The Plot полностью

Samantha was not an especially lucky girl, she was well aware. Clueless had played at the movie theater in Norwich the previous summer; she knew there were girls her own age who drove cars around Beverly Hills and put together their outfits on a computer, and that obviously wasn’t her, but at the same time she wasn’t contending with violent child abuse or abject poverty, either. There was food in the house. There was school, which meant books, and they had cable, and her parents had even taken her down to New York City twice, but on both occasions they’d seemed mystified by what they should do once they actually got there: meals in the hotel, a bus that drove around with a guide making jokes she didn’t understand, the Empire State Building (it made sense the first time, but the second time also?) and Rockefeller Center (also twice, and neither trip was around the holidays, so … why?). Not that she was all that knowledgeable, herself, about what the greatest city in the world might have to offer three yokels from the middle of New York state (which might as well have been the middle of Indiana) but she’d only been nine the first time and then twelve the second so it really shouldn’t have been up to her.

The main thing she did have, which most people didn’t, was a future.

Her parents had jobs and her father’s was for the college in Hamilton, where his title was something important-sounding like “plant engineer” but it really meant he was the one who got called when some girl tried to flush a Kotex. Her mother cleaned too, but at the College Inn: her title was the far more honest “housekeeper.” But what her father’s job in particular really signified was something she’d had to explain to him, rather than the other way around: his fourteen years of service to the institution was a leg up when it came time for her to go to college herself, and a significant chunk of change to pay her way. According to her father’s own employment handbook, which he himself had never read but which Samantha had been on intimate terms with for a couple of years, the college gave every consideration to the children of its faculty and staff when it came to admissions, and when it came to financial aid, that was actually spelled out in black and white: 80 percent scholarship, 10 percent student loan, 10 percent on-campus employment. In other words, for a person like Samantha, something along the lines of a golden ticket in a chocolate bar.

Or at least that had been true until today.

Her shitstorm was not to be blamed on substandard sex education at Earlville Middle School, let alone Chenango County (where the locals had done everything possible to prevent its young people from learning how babies were made); Samantha had been fully cognizant of the details since the fifth grade, when her father said something about an especially eventful weekend at one of the fraternities (an incident which had necessitated the presence of the police and resulted in a girl dropping out). She was used to finding things out for herself, especially when those things were cloaked in the distinctive parental silence of stuff-you-weren’t-supposed-to-know-about. Over the following years, her peers caught up to her in basic knowledge (again, no thanks to the official policies of the school district and the state, which had actually declined to mandate sex education) but the knowledge was just that: basic. Two girls in her class of sixty had already moved to “homeschooling” and one had gone to live with a relative in Utica. But those girls were stupid. This was the kind of thing that was supposed to happen to stupid people.

She gathered up the rest of her stuff and left the classroom as a pregnant person. Then she went to her locker as a pregnant person and she joined the others outside and got on her bus, taking her customary seat at the back, but now as a pregnant person, meaning a person who, if she did nothing, was going to eventually produce another person and therefore let go of the reins of her own life, probably forever.

But obviously she wasn’t going to do nothing.

He told no one. Of course.