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Chapters (47)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraphs
  5. Prologue
  6. Part One
  7. ONE
  8. TWO
  9. THREE
  10. FOUR
  11. FIVE
  12. SIX
  13. SEVEN
  14. EIGHT
  15. NINE
  16. TEN
  17. ELEVEN
  18. TWELVE
  19. THIRTEEN
  20. FOURTEEN
  21. FIFTEEN
  22. SIXTEEN
  23. SEVENTEEN
  24. Part Two
  25. EIGHTEEN
  26. NINETEEN
  27. TWENTY
  28. TWENTY-ONE
  29. TWENTY-TWO
  30. TWENTY-THREE
  31. TWENTY-FOUR
  32. TWENTY-FIVE
  33. TWENTY-SIX
  34. TWENTY-SEVEN
  35. TWENTY-EIGHT
  36. TWENTY-NINE
  37. THIRTY
  38. THIRTY-ONE
  39. THIRTY-TWO
  40. THIRTY-THREE
  41. THIRTY-FOUR
  42. THIRTY-FIVE
  43. THIRTY-SIX
  44. THIRTY-SEVEN
  45. Acknowledgments
  46. About the Author
  47. Newsletter Sign-up

But the next week, she threw up again when she ate one of the candy corns that Mrs. Brennan, her guidance counselor, kept in a bowl on her desk. They were talking about her college applications and SAT scores, and what a good shot Mrs. Brennan thought Ann had at getting into a good East Coast school, but Ann was calculating the best route to the bathroom, so overtaken with nausea she couldn’t focus.

She tried to convince herself she wasn’t pregnant. She went to the bathroom so often to see if she was bleeding that her classmates began to notice. She prayed she’d find blood in her underwear—God, she never thought she’d want a period this badly. She looked back through calendars and counted backward to that awful night. She couldn’t remember when she’d last used a tampon.

She’d thought about taking a test but put it off. It was just one time, the first time. What were the odds? Homecoming was next week. She couldn’t be pregnant on homecoming court—this sort of thing couldn’t happen to school royalty. It happened to other people.

NOT UNTIL AFTER THANKSGIVING did Ann finally muster the nerve to go to the Planned Parenthood next to Shank Hall, the place where she’d heard that the girls from her high school got their birth control and had their abortions, and where the glassy-eyed protesters held up giant signs of bloody fetuses. She filled out paperwork, peed in a cup, read brochures asking “Is a seed a tree?,” and looked around at the other girls in the waiting room. Were they also pregnant? Why did they all seem so calm?

The counselor confirmed her suspicion. “You’re pretty far along,” she said. “We need to perform an ultrasound to confirm the dates.”

Was she too far along for an abortion? Ann thought about her alternatives: Drinking bleach. Throwing herself down the stairs.

He put some cold jelly on her stomach, and there, on the black-and-white television screen, she saw it: a baby, not just the idea of a baby but a real, perfect little child. It seemed so alone inside her there, so vulnerable. So alive.

The pregnancy reminded her of something Michael had taught her about gardening: that if you want a ripe tomato early in the season you can slam a shovel into the roots and throw the plant into a shock, enough shock to produce fruit before the plant would otherwise be ready.