Still the One

by Robin Wells

  “Told you,” whispered a freckled, sandy-haired girl at the end of the table. The room buzzed loudly as all the kids turned and stared at her.

  Gracie focused on getting her straw out of the wrapper and into the milk carton.

  “So how did it happen?” a cherub-cheeked blonde at the table inquired.

  Gracie frowned at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

  The other girls at the table snickered. The one on the far left, a brunette wearing a tight red shirt over a cami, leaned forward. “She means, did a condom break or something?”

  Or something covered a lot of territory. “Yeah.” Gracie stuck her fork into her spaghetti, hoping to signal that she wanted to eat, not talk.

  “You’re from Pittsburgh, right?”

  “Actually, I’m from Kansas City.” She refused to be defined by the year she’d spent at her aunt’s.

  “You’re Gracie, right? I’m Kayla, and this is Lauren, and Gabby, and Alex and Jennifer.”

  “So… tell us about the baby’s daddy.” The ponytailed girl in the middle of the opposite side—Gabby or Alex, Gracie wasn’t sure which—leaned forward. “Are you in love with him?”

  “Yeah. What’s he like?” the brunette asked.

  Gracie forked a bite of spaghetti into her mouth. Maybe by the time she finished chewing, they’d have moved on to another topic.

  “Is he going to help raise the baby?”

  “Is he going to move here, too?”

  The spaghetti tasted like shredded latex. It took a monumental effort to swallow. “He’s not in the picture,” Gracie finally managed to say.

  “Why not?” asked the brunette.

  Jeez, what was with all these questions? It wasn’t like they actually cared. They just wanted information so they could gossip about her. “Because he’s a freakin’ rat.”

  “If he’s a rat, why did you sleep with him?”

  Her palms were perspiring so much it was hard to hold the fork. She jabbed it back into the spaghetti. “I didn’t know he was a rat until it was too late, okay?”

  “He freaked out when he learned you were pregnant, huh?” the ponytailed girl said knowingly.

  Gracie’s stomach felt tighter and tighter. She hunkered down over her tray. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Is he somebody famous?” The brunette turned to the other girls. “Her dad hangs out with all kinds of famous people. And her mother is Emma Jamison’s best friend. I bet her boyfriend is somebody famous, too.”

  Gracie felt like crawling under the chair, but she didn’t want to let them know they were bothering her. “Wow. And here I thought my secret was safe.”

  The ponytailed girl slapped her palm on the table. “I knew it!”

  Jeez, didn’t these girls understand the concept of sarcasm?

  “Is she kidding? I think she’s kidding,” said the cherub-cheeked blonde.

  “Why would she kid about a thing like that?” the brunette asked.

  “I dunno.” The ponytailed girl looked at Gracie. “Are you kidding?”

  If they couldn’t figure it out, Gracie felt no inclination to enlighten them. She lifted her shoulders.

  “Oh my God! She’s not kidding!” Freckle Face leaned forward, her eyes wide.

  “I knew there was a reason you and your dad had moved here,” the brunette said excitedly. Her eyes were big as saucers. “It’s to lay low while you’re pregnant, isn’t it?”

  “It can’t be anyone famous,” said Cherub Cheeks. “She said the dad was a rat.”

  “So? Famous people can be jerks.”

  Ponytail Girl lowered her voice. “Who is it? We promise we won’t tell.”

  Gracie should have just said, “I’m joking,” or “Get real,” or even “Just how stupid are you?” But Gracie had never been able to resist pushing the envelope. “Well, if you promise not to tell…”

  “Promise.” The brunette raised her hand like she was taking an oath.

  “Scout’s honor,” said the girl next to her, raising two fingers.

  “Yeah. Who is it?” Freckles asked.

  “Well”—Gracie leaned over her tray and spoke in a loud whisper—“it’s one of the Jonas Brothers.”

  “Oh my God!” Ponytail Girl clasped her hands to her chest. “Which one?”

  “I can’t say.” Mainly because she hated their music and didn’t even know their names.

