It sounded bitchy. It was bitchy, but I didn’t know this person well, didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her and didn’t give much of a crap what she thought of me. My upset at being outed was making way for anger, and anger meant...

Piss off, Danielle, was what it meant.

“Right, okay fine. If that’s how it is,” she said, sounding injured.

“It’s how it is.” I ducked into my class, leaving her standing there, stupefied, in the hall. I sat through the next hour of class growing more and more rage-faced. Leaf, this great guy, I’d thought, who’d shared lunches with me and talked about hospitality, and invited me out with his friends, had run his mouth with a story that wasn’t his to tell. Who did he think he was? Did he think that was his news to share? Was he adding the “lol Hispanic chick” angle to it, or would the other kids do that, ’cause it was bound to come up. “Hahaha, it’s funny, the Latina—” which I wasn’t, but nuanced discussions of Hispanic versus Latina weren’t quite talking points for a lot of white people “—got knocked up.” The jokes that’d follow would be about dudes not looking at me too long or I’d get pregnant. Or that I can’t share Cokes or use a dude’s toothbrush without getting a twin inside of me. The meaner comments would be about me being easy. Or ignorant. Or... Really, pick your trope, but they’d happen because no one knew me or cared about me in a new school. I was the weird outsider who’d just gotten a whole heck of a lot weirder and more outsider-y, which wasn’t a word, but I didn’t care.

I’d worked myself up into a full-blown snit by the time I got to Weller’s class. I sat in my usual seat because I wasn’t giving Leaf the satisfaction of seeing me squirm in front of him.

He promptly sat next to me and, without hesitation, pulled a Saran-wrapped pastry from his bag, sliding it onto the corner of my desk.

“Fresh batch,” he said.

“Screw you,” I said.

His surprise seemed real enough, but then I’d thought everything about him was earnest from the get-go. Maybe I’d misread him. If he was going to out me to the whole school as “that pregnant chick” maybe he’d played good guy at my expense from the very beginning. That red-haired girl on the first day had given me a half-hearted warning.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Like you don’t know?”