He chuckles and kisses the top of my head. “Are you planning on letting go of me, Sunny?”
“No. I’m good.”
He peels me off his body anyway, and turns around so I’m staring at his back. “Hop on.”
“You can’t be serious. We’ll get in trouble.”
“Says the girl who’s holding a tardy slip. Just get on me.”
I hop up and wrap my legs around him. He takes off, running down the hallway, weaving in and out of bodies that are all staring at us like we’ve lost our minds. If I wasn’t awake before, I am now. “Rhett, slow down!”
He doesn’t. Not until we’re in front of the locker room where he places me back on my feet again. “I gotta run, but I love you.”
Shaking my head, I laugh as he runs back the way we came, high fiving Jake on his way. “I love you, too,” I murmur to myself.
I change into my gym uniform and wait for Becca on the bench next to our gym lockers, but when the bell rings, and she’s still not there, I reluctantly go into the gym without her. The only reason I survive this class is because she’s in it. She wasn’t joking when she said Wyatt was the athlete of the family.
We’re running our boring warm-up laps around the perimeter of the gym when I start to feel like I’m going to throw up. Running isn’t my thing, especially when I’ve only been awake for forty-five minutes.
“Okay everyone, grab a stick. We’re going to play some indoor hockey,” Mrs. Haines, the gym teacher on a permanent caffeine high, announces.
I pull a stick out of the box and stand back, letting the other girls move ahead of me. Some are actually excited to knock a hard plastic ball around the gym. Me, not so much. It only gets worse once we move into positions and Mandi ends up lined up across from me.
The whistle blows and she charges at me like we’re playing a game of football instead of hockey. “What is your problem?”
“I’m just playing defense.”
“Your team has the ball, back up.”
She listens and puts some space in between the two of us, but she takes a pass from her teammate, and then, like it’s in slow motion, she winds up and swings her stick with all of her might, sending the ball flying directly at me.
I fall to the floor, and my stick hits the ground as hard as I do. Immediately, I know something’s wrong. I try to peel my body off the floor, but it hurts too much. “I’m going to throw up,” I say to whoever’s close enough to hear it. Before the trash can gets to me, I heave all over the floor in front of everyone.
Mrs. Haines blows her whistle, backing everyone up. “Mandi, you’re out of the game. Sierra, tell the nurse we need her. Hurry up.”
Sierra, like a deer in headlights, runs through the doors, and into the hallway. She’s back in a couple minutes with Nurse Cathy by her side. She gives me a once over before she moves me into the wheelchair she brought with her. Everyone’s staring, which I hate, but I let her wheel me to her office, too weak to go on my own two feet. I’m trying too hard not to throw up again to really care who sees me.
She opens the small room all the sick kids rest in until their parents pick them up, and wheels me next to a cot. “Lie down for me, Kinsley.”
I listen to her, as she runs through a series of questions. I answer them all honestly, even the one about how I was feeling before I came to school. She listens to every word I say, and I think nothing of it. That is, until her next question. “When was your last menstrual period?”
I sit up, not wanting to discuss this with her. “I’m fine.”
“We need to discuss this if there’s a possibility you could be pregnant. Is this something we need to consider?”
“I’m not talking about any of this at school. You’re not my doctor.” She can’t force me to do anything. “Can I get my stuff from the locker room? I want to go home.”
She nods her head. “Will you take this for me at home, and let me know the results.”
I take the pregnancy test out of her hand, and stare at it. I’m not walking around school holding a test. Like she can read minds, she hands me a paper bag. “You’re not going to tell anybody anything, are you?”
“I can’t by law, but if you are pregnant, Kinsley, you need to get to the doctor. Go home and take the test. You’ll want to open it, and—.”
I hold up my hand before she can go any farther. Even talking about it makes me want to throw up again. “I’ll read the directions and take the test.”
She lets me leave, but I have to stop in the bathroom to throw up again. It’s only when my face is close to a disgusting public toilet that I realize the nurse is right, I need to see my doctor because I’m almost positive this test is going to be positive.
I haven’t had a panic attack since the football game, but right now, one’s threatening to grip me by the throat, making it almost impossible to catch my breath. Why is this happening to me? Rhett’s always been careful—at least I think he has.
As I peel myself off the bathroom floor, all I can think about is how disappointed my mom would be. Kate’s going to kill me. Wyatt’s going to hate me. But Rhett—he’ll leave me, and that’s what scares me the most right now.
An hour later, I’m sitting in the doctor’s office with a tiny plastic cup in my hand. The test I took at home was positive—just like I knew it would be. I’m not ready to be a mother. This was all an accident—a really big accident that’s going to cause a ton of trouble if this second test ends up positive, too.
And it does.
Now I’m listening to Dr. Royer’s go on and on about my options while I’m still trying to process the fact that I’m pregnant. I can’t be more than a couple weeks along, but the second he mentions termination, I already know it’s not an option. We learned about what happens in health class, and there’s no way I want to go through any of that. “I don’t want an abortion.”
Nurse Kimberly nods her head, and Dr. Royer, continues to type on the laptop she carries around with her from room to room. “What are you typing?” I ask her, when curiosity gets the best of me.
“Everything we’re discussing. It makes dictating easier for me.”
“Who looks at it?” I’m already trying to figure out if it’s going to get back to Kate, who was my legal-guardian, up until my eighteenth birthday this past summer.
“It all goes into your medical records account.”
“Oh, okay.”
Another woman walks into my room, pulling a cart with a machine on it. She gives me a hesitant smile, like I’m a fool for getting knocked up at such a young age—like I purposely tried to make a baby with my boyfriend.
“My name’s Tammy, I’m going to do your ultrasound for you.”
“Why do I need an ultrasound?”
Dr. Royer looks up from her computer long enough to answer my question. “It’s protocol, especially for someone who was hit in the stomach.”
All this time I’ve been freaking out, I never once considered that when the ball pounded into my stomach, it could have hurt the baby. I’m too scared to find out the answer, so I don’t even bothering asking if they think the baby’s injured. I’ll know soon enough.
Nurse Kimberly helps me lie on the table, and holds my hand once I’m in position. She’s only known me less than an hour, and still, it’s comforting having her by my side. I’m glad I’m not going through this alone.
“You can watch the screen, and once I have the probe in place, you’ll notice some movement.”
The screen’s black and white, and suddenly, it sounds like I’m in the middle of the ocean. One summer at the beach, I held a giant seashell to my ear in a souvenir shop. It’s the same kind of whooshing sound I heard then. “What is that?”
Kimberly smiles, looking down at me. “That’s your baby’s heartbeat. One of the best sounds in the entire world.” She points to the blob on the screen that’s wiggling around. It looks like a gummy bear—a hyper one. “And that right there is your baby.”
I sit up a little bit, propping myself on my elbows while keeping the rest of my body exactly how it was. Staring at the screen, it doesn’t seem like I’m looking at something inside my own body—that I have a tiny person inside me. “Do you know what it is?”