Chapter 13: Baby on Board!!!
The morning sickness didn’t fade. It settled in, a permanent, greasy tenant in Alexandra’s gut. She’d mastered the quick dash to the bathroom, the way to brush her teeth without triggering another gag, the bland, cracker-based diet that did little but stave off the worst of the nausea. She moved through her days at college like a ghost, half-present, her mind spiraling down into a dark, calculating place. She counted days. She tracked cycles that no longer applied. The numbers screamed at her.
Diane watched. She saw the purpling under Alexandra’s eyes, the way her new, smaller clothes were already fitting differently—not with fat, but with a subtle, unsettling tightness across the abdomen. She remembered the desperate, angry sex with Daniel, in this very house, just before the world ended. The timeline was a perfect, terrible lock clicking shut.
She’d voiced her suspicion once, tentatively, over a dinner of plain toast. “Al… you don’t think…?”
“It’s a stomach bug, Diane,” Alexandra had snapped, her voice sharp with a fear she couldn’t name. “Or stress. It’s just stress.”
Diane had let it go. Maybe it was just food poisoning like Alexandra said.
But after two more weeks, and her queasy feelings never went away, the possibility hardened into a cold, certain dread. Alexandra was losing weight everywhere except her middle, which had taken on a faint, firm roundness. She was always exhausted, sleeping ten, twelve hours and waking up drained. This wasn’t a bug.
That’s when Diane took her to the doctor. Not a campus clinic, not anything official. She found a place online, a small community health center in a strip mall on the other side of town. The one that didn’t require ID or health insurance. Because they didn’t have any as women. Their old identities were useless, dead paperwork belonging to dead boys. They were phantoms.
The waiting room smelled of industrial lemon cleaner and stale sweat. Faded posters about diabetes and flu shots were tacked to walls the color of old cheese. A toddler wailed somewhere down the hall. Alexandra sat stiffly in a plastic chair, her knee jiggling, hands clenched in the lap of her jeans. She looked like she was waiting for a sentencing.
“This is stupid,” she muttered for the tenth time. “We can’t afford this.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Diane said, her own stomach in knots. She was playing a role now: the supportive friend, the concerned roommate. It was easier than being the accuser.
A nurse called them back. The doctor was a woman in her fifties with kind, tired eyes and a no-nonsense demeanor. Dr. Sharma. She ushered them into a small, cramped exam room, the paper on the table crinkling under Alexandra’s weight.
“What seems to be the problem?” Dr. Sharma asked, her eyes on Alexandra.
“Nausea. Fatigue. For weeks,” Alexandra recited, her voice flat. “I think it’s just… a lingering virus. Or anxiety.”
Dr. Sharma asked questions, nodding, making notes on a tablet. She took Alexandra’s vitals, felt her lymph nodes, pressed gently on her abdomen. Alexandra flinched at the pressure low on her belly. Diane, standing by the wall, saw the doctor’s eyebrows lift a fraction. A clinical curiosity.
“We’ll run some standard bloodwork,” Dr. Sharma said. “Check for mono, vitamin deficiencies, thyroid issues. It’s probably something simple.” She prepared a vial for blood draw.
As the doctor turned to label the vial, Diane leaned in. The smell of antiseptic and Alexandra’s nervous sweat filled her nose. She put her hand on the doctor’s arm, gentle but firm. Dr. Sharma paused.
Diane’s lips were at her ear, her whisper barely a breath. “Try a pregnancy test.”
The doctor’s head turned slightly, her wise eyes meeting Diane’s. There was a flash of understanding, of having seen this dynamic before—the knowing friend, the scared patient. She gave a minuscule, professional nod. Without letting Alexandra know.
Because she really knew.
The blood draw was quick. Alexandra looked away, jaw tight. “All done,” Dr. Sharma said brightly. “The lab is just down the hall. I’ll have the nurse run these now. It’ll be about twenty minutes. You can wait here.”
