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“Yeah,” he said. “That’s how I’ve always felt, too.” He turned back to face me then, his eyes wide and curious. “But do you ever wish that you’d said no that night? To Iris? That maybe if you had, none of this would have happened?”
It was the first time the question had been said out loud, the first time I’d even really let myself analyze the possibility. There was no point in asking, not if I couldn’t change that first response. But I had the answer, I realized. I didn’t need to think about it.
“No,” I said, and I knew right away that I meant it. “Maybe if you’d asked me when I’d first found out about it. But now . . . No. I think it was the right answer. Or the only one, maybe.”
He nodded, as if it was just as simple as it sounded. “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you, little one,” he said, gri
I nodded, at a loss for expressing everything I was feeling in that one moment. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Perfect, because you don’t have to thank me. So don’t waste any more time trying to come up with anything good, okay?” He put one arm around me and squeezed, an awkward half hug that left me feeling prickly and overheated. “I’ll see you Monday?”
“Monday.”
I had an awful feeling about Monday, a horrible, creeping suspicion that everything was just a weekend away from erupting all around me. But the idea that Jesse would be there helped, made the day feel at least a tiny bit less ominous. And there was Ha
I gave one last wave before walking off to my car, my head whirling with everything that had happened in the past two hours, good and bad. My secret was officially out in the open, and the rest was just a matter of time. On the flip side, I’d made a new friend who believed me, or at least seemed to believe me, and who could verify that Iris had definitely existed.
But I’d also found out that Izzy had done the unthinkable, that not only had she abandoned me, she’d snuck around behind me and stabbed me in the back.
The sting hit me all over again. I had to see her. I needed her to admit to my face that she’d betrayed me. I needed her to feel ashamed when I walked into school on Monday or whenever that day would finally come, mobs of people pointing and judging me. Because of her. Because she didn’t even have enough loyalty to keep my secret.
But most important, I needed her to know that I was fine without her.
Because if she thought that, maybe I could believe it, too.
chapter nine
I woke up at four the next morning with my arms wrapped tight around my belly and a smile on my lips, the wisps of a happy dream I couldn’t quite remember floating above me, just barely out of reach. I thought again about what I’d said to Jesse the night before, about how I wouldn’t trade in my answer to Iris, not anymore. I was relieved to realize that it was still true this morning. I still believed. I believed in the miracle that was this tiny baby inside of me right now, right here in my bed with me. I curled to my side, hugging myself into a ball.
But just as I let my eyelids close again, willing myself back into my cozy, su
I doubted that she had, though. On the outside, she and her mom and her stepfather were the perfect upper-middle-class family unit, about as shiny and pristine-white-picket-fence and four-car-garage as it could get in our town—the mini-mansion, Ha
But everything wasn’t quite that glossy when you stripped away the top layer, even if Izzy very rarely went into details. It had taken until a few years into middle school of collecting bits of evidence for Ha
Izzy had always had us as her second family, ready and waiting to fill in for her real one on the bad days. Me and Ha
By eight thirty I put down my old tattered copy of A
I stopped by the kitchen on my way out to tell my parents I was going to see Izzy, even though I’d considered slipping out the front door and bypassing the conversation altogether. My mom raised an eyebrow in a silent question mark as she stood up to hug me good-bye. My dad, however, continued reading his newspaper as if I’d never walked into the room at all. The blatant indifference made the knot in my stomach pull even tighter—I had thought I’d gotten used to him ignoring me, but after the other night, my hopes had shot up too dangerously high. Had I imagined it all? Was that image of my dad at the stove just a dream I had desperately wanted to make real?
No. It had happened. Maybe to him it had been a small, meaningless gesture, but to me it had been a gigantic one. I brushed it off, though, waved to them both anyway, and pulled myself together for the bigger challenge ahead.