The Kissing Booth: New Love

Alternate Chapter 24

Noah

After we finished talking to my Mom, I drove Elle home, promising her that I would see her in the morning. My Mom told us she would call us off school and give us a day to figure our shit out about our future (my words not hers) before we had to tell everyone the news. The plan is that I'll pick Elle up like normal and bring her back to my house, which is also normal for us, although I didn't tell my Mom that. Then we'll figure out our plan and how we'll tell our Dads.  Plus, we can't forget about telling Lee.  As if Elle hasn't been worried enough about breaking the news that we're dating to Lee, I can only imagine how he'll take the pregnancy news.  I'm sure telling my little bro that I knocked up his best friend isn't going to go over so well. 

I've been laying on my bed throwing a nerf football at my ceiling since I got home. I've pretty much been running on autopilot since Elle told me the news.  This is the first time I've given myself a chance to think about anything other than the next thing we have to worry about, the next steps we need to figure out.  This is the first time I've had a chance to stop and think about how I actually feel about all of this. 

Elle is pregnant.  We're having a baby.  I'm going to be a Dad.  Those thoughts have been running through my head for the last 24 hours. They still don't feel real but they do scare the shit out of me.  I know neither one of us is ready for this. I have been working my way towards Harvard for the last four years. But right now, I don't even know if Harvard is still a possibility. The unknown is the part of this that is driving me crazy. The part I'm happy about is the thought of doing this with Elle. I realize there isn't anything about this situation that will be easy but I feel like the two of us actually could make this work.  At least with her, I'm willing to do everything in my power to make sure it does.

The next morning, I turned off the alarm on my phone as soon as it started going off. I had been awake for hours.  I'm not sure if I even slept last night. Pretty much like the night before. After picking up Elle and bringing her back to my house, things between us seem awkward.  Elle is obviously still upset and I understand that. I had to wonder if she blamed me for this.  I just wanted to pull her onto the couch with me and kiss her like this was any other morning but I knew that wouldn't help anything. There was a lot we needed to get figured out before we have our big talks with everyone tonight.

We spent the morning having the hard conversations.  As soon as we sat down, Elle pulled one of the notebooks out of her backpack to start the first of what I'm sure would be many pros and cons lists.  I don't know how many of these I had seen Elle make through the years.  When Elle's Mom was sick and they knew she probably wasn't going to get better, Elle was devastated at the thought that her Mom wouldn't be there to help her make all of the big decisions coming up in her life.  Joni's solution was to get her started making pros and cons lists to help her feel more confident in making decisions on her own.  After that, she used a pros and cons list for everything, to the point that I used to make fun of her every time she pulled out a paper and pen when in the middle of making any decision.  She even showed me the pros and cons list she made after the night of our first kiss to decide if she wanted anything to do with me. This was the process that worked for her.  These were probably going to be some of the most impactful decisions of our lives so far, so I knew I couldn't give her any grief this time.

First question, did Elle want to go through with the pregnancy and have this baby?  Yes.  Second, did we want to keep the baby? Yes.  Maybe we were being naive but we were young and in love and although we knew we weren't ready, neither of us could imagine not keeping a baby that was part of both of us.  Once we had gotten that far and knew that we both wanted to keep the baby, we relaxed a little.  We still had a lot of big things to figure out, huge things, like dealing with school and living arrangements and all of that.  But, knowing we felt the same way about where we were heading, made the earlier awkwardness between us melt away.  Elle was in my arms again and we were talking like normal to each other.  We threw out some thoughts and ideas and Elle took notes about things we needed to look into and ideas that we had.  We didn't get too far on any of those decisions because we knew that what we really needed to figure out was how we were going to tell our Dads and Lee about this.  Mom wanted us to talk to our Dads first but we both knew that Lee needed to be the next to know. We would talk with him right after school, then we would each talk to our Dads on our own when they got home from work.