It went well. Very well.
Despite the fact that Hobby was openly nervous and Claire was nervous but hiding it, they took their time. They kissed without touching each other until they couldn’t stand it anymore, and then they touched each other. Claire was wet to melting; the sound that escaped from her lips when Hobby touched her was so erotic that he nearly came in his underwear. He climbed on top of her.
She said, “Yes, I’m ready. I’m so ready.”
She had said this at the exact moment when Hobby was reaching for a condom. He had a box of three, as yet unopened, under his bed. But when Claire said, “Yes, I’m ready, I’m so ready,” Hobby construed this to mean that it was okay for him to enter her right then, without a condom. He figured she must be on the pill. What he thought was, Okay, she’s on the pill, lots of girls are on the pill, it helps with acne or whatever. Heather was on the pill, even Penny is on the pill. Claire’s mother, Rasha, is cool, she must have made sure he daughter was on the pill, that’s what cool mothers do.
He entered her halfway-not wearing a condom-and checked with her. “You okay?”
“God, yes!” she said. “Go!”
So he went, slowly at first, gently, kissing Claire’s face, and then he went faster and faster, and Claire cried out and again the sound aroused him like nothing else had in his entire life, and he came all the way up inside her.
Eight days before graduation, on June 8, she was standing by his locker in the morning, and he knew. It was written all over her face. But maybe not, he thought. Maybe she just looked like that because she’d bombed her Chemistry final.
“Hey,” he said.
She dissolved. Tough Claire, cool Claire-she was a wreck. Hobby collected her in his arms. Claire was tall, but he was taller, tall enough to kiss the top of her head. To the rest of the runty adolescent population of their school, he supposed they looked like a couple of mating giraffes.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said.
“It’s not okay,” she said. “I’m seventeen.”
Yes, that was something he could identify with. He was seventeen also. A daft seventeen-year-old boy. He’d assumed she was on the pill. Wasn’t she on the pill? he asked gently. And if she wasn’t on the pill, what had she thought they were using for birth control?
She’d thought he would pull out, she said. She had been with someone over the summer-not Luke Browning, but a summer guy by the name of Wils something or other-and Wils had pulled out and everything had been fine. Then, when Hobby came inside of her, she panicked a little, secretly, but not too much because she’d just finished her period, and anyway she went immediately on the pill-immediately as in later that same day. She’d had the pill pack sitting in her underwear drawer, she had gotten it back in December when things between her and Hobby were so intense, but then after things cooled off between them, she hadn’t seen any reason for birth control.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“It’s my fault,” Hobby said. “I should have used a condom.”
“What are we going to do?” Claire said.
They were two good kids, among the best that Nantucket High School had to offer. Hobby was going to be given a free ride to a top-tier school. Claire would either shoot for the Ivy League or opt to play lacrosse someplace like Bucknell or Williams. They were rocket ships, side by side. A baby? A baby was unthinkable.
“Let’s wait a few days,” Hobby said. Just at that moment Patrick Loom walked by, slapping Hobby’s shoulder as he passed. Patrick Loom was headed to Georgetown in the fall. When Hobby looked at Patrick and thought about Georgetown, he saw everything he wanted for himself: brick buildings, manicured lawns, lectures and readings and film series and pretty girls in sweaters and crisp leaves underfoot and an indoor stadium packed to the rafters as Hobby jogged out onto the floor wearing a dove-gray Hoyas jersey, like Patrick Ewing.
“I heard there’s a guy on the Cape,” Claire said.
“On the Cape?” Hobby said. He had thought they were certainly looking at a trip to Boston, or possibly out of state. He didn’t know. He was daft. So fucking daft.
“It’s supposed to be quick,” Claire said. “They knock you out and you wake up and it’s over and the guy gives you a prescription for Percocet.”
“That’s what you want to do?” Hobby said.
Claire nodded.
Yes, that was what Hobby wanted to do too. He wanted to fly to Hyannis-tomorrow wasn’t soon enough-and see this guy and have it taken care of quickly and painlessly. Relief flooded his chest cavity, but it was trailed by something unexpected and unwelcome: guilt. The course of action they had taken just thirty seconds to decide upon-say it out loud, an abortion-seemed so selfish. They were two good kids, but this decision felt sinister. And yet to decide otherwise would be to ruin two brilliant futures.
And yet, and yet.
Hobby kissed Claire gently on the lips, and she went to class. Hobby’s mother had asked him a few months earlier if he’d ever been in love, and then she’d asked about Claire specifically. Did Hobby love Claire? No. Hobby liked Claire, Hobby thought Claire was cool. He and Claire were friends, they’d been lovers, they had this situation now and they were going to deal with it together, like good business partners who wanted the same outcome.
And yet, and yet.
Hobby had learned most of what he knew about the adult world from listening to his mother and her friends-Al and Lynne Castle, Jordan and Ava Randolph-as they sat around the dinner table after the meal had been consumed, when all that was left was to finish the wine, watch the candles burn down to nubs, and talk.
He had once heard his mother describe what it had been like for her to get pregnant, unexpectedly, at the age of twenty-two. She had been in her final semester at the Culinary Institute, she was dating Hobby’s father, Hobson senior, they were in love and living together. Hobson senior was a master butcher, a professor of Meats, and Zoe was a superstar, she had accepted an externship at Alison’s on Dominick, which at the time was the most sought-after job in the whole city. But then she discovered she was pregnant.
Zoe hadn’t seen Hobby lurking around the corner. She thought he was in bed, fast asleep.
She told her friends, “I’m not going to lie to you. I wanted an abortion. I had a life to live. A career to pursue. I was too young to have a baby. But Hobson talked me out of it. We got married at City Hall in Manhattan. We had been married six months when he died.”
There was silence around the table. Hobby could remember seeing Lynne Castle hold her face in her hands. She was staring at Zoe.
Zoe said, “Thank God I kept those babies. They are so precious to me. They are all I have, sure, but they’re also all I want.”
Those words weren’t lost on Hobby. His mother had had a choice to make. She could have gone to some guy and had the embryos growing inside her taken care of quickly and painlessly. She could have pursued a career, made a name for herself, opened her own restaurant; she might be as famous as Mario Batali by now. But she had chosen him and Penny instead.
Claire called and made an appointment with the guy on the Cape. It was for Tuesday morning; she would have to skip school. Hobby convinced her to postpone it for a week, to wait until school was out, until after graduation. He didn’t tell her that he was having second thoughts because he wasn’t sure what kind of influence he would have with her. It was, after all, her body. It was ultimately her senior year that would be affected, and possibly her chances for college. Hobby wasn’t prepared to marry Claire. God, if he asked her, she would laugh at him. But he wondered if he could convince her to have the baby, and then they could put it up for adoption.