And the next thing I know, Amira Bhatt is tugging me down the hall toward the junior lockers in the math and science corridor.

“Don’t what?” I whisper back, but she only rolls her eyes.

“I know what you were about to do.”

“You know I was about to pull my waistband down to my hairline and show off my complete lack of stretch marks and postpartum pooch?”

The internet says it takes a while for the uterus to contract to normal size, and mine’s never been anything but normal size. That has to mean something.

Her full, perfectly arched brows rise. “Okay, that’s a little more graphic than I expected, but I knew you were about to make a scene.”

Amira used to be my best friend, but we’ve hardly spoken in six months. We didn’t have a fight or anything. After my dad died, we just kind of drifted apart. I mean, she came to the funeral, and for a little while after that, she would drop by and try to cheer me up. But when I wasn’t ready to cheer up, she didn’t seem to know how to be with me, the way that Jake did. Being at my house made her uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to go anywhere else. So she just … stopped.

And I just let her.

“It isn’t my baby,” I tell her as we stop in front of my locker. “And I can prove it.”

“I know. But there is no world in which pulling your pants down at school ends well. So unless you want your proof to go viral, you should just keep your pants buttoned. Besides, showing people your stomach won’t prove much. They’ve been googling ‘pregnancy doesn’t show’ all weekend, trying to figure out how someone at Clifford could be secretly pregnant, when Lilly Copeland’s situation is so … obvious.”

I did the same thing. It turns out my mom was right; occasionally, and for various reasons, a pregnancy doesn’t show until it’s nearly over.

“And a belly that didn’t have much pooch during pregnancy won’t have much pooch afterward,” Amira says. “Right?”

I have no idea. But I do not want my soft, winter-pale stomach on the internet.

“Just hang in there and ride it out,” she advises while I dial in my locker combination. “Wear tight clothes, so they can see that neither your stomach nor your boobs are any bigger than they used to be, and people will move on to whoever the Crimson Cryer points a finger at next.”

“Any idea who the Cryer is?”

“Nope. My mom says that was the name of the school paper before it got canceled.” Her mother teaches our one physics class, as well as all the Chemistry I and II sections.