Ice, Ice, Babies!

First Appointment

"You're having twins."

I looked over at Brittany, my ultrasound tech, and really, really hoped she was joking.

"Pardon?" I asked.

"There are two babies here." I looked up at the TV that was mounted on the other side of the room. An image of two blobs came up on the screen. "Here's one baby, and here's the other. They're fraternal, not identical."

"And I thought this couldn't get any crazier. Oh man. I think my life is ruined," Trevor said from my phone. We were video-chatting. He had an away game tonight.

"You're the absolute worst," I said to him.

"I'm just kidding! We'll be fine," he said.

"You're positive that there's two?" I asked Brittany.

"One," she said, circling her mouse over one blob. "And two," she said, circling the mouse around the other blob. "I'm not sure I can make it any clearer for you, sweetheart."

"Ugh. I can't believe this whole thing is really happening," I said, trying to put the pieces together in my head.

I wondered if when I was driving home for winter break, some portal opened on the highway and sucked me into an alternate reality. In this reality, my mom was dead and I was pregnant with twins at twenty. But I needed to get back to the actual reality: the one where my mom was still here and I wasn't pregnant while I was still in college.

"They're still pretty tiny. I'd say you're about five, maybe five and a half weeks along," Brittany said. "Twins usually come early, but this would put your due date sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas."

"Oh no. That's right in the beginning of the season!" Trevor said.

"Trevor Martin, I swear on my life, if you use your low-level status on a minor-league hockey team as an excuse to miss the birth of your children, I'll shove a hockey stick so far up your ass that it'll knock your teeth out!" I said.

Trevor's eyes were wide. Brittany was staring at me in silence, blinking her eyes a few times and trying to come up with something to do or say, her one hand still on the mouse, her other on the probe shoved up my vagina because it was too early to have an external ultrasound.

"Umm...would you like to see if we can hear the heartbeats?" Brittany asked after what felt like an eternity.

"I-I'm sorry. I don't know where that came from. It's been a rough year for me. I...my mom died a few months ago, and then I got a boyfriend, and now I'm pregnant with twins and...I just don't even know what's going on anymore," I said.

"Oh...I'm so sorry," Brittany said. "You're really young to be without your mom, but you seem like a strong-willed young girl. I think you'll be okay."

"Thank you, Brittany," Trevor said. "I've got about ten minutes before we start warm-ups so I gotta hear these heartbeats real quick."

"Coming right up," Brittany said.

She pressed a button on the monitor and we heard a thump-thump sound. She pressed another button and it was the same thing. Bethy was showing me some of those online teen pregnancy stories that she loved, and the description of the first ultrasound was just...different from what I felt. They described these scenes of the babie's "heartbeat filling the room" and having this musical type of quality, the teen parents' eyes filling up with tears at the pure beauty of the sounds, but I didn't feel that.

"Can we turn that off, actually? This is kind of a lot for me," I said.

"Sure," Brittany said, silencing the sound. "Everything looks good so far. Two healthy babies. I'll go print out some pictures and be right back."

Brittany took that awful fake dildo out of my cooch and left the room. I looked at Trevor's face on my phone and tried to keep it together.

"What if I actually can't do this?" I asked him.

"What do you mean? You're already doing it," he said.

"No Treav, I literally can't. If my dad makes the decision to move him and the girls to the city, I'm already gonna be screwed because I have no family here, and now I'll have two babies on top of that! What the hell am I gonna do? I can't raise two babies all alone with no family while you're off somewhere playing hockey!"

"Listen, we'll figure it out, alright? I gotta go. Love you!" he said.

"You what?"

He hung up before I could say anything else. I put my phone down and just laid back on the table, contemplating my existence.

"Here are those pictures for you," Brittany said, coming back in the door.

"Great, thanks." I took them and put them in my purse. "Onto the next part?"

"Yup, you can come with me down the hall." I walked with Brittany to a room a few doors down. "You can just make yourself comfortable, and Doctor Andrews will be in for you shortly."

She shut the door and I took a seat on the exam table, ready to text the few people I had left in my support system. I sent out texts to Bethy and Hannah, along with Opal, my one friend from back in Oak Falls.

I had a larger friend group from back home before my mom died, but I learned that not every friend you'll have is going to be a true friend. A lot of my girlfriends just weren't there for me when my mom was sick. They didn't answer my texts or my messages on any of my social media. Some of them said they'd show up to my mom's funeral, and then they didn't.

I guess it was cool to be my friend when we were hanging out at my pool or enjoying my mom's amazing cooking, but not when I was sad at night (it's when the grief seems to hit me the hardest) or when I needed additional support at my mom's funeral because my two little sisters were a wreck. Thankfully I still had Bethy, Hannah, Opal, and Trevor.

There was a knock on the door, and a lady in a white lab coat with curly brown hair walked in. She had a warm smile. It reminded me of my mom's.

"Hi Icelynn, I'm Doctor Andrews. It's nice to meet you," she said, sitting down in the chair across from me.

"Uh...same. You can just call me Lynn though," I said.

"Sure. So, Lynn, you're five weeks along with two healthy babies. Do you have any questions so far?" she asked.

I stared blankly at her and said, "All of them."