OUT OF THE RED ↝ dave grohl

forty-six.

           MUCH TO KATE'S chagrin, Reagan decided that she wanted to drive home immediately after she'd tossed away the pregnancy test into the trash and slid back into her jacket.

"Do you really think that you ought to drive right now?" Kate asked nervously, scurrying at Reagan's heels as she strode through the room. Kate had seen the blatant dread on her sister's face when she'd stepped out of the bathroom. It was a look that Kate had never seen Reagan wear before, not even during the countless reoccurrences of bullshit that she'd put up with in her life.

"Yes. I have to go," Reagan answered mechanically, still void of any concrete feeling. She felt trapped in a state of limbo as she processed the truth. She was pregnant and there was no denying it, not after she'd seen the two defined pink lines staring up at her on the test. They had not even been faint, as if the test had been mocking her proudly by the certainty of those damning lines.

"What about Dave?" Kate continued as Reagan threw open the dormitory door. "Didn't you say that you were going to his place after this?"

"Not anymore," Reagan said with the slightest tremble to her voice. Under no circumstance did she find it possible to face Dave in that moment. She herself had not come to terms with the news and there was no way that she'd be able to sustain both his reaction and hers together. It seemed even impossible to imagine looking him in the eye.

Kate chased Reagan all the way downstairs to her car, but Reagan refused to change her mind. She had no desire to wait out her anxiety in Kate's dorm room. There was a perfectly good empty bedroom awaiting her arrival in Olympia and it was there where she would allow herself to crumble. Being in Kate's room would only feel like entrapment in the midst of her slowly budding panic attack.

"Call me soon," Kate urged. "We can figure this out together."

Together. The word reverberated in Reagan's mind as she pulled off of the university's campus. The only true person who she was really in it "together" with was the same person who she was then running away from. Kate's desire to help her was sincere, but there was only so much that she could do. She was a young college student with her whole life ahead of her. Once again, Reagan was the fuck up in comparison to her bright little sister.

The sky seemed to grow darker than ordinary as she drove back to Olympia, her hands growing slick with sweat while gripping the steering wheel. She didn't even realize that she'd been gritting her jaw together so hard that her teeth ached. The only thing she could focus on was the thought that in the strangest of ways, she was not alone in her car that night.

There was someone else there. Someone inside of her. While this idea would have been cause for celebration to some women, Reagan felt revolted by it. Knowing that her body was harboring something she had not asked for, nor was she capable of caring for, made her want to pull her car over and vomit.

Admittedly, she was familiar with babies. She could thank Richard and Kimberly for that. Although she had been young when Robbie was born, he'd still been the very first infant in her life whom she'd held and nursed as if he were her own. And when the twins had come along, she'd done the same thing with them, cradling them day and night and finding herself in the position of something akin to a mother.

But that was the only time Reagan had ever gone misty-eyed over babies. Besides her own siblings, she'd never felt a pull towards snotty-nosed little ones who screamed in the range of banshees and caused pile ups of dirty diapers. She'd always been content to love and wait on the babies born into her family, but other than that, it was safe to say that she mostly stayed away from all other infants.

It felt ironic that despite those feelings, she was in the situation that she suddenly found herself in. She of all people had wound up pregnant. The same girl who designated her weekends to going to punk shows and was in the middle of her very first relationship. There were plenty of women in the world who yearned for babies, who would have spared a piece of themselves to have one, yet of course Reagan had been selected as the next mother in line out of a billion others.