  “Oh, come on,” the brunette wheedled. “You’ve told us this much. You’ve got to tell us!”

  “Yeah. We promise to keep it secret.”

  “I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.” Gracie paused dramatically and looked at their puzzled faces. She shot them a wicked smile. “I did all three of them.”

  The girls collectively gasped. Gracie picked up her tray, marched to the return window across the room, and slid it through the opening.

  The lunch lady on the other side looked at her practically untouched meal. “Didn’t you like the food, honey?”

  “I lost my appetite,” Gracie said.

  As it turned out, the lunch lady knew Katie, and reported that Gracie had barely touched her meal. The next day, Katie had started making Gracie’s lunch.

  “Are you making any friends?” Katie asked now as Gracie shoved her arm through the strap of her backpack.

  “Not really.”

  “Amber Drindle is nice,” Katie said. “I cut her hair. I can talk to her mother and see about getting you girls together.”

  What Katie didn’t know, and Gracie was too proud to tell her, was that being seen with Gracie would be social suicide.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Who do you sit with at lunch?”

  “No one in particular.” The truth was, she’d started spending her lunch hour hiding out in the girls’ restroom.

  Word had quickly spread about her Jonas Brothers’ comment. “As if the Jonas Brothers would touch that,” a Barbie look-alike had said to her friend as they’d passed in the hall.

  “It was a joke,” Gracie had snarled. But no one seemed to think it was funny. For more than a month afterward, she couldn’t walk down the hall without overhearing comments like, “pathetic,” “liar,” and “slut.” A particularly obnoxious jock thought it was funny to holler, “Will you have my baby if I sing ‘Please Be Mine’?”

  Eventually, things had kinda died down. Now everyone just mainly cut her a wide berth, as if she were contagious.

  Gracie slung the book bag over her shoulder and headed out the door.

  “Have a great day, sweetie,” Katie called.

  Gracie snorted. “As if anything could be great about school.”

  Although the truth was, she didn’t really mind the classes. She liked them, in fact. Once she was safely behind a desk, she felt like she could actually breathe. She was a fast learner, she liked her teachers, and she was getting good grades again. Plus today was dissection day in biology. They were going to cut up rats, which sounded gross to most kids, but Gracie was looking forward to it. She was interested in the way living things were put together.

  The school was a regional high school, which meant kids from the entire parish attended it, so it was a lot bigger than she’d thought it would be when she first moved to this tiny town. It was only three blocks from the house, so she walked.

  She climbed the concrete stairs of the old brick building, past the groups of kids clustered at the door, and strode down the hall to her locker. She turned the lock—three left, five right, four left—and tugged the door open.

  A dead rat fell out, a pacifier and a large note tied around its neck. The note read, “Gracie’s baby.”

  She jumped back and screamed.

  Loud laughter sounded behind her. She turned around and realized that a crowd of kids were standing behind her, just cracking up. Apparently the practical joke had been a group effort.

  Tears flooded her eyes. Dropping her books on the floor, Gracie turned and fled down the hall, out the school door, and down the s
treet.

  The contractor rebuilding Katie’s house pushed his mirrored sunglasses up his balding head, under the rim of his cap that read Flautere Home Construction and Remodeling. “We’re way ahead of schedule,” he said in a lilting Cajun accent. “If ever’t’ing goes well, we’ll have you fix’t up and moved back in less’n a month.”

  Katie squinted at the new roof of her house. “I thought it was going to take at least two or three more months.”

  “We been lucky, cher. The weather’s been dry, and the slow econ’my has work’t in our favor. The stores had all the supplies we needed in stock, and all the subcontractors have been ’vailable when we needed them. We’re sailin’ along.”

  “Well, great.”

  So why didn’t it feel great? Her stomach clenched as she acknowledged the answer: as long as she lived at Zack’s house, she could delude herself into believing that she and Zack had a chance of working things out.

