12.

I waited until Monday morning to take the test at school, a weird place to do it, but I thought taking it there would make it less likely to come out positive. I was wrong.

Debbie Marshall was on the phone with her mother outside the stall as I was waiting to look at the stick. The volume was so high I could hear both sides of the conversation. She was telling her mother how all the seniors liked her, and how she was the only freshman invited to the holiday dance. I saw the lines the same moment Debbie’s mom cackled that the only reason they liked Debbie was because of her “big booty butt.”

I stepped out of the stall and breathed the cold air coming through the crack in the window. All I could think was, Where would it sleep? My room at Mom’s was tiny. Dad had carved it out of the living room when I was two and they’d decided I should have my own room. It was hard getting me to sleep in there at first. “Daddy had to come in a hundred and fifty times the first few nights to put you back in bed,” Mom had said. “It was our fault for keeping you in our room for so long. We were hippies about that one particular thing.” My room didn’t have real windows, just a couple of glass blocks along the curved side of the wall to let in light from the living room. Babies needed windows. Air.

It would be easier in Vanessa’s room, I thought. She had a deep closet you could fit a crib into, if you took off the sliding doors. I had a closet at Dad’s but not in my room at home. Just an armoire. Mom had made this stripy pattern all over it with a comb when the paint was wet. There was the armoire and my bed, which took up the whole wall on one side. My desk stuck out along the wall across from it. I had to walk sideways in between my desk and my bed because the pile of clothes on my chair would fall off if I walked straight. I thought, We could build a loft bed, where I’m on top, and the baby’s in a little crib underneath. That’s the only way it could fit. Or we could not build a loft bed and I could get an abortion.

I left the bathroom to find Vanessa. She was in homeroom and I wasn’t supposed to go in there. Mr. Scarpinato eyed me like I was going to start an insurrection.

“It’s an emergency,” I whispered, and for some reason he let me pull her into the corner.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m pregnant.”

“No!” she said, her smile catching me off guard. It made me smile too.

“Yes.”

“Have you told him?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay, well, do that, and we’ll figure out the rest.” She looked out the window, thinking. “We can find out who Jamie’s doctor was.” Jamie was her cousin in New Jersey who’d had an abortion a year earlier. “I’ll call her.”

I ran my finger along the radiator dust, picturing Jamie, her red hair falling off the sides of a doctor’s table, her freckly, pointy knees sticking up in the air. I looked at Vanessa, who was watching me with her arms folded. “What the hell?” I said, shaking my head at her.

“Don’t worry,” she said, grasping my shoulders. People were staring at us. “We’ll figure it out.”

Mr. Scarpinato cleared his throat, pulled a piece of chalk out of his brown polyester pants and started writing on the blackboard for his next class.

I went back to the bathroom to call Will.

“So, yeah,” I said.

“No way,” he said. “What do we do?” Any trace of wistfulness in his voice from the night before had vanished.

“We’re finding a doctor.”

“Well, I’ll go with you.”

“No,” I blurted. “It’s okay. Vanessa’s going to come.” I knew right away I had to keep him out of it. In the back of my head I worried that any shared downer experience would be dangerous for us, and I couldn’t have that. I hung up, stuck my phone in my jeans pocket and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, the new me.