My breasts had been sore since August. A fullness when I lay down. Some mornings a looseness in my stomach before I was fully awake that I’d learned to lie still through. I told myself it was just the summer.

September changed the light. High school was louder and bigger and full of people who already knew where they were going. I went to class and ate lunch and texted Kayla between periods and came home and did homework and sat at dinner and said the right things. Nate was in third period English. He’d nodded at me across the room the first day and I’d nodded back and that was all.

When the third week of September passed without my period I did the count I’d been refusing to do. The number came back and I sat with it — forty-something days counting back to the last afternoon of August, the couch pillow under my hips and my ankles on his shoulders and his palm pressed flat against my lower belly while he stayed inside me, holding there, still. There was a different night — our parents in the room, my mom six feet away on the other couch, his cock inside me under the blanket while the TV went and nobody looked over — and his palm flat against me then too, pressing in slow, holding it. The last Wednesday he’d done the same. The same pressure, the same deliberate stillness at the end, the same hand.

That was what I sat with.

I bought the test at the Walgreens on Fletcher on the way home from school. Cash from my mom’s kitchen drawer, the emergency twenty she kept behind the rubber bands. I got off the bus a stop early, bought it, walked the rest of the way. Sat through dinner and my mom asking about the history test and her saying goodnight with it still in my bag.

After midnight I locked the bathroom door and did it. I already knew. I waited the three minutes anyway.

Two lines.

I held it for four days.

Sleep cut it — a few hours of nothing — and then the morning came back with the weight of it before I remembered what it was. I’d lie there trying to hold the space before it settled in, and then it settled in.

Kayla at lunch talking about Jaylen — the parking lot senior, she’d found out his name — while I sat next to her with what I had sitting inside me. Geometry. The bus home. The same seats, the same stops, the same hallways I was supposed to be mapping. My body going through the ordinary mechanics of a freshman year while I was running different numbers inside it.

At dinner my mom made pasta and asked about the history test and my dad talked about someone at his office and I ate and said the right things and looked at the table where Cole had sat all summer. The bread basket in the center. The chair.

On the fourth day I called him.

He picked up on the third ring. Noise behind him — hallway or street, he was somewhere in motion.

“Hey.”

His voice did what it always did. I was sitting on the floor of my closet with the door pulled shut and I could feel it through the phone — the specific register of him, the low of it — the same as I’d felt it all summer pressing close at my ear in the dark, close above me in the weight of him. My chest went tight. Something lower. He was three hundred miles away and failing me and my body hadn’t gotten that information yet.

“I need to tell you something.”

The noise shifted. A door on his end, then quiet.

“What.”

I told him.

A silence. Long enough to mean something.

“How far,” he said.

“Six weeks. Maybe seven.”

“Are you sure.”

“Yes.”

“Have you—” A stop. “Does anyone know.”

Not are you okay. Not I’m coming home.

“No,” I said. “No one.”

Another silence. I could hear him working something out on his end — the particular quality of Cole going quiet, which wasn’t the same as other people going quiet.

“You need to be careful,” he said. “About who you tell.”

Careful.

“I know,” I said.

“This needs to stay—” He stopped. Started over lower. “Handle this quietly.”

“Okay.”

“Are you—” He stopped himself again. Left the end off. Didn’t finish it.

He went quiet. I could feel him moving toward something — the shape of a sentence he was leaving open on purpose. Space where a word should be.

“You know what you need to do,” he said.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

Small breath out. Controlled. The same sound he’d made at the kitchen sink in June when the period came and something went out of his shoulders.

“Okay,” he said. “Good.”

He thought we’d agreed.

I sat on the closet floor until my legs went numb.

My parents asleep. The calendar at the end of the hall with August 29th already past.

I pressed my palm flat against my lower belly. His hand had been there — that last afternoon, pressing in low, like he was making sure of something.

The floor was hard. I didn’t move.

For a week I watched him across the room in third period English. Two rows over, same seat, same as always. The back of his neck, the way he wrote. Nothing I hadn’t seen before.

That afternoon I texted him.

hey do you have the reading notes from tuesday

He answered in four minutes. He had them. Did I want to come over — he was home alone, easier than the library.

It was easier.

His house was a ten-minute walk. He answered the door a little flushed, t-shirt and socks, the way someone looks who’s been waiting and doesn’t want it to show. Inside: a normal living room, TV on low, his backpack on the floor. He got me a glass of water I didn’t drink. We sat on his couch and he pulled up the notes on his phone and I looked at them and we talked about the English reading and a kid in class who’d said something stupid, and I don’t remember what I said, but my voice kept coming out fine.

He was close enough that I could smell him — just him, something clean, nothing I had a name for. He had a way of looking at me sideways when he thought he wasn’t being watched. I’d known about it all summer at the pool and now I knew about it at his house.