  Yeah, right. It was going on two weeks, and she hadn’t heard a word from him. He stayed in regular touch with Gracie, but as far as Katie was concerned, he’d been entirely incommunicado.

  Not that she’d tried to contact him, either. As far as she was concerned, she’d handed him her heart, and he’d rejected it.

  With each passing day, the facts were becoming more obvious: Zack was not now, and never would be, commitment material. She couldn’t build a life with someone who bolted the minute things got emotional.

  Her cell phone rang. In spite of herself, her pulse rate spiked at the thought it might be Zack. She reached into her purse, pulled it out, and looked at the number. Not Zack. It was a local number she didn’t recognize.

  A female voice spoke through the earpiece. “Katie, this is Jeanne at the high school. I was calling to see if Gracie’s okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “Well, she isn’t at school. She was here before the bell rang for first hour, but she never went to class.”

  Alarm jangled down Katie’s spine.

  “I hoped she was there with you.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear.”

  The alarm ratcheted up to panic. “Oh, dear, what?”

  “Well, there was an incident at her locker. She was upset.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  “Somebody put a rat in her locker.”

  “A rat?”

  “It was one of the ones the kids dissect in advanced biology. It was a prank.”

  “Oh, no.” Katie tightened her grip on the phone.

  “We don’t know who did it,” Jeanne continued, “but when we find out who it was, Principal Burton intends to suspend them.”

  They ought to be strung up by their toes, but that wouldn’t help Gracie, and helping Gracie was all that Katie cared about. “This was what—two hours ago? Why did you wait to call me?”

  “We hoped she’d come back.”

  Katie speed-dialed Gracie’s phone. Voice mail immediately kicked in, meaning her phone was turned off. She called Annette and Dave. They hadn’t heard from Gracie, either. Dave suggested she call the bookstore, which was being run by the assistant manager during Dave’s convalescence. No luck there, either.

  Maybe she’d gone home. Katie rushed down the block, only to find Zack’s house empty. Gracie’s Prius was in the driveway. She hadn’t driven anywhere.

  There was only one other person whom Gracie might call. Drawing a deep breath, Katie dialed the number.

  Zack picked up on the first ring.

  “Have you heard from Gracie today?” she asked.

  “No. What’s going on?”

  Katie rapidly filled him in.

  Zack muttered a low oath.

  “I don’t know where else she’d go,” Katie told him.

  “She likes to walk when she’s upset,” Zack said. “That’s what she was doing when your house was struck by lightning. Are there any walking paths around the school?”

  “The park at the lakefront is about half a mile away.”

  “Look there. And keep your phone with you. I think she’ll call.”

  A blackberry bramble grabbed Gracie’s hair as she hurried around a bend on the lakeside trail. She stopped, breathing heavily, and swatted at the branch to free her hair. A thorn ripped the tender white skin on the inside of her wrist. “Damn it,” she muttered as blood beaded up along the inch-long red line. Panting, Gracie raised her hand to her mouth and sucked on the wound, then looked at it. It was just a superficial cut. Too bad; if it were deeper, she might bleed to death, and then the world would be a better place.

  She swiped at the tears coursing down her face. She’d thought she was out of tears, after crying for the past couple of hours, but apparently not. How much misery was one person supposed to handle?

  Probably as much as they brought on themselves. After all, everything bad that had happened to her was her own fault.

  Her parents’ death. Her pregnancy. Even the way the kids at school treated her.

  The thought of that rat falling out of her locker made her shudder. Not because it was a dead rat, which was pretty gross, and not even because it was dyed yellow with blue veins—that was so you could see the venous system when you dissected it. The thing about the formaldehyde-soaked rodent that had totally creeped her out had been the tag on its foot: “Gracie’s baby.”

  As if she had a dead, limp, yellow-and-blue rat inside her. It was like coming face-to-face with her worst fear. The guy who’d knocked her up had been a rat of the first order. Maybe her baby was going to be a rat, too.

