“Sometimes,” he agrees. “And just to rub that in …” He unlocks his phone and shoves a picture of his girlfriend, Daniela Montes, at me. “She sent me that on Wednesday night. One week ago. Two days before Lullaby Doe was born. Do you see any way she could have been pregnant in this picture?”

The short version? No.

My brother’s girlfriend is crazy-hot. And in this selfie, she’s about to combust. She’s posing on her bed in nothing but a matched set of lacy red underwear and a Santa hat, the phone angled to show her entire body from above. Including part of a butt sculpted from years of soccer and a tiny, tiny little waist.

I know that sometimes a pregnancy isn’t noticeable through clothing until late-term. I’ve done the same googling everyone else has over the past week. But there’s no way on earth that Daniela is thirty weeks pregnant in that picture.

There’s also no way the picture is from last year, because last Christmas she and my brother weren’t together yet.

Also, last year her hair was down to her waist, and in this picture, it’s just below her shoulders. She cut it in October, so she could fit it into an updo for the Fall Ball, which the school settled on last year as a way to cut spending by replacing the homecoming dance and the winter formal with one event.

Yes, they canceled the homecoming dance. Permanently.

“I believe you.” I hand his phone back to him. “I believed you even without the picture. I’m sorry, Penn. I guess I’ve just been a little preoccupied with clearing my name.”

“By dragging mine—and Daniela’s—through the mud?”

“All I can say in my defense is that last night the pieces really seemed to fit. And I really need the truth. Sorry I got carried away. This whole thing just really sucks.”

Penn exhales slowly. Then he comes in to sit on the closed toilet. “It’s getting pretty bad, isn’t it?”

I turn back to the mirror and select a lipstick I don’t hate. “Yesterday I got chased down the street by a reporter from WBBJ.”

“I saw.”

“What?” I spin again, and Penn pulls his phone from his pocket. “They used the footage? I didn’t even answer any of their questions!”

“Evidently you’re news either way. I don’t know whether it was on TV, but they posted the clip to their website and to Twitter, and the Crimson Cryer retweeted it half an hour ago. It already has five hundred retweets.”

He hands me his phone, and I tap the play triangle superimposed over an image of my face frozen in midshout, with the local flower shop visible over my shoulder.

It is not a flattering shot.