Jenny was fifteen and pregnant.

   She had gone to Walgreens, gotten about twenty pregnancy tests, peed her little bladder dry, and every single one had that stupid little smiley face or pink line just taunting her like a portent that life as she knew it was over.

   Jenny never thought that this would happen to her. She was raised with incredibly antediluvian values that bordered on complete Victorian prudishness. She never could have guessed that her first time would be in the back of a van in the parking lot at the church where her mom ran a day care. And she definitely never realized that sperm was fungible enough to slam a home run on her first time.

   But she definitely and undeniably had a bun in her oven.

   She couldn't drive or vote. She couldn't drink alcohol—although she often got together with her friends to knock back a few Bud Lights. She hadn't even graduated high school. And now all of a sudden, she was going to have a child.

   She had all of these quixotic dreams of winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Oscar, Grammy, and Pulitzer by the time she was thirty. She wanted to be Angelina Jolie, traveling around the world as an ambassador of peace for the United Nations. But unlike Angelina, Jenny never wanted to adopt kids. She always thought they were slimy, sticky, dirty, and obnoxious. She understood why other, more felicitous women, would want to have and adopt litters upon litters of kids, but that was never a part of Jenny's life plan.

   And yet, still, here she was having a child.

   Jenny weighed the options. Abortion made her stick to her stomach just thinking about it. Even as much as the little bastard was completely inconvenient and would cause more physical and emotional pain than she would care to think of, she would never want to kill it. Adoption was a bit too odd for her to think about. Just the thought that part of her would be living in someone else's house completely out of her own life was uncomfortable and unsettling. So she decided to keep the thing.

   The first step was telling her best friend only to be greeted by a reaction of laughter and "I told you so." Jenny wasn't quite sure what her friend was referring to as something she had forewarned against, but that wasn't really the point. What she needed was support in telling her parents.

   Just as Jenny had thought, their reactions were far from benign. Her mother cried and locked herself in the bedroom for about a week and her father got quiet. Eerily quiet. He pursed his lips, shook his head, and then proceeded to pretend that nothing ever happened.

   The weeks that followed left Jenny pretty much alone. At school she was a leper. Even after a while, her closest friends began showing how uncomfortable they were in their own idiosyncratic ways. One kept on making up fake appointments where another started referring to her as "her pregnant friend" in the course of almost every conversation. Her father continued to show is discontent in entirely passive-aggressive ways, with the worst being constantly acknowledging how "fat Jenny was getting" and that "she should go on a diet."

   So Jenny was alone. And she was fine with that.

   With her dreams dashed at the shore, her social life non-existent, and the list of things she couldn't eat or do seemingly getting longer each day, Jenny wanted to be alone. It was an ethereal calm. Between doctor appointments and ultrasounds, Jenny would sit in a room staring at the blob forming in what she liked to refer to as "her womb." She had stopped hating it so much, but still only referred to it as "the major inconvenience."

   At times, the father, a boy she met in Algebra named Danny, would come over but her parents would turn him away. Frankly, she was ok with. She blamed him for everything.

   Pretty soon her due date was rolling around the corner. "Her womb" had become the size of a zeppelin and "the major inconvenience" took up the rather irritating hobby of kicking her from the inside every chance it got.

   Then her water broke. On her sixteenth birthday. At dinner with her family all around.

   She was rushed to the hospital. After what seemed like three months of labor and the greatest pain ever imaginable, Jenny's son, Hunter Thomas, was born. Even though it kind of looked like a baby pig covered in Jell-O, Jenny felt an odd, existential sense of completion looking into its soft gray eyes. It was the exculpatory moment she hadn't even known she was waiting for. This little thing in her arms made everything else make sense.

   At that moment, she was too smart to know that this moment meant life would be easier from there on out—in fact, she knew it would get harder. But it was in that moment that she truly learned what love was and why life was worth living to find it.

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