She left, taking the vial. The door clicked shut, leaving them in the humming silence of the room.
“See? Bloodwork,” Alexandra said, a false relief in her voice. “Probably just anemic.”
“Yeah,” Diane said, staring at the closed door.
The twenty minutes stretched into an eternity. Alexandra picked at the paper on the exam table. Diane studied a diagram of the human ear on the wall until it lost all meaning. The distant sounds of the clinic were muffled, ominous.
A soft knock. Dr. Sharma returned, holding a thin folder. Her expression was neutral, carefully composed, but her eyes went directly to Alexandra. There was a new weight in the room.
“The bloodwork showed some interesting things,” she began, sitting on her rolling stool. “Your hormone levels are… quite elevated.”
Alexandra’s face went blank. “Hormones?”
“Human chorionic gonadotropin, specifically. hCG.” Dr. Sharma paused, choosing her words with precise care. “It’s a hormone the body produces during pregnancy.”
The words hung in the antiseptic air. They didn’t dissipate. They solidified, becoming a physical object between the three of them.
Alexandra blinked. A slow, disbelieving motion. “That’s… that’s impossible.”
“The test is very reliable,” Dr. Sharma said softly. “According to the levels, I’d estimate you’re about seven to eight weeks along.”
A cold, sharp laugh escaped Alexandra’s throat. It was a sound of pure fracture. “No. You don’t understand. That is literally impossible.” Her hands went to her flat stomach, then flew out in a gesture of frantic denial. “I can’t be. You have to run it again. There’s a mistake.”
Diane took a step forward. Her heart was a pounding drum in her ears. “Al.”
“Shut up, Diane!” Alexandra snapped, her eyes wild. She turned back to the doctor, her voice pleading, desperate. “Look at me. I’m nineteen. My… my body… it’s new. It’s not… it hasn’t been…” She was floundering, trapped in a lie that was also the truth.
Dr. Sharma’s gaze was compassionate but firm. She’d seen denial in every shade. “The test doesn’t lie, Alexandra. Your body is pregnant. Whatever your history, whatever you believe is possible, the biochemical reality is right here.” She tapped the folder. “We should schedule an ultrasound. To confirm viability and get a more accurate date.”
The word ‘viability’ seemed to detonate in Alexandra’s chest. She stopped breathing. Her color, already pale, turned a sickly gray. She stared at the doctor, then at Diane, her eyes wide with a terror so profound it looked like madness.
“An ultrasound,” she echoed, the word foreign.
“It’s a simple procedure. We can see the gestational sac, the fetal pole. It would give us more information.”
Alexandra shook her head, a stiff, mechanical motion. “No. No ultrasound. I don’t… I need to go.”
She slid off the table, her legs buckling slightly. Diane caught her elbow, holding her up. Alexandra’s arm was rigid, trembling.
Dr. Sharma stood. “Alexandra, I strongly advise—”
“I need to go,” Alexandra repeated, her voice a choked whisper. She pulled away from Diane and fumbled for the door handle.
Diane met the doctor’s eyes for a second—a silent exchange of apologies and shared helplessness—then followed Alexandra out. They moved down the hall, past the curious glance of the nurse, through the waiting room where the same toddler was now quiet, and out into the blinding, indifferent sunlight of the parking lot.
Alexandra walked to the car, her steps jerky. She yanked the passenger door open and collapsed inside, slamming it shut. Diane got in the driver’s side. The interior of the car was an oven, the air thick and still.
For a full minute, there was only the sound of Alexandra’s ragged, unsteady breathing. She stared straight ahead through the windshield, seeing nothing.
“It’s Daniel’s,” she finally said, the words hollow and flat.
“I know,” Diane whispered.
“He’s gone. I’m here. And his… his child is inside me.” A hysterical note crept into her voice. “What is it, Diane? What the fuck is growing in me? Is it a monster? A ghost?”
