Devi reached out to touch it, poking at my belly button.

“Yep, that’s a kid,” she announced.

“Yep.” I rolled up my pants. “I tried to change before you got here but jeans fit weird. Too tight. So I said screw it and went back to my PJs. Fat pants forever, I guess.”

“Hey, fat pants are the best. I own at least five pairs.”

“Says the girl with no fat to speak of,” I said.

“Don’t hate.” Devi crawled up beside me, her head fwumping down into the pillow beside mine.

I snuggled into her side. “I don’t hate. I just wish I felt better.”

“You will.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah.”

Except Devi was wrong. Not forever wrong, but wrong for a while, and most particularly wrong that next Monday. I was at my locker in the morning, trading my book bag for my folders just like I would any other school day, when it started. Six lockers down from me, a girl, who’d never even introduced herself to me, started talking about me. I think her name was Shelby, but for the purposes of this retelling, let’s just call her Doucheface McAssBurger.

“She’s pregnant,” Doucheface said to her shorter thinner friend—henceforth called Armpit McButtSandwich—in a stage whisper. “Can you believe it?”

I’d never talked to either of these girls, but there they were, making my business their business and the business of anyone in earshot, which was everyone, because Doucheface’s voice carried. I froze, staring straight ahead at my stack of books and papers, realizing that the soft din of chatter around me was probably all about me.

Oh.

The cat, it seemed, was out of the bag.

It was going to get out sooner or later, particularly with my starting to show, but knowing that the gossip rag had started with Leaf sucked. It sucked a lot. I’d been at the school a couple weeks, made three friends total and already one of them had thrown me under the bus.

My new-friend roulette hadn’t paid off.

I glowered at Doucheface and Armpit hard enough that they stepped back, and I slammed closed my locker door. My eyes stung. Stupid hormones made stupid crying more stupidly possible and I hated it. I managed to hold it together, swearing to myself that my hag classmates wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing the preggo freak out. I was two steps down the hall when Danielle Hopkington, with her short brown curls, hoop earrings and barrage of freckles, called my name and fell into step beside me.

“Hey, Sara. Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yep.”

That’s not what you really want to ask, Danielle, and we both know it.

I kept walking. Danielle kept pace.

“I just heard you were in trouble, and like, I wanted to help.”

“Don’t.”