And then, one day at school, between second and third period, just outside Mrs. Chalmer’s door … what was that? She almost dropped her books. A flutter deep inside her. A literal flutter, light and quick. Her classmates rushed past her, late for class. Kathy Landuski put on lipstick. Ben Johnson gave Marcus Rose a high five. The bell rang, shrill and loud. There it was again. The baby! Before, the baby meant the end of her future, her youth, her life as she’d known it. Now the baby was more than an idea. It was real, alive and kicking. It was hers.

This gave her a new appreciation for her mom, wise now because she’d also once been pregnant and given birth. She took off work to drive Ann to her appointments, reminded her to take the horse-pill-sized vitamins, and sewed elastic panels into Ann’s jeans. She and her friends had started a baby quilt. Connie held her hand as the technician spread the wand over the gooey junk on her stomach. There on the screen, like a black-and-white etching, she saw the round C of a spine. A skull. Fingers and toes. The technician measured the circumference of the baby’s head, counted the ventricles of his heart. “I’m not supposed to say this, but your baby is perfect,” she said. She confirmed what Ann intuitively knew: a boy. She was having a boy, and the boy was sucking his thumb. This news seemed to please Ed. He’d been supportive, although Ann could tell he blamed himself for not being more attentive to what he thought had been happening right under his roof. She could also tell that Ed missed Michael. Ann had heard her parents arguing about whether or not to try harder to find him. “He’s eighteen now,” Connie said. “He’s not a missing child; he’s not even a runaway. Ed, let him go. I can forgive him for getting Ann pregnant, but I can’t forgive him for leaving. I just can’t.”

Now there was this new boy to focus on, growing so fast and so hard that Ann would sometimes double over from the pain of spreading muscles and stretching skin as she moved into her third trimester. Once the news settled in at school, kids watched Ann’s growing belly with blatant interest. She’d liked being the center of attention before; now she wanted to escape all the sideways glances and outright stares, the classmates who dared ask if they could touch her impossibly swollen belly, the kid who sat next to her in chemistry who noticed a tiny elbow glide from one side of her stomach to the other and shouted, “Holy shit!” She didn’t care anymore about being popular or admired. It was so freeing to care only about this constant companion twisting, hiccuping, kicking, and swimming inside her.

Her body was the bell, and the baby the clapper.

SEVENTEEN