I push my chair back. “We’ll be back in a bit,” I tell Allie. “We’re gonna see if we can find Char.”

“Whatever.” Allie sighs, turning her attention to the dance floor hoedown. “You’re lucky I love you.”

I feel like a bad kid, looking over my shoulder, half hoping that someone is watching as I pull Gimp by the hand toward the boys’ locker room. We awkwardly manoeuvre our clumsy bodies behind the heavy swinging door and into the blackness. He stops, his hand fumbling for the light switch. I keep moving and grab him by his plaid shirt, pull him close and kiss him hard. He kisses me back, but softer, more tenderly. I plant my hand in the general vicinity of Gimp’s goods. He breaks away from the kiss and lifts my hand off his crotch and places it on his chest. His heart thumps along, smooth and steady.

“Listen, maybe we could do this like grown-ups, eh? Go out on a date or something.”

“This is a date.” I press my hips against him. “Don’t wreck my dream of swaggering back out there with a freshly laid grin on my mug and my drawers in my purse. I might not get a chance like this again.”

He flicks on the locker room lights. “I just . . . I want to be able to see you, is all.”

“K, whatever, we can do it with the lights on,” I say, pressing harder, trying to fling my leg around his waist, threatening to knock us both to the floor in a decidedly un-sexy way.

“Look, Crow, I don’t think —”

“Dammit, Gimp, I don’t have time for you to think. Are we going to do this, yes or no?”

Before he can answer, the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes streaming out of the place where I figured my underwear would be by now. I reach into my purse and answer my phone. It’s Peggy.

“Get out to my place,” she barks. “Char’s up a tree with the baby and she won’t come down.”

5 YOU’LL WISH YOUR CAKE, DOUGH, BABY

November 19 is World Toilet Day. It is also the day I was born, and the day I damn near killed my mother, so you can bet I’ve heard all about that a few times. The doctor didn’t know that there was a big slab of placenta blocking my exit when they jacked Mama full of Pitocin in order to evict me from her cozy womb. I was nearly three weeks overdue. The doctor chalked it up to Mama having her dates wrong, what with her being so young and poor and obviously stupid. They didn’t listen when she told them that something was wrong after the first blast of Pitocin, so they gave her another one and added weak and whiny to their list of judgements about her. But she wasn’t whiny or weak or stupid, despite being young and poor. She was hemorrhaging. A piece of placenta was blocking the exit and had separated, so I was trapped in a contracting uterus with nowhere to go.