drove

all the way to the Grand Canyon, a solid eight hours, and just looked at it, bought some Sour Patch Kids, and drove all the

way home so I could go to school the next day.

If Shyanne hadn’t had me, what would she have had?

“I scheduled an abortion,” I told her. She didn’t say anything. “But I don’t think I can go. Like, I can’t picture myself

going.”

“Well,” she said, “you’ll have to wait until it’s time and then figure out if you want to go or not.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to show how thrilled I was that she’d backed off the idea of me definitely going through with it.

Like I was lying to stay home sick.

I called and canceled the abortion the moment I left her house that day. I couldn’t tell you why. It was a bad idea. I did

not have good reasons. And it wasn’t because I wanted to be a good person, not really. It wasn’t because I was in love with

Mark. I just wanted that baby. I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything.

I cut out the best of the ultrasound pictures and kept it on my bedside table. I would spend hours staring at it. It was such

an inadequate, ugly image, so frustrating in its refusal to give me anything to hold on to, any way of envisioning who the

baby would be. My body was making something in secret, and I was reduced to spying on my internal organs with these grainy

black-and-white photos. But I hung on, faithful, waiting.

Once she was past sixteen weeks and an abortion was no longer legally possible, Margo wrote to Mark to tell him she was keeping

the baby. She didn’t want him to be able to talk her out of it. He didn’t write back. She’d expected a lecture, a panicked

phone call. For days she waited for the reaction she was sure would come. Even two weeks after the email, she expected him

to do something, reach out in some way. He didn’t.

It scared her, how much this stung. To be ignored. How much, perhaps, she had thought that keeping the baby would force him

to deal with her. She didn’t think that was why she’d made the decision, but it wasn’t not why. It’s not like she wanted Mark to play husband, play Daddy—she knew that. If he had said, “Okay, my marriage is a sham

anyway, I’ll get a divorce and marry you and raise the baby,” she would have been horrified. She wasn’t even interested in

seeing him that regularly. But he had always been clear about one thing: That she was important. That she was amazing. But

if she really was, would this be how he treated her?

When Margo told Jinx she was keeping the baby, he was very relaxed about it. “I’m looking forward to being a grandpa,” he said in his weirdly calm, Mr. Rogers–esque voice. She was the youngest of his kids, the first to have a baby, and this was not lost on her.

“Maybe it will be a boy, and he’ll be a wrestler,” Jinx suggested.

Margo felt instantly terrible that Mark was so short. She hadn’t even chosen a big, strong dummy to procreate with; instead,

she’d mated with a small, immoral weirdo. Jinx elegantly filled in the pause.

“I didn’t realize you had a fellow,” he said.

“I don’t really,” she said.

“Oh, that’s all right, Margo. You’ll do just fine, I think.”

They hadn’t spoken since. She called him now.

“I’m scared,” she blurted out the moment he picked up.

“Hello there,” he said, and his voice sounded weird. Then she heard a woman in the background. It could have been a lover

or his wife or one of his daughters, and Margo knew it meant he would keep this conversation short. At least he’d picked up,

she told herself. He could see it was her, and still, he’d picked up. That was a kind of love.

She cut to the chase: “What if I’m making a big mistake?”

“You aren’t,” he said. They both knew they were about to have the most abbreviated version of this talk possible. It was like

speaking in Morse code.

“I’m not? You know for sure?”

“I can guarantee,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

They hung up, and she felt better. But it was a slow, unsatisfying release of tension, like pouring out a flat beer.

One Saturday, when she was six months along, Margo and Shyanne were at the Goodwill hoping to find a used stroller that wasn’t unspeakably sad. Margo wanted an UPPAbaby stroller more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life, and the strollers at Goodwill were so far from the UPPAbaby stroller, made of a brown floral fabric that bespoke another era or country, perhaps Soviet Russia, and crusted with the food of some previous baby who ate, by the look of things, a lot of egg.