She turned to Diane, her face a mask of agony. “The necklace… it changed everything else. Did it just… freeze his sperm in time? Did it wrap it in magic and stitch it into my new uterus? What is the science of this? What is the rules?!”
Diane had no answers, other than one. "Al... rememberwe had sex 7 weeks ago. Just before i lost my penis? The time frame matches." The absurd, grotesque reality of it was too vast. A pregnancy conceived by a man in a body that no longer existed, carried in a womb that was less than two months old. It was a biological paradox, a nightmare fairytale.
“We have to get rid of it,” Alexandra said, the decision crashing down with sudden, violent certainty. “We have to. I can’t… I can’t carry this. I don’t even know what this is.”
The word ‘it’ hung between them, cold and dehumanizing. A defense mechanism.
Diane put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it. Her hands were slick on the wheel. “An abortion.”
“Yes.” The answer was immediate, desperate.
“With what money, Al? With what ID? That clinic back there does testing, not… that. We’d need a different place. More money than we have. And what do we tell them? That you’re a transgender man who got pregnant before starting hormone therapy? That you’re a magical construct?” Her voice rose, frayed at the edges. “There is no box to check for this!”
Alexandra slumped back against the seat, the fight draining out of her, replaced by a crushing despair. The logistical wall was as impenetrable as the biological mystery. They were trapped. By magic, by bureaucracy, by the sheer, unmappable reality of their own bodies.
She placed a hand on her lower stomach, over the firm, subtle curve beneath her shirt. A life, or something like it, was anchored there. A piece of a boy who was now a girl, growing inside a girl who was once a boy. A secret with a heartbeat, beginning to thrum in the dark.
“Then what do we do?” Alexandra asked, her voice small and lost.
Diane looked at her friend, at the sheen of sweat on her pale forehead, at the absolute ruin in her eyes. The protective instinct rose, fierce and terrible. She didn’t know the answer. But she knew the next, impossible step.
“We go home,” Diane said, turning the key. The engine coughed to life. “We figure out how to get more money. And then we find a clinic that doesn’t ask questions.”
She pulled out of the parking lot, the car pointed toward the shabby house that was their only refuge. The future, which had once seemed like a blank, terrifying page, now had a shape. It was a countdown. A slow, inevitable swelling.
And in the quiet of the moving car, beneath the rumble of the engine, Alexandra thought she could feel it—a faint, fluttering echo, deep in the core of her new self, answering back.
And in the quiet of the moving car, beneath the rumble of the engine, Alexandra thought she could feel it—a faint, fluttering echo, deep in the core of her new self, answering back.
She jerked her hand away from her stomach as if burned. “Don’t,” she whispered, to herself, to the feeling, to everything.
The rest of the drive was a blur of stoplights and suffocating silence. Diane’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, her mind racing through a maze of impossible logistics and phantom costs. They parked in their cracked driveway. The house looked smaller, shabbier, incapable of holding the enormity of what they now carried inside.
Alexandra got out. She moved up the walk, through the front door, and into the living room where the stale, closed-up air still held the ghost of that lavender candle. The reality of the doctor’s words, the solidity of that medical folder, finally detonated behind her ribs.
Her composure shattered.
She didn’t make it to the bedroom. She ran to the sofa and flopped down on her side, hiding her crying eyes into the cushions. The sobs were ugly, wrenching things that tore out of her, muffled by the fabric. She cried for the loss of Daniel, for the terror of her own body, for the alien thing taking root inside her that was both a piece of her best friend and a total stranger.
Diane watched from the doorway for a moment, her own heart a tight, aching fist. Then she walked behind her and joined her. She lay down, fitting her body against Alexandra’s trembling back, spooning her on the narrow sofa. She wrapped an arm around her waist, over the place that was changing by the hour.
She felt Alexandra flinch, then melt into the touch, the crying growing quieter, wetter.
