Free Friends with Benefits by Melody Mayer Page A

treating the baby like a little doll they could dress up. Usually that didn’t last more than a few days or weeks. When their friends stopped oohing and aahing and they realized they could never go out, never have any fun, and that their high-tailed fine little body wasn’t quite as fine anymore, that was when
Mama
or
Tía
or
Abuela
would step in and the little girl got to pretend she was a little girl again. Esme had never known anyone who actually put their baby up for adoption. And abortion? Abortion was unthinkable.
    Esme shuddered. Thank God for birth control. If she got pregnant . . . She’d handled a lot in her life but that would be too much. Of all the awful things about it, the worst would be that she wouldn’t know if the baby was Junior’s or Jonathan’s. God, how had she turned into the kind of girl who wouldn’t know who the father of her baby was? Her eyes slid again to Junior, who had gone into the back of the ambulance to prepare for their call and was just now returning to his seat. He deserved better than her.
    Possum turned into an alley that Esme hadn’t even seen. “On the right, up there,
esa,
” Junior told Possum, hitching a thumb to the right.
    A little girl stood on the small patch of dirt in front of a stucco house that had probably once been white. The heavy black bars over the windows and the front door were ornately filigreed, as if that would fool people into thinking they were there to make the house look good and not to keep the junkies out. The girl saw the ambulance and waved for it to stop. When she jumped up and down her long, inky braids jumped with her.
    â€œÂ¡Mi hermana, mi hermana!¡ El bebé viene!”
she yelled, lower lip trembling.
    Junior was out of the ambulance in a flash.
“No te preocupes,
todo será bueno,” he assured her. “¿Donde está ella?¿Y cómo
se llama?”
    â€œEn su cuarto, en la casa. Se llama Esmeralda.”
    Possum and Junior got the gurney from the back of the ambulance and the girl led them inside. Esme waited by the ambulance. Some teen girls eyed Esme as they sashayed by with their we’re-all-that struts; too much eye makeup, lips outlined in dark pencil and filled in with light lipstick, long hair hot-rollered to fall in waves over their shoulders; tricked out in short, frilly skirts that twitched this way and that at each stiletto-heeled footfall.
    Looking at them, Esme felt disdain. They were such fools. Then her chest tightened. Was she really so different from those girls? What right did she have to feel superior? None. None at all.
    For such a tiny girl, Esmeralda the pregnant fourteen-year-old had a big set of lungs. She screamed and cried for her mother and her savior, and cursed her boyfriend as Junior and Possum wheeled her into the rear of the ambulance. Her long, naturally dark hair had been bleached an unnatural brassy blond. Esme noticed an inch of black roots.
    A hard-faced skinny woman with rollers in her hair and a cigarette seemingly glued to her lower lip came out of the bungalow next door. Junior asked if she knew where the girl’s mother was. The woman explained that the mother worked nights and never got home until morning, and that was only if she didn’t put in overtime. The baby’s father? The woman just shrugged and sucked on her cigarette.
    They got back in the ambulance—Junior let the younger sister ride in front with Possum. He and Esme stayed in the back, talking to the pregnant girl, calming her during her contractions, checking her vitals, stroking her hair, assuring her that everything would be fine.
    Esme knew that Junior was a sucker for kids. She knew he’d be an outstanding father. The knot in her stomach was shame over her own behavior.
    They took the girl to County General because no way did she have insurance, and the city hospital at USC wouldn’t give her a hassle. Once they wheeled Esmeralda inside, Junior