Mom’s foot nudged mine under the table. I glanced over at her. She winked at me and bit into a biscuit.

“Yes,” I said, looking at Mom, but my words were for my grandmother.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I’ve decided.”

“And?”

“I don’t think I’m going to tell you yet.”

That ill-advised proclamation, given in a moment of annoyance, hit the floor like a turd dropped from the roof of the Empire State Building.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I asked for space and you haven’t given it. Like, even a little bit. Mom’s told you to leave me alone, and you haven’t. And now you’re demanding answers and I just...don’t feel like telling you.”

I shrugged. “Not yet.”

Mormor’s mouth opened and closed like a fish cast on the banks gasping for water. Eventually, she managed a “You can’t be serious.”

“She looks pretty serious,” Mom said. “That’s... I know my kid. That is Grade-A serious face.”

If you’ve never seen a pale-as-paper person turn purple, you’re missing out. Mormor looked like a silver-tipped eggplant, her eyes bulging from her sockets, her cheeks ballooning. She was the throbbing zit that needed popping, but I wasn’t ready to relieve the pressure yet, so I just let her be an engorged rage factory of old lady and went back to eating my potatoes.

Which were delicious, by the way.

“Fine. Fine, we’ll talk again when you’re ready to talk about it. The disrespect of this girl.” Mormor’s hissed proclamations were followed by a long line of Swedish words neither Mom nor I understood. Mormor stood from her chair, collected her dinner and stomped out to watch Fox News in front of the new TV in the living room. For extra “screw you, Serendipity,” she turned the volume up to ear bursting.

Mom glanced back behind her at the living room and then over at me.

“She mad,” she said.

“Yep. You know what’d make her madder?”

“Eh?”

“She turned the TV up so loud, she won’t hear me tell you I’m keeping the baby.”

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

First impressions are lasting impressions, and my first impression of Stonington High School was that it was a huge metal wood tick of a building humping the ground. The center was a domed top—the gym, I’d later find out—with two stories of extending branches of classrooms to either side. The football, soccer and baseball fields were in the far back of the property, surrounded by a freshly painted green track. Tennis courts to the left. A large field of grass with dandelions to the right.

You could fit two of my former high school into the same space.