Free Turning Pointe by Katherine Locke

say, grinning despite myself. “You just made a dirty joke.”
    “I know,” she says, and then laughs again. She brushes her hair back and glances at me, the side of her mouth still tilting up. “So yeah? I mean—I know this is weird, for where we are right now.”
    “We’ll figure it out,” I say, thinking that’s becoming the theme of our relationship, and then lean back, suddenly realizing something. “This is why you’ve felt like shit.”
    “I should have realized it sooner,” she admits. She looks at the swing dancers again as the music shifts to a new song, one I kind of know. “It’s not like I get sick that often. I just feel run-down right now.”
    I don’t want to sit still because if I stay here, I’m going to throw up. Like Aly probably did this morning. I’m twenty. I still have to give my roommates cash to buy me beer when we host anything at the house. I can barely make it to class on time and remember to do laundry.
    I need to move. If I’m moving, if I’m dancing, I’m not thinking. The song playing catches in my ear again and I know it. It’s “De-Lovely.” I get to my feet and offer Aly my hand. She accepts it, and it takes us a few steps and a spin to join the other dancers swing dancing by the boom box and the fountain, kids jumping up and down in their version of dancing between each couple. We dance the whole song without saying anything else, because there’s not much else to say at this point. When the song ends, though, reality crashes back through me. The song only held it at bay, like a dam. When my feet stop moving, my mind starts spinning.
    She’s pregnant. We are fucked.
    And she is way, way too calm. This is Aly. She spins out if there’s a shrimp in her chicken lo mein or if she loses a hair tie. If she’s calm, it’s only the calm before the stormy meltdown. I’m the calm and steady one in this relationship. I have to get myself together. For her.
    I take a shaky breath. “What’s next?”
    “I have a doctor’s appointment next week,” she says, almost shy. Aly, shy. Too many new things for one day. Too many changes. “If you want to come. You’ll have to skip class for a day.”
    “Okay,” I agree immediately and she laughs, leaning back against my arms. I spin her, just to see her eyes light up again. “And then what?”
    “One week at a time. I don’t want to tell Johan until I absolutely have to,” she says, gripping my arms tightly. “So it’s a secret.”
    “
Okay.
” Ask me for the moon, Aly, I’d give it to you.
    She takes my hand and squeezes it. “You aren’t fooling me, Zedekiah. You’re freaking out. Would you believe me if I tell you it’ll be okay?”
    I snort. “I should be telling you that, shouldn’t I?”
    Her smile’s like the sun in the park. Unexpected. “We’ll reassure each other, then.”
    It’s brutal, how beautiful the day is, how beautiful she is, and how desperately I want to be happy right now. I’m spinning between happy and afraid enough to puke and I can barely keep the park in focus. It’s almost impossible to imagine going back to the studio for rehearsal because this feeling, right there in the sun with our hands linked together, this is exactly the feeling I seek every time I step onto the stage. It feels like waking up.

Chapter Ten
    Aly
    “Don’t lose that,” Zed tells me for about the billionth
time as he glances over at the tiny ultrasound picture in my hand. His eyes
return straight to the road as it curves along the river back into the city.
    “I’m not going to lose it,” I promise, resisting the urge to
tease him as I fold up the picture and slip it into my wallet. I drop my purse
on the ground between my feet and lean back, watching the sun dance off the
river. “Besides, we’re going to have a lot of those pictures.”
    “The first one is special,” he insists.
    I can’t argue with that, and I don’t want to argue. At the
doctor’s office, he asked almost all the questions