  The thought made her sick. She didn’t want anything to do with that creep, and yet here she was, having his baby. Last night she’d had another nightmare about him. She’d dreamed she was wearing a puffy pink dress, kinda like the princess costume she used to dress up in when she was little, and she was in a car going to a prom or something. She couldn’t see the face of her date, but she was all happy and excited. And then he turned toward her and it was him, only his face was really a mask. And she’d gotten really scared and closed her eyes, because she just knew he was so horrible she would die if she really saw him, and then all of a sudden they were out of the car and he was pinning her down and she couldn’t breathe, and she woke up feeling like her heart was going to pound out of her chest.

  For the trillionth time, she wondered what her mom would say if she knew she was pregnant. Her mother would have been so disappointed that it would have killed her if she weren’t already dead.

  Another tear flashed down her face. Why was she such a jerk? Her dad had once told her that she charged at life as if it were an enemy. Why did she do that? She didn’t know. Something was wrong with her. Something about her just didn’t fit in with the rest of the world.

  She tried to pretend she didn’t care, but she did. She cared so much it hurt. The truth was, she cared so much that she preemptively treated people with disdain, so it wouldn’t hurt when they rejected her.

  Could she really love this baby, when she couldn’t even love herself? Was she going to think about Kirk or Kirt or whoever he was every time she looked at it? The bigger her belly grew, the more scared she got.

  She was a total fake. She pretended she had it all together, but she didn’t know what the hell she was doing most of the time. If she couldn’t manage her own life, how the hell could she manage someone else’s? Her baby was going to be even more screwed up than she was. She had no business procreating her own wretched existence. She wished the baby would just go away.

  She resumed her march along the deserted lake trail. The trees and bushes had thinned out as she neared the lake, then gave way to a mowed stretch that ran beside the road. The sun crept out from behind the clouds, and although it was October, the sun beat down like a blowtorch. Jeez, did it ever cool off in Louisiana, or was it always hot? She sat down on the grass and pulled up her leg, then noticed some blood on the thigh of her jeans. That stupid thorn had really made her bleed. She glanced at her wrist, and saw
that the cut was just a thin red line.

  The blood wasn’t coming from her wrist. It was coming from…

  Holy crap! She was bleeding. Bad. Was she losing the baby? She didn’t feel any cramps or anything. Still, this was a lot of blood.

  The breath froze in her throat, as if it couldn’t go in or out, and her chest ached. Oh, God—it was all those bad thoughts. That book The Secret that Annette had loaned her said that people made things materialize by thinking about them. Had she killed the baby by wishing she wasn’t pregnant?

  “I didn’t mean it,” she whispered. Her heart pounded like a tom-tom. She stood up, then felt a sticky warmth between her legs. She sat back down, panic making her breath come in fast spurts. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. She reached in her purse, pulled out her phone, and hit Katie’s speed-dial button.

  “Help,” she said as soon as Katie answered. “I think I’m losing the baby.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Katie stroked Gracie’s hair as Dr. Greene ran an ultrasound over the girl’s stomach thirty minutes later at the hospital. Katie was quaking inside, but she tried hard to project a sense of calm for her daughter’s sake.

  “It’s what we hoped wouldn’t happen,” Dr. Greene told Gracie. “Your placenta has grown over your cervix.”

  Worry coiled through Katie’s body.

  Gracie raised her head. Her eyes were swollen from crying. “Is the baby okay?”

  “Looks fine.” The doctor pointed to the screen. “There she is. And her heartbeat sounds good and strong.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Gracie lay back and stared at the screen.

  The tightness in Katie’s chest loosened a bit.

  “That’s the good news. The bad news is, you are now on complete bedrest.”

  “For how long?” Gracie asked.

  “The rest of your pregnancy.”

  “No way. That’s more than a month!”

  “There’s no other option.”

  “So this is serious?” Katie’s brow pulled together.

  “I’m afraid it is. Gravity is the enemy—especially as we get closer to her due date, and the cervix softens and thins. And she’s definitely going to need to be delivered by C-section.”