Page 19 of Wicked Brutal

My pulse starts beating harder. “He does.”

“Apparently not today.”

Xander reaches us before I have to answer. “What happened?”

“Harrington being Harrington,” Penny says.

Xander looks past us to where Ryan and Iz are disappearing around the corner, and his mouth twists. “Shocking.” Then his attention drops straight back to Penny. “You eat?”

She sighs. “Yes.”

He takes the folder out of her arms. She lets him. I watch them start bickering about whether a banana qualifies as breakfast, and I have to look away, because the ache isn’t jealousy. Not really. I don’t want Xander — obviously. I don’t want what Penny has instead of what I have. I just want to stop pretending mine doesn’t exist. For one morning. One hallway. One stupid minute where Ryan could look at me the way he does when a door is locked.

I press my tongue against the inside of my cheek and follow them to assembly. Because that’s the deal. Publicly, Harrington gets to hurt me. Privately, Ryan puts his hand over our baby and apologizes for it afterward. Sometimes both things are true at once, and I’m learning that’s basically the theme of my entire life.

By third period, the nausea has progressed from annoying to I may actually die in this classroom.

Mrs. Whitmore is halfway through a discussion about unreliable narrators when the girl beside me opens a yogurt. Strawberry. I smell it before she’s even got the lid all the way back, and my stomach turns, hard. No. Absolutely not. I stare at the sentence in my notebook and breathe through my nose, which is a mistake, because the smell is worse that way, so I switch to my mouth while Mrs. Whitmore says something about perspective and objective truth and I conduct an increasingly desperate negotiation with my own digestive system.

Not here. Not now. You can make me throw up in literally any bathroom in Massachusetts after three-fifteen. You are not doing it in AP English.

The baby, apparently, does not respect academics. A hot wave rises into my throat, and I put up my hand.

Mrs. Whitmore looks at me. “Ally?”

“Bathroom?” It’s the only word I’ve got.

She takes one look at my face. “Go.”

I’m out of the chair before she finishes the word. I don’t run — running gets attention — I just walk fast down the corridor, around the corner, into the nearest bathroom, into a stall, and I throw up absolutely nothing, because breakfast was four crackers and half a banana. Pregnancy is glamorous.

I stay bent over the toilet for a minute after my stomach gives up, then sit back against the cold tile of the stall wall. “You’re being extremely dramatic,” I whisper. My hand rests low against my stomach. There isn’t much of a bump — a little fullness that wasn’t there before, enough that I see it, enough that Ryan sees it, nothing anybody else would catch. Yet. My fingers spread over it. “Your dad is going to blame me for this, you know.” I smile despite myself, the nausea already fading. “He’s going to say I offended you with yogurt.”

I stay another minute. Then I clean myself up, rinse my mouth, drink from the water bottle in my bag, and stare at myself in the mirror — pale, eyes too bright — and pinch some color into my cheeks. Better. Not convincing. Good enough.

When I get back, Mrs. Whitmore doesn’t ask. She just nudges my water bottle closer to the edge of my desk when she passes, and I love her a little for it.

The essays come back in the last ten minutes of class. I’d almost forgotten mine. We had to write a personal essay about a place that shaped us, and most people chose somewhere they loved — a childhood vacation house, a grandmother’s kitchen, a baseball field. I wrote about my bedroom. Not the whole truth. Never the whole truth. I wrote about doors — about learning the sound of footsteps in a hallway, about the way a room changes when it belongs to you but isn’t really yours because somebody else can walk in whenever they want, about writing stories under a blanket with a flashlight when I was twelve because the page was the only place nobody else got to decide what happened. I made it abstract enough that nobody could call guidance. Personal enough that it hurt.

Mrs. Whitmore sets the paper face-down on my desk. “See me after class.”

My stomach, already traumatized, drops again. “Okay.”

She moves on. I wait until she turns away before I flip it. An A. Not shocking — I’m good at English. There are notes down the margins in her tiny blue handwriting, a question mark beside one sentence, beautiful beside another. And then, at the very end, beneath my conclusion, six words:

You should be writing professionally.

I read them once. Then again. The classroom goes strangely quiet around me — not actually quiet, chairs scrape and somebody whispers and Mrs. Whitmore is telling Logan Mason to put his phone away for the eight thousandth time this semester — but those six words just sit there, heavy. Professionally. Not this is good. Not you have talent. A future-tense sentence disguised as advice. It assumes there’s an after. After Edgewood. After Roman. After Tremblay. After hiding. A version of me somewhere on the other side of all of it who writes because she wants to and gets paid for it, who maybe sees her name printed on something that isn’t a school roster or one of my father’s legal documents. I touch the ink with the tip of my finger.

The bell rings. Everybody starts packing. I don’t move until the room’s mostly empty, and Mrs. Whitmore sits on the edge of her desk. “You look terrified,” she says.

That startles a laugh out of me. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” She nods at the paper. “I meant it.”

I look down. “I like writing.”

“Ally, you’ve turned in something like thirty assignments to me over four years.” She smiles. “You disappear in person.” My throat tightens. “But you don’t on the page.”