Something began to ache inside me. I felt bad for the eighth-grade Annabeth. If she knew what was coming, she would have stayed in that photo forever.
My phone buzzed. Text from Phinnea.
u ok? bryan rlly likes you, and he’s all worried that you left because you were mad at him.
I explained about Carly Ocean. my friend was crying, i had to go.
The texting wore me out. I turned off my phone. Mom knocked on my door in her pajamas, all “How was the dance?” I tipped the eighth-grade photo down before she noticed it.
“Just shoot me,” I said.
36
I WAS GRATEFUL WHEN SCHOOL STARTED again. Even though the break was only four days long, it felt like forever. I’d gotten a cold the day after the dance and spent Sunday on the couch watching Fraggle Rock. I wasn’t too sick to go back to school, but I was still a little queasy and tired.
Noe had come back from the ski lodge wearing a brand-new coat with a fake fur collar. At our lockers that morning, she chattered about Darla. “She’s like a second mom to me, you know?”
Noe’s mom was perfectly nice: generous and exhausted, always making sure you had a drink and a snack. Noe couldn’t stand her.
“Why do you need a second mom?” I said, which seemed to make Noe annoyed.
That afternoon, we had a gym meet, the first one that counted for points. Noe got three first-place ribbons. My whole body felt heavy and I was sneezing so much I almost fell off the uneven bars, so for the rest of the afternoon I sat on the bleachers reading How to Survive in the Woods, two warm sweaters pulled over my leotard, a small mountain of tissues piling up beside me.
“Did you make out with Bryan Drexel?” Noe asked me on the bus ride home. “Rhiannon heard you did.”
“Extenuating circumstances,” I croaked. “You had to be there.”
“You’re getting to be so scandalous,” Noe said. “You never even used to talk about boys, and suddenly you’re the one-night-stand queen.”
“I don’t think a kiss counts as a one-night stand,” I said.
“Darla thinks you’re acting out your father issues,” Noe said.
“What does Steven’s mom know about my father issues?”
“Just because your dad left your mom doesn’t mean that any boy you actually like is going to leave you.”
“Noe. I was bored. I made out with Bryan Drexel. You don’t have to come up with some big interpretation.”
The bus jolted over a pothole, and I felt a wave of fatigue. I couldn’t wait to get home and lie down. “In other news,” I said, “Margot Dilforth has been telling people you throw up in the bathrooms.”
Noe made a gesture of contempt encompassing the bus, the scenery, and the universe at large. She put her arm around my shoulder as if to assert our solidarity against the meddling Margot Dilforths of the world. “Margot Dilforth is an idiot,” she said.
37
THE FIRST FRIDAY BACK FROM Thanksgiving, they herded all the seniors into the auditorium to drill us on the rules for campus visits. No drinking. No illegal substances. No sexual escapades. Noe and Steven held hands throughout the entire presentation, making plans to video chat every night of the three-day separation.
I wasn’t quite so gung ho.
Uncle Dylan had called Ava to say I was coming and bought my Greyhound tickets online to get the early-bird price. Mom called her best friend, Pauline, who lives in the same town, to arrange for me to go over for dinner on my last night.
The town, Maple Bay, was an eight-hour bus ride away. “We’ll see each other all the time,” Noe had reassured me when I’d expressed my dismay a second time. “You’ll still come home for Christmas and stuff. Don’t worry.”
I stared at the map on my computer screen, with the route snaking across it in blue. I turned off my computer and lay on my bed with How to Survive in the Woods, but the route stayed pinned to the back of my eyes.
I had never been that far from home before.
38
THE MORNING BEFORE I WAS SUPPOSED to leave, I threw up in the garbage can next to my bed. I stared at the throw-up numbly, my body filling up with a terrible foreknowledge.
Not possible, I thought. So not possible.
But my body clenched and rumbled and I threw up again.
I sat on my bed, my body curiously rigid, curiously light.
No, I thought to myself, no, no, no, no.
I listed all the reasons it couldn’t be true: I was taking exactly half my pills, and Noe had said that was enough. The condom we’d used had mostly stayed on. I was underweight—the nutritionist had said so. Skinny girls couldn’t get pregnant.
I tried to remember when I’d had my last period, but before the Pill I got it only every three or four months, and I wasn’t sure when it was supposed to happen now that I was taking it.
Mom had left for work half an hour ago. I went downstairs, threw on my coat, and fired up the Honda, which I’d barely driven since my last shift at the ice-cream shop. The familiar houses jerked by, and the dented newspaper boxes that had melted snow pooled inside them, and the convenience store with wet bundles of firewood stacked beside the door. It seemed disloyal of the world to change like that, to be cold and dismal where it had been bright and scented and thrumming three months before. Change back, I wanted to scream. Change back. As if the winter was a cruel withholding by a universe that could just as easily churn out spring.
The drugstore was practically empty at that time of day, just a scattering of old men looking at vitamins and tired moms trying to resist their children’s efforts at grabbing Christmas candy. There’s no reason to panic, I told myself. Any sane person wouldn’t even bother with a test. I’m being paranoid.
I found the tests in aisle 7 and put one in my basket, then covered it with a box of tampons and a pack of hair elastics and a chocolate Santa. The checkout clerk probably wouldn’t even notice what I was buying, I told myself. They scanned so many barcodes it had to become automatic. Still, I was sweating under my snow coat. I didn’t trust myself not to fumble the PIN on the debit card reader, so I thrust a twenty-dollar bill at the cashier and did not meet her eyes while she counted the change into my hand.
At home, in the bathroom, a plus sign appeared. I wrapped the test up calmly, neatly, as one would in case of fire, and slid it to the bottom of the trash. I walked back to my bedroom and sat on my bed.
Outside, the last of the leaves on the birch tree were detaching themselves and spiraling down, detaching and spiraling down, landing on the snow-covered lawn. I watched them fall one by one, observing where they landed, as if I would be called to give an account of them later. When it got too windy to watch the leaves anymore, I put on The Velvet Undergound and listened to the entire album three times.
Finally, there was nothing to do but leave the house, so that is what I did.
39
IN THE “UNEXPECTED PREGNANCY” EPISODE of the TV series, the girl in trouble always Considers Her Options and Struggles with the Decision. She changes her mind a bunch and later, always wonders if she Did the Right Thing.
I was not a girl in a TV show. I’d made my decision in the seconds it took me to throw up in a garbage can. There was no going back and forth. No waiting for the decision to appear like a package in the mail. It just landed there, thud.