Andrea Cole didn’t simply return to school pregnant. Nope, in her adult and responsible, super Andrea-Cole way, she’d taken small steps throughout the summer to prepare all of us for it. She’d met with the principal and all of her teachers, file folder with the color-coded tabs of her medical records and relevant state laws ahead of her like a shield. She met with select groups of friends over coffee (decaf tea for Andrea) where she made the announcement the same way she’d dropped the bomb of her twelve college acceptances: calm, cool, without ego and with compassion for other people’s feelings. She met with Coach Nickle, a man whose gnarled mien and cracked, bowed knees inspired fear in even those at High who avoided his aquamarine dungeon, and she bowed out of the swimming captaincy without putting him through the indelicacy of asking, requesting only to continue on as record keeper. This from a girl who could have gone all-state again carrying triplets. Coach took to grumbling to anyone who’d listen. Record keeper. Why Coach knew stories of Soviet Olympians purposefully impregnated in the off-season for more hard-core training.
So we were prepared when we saw her, first day of senior year, her Calculus and Shakespeare textbooks clutched at her hip, just to the side of her growing bump. There was her familiar freckled face and tangled curls, her clean soapy smell as she reached to give us the same student council hug that had won her the presidency; the same victory grin as when she’d led a three-day walk-out to oust the last district superintendent, whom Andrea herself had exposed for embezzling federal funding meant for minority programs. It was her sophomore year that she’d been editor-in-chief of the school paper.
Nothing was said of a father. She forestalled such piddling, tasteless inquiries. Certainly it couldn’t be Jeff Finebrow, Andrea’s longtime flame and star student who’d left early for an internship in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Homecoming dance to escort her with such dignity and magnanimity, bending to kiss her forehead like an older brother, Andrea smiling so politely, clapping like she was the proud older sister when the dance floor floodlight moved Jeff’s way and the PTA president took the podium to announce his presence in the gym. Anyway, they’d broken up last winter, too long ago.
As for the PTA, not a small force in our spinning world, and the local newspaper and their letter-writers, Andrea tamed them too, and with the same apparently effortless ease of her butterfly stroke, leaping and surging from the water without visible distress, all the machinery of it hidden below the surface. She volunteered to speak at our first school assembly, the one typically given over to drugs or guns. Teen pregnancy is all-too common, she said, and let me tell you how it already has and will affect my life, so that I can be a warning for you. Then she succeeded in a campaign to turn an underused administrative office into a lactation room for breastfeeding faculty and staff. This was the Andrea we knew, wrapping adults around her little finger and then righting their wrongs so masterfully that they didn’t even mind. Principal Chalmers, a woman with softly curling blonde-gray hair, a woman for whom the pastel skirt-suit might have been invented, took the opportunity to present Andrea with a badge for her service. What the heck, she must have figured, it was Andrea’s senior year.
It couldn’t have escaped the PTA’s notice that pregnancy didn’t actually seem to affect Andrea’s life. She continued to set the curve on all of our tests, continued with her manner toward teachers and her schoolwork, never arrogant and never obsequious, to charm the rest of us so we didn’t mind. She started LGBTQ and Al-Anon groups, the last two items on her (we all remembered it from that infamous sophomore year) Editor’s List of Things to Be Changed at High.
Yet neither did she glorify her pregnancy. Like with everything Andrea did, she made teen pregnancy look natural and easy, and because of that we all understood it to be very, very difficult. It was like Andrea was taking an extra six AP credits again, or like last spring when she’d chaired the county breast cancer walk while her own mother was undergoing chemo.
You could even say we understood it as a marker of the effects of pregnancy—pregnancy plus Andrea Cole—when her crusading rose to an even higher pitch around Halloween. She was ready for the PTA again when they went to Principal Chalmers to ask if Andrea’s newest project to raise awareness of child sex trafficking was really appropriate. It had been one thing when she’d grilled Coach in Health about condoms and AIDS. It was another to have a pregnant student with a bull horn yelling about sex from the center of the track field, declaring that even little boys could be raped, and what with the middle school right there.
Principal Chalmers must have agreed, and must have spoken to Andrea, spending the capital she’d earned by looking away all those years and by having been such good friends with Andrea’s mother and even a pallbearer at her funeral. Andrea acquiesced, retreating to her regular causes: spending Thanksgiving at the food bank, sitting with the transgendered kid at lunch.
And since it was winter, it was time again for her patrol. A river cut through our town, most of which froze solidly by February. There were also many bars, remnant of our German heritage now supported by a large campus of the state university system and outdoor tourism. Given this combination it was inevitable that every year, often weekend nights, people walking home from those bars went in. Through the ice. A wrong turn, the paper would say, or an unlucky spot for a short cut. Usually these people were young men, college-aged. Only Andrea Cole used a word no one else did: suicide. It was a controversial word, a word that was perhaps overdoing it a touch, like Andrea herself, self-styled crusading angel walking the river at last call with a thermos of hot cocoa and flashlight. The drunk men were like sleepwalkers, she said. You couldn’t talk them out of crossing the river, of walking in, but if you saw them in time you could take their elbows, lead them to one of the bridges.
The first of the year on a cold, though not cold enough, evening in early December, the dark men’s parka she’d taken to wearing over her now fully bulging belly was at first confusing to the rescue team when they fished Andrea Cole’s body out of the hole. A large trash bag? No, a girl. We found out the way we learned anything of Andrea, the news like a trickling river grown of snow melt, small at first and eminently natural but in the end a force of nature, a thing before which you could only stare and maybe marvel a minute. What a beauty. Or what a horror. But not a thing we could do anything about.