“Mark should be buying you a stroller,” Shyanne was saying. “It’s the least he could do. Have you even talked to him about

this?”

Once Shyanne accepted Margo wasn’t having an abortion, she narrowed her entire focus to one thing and one thing only: getting

money out of Mark. Every conversation became about this, about how Margo needed to sue for paternity and ensure he paid child

support. Shyanne was appalled when Margo refused and said she didn’t want to make waves in his marriage. His wife had never

found out about them, and Mark was desperate for her to remain ignorant. “Don’t make the same mistake that I made,” Shyanne

said. “You may think on some level that if you’re generous and let him keep his marriage, then maybe, you know, things between

you...” But that wasn’t how Margo felt at all. She honestly wanted nothing to do with Mark anymore.

“No,” she said. “I’m not asking Mark for a damn stroller.” Except now she was about to start crying in the Goodwill, and she’d

never even thought of herself as a materialistic person. Whatever was in Target or thrift stores had always been perfectly

fine with her. But she felt if she had to use one of those brown strollers that smelled like bowling alley shoes, then her

baby would grow up to spit from truck windows and laugh at racist jokes. And honestly, there was a pretty high chance that

was going to happen no matter which stroller she used, and the thought of this made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.

“Maybe I don’t need a stroller,” Margo said. “Or maybe I’ll find one on Craigslist.”

“Here’s what you do,” her mother said, steering her toward the glassware and ceramic section, always Margo’s favorite. “You

write to Mark, and you say—”

“No,” Margo said. “I don’t know how to be clearer about this. I will never, ever ask Mark for a single thing. Not ever.”

Shyanne rolled her eyes. “I guess we’ll see about that.”

“Let’s go look at the blue one again.”

“The blue one’s snack tray is busted.”

“Let’s go look at it again,” Margo said, dragging Shyanne back to the strollers.

In the end, Margo waited in line for thirty minutes and bought the blue one, her head held high, her eyes lit up by a pride

that burned, that she could feel inside, its blue flame-tongues lapping, and she believed then that it could make her clean,

burn away every impurity, that it could save her.

And then Bodhi was born, and Margo was alone with him in her room, like she’d been locked in there and told to spin straw

into gold. How did other women do this? She slept at most two hours at a time. Her pajamas were crusted with dried milk and

baby spit-up. Instead of changing out of them, she’d put on her giant gray sweatshirt, strap Bodhi in his carrier on her front,

and shuffle down to Fuel Up! on the corner, where she’d buy an orange juice and Harvest Cheddar SunChips, a breakfast she

and Becca had invented called “Orange Meal.”

She’d texted Becca way back after their call— I’m keeping it —and Becca hadn’t responded. When Bodhi was born, she sent Becca a picture. Becca texted back, He’s beautiful! Congratulations! But after that, radio silence. Even the girls she knew from high school who admirably tried to stay friends with Margo after

Bodhi was born, coming around with Chinese food and hoping to watch Netflix, were disturbed by how impossible it was to have

fun with the baby. They didn’t know how to hold him—he’d arch his back and thrash when they tried—so they couldn’t even help

while Margo took a shower. He knocked over an entire container of egg foo young with a flailing arm while he was still hooked

to Margo’s boob. That was the other thing: her boobs were everywhere. She’d forget to put them away, and one tit would be

dangling there like a lazy eye while she finished whatever she was saying or took a bite. And her nipples had become weirdly

long, like fully half an inch long. It was not fun. It was not fun to visit Margo and the baby, and so gradually they all

stopped.

Her roommates weren’t sympathetic about the baby situation. All three acted like Margo having a baby was just about the same thing as getting a dog when dogs were prohibited on the lease. It seemed insane to them that someone was allowed to have a whole screaming baby wherever they wanted, and Margo understood their point, she could remember distantly their headspace, but she wasn’t able to communicate to them what had changed for her or how she thought they should behave.

