Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [26]
“I’m gonna breast-feed, too,” Sara said.
“That’s really great,” Bethany said. “Doctors say breast is best….”
“Oh yeah, it helps ward off infections, especially in the first year,” Sara said, all of a sudden surprising me with a hint of maternity. “And I’ll look so hot in my gown. Omigod! Did you see Angelina Jolie’s rack after she had the baby?”
Now both Bethany and I had lost the ability to speak.
“Destiny is due on August twenty-fourth,” Sara said. “I’ve got exactly ten months to snap back into shape!”
It will be the snap heard around the world. Perhaps you have heard some pregnant women described as “all belly.” It usually means that the pregnancy weight has settled into a cute, compact, baby-shaped ball right there in the belly. If the term “all belly” were used to describe Sara, it would mean that she had literally become “all belly,” that the entirety of her physical being had been consumed by her belly, so that even all body parts that were unrelated and far removed from the belly, such as her ankles, or her earlobes, had become indistinguishable from the belly. Sara was one huge, rotundous belly with one month to go.
I know it sounds like I’m criticizing her for packing on major pregnancy pounds, but I’m not. In her pre-babymama days, Sara was well into the maintenance phase of anorexia, when the starvation wasn’t such a struggle anymore because it was one of many habits—chain-smoking, mainlining Starbucks, inhaling horse tranquilizers—incorporated into her totally unhealthy lifestyle. So not unlike every Hollywood actress who gets knocked up, Sara had to gain about twenty-five pounds just to be in the normal weight range for an unpregnant woman. And once the pounds started piling on, she couldn’t stop them. In eight months of gestating she’d more than made up for all the food she hasn’t eaten in the last decade. And yet, paradoxically, for all her bellyness, Sara looked more attractive than ever at that shower in that au naturel, glowing-from-within way that pregnant women often do. It’s a shame that her anathematic personality offset these improvements in her appearance.
Babydaddy Scotty showed up at the end of the shower for the express purpose of piling all the presents into a luxury SUV and bringing them back to the condo they now share in Seaside Park. At twenty-two, Scotty seems prematurely middle-aged, with a thinning hairline and a thickening waistline. To look at him, you would never know that just four years ago he was voted Most Popular and Class Athlete in the Pineville High School Class of 2002 yearbook. (That Scotty and Sara’s ex-BFF, Manda, “the carpet muncher,” were voted Class Couple is not discussed. Ever. Nor the fact that Scotty tried—and failed—to get into my pants for four years, even when he was half of the celebrated coupling.) Scotty is the personification of every Springsteen song about burned-out, packed-in, broken-down, and washed-up high school heroes. You know, the former stars whose best days are long behind them, whose dreams of post-graduation glory are dashed and scattered among the wreckage on the dark, lonesome highways twisting through the abandoned carny towns along the Jersey Shore…
Or something like that.
Scotty and I exchanged the briefest of banal pleasantries.
“Congratulations,” I said lamely.
“Yeah,” he said, doing pop-a-wheelies with the Bugaboo stroller filled with pink and white paraphernalia.
“A girl,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Yeah,” Scotty said. “Sara says so. Every firstborn in her family for the past one hundred years or something has been a girl. It’s the D’Abruzzi Family Legacy.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Sara and I call it”—he paused here and spread his impressively thick hands in the air, as if he were calling attention to an imaginary marquee—“the D’Abruzzi Pussy Legacy.”
Now, that would have been a memorable motto for the parting gifts: miniature baby bottles filled with pink bubble-gum jelly beans. Instead, Sara had attached a tiny “Save the Date” card that read like a promo to a cheese-ass romantic comedy I’d never pay ten dollars to