Diane rested her cheek against the back of Alexandra’s head. Her scent was shampoo and salt. She began to pat her head, slow and rhythmic, a gentle, anchoring beat against the chaos.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Diane whispered, the words vibrating against Alexandra’s spine. “Somehow. It’s gonna be okay.”
Alexandra shook her head, a weak protest into the cushions.
“I’ll help,” Diane continued, her voice firming, surprising herself. “I’ll help take care of it. All of it.” Her hand slid from Alexandra’s head, down, coming to rest gently over Alexandra’s own hand, which was clawed into the cushion. She laced their fingers together. “After all, it’s mine, too.”
Alexandra went very still. The crying hitched, softened to a shaky breath.
Diane pressed her lips close to Alexandra’s ear, her next words a soft, definitive promise against her skin. “Al… we will be great mothers.”
The words hung in the dusty living room air, absurd and undeniable. They weren’t a solution to the money or the fear or the grotesque mystery. They were a direction. A choice. Alexandra turned her head slightly, just enough to look at their joined hands. She said nothing. She just held on tighter, her grip desperate and sure, as the fluttering echo quietly persisted beneath their tangled fingers.
She just held on tighter, her grip desperate and sure, as the fluttering echo quietly persisted beneath their tangled fingers.
It wasn't okay. It wouldn't be okay for a long time. But the storm of tears had scoured her hollow, leaving a numb, gritty calm in its wake. They stayed like that on the sofa until the light through the blinds faded from gold to gray, until the sporadic tremors in Alexandra’s body finally stilled.
Hours went by and Alexandra finally was okay with it. Not the pregnancy, not the nightmare of it, but the weight of Diane’s arm around her, the anchor of that shared, impossible promise. She pushed herself up, joints stiff, eyes swollen and hot. Diane’s arm fell away.
“I’m starving,” Alexandra said, her voice raspy from crying. “But the thought of food is making me want to puke again.”
“Toast,” Diane said, getting up. “Plain. It’s the only law we have right now.”
Alexandra followed her into the kitchen. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, harsh after the dim living room. Diane put two slices of bread in the toaster and pushed the lever down. The click was loud in the quiet. She filled the kettle for coffee, the tap water roaring then fading.
Alexandra leaned against the counter, watching her. The domestic normalcy of it was surreal. Her hand drifted back to her stomach, not in panic this time, but in a kind of awed, terrible reconnaissance. Something was in there. Daniel’s. Hers. Theirs.
The toast popped. Diane buttered it lightly, set a plate on the chipped Formica table. She poured two mugs of instant coffee, the steam carrying a cheap, bitter smell. They sat. Alexandra picked at a corner of the toast, took a tentative bite. It was bland, dry, perfect. She swallowed and waited for the rebellion. It didn’t come.
She sipped the coffee. It was terrible. It was familiar. They didn’t talk. They just sat there, the steam from their mugs mingling, the only sound the soft crunch of toast and the hum of the fridge. The world had ended and begun in this room, and now there was just this quiet, shared exhaustion in its aftermath.
Later on, just before dusk, a hard, official knock on the front door stirred them from their silence.
It wasn’t the lazy tap of a neighbor. It was three sharp, percussive blows that vibrated through the flimsy doorframe. Diane and Alexandra froze, eyes locking over the rim of her mug. The peaceful stupor shattered.
Alexandra’s face went parchment-pale. Diane stood, moving slowly toward the living room. “Don’t,” Alexandra whispered, but Diane was already at the door, leaning in to put her eye to the peephole.
The fisheye lens distorted the world outside into a grotesque bubble. She saw the trimmed hedge of their front yard, the dying lawn. And standing on their welcome mat, crisp and out of place, was the suit. The same severe, expensive suit that had been here weeks prior with Daniel’s ex, Megan. The man’s face was a bland mask of professional impatience. He held a thick, legal-sized envelope in one hand.
