Chapter One ONE THE DAY MY BOYFRIEND DIES, he texts me to say he's sorry. He loves me. He'll never forgive himself for hurting me while I'm pregnant with his baby. Arik's text ends with a typo. A single letter J . I don't understand why he hasn't finished his thought until my mom takes me out to lunch that afternoon. While scrolling Instagram at our usual table, I see a picture of Arik on my timeline with the caption "R.I.P." He's crashed his car while texting me. That night, three hundred people follow me on Instagram. Hunched over my phone on my parents' couch, I scroll past dozens of posts about Arik: pictures of him playing baseball, grinning at the camera, laughing with his family. There are screenshots of news stories about the crash that killed him, photos of people sobbing, and broken-heart emojis, all mixed in with the usual Instagram content--blurry selfies, food porn, a mediocre sunset. Those happy photos feel like they've been posted from another universe. Reminders of a time before I got pregnant and had to move back in with my Mormon parents in Southern California. Before I had to leave my scholarship and Division 1 tennis career at Brigham Young University behind. I feel like I have to post something. But I have no idea what to write. I don't want to admit that hours before Arik died, I'd learned he cheated on me. Devastated, I'd said the cruelest things I could think of: that he wouldn't meet his baby unless it was in court; that he would never see me again; that I would never forgive him. How could I explain via Instagram what it felt like to learn--at that dingy restaurant with my mom--that Arik died while texting me to ask for forgiveness, to tell me that I deserved better, to say that he loved me? How do you write a post about that? WHEN YOU'RE FOURTEEN WEEKS pregnant and your boyfriend dies, people say a lot of things. "You'll meet someone else. You're still young." "You have plenty of time to find a father for your baby." "You don't look that sad in the pictures you post on Instagram." "God has a plan for you." I've known all along that God has a plan for everyone. I just don't know why mine is so shitty. By twenty, I've already been drugged and raped. I've escaped an abusive relationship, only to fall in love with someone amazing and get pregnant unexpectedly. The night Arik dies, my mom is so worried about me that she drags an extra mattress into her bedroom so she can keep an eye on me while I sleeplessly stare at the ceiling. THE NEXT SEVEN MONTHS are a gray, depressive blur. The easiest tasks--getting up, eating breakfast, taking the online classes that will allow me to keep my NCAA tennis eligibility--feel impossible. More than once, I think about dying. You wouldn't know it from my Instagram feed. I don't post any shots of me sobbing to sad music in the shower or writing that I want to die in my journal. Instead, I upload pictures of me holding a starfish to obscure my massive belly. And another of me smiling on a cruise ship, pretending I'm not thinking about jumping overboard. When I look back on that twenty-year-old gripping the railing and debating drowning herself in the ocean, I want to tell her that things will get better. That she'll forgive herself. That even though this pregnancy is unexpected, she'll love her baby more than anything in the world and fight hard for her next ones. I want to tell her that she'll fall in love again, in a big, beautiful, dramatic way, that she'll learn to live her life without fear of judgment, and that at some point she'll hear the phrase "soft swinging" and not only know what it means but understand it's the scandal that brings her to reality TV. Most of all, I want to tell her that the tragedies and trauma she's experienced won't define her. That there's no reason to feel shame about any of her mistakes--that the only shame is in hiding them. Excerpted from Told You So by Mayci Neeley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
