A Beautiful Mistake

Brooklyn was miserable when she went into school the next day.

It was a Thursday morning, so everybody was talking about what party they were going to and who they were going to go to the movies with. Brooklyn, though, found herself not participating in any of the pre-weekend chatter. She just didn't feel up to it. But her unsociable attitude didn't go unnoticed.

“What's up with you, girl?”

It was Anna, one of the main cheerleaders besides me on the squad. Brooklyn answered her question with a 'I'm fine' lie, and thought about the night she got pregnant. It was a Saturday – September third to be exact. It was the November 17th now, so the doctor was on point. Two and half months.

In six and a half months, she'd have a child. She'd be a mother. Jesus Christ.

“Are you sure you're alright?” Anna asked as Alex and the other girls sat down. Football season was over, but all the cheerleaders still hung out. The group of them didn't know that Brooklyn wouldn't be participating in competitive cheer this year, or any other year from now on.

She was only a Sophmore, for God's sake.

Her child would be two when she graduated.

“Yeah,” Brooklyn answered, grabbing her untouched tray and standing up, “I got to go study in the library, though.”

She walked over to the trash and dumped the styrofoam tray, then left the cafeteria. She didn't want to be around her friends right now. She didn't want to be around anybody. Her parents weren't taking this too well. She hadn't expected they would, but it sucked that they couldn't be more supportive.

Brooklyn went to fifth period, and sulked all the way to the back.

She didn't feel like talking, and if she looked at the floor enough maybe the teacher would ignore her. By the time that the school day ended, she was more than ready to go home. As she walked outside, Brooklyn noticed that the clouds in the sky were a dark, dark gray and it was much colder than it normally should have been.

Brooklyn pulled her sweater closer around her as she went out to her car.

As she drove home, she pondered what her parents were going to do about the situation she was in. She knew they were planning something. Every time over the past couple of days she would walk in the room, they would stop their conversation immediately, so of course they had been talking about her.

What her parents were planning, she didn't know.

But it was something.

She walked into the house, and noted that it was empty. She breathed a sigh of relief; Brooklyn really didn't feel like talking to her parents right now.

She was really sleepy, so she took a nap and didn't wake up until around seven thirty. By that time, my parents were home and in the kitchen when I walked into get something to eat. Again, they stopped talking to each other.

Brooklyn said nothing as she grabbed something out of the fridge, and went back up to her room to eat and do homework.

School was something that had always been easy for her. She flew through the work like she always had. Brooklyn wondered if that would change now that she was going to have a baby. When she was done, she took her dishes back downstairs and when she came back up, there was a text message on her phone from Alex.

Do you want to come to this party tonight? It's going to be awesome.

Brooklyn tossed her iPhone aside, ignoring the text. She would tell her she'd fallen asleep or something. She just wanted to be a hermit crab. Pulling the covers up to her armpits, she looked out at the rain that was falling pretty hard. It was freezing outside.

“Do you need anything, Miss Brooklyn?”

The maid stuck her head into the door of her room.

“Some hot coco,” Brooklyn answered, doing her best to smile at the woman. She was very nice – always had been. She nodded, and ducked back out of the room. When she returned ten minutes later, she had a big mug of hot coco with marshmallows, and whipped cream on the top.

Brooklyn thanked her, and she left.

As she watched the weather slowly get worse, Brooklyn was glad she was under her warm blankets with her hot coco. She knew she was going to have to learn how to be stronger than this, but right now she was comforted by these simple things.

She hated New York weather.

The winter was the worst. She had visited Austin, Texas – where her Aunt lived – in the winter, and it was awesome. Brooklyn had never been one for cold, staying inside as much as she could when it did get to winter.

Brooklyn had a hart time going to sleep that night because of her nap.

She lay awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering that the Hell she was going to do. She wouldn't get an abortion, of course not. She would feel horrible if she did. Brooklyn felt that the only time abortion was acceptable was incest and rape.

Her situation was neither.

Brooklyn had laid down and created this baby; She couldn't just do away with it because she felt she was too young to take care of a child.

And she'd been thinking about adoption.

But the more and more she thought about it, she was slowly realizing that there was no way she was going to be able to carry this baby inside of her for nine months, bond with he or she, and then give the baby up.

She couldn't do it.

So as she lay there, eyes open as she stared up, Brooklyn knew that there was only one choice left. She was going to raise the baby herself. This was the first time that she actually thought the words. Before, she hadn't known what to do. Now she did.

She wondered how her parents were going to react.

But as she thought about that, too, she realized her parents probably already knew what their daughter was going to do. That was probably why they were acting the way they were acting. So unsupportive in her hard time.

When she finally fell asleep, exhausted from being up too long, it was hard and dreamless sleep. Her alarm woke her up at seven thirty the next morning, and she got up and turned the TV on.

It was on the news, and a list of schools was scrolling along the bottom of the screen.

Washington High School: Closed