Diane’s blood turned to ice in her veins. She stepped back, her shoulder hitting the wall.
“Who is it?” Alexandra mouthed from the kitchen doorway.
Diane just shook her head, her lips pressed into a white line. She opened the door just a crack, the chain lock taut.
“Can I help you?” Her voice was higher than she wanted.
“Diane Thompson?” the man asked, though it didn’t sound like a question. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Legal courier. This is for you and Alexandra Thompson.” He slid the envelope through the narrow gap. “You’ve been served.”
The envelope dropped to the floor inside with a soft, heavy thud. The man nodded once, turned on his heel, and walked back to a dull sedan idling at the curb. Diane slammed the door, fumbled with the chain, and snatched up the envelope. It was stiff, ominously weighty.
Alexandra was beside her now, reaching for it. “Served? What does that even mean?”
Diane tore it open, her fingers clumsy. She pulled out a sheaf of papers, the words a blur of dense, intimidating legalese. Her eyes snagged on the bold headers: COMPLAINT, CIVIL SUBPOENA, ORDER TO COMPLY. Names jumped out: Megan Davies v. Daniel Walker, et al. Their address. Phrases like “conscious avoidance” and “aiding and abetting a fugitive.”
“They’re accusing us,” Diane said, her voice hollow. She thrust the page toward Alexandra. “Of housing him. They say we know where Daniel is and are, like, hiding him from the court or something.”
Alexandra scanned the page, her breath coming faster. “This is insane. He’s gone.”
“They don’t know that. Megan doesn’t believe it. She thinks he’s just hiding out here, and we’re covering.” Diane flipped to another page, her stomach dropping further. “Look. This is a compulsion order. They’re giving us a month. Thirty days to comply with discovery and allow a full search of the premises.”
“A search?” Alexandra’s voice cracked. Her eyes darted wildly around the living room—to the feminine clothes strewn over chairs, the makeup on the coffee table, the shared bedroom with its twin beds and single, stolen necklace hidden in a drawer. “They can’t just search our house.”
“They can. This paper says they can. If we don’t voluntarily comply, they get a court order, and then the cops come anyway.” Diane sank onto the arm of the sofa, the papers rustling in her trembling hands. “And if we lie to the court, or obstruct… it’s contempt. Fines. Maybe worse.”
This wasn’t a good thing at all. The precarious world they’d built, a house of cards held together by magic and silence, was facing a scheduled demolition. A forced search would find nothing of Daniel, but it would find everything of Alexandra and Diane. It would raise questions they could never, ever answer.
“We need a lawyer,” Alexandra said, the words sounding foolish as she said them.
“With what money?” Diane’s laugh was a short, sharp burst of air. “My last paycheck from the garage was for Daniel Walker. I can’t cash that. You’ve been skipping classes. We’re living on ramen and dread.”
Alexandra spent the next two days in a frantic, digital haze. She called legal aid offices, her voice pitched in her new, unfamiliar feminine register. She filled out endless online forms for pro bono representation. The answers were always the same: waiting lists six months long, income requirements they couldn’t prove, case specifics that didn’t fit. Their situation was too strange, their identities too nebulous. They fell through every crack.
No luck.
The second problem was just as dire, a looming administrative ghost. Diane pointed it out, her finger tapping the subpoena. “They want our depositions. Our official statements. To do that, we need to prove who we are. We need IDs.”
They stared at each other. Alexandra Thompson’s driver’s license showed a short-haired, flat-chested teenager with a stubborn jaw. Diane Walker’s photo was a grinning, muscular guy in a grease-stained shirt. Those people were extinct. The women in this room had no birth certificates, no social security cards, no proof they existed at all.
They would also have to get paperwork and IDs for themselves ASAP. It was an impossible puzzle. To get an ID, you needed a birth certificate. To get a new birth certificate with amended gender, you needed a doctor’s letter and a court order. To get a court order, you needed a lawyer and money and a paper trail that began with an old ID. The system was a closed loop, and they were outside of it.
