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boyfriend's car. Besides, they had arrived at the dance only two and a half hours ago. Jerry's eagerness was unseemly and more than a little selfish. But after all, she reminded herself, he was just a horny teenager, not a real man, and certainly not a romantic. Besides, she couldn't really enjoy herself anyway, not with everything she had to worry about. She agreed to leave with him, although what she had in mind for the remainder of the evening was much different from the steamy makeout session he was contemplating.
        As they left the gymnasium, which the decorating committee had tried desperately to transform into a ballroom, Amy glanced back wistfully, taking one last look at the crepe paper and the tinsel and the carnations made out of Kleenex tissues. The lights were low. A revolving, mirrored globe hung above the dance floor, turning slowly, casting down splinters of color from its thousand facets. The room should have looked exotic, magical. But it only made Amy sad.
        Jerry owned a meticulously restored, fussily maintained, twenty-year-old Chevrolet. He drove out of town, along narrow, winding Black Hollow Road. Eventually he pulled off on a single-lane, dirt track near the river and squeezed the car in among the high brush and the scattered trees. He switched off the headlights, then the engine, and he rolled down his window a couple of inches to let in a warm current of fresh night air.
        This was their usual parking spot. It was here that Amy had gotten pregnant.
        Jerry slid out from behind the wheel. He smiled at her, and his teeth looked phosphorescent in the calcimined moonlight that streamed through the trees and the windshield. He took Amy's right hand and put it firmly on his crotch. “Feel that, baby? See how you get to me?”
        “Jerry-”
        “No girl has ever gotten to me like you do.” He slipped one hand in her bodice, feeling her breasts.
        “Jerry, wait a minute.”
        He leaned toward her, kissed her neck. He smelled of Old Spice.
        She took her hand off his crotch and resisted him.
        He didn't take the hint. He removed his hand from her bodice only long enough to reach behind her for the zipper to her dress.
        “Jerry, damn it!” She shoved him away.
        He blinked stupidly. “Huh? What's wrong?”
        “You're panting like a dog.”
        “You turn me on.”
        “A knothole would turn you on.”
        “What's that supposed to mean?”
        “I want to talk,” she said.
        “Talk?”
        “People do, you know. They talk before they screw.”
        He stared at her for a moment, then sighed and said, “All right. What do you want to talk about?”
        “It's not what I want to talk about,” she said. “It's what we have to talk about.”
        “You aren't making sense, baby. What is this- a riddle or something”
        She took a deep breath and blurted out the bad news: “I'm pregnant.”
        For a few seconds the night was so perfectly still that she could hear the soft gurgling of the river washing along the shore twenty feet away. A frog croaked.
        “Is this a joke?” Jerry asked at last.
        “No.”
        “You're really pregnant?”
        “Yes.”
        “Oh, shit.”
        “Ah,” she said sarcastically, “what an eloquent summary of the situation.”
        “Did you miss your period or what?”
        “I missed it last month. And I'm overdue this month again.”
        “You been to a doctor?”
        “No.”
        “Maybe you aren't.”
        “I am.”
        “You aren't getting big.”
        “It's too early to show.”
        He was silent for a while, staring out at the trees and the black, oily river beyond. Then: “How could you do this to me?”
        His question stunned her. She gaped at him, and when she saw he was serious, she laughed bitterly. “Maybe I wasn't paying much attention in biology class, but the way I