Pregnant Pause by Han Nolan Read Free Book Online

look around and try to see it through her eyes: the four-poster bed made up in the corner with the empty bookshelf beside it, the couch and coffee table, the card table with the record player and the big moose head surrounded by all our junk. I don't know, maybe it looks more grown up in here than in her cabin with a bunch of bunk beds lining the walls, but still, it ain't pretty in here by a long shot.
    Banner runs on tiptoe to the couch and sits down on it and rubs her hand on the scratchy armrest, and she has this look of awe on her face like it's made of rubies and satin.
    "I'd love to live here."
    "Believe me, no, you wouldn't."
    "Yes, I would. I love the mountains and living in the woods. And swimming at the lake is my favorite thing to do in the whole world. I'd love to live here all by myself, in the dead of winter."
    I go over to the record player that sits on top of the card table. "Sounds boring and lonely to me," I say.
    "But I'd have a stack of books a mile high that I would read, and there would be deer and bears and moose and other animals to watch, and I'd skate on the lake and just sit and watch the snow fall during the day, and then watch all the stars at night. Have you noticed how big they are up here? And they twinkle. At home in New Jersey, the stars seem so far away, and they never twinkle." She crosses her ankles and leans back against the couch with a look of satisfaction, as if her living here were real.
    "Yeah, I like to read, too," I say, while I look through the albums for something I recognize, but there's names here like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. They're vaguely familiar, but judging by the way they look on the covers—clean-cut and wearing suits with ties—I don't think it's my kind of music. Then I find a Christmas album called
Holly Jolly Christmas.
I laugh and turn to face Banner. "You want to pretend it's winter here?"
    She nods and clasps her hands together in her lap. "Sure!"
    "Okay. Here goes something." I put the record on and set the needle in the first groove, and out comes "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."
    "Come on," I say. "I need the practice. Let's dance."
    She eases herself off the couch, looking uncertain, and comes out to the center of the room, where I'm already dancing. She giggles and wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. "You look funny dancing with your stomach big like that."
    I grab her arms and twirl her around. She giggles again, and the two of us dance together.
    She likes the twirling thing, so we do that a lot, and then we do some line-dancing stuff and just fool around, swinging and kicking and jumping, and I can tell she's having a great time, and so am I. If dance class could be like this, it wouldn't be half so bad to teach it. The entire album is full of fast, happy Christmas music, and we go through the whole thing, both sides, sometimes singing along when we know the song.
    As the last song is dying down, we hear a siren outside, and it sounds kind of close. "What's that for?" I ask. "Are they calling everybody to the main cabin or something?" Lam's parents had given me a camp booklet with all the rules and camp business in it that I was supposed to read because I had skipped out on the sure-to-be-boring counselors' assembly by pretending that I had a doctor's appointment, but I hadn't finished reading it yet. The siren had to mean something big, like it's time for one of their camp-wide weight-loss pep talks they're supposed to give every day. Only I thought those were held in the morning. The two of us go to the door and step outside. We see people running around, coming in and out of the woods beyond the cabins, and I see Ziggy, and he's yelling something that I can't make out. Then I look out over the trees to the bottom of the hill at the parking lot, and I see a police car, and its lights are flashing. I'm about to say something when it hits me what everybody is saying, and it hits Banner at the same time, because she cries out,