On the third evening, Alexandra stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She lifted her shirt. The change was undeniable now, a soft, definite roundness pushing against the fabric of her pajama pants. Two timelines were collapsing inward: the biological countdown inside her, and the legal countdown ticking down on the papers on the kitchen table.
Diane appeared in the doorway, her reflection hovering behind Alexandra’s. Her eyes dropped to Alexandra’s stomach. “We can’t let them in here,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“We have thirty days to make two people legally exist, or to make a lawsuit disappear.” Diane’s hand came up, hesitantly, and rested on Alexandra’s shoulder. Her thumb stroked the bare skin there. “Or…”
“Or what?”
Diane met her eyes in the mirror. The fear was there, but underneath it was a harder, sharper glint. The same glint she’d had when she’d stolen the necklace. “Or we find another way. We’re not the people they’re looking for. Maybe we need to stop trying to prove we are, and start making it impossible for them to look.”
The fluttering echo chose that moment to tap again, a soft, insistent pulse beneath Alexandra’s skin. A reminder. They were out of time in every conceivable way. Alexandra covered Diane’s hand with her own, watching their intertwined reflections—two beautiful secrets the world was threatening to expose.
“Start making it impossible,” Alexandra repeated, the words tasting like a new, dangerous kind of promise. She didn’t know what it meant yet. But the alternative was annihilation. "How?" Alexandra asked, her voice barely above a whisper. The question hung in the air between them, heavy with the weight of everything they didn't know.
Diane exhaled sharply through her nose, her fingers tightening slightly on Alexandra's shoulder before releasing. "I don't know yet," she admitted. "But we can't just sit here and wait for them to tear our lives apart. We need to be proactive."
Alexandra turned to face her fully, her reflection in the mirror now showing the faintest hint of tears welling in her eyes. "Proactive how? We can't fight this legally. We can't even prove who we are anymore."
Diane's jaw set in determination. "We come out as Trans, that way we can at least get our birth certificates and social cards fixed to our genders. I... I know someone in the county clerks office.... well Daniel knows her. But..."
"But what?" Alexandra said quizically.
"I haven't talked with her in years. I mean YEARS.. she's my mom." Diane said, her voice dropping to a whisper.
"I haven't talked to her in years. She's my mom." Diane said. "She threw me out back when I turned 18, for shop lifting. Said I was a disappointment and would never amount to anything. I also hate her because.... well I never said this to anyone eeeever. You'll be the first. My mother was into Petticoat punishments. Instead of spanking me or grounding me she made me dress like a girl for a long period. One time when a few years back, she made me dress up and tossed all of my male clothing out. And what I stole was a pair of men's jeans and a shirt." Can you imagine me walking in that office now and say hey, you're baby boy is here, and id have to act as a transwoman. Oh god that brutal." Diane said in a whispered tone.
The weight of those words hung in the air between them, thick with years of buried shame and resentment. Alexandra’s breath hitched, her fingers tightening around Diane’s wrist. “You don’t have to do that,” she whispered back. “We’ll find another way.”
Diane shook her head, her jaw clenched. “No, we won’t. Not in time. The clock’s already ticking on the subpoena. If we don’t act fast, we lose everything.” Her voice dropped to a near-whisper. “And I’m not just talking about the house or the lawsuit. I’m talking about us. The way we are now. Ill just have to bite the bullet on this one. She's always wanted a daughter anyhow." She chuckled. "I guess i can act like a transwoman for a few. Well have to tell her that we were both men transitioning into women. Well fully transitioned. Anyhow." Its been 4 years so it shouldn't be too unbelievable. She'll probably ask where we got surgery from if we have no money to be doing this. So we'll say we got it done dirt cheap in Thailand." "And we'll say we were both taking hormones for a while. Ever since she threw me out. She'll buy that. Maybe because she'll feel like she won."