After lunch, we reconvened in the art room for smokes. There’s no sixth-period class there, so it’s always abandoned. Various half-completed art projects and splattered drop cloths gave it a more refined atmosphere than our other option—the south parking lot Dumpsters.

“So what’s with the sack of flour?” Cole asked. We’d all been eyeing it in Kori’s arms. Not asking her about it, since she wasn’t supposed to speak. We should’ve known it would be too hard for her to stay silent all day.

“Thought you’d never ask,” she returned with a grin. She hoisted it onto the high craft table. “This is my baby.”

Several other students had also been carrying similar packages, so we knew she wasn’t crazy. But still.

I eyed the sack of flour. It was one of those basic five-pound jobs, but she’d decorated it to look like Charmmy Kitty, which touched my heart. For our fourteenth birthday, she gave me a plush version, because “Charmmy has a key around her neck too.” I gave her a Badtz-Maru. It was one of those weird twin moments, aided by the popularity of Hello Kitty.

“Baby, huh?” Cole raised her professionally arched eyebrows knowingly at me.

“Yep. Doc Ramsey knocked me up.”

“Cute.” Cole smirked. “Does the school board know?”

“Don’t look so smug, he’s gonna knock both of you up next period.”

Cole and I exchanged fearful looks; we both had him right after lunch.

“It’s not fair,” Lexi wailed, since she was the only one of us who hadn’t gotten into one of Doc Ramsey’s social psych classes.

Kori dropped an arm over Lexi’s skinny shoulders and said, “I bet he’ll knock you up too, honey, all you have to do is ask.”

“Yeah, Lexi, just ask him to slip you his seed.” Cole laughed, but I didn’t think it was very funny.

Kori caught my discomfort before I could disguise it. “Okay, guys, enough, we’re upsetting Serena.”

I snubbed out my cigarette in an impromptu ashtray I’d made of leftover clay. “Aren’t you supposed to be shutting up, Kor?”

“Oh, don’t be so touchy.”

“Serena’s hormonal, you know—being pregnant and all,” Cole said with a wink.

“Ha-ha. Anyone got any, like, Visine?” I asked, pulling out my Altoids mints. Cole tossed me a bottle, while Kori mocked me for scrambling to appear chaste for my favorite teacher.

Cole and I giggled through the entire flour-baby-making class. I’d decorated mine as a Baby Badtz-Maru, and Cole’s was a candy-colored Louis Vuitton print. You could take the girl out of the fashionistas, but you couldn’t take the fashionista out of the girl.

“I feel bad,” Cole said when she finished.