1. Alison #2
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.”
I stare at her. She doesn’t seem to realize what that sentence does to me — or maybe she does. Mrs. Whitmore is one of those teachers who notices more than she admits. “Have you thought about studying it?” she asks.
“Writing?”
“English. Creative writing. Journalism. Publishing. There are a hundred ways in.”
“I haven’t really thought about college like that.” Which is technically true — I’ve thought about college as escape, as distance, as housing and money, as what happens to Tobias if I go. I’ve never once thought about it as somewhere I get to choose a thing because I love it.
“You should,” she says.
I fold the essay carefully. “Maybe.”
“That’s not a no.”
“No.”
“Good.” She smiles again and turns back to her computer, letting me go without making the moment bigger than I can carry. I slide the essay into the safest section of my bag. Then I go upstairs.
The third floor of the arts building smells like dust and old wood and the specific stale warmth of rooms nobody bothers renovating because nobody important ever sees them.
The music room at the end of the hall has been abandoned for years — not officially, technically students can still use it, they just don’t.
The piano’s out of tune, three keys don’t work, and one wall has a water stain shaped like Italy.
It is my favorite room in the entire school.
I knock twice. Pause. Once. The lock clicks. Ryan opens the door.
And there he is. Not Harrington. Ryan. The difference is so immediate it almost hurts.
His blazer’s off and thrown over the back of a chair, his tie’s loose, his sleeves are rolled to the elbows, and there’s a paper cup in one hand — and the second he sees me, his whole face changes.
Not dramatically; he’d never survive our arrangement if he couldn’t control himself.
But his shoulders drop. His eyes warm. Mine.
“Hey.”
One word, and I’m almost crying. Ridiculous. I step inside, and he locks the door behind me. “What happened?”
Of course. I haven’t even said anything. “Nothing.”
“Your eyes are red.”
“Pregnancy.”
“That’s not an explanation,” he says. “That’s a hostage situation.”
I laugh. He takes my bag off my shoulder before I can stop him, sets it on the piano bench, and hands me the cup. Ginger tea. Honey. Exactly enough lemon that I can taste it but not enough to make my stomach revolt. I take a sip. Perfect temperature. “How long has this been here?”
“Seven minutes.”
“You timed it?”
“No.”
Ryan watches me for a moment, and then his mouth tightens. “What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“Ryan.”
He reaches out and brushes his thumb beneath my eye. “Did I go too far downstairs?” There it is. I look at him. “You saw Penny,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“And the guy by the science doors.”
“Yeah. Who was he?”
“No idea.”
“Then why—“
“Because he was watching the hallway instead of walking through it,” Ryan says, and of course he noticed that. “I needed him to see me dismiss you.”
“I know.”
“Still hurt.” It isn’t a question, and I hate that he knows. I look down at my tea. “A little,” I admit.
“Fuck.” His hand slides to the back of my neck. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t apologize every time.”
“I can.”
“We agreed.”
“I know what we agreed.”
“So don’t make yourself crazy over it.”
His jaw flexes. “I’m working on that.”
“Poorly.”
“Extremely.” I look up, and his eyes are genuinely miserable, and that softens the last of the sting. “I called you an asshole after,” I tell him.
His mouth curves. “Good.”
“Penny agreed and Xander didn’t defend you.”
“Betrayal.”
“Nobody likes you.”
“You like me.”
I take another sip. “Debatable.”
He kisses me. Quick — just enough to steal the smile I was trying to hide.
Then he kisses me again, slower this time, his hand staying at my neck while the other settles at my waist, and the whole day falls away in inches.
The hallway. Penny. The watching man. The yogurt.
For ten seconds I get to be kissed by my boyfriend in the middle of Edgewood Prep.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against mine. “Better?”
“Maybe.”
“Need more data?”
“Probably.”
He kisses me again, and I laugh against his mouth. “There she is,” he murmurs.
“Shut up.”
His hand moves from my waist to my stomach without thinking about it, and we both notice, and neither of us says anything for a second. The curve under my shirt is still small. He knows exactly where it is anyway. Then he crouches, and I immediately narrow my eyes. “No.”
He looks up. “What?”
“Don’t start.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Your face.”
“Apparently my face has a reputation.”
“It does.”
He pushes the bottom of my shirt aside and lays his palm gently, warm, over my stomach. “Hey, tiny terrorist.”
I close my eyes. “Ryan. I told you not to start. I already threw up in AP English.”
His gaze snaps up. “You threw up?”
Oops.
“I was going to mention that.”
“When?”
“Eventually.”
“Ally.”
“It was yogurt.”
“Did you eat?”
“Crackers.”
His expression darkens.
“And half a banana,” I add, which does not help.
“That’s not breakfast.”
“The baby disagreed with breakfast.”
He looks down at my stomach with real severity. “You are a strawberry with no legal authority.”
I laugh, and his thumb strokes slowly over the fabric of my shirt. “Your mother eats,” he tells it.