Once, in the middle of the night, Bodhi would not stop crying, and she had no idea why. She’d done all the things: she’d changed

the diaper, she’d nursed him, she’d burped him. But he kept arching his back and making these piercing shrieks, like a supremely

pissed-off eagle. She tried stuffing her boob in his mouth, and he only turned his face away and screamed some more.

Kat the Larger banged on the wall. “Keep it down in there!”

“Don’t you think if I knew how to make him stop, I would?!” Margo screamed.

She heard Kat the Larger throw something, by the sound of it a book or maybe an alarm clock, something relatively heavy.

“What do you want me to fucking do?” Margo yelled.

“Go outside,” Kat the Larger roared, then Margo heard stomping, and Kat the Larger was in her room, talking fast as an auctioneer. “I don’t

know why you think this is acceptable, this is completely unacceptable, are you fucking nuts, you think I have nothing to

do tomorrow, I have a final in biochem, and you will never understand what this night of sleep might cost me, you will never

get it, so if you can’t make him shut up, take it outside!”

Kat the Smaller appeared behind her in the doorway. “If you guys could keep it down?” she said.

“It is two a.m. and you are kicking me and a three-week-old baby out of the apartment?” Margo asked, feeling the wonderful, revving warmth of rage. She hadn’t known this was what she needed: to fight. She was so angry, she’d been angry for weeks: at Mark for making her pregnant and also for being right that babies were hard and she shouldn’t have had one, at Shyanne for not helping more and for being correct that this decision would ruin her life. It was ruining her life. Her life was ruined. She hadn’t taken a shower in four days, and even when she did there was no other choice than to lay Bodhi on the bathmat and let him cry, talking to him and singing as she washed her hair and body as fast as she could. Why on earth had she done this? The size, the sheer magnitude, of her own idiocy was crushing. And it hurt all the worse because she loved Bodhi more than she’d ever loved anything or anyone, and she would not give him up for all the world.

“Fuck you both,” Margo said. “You could offer to help me. You could extend basic human decency.”

“What are you talking about?!” Kat the Larger said, gesturing now with her hands in the dark bedroom. “Are you insane? It

is your baby! It is your responsibility! It is not my responsibility! My responsibility is to pass my biochem exam!”

“I think,” Kat the Smaller began in her high, soft voice, “what Margo is saying is—”

“Fine,” Margo said. “I’ll leave.”

She strapped Bodhi to her front and jammed a hat on his head. “Are you happy now?” she asked them.

“Yes!” Kat the Larger said. “Because now I will be able to sleep!”

“Margo...” Kat the Smaller said, then nothing more.

Margo slammed the front door, hop-skipped down the outside stairs. Normally she was terrified going up and down with Bodhi,

positive she’d slip and fall and crush him under her massive body (she felt their size discrepancy keenly; at three weeks

he was barely the size of a small cat), but the rage made her so graceful—she feared nothing. When she was out on the darkened

street, the beauty of the night overwhelmed her. It was crisp, not cold. The moon was out. She started to walk to her car

because she didn’t know what else to do. Lulled by the motion of walking, Bodhi relaxed and snuggled into the carrier, and

she could tell he was on the verge of falling asleep. She looked up and down the sidewalk. It was a lovely night. There were

streetlights and she felt relatively safe, so long as she stayed in her little residential area and didn’t get too close to

the freeway.

She walked around Fullerton for over an hour, thinking about what had happened, the series of decisions that had led her to this point, and what any of it meant. How much kindness would mean right now, and how unwilling anyone was to give it. How sacred the baby was to her, and how mundane and irritating the baby was to others.

Margo felt so raw and leaking, so mortal, and yet stronger than she’d ever been. The option to throw yourself on the ground

and have a good cry was gone. You had to keep going, past the rosebushes and garden gnomes in the dark, the baby asleep on

your chest, wondering when it would be safe to go home.