SCREWED.

Laurie Plissner.

For Jonathan, Charlie, and Molly.

CHAPTER 1.

Grace stared at the pale blue cross in the tiny oval window, willing it to disappear, wondering how anyone could call that a positive result. There was nothing positive about being seventeen and pregnant. If you were all grown up, then finding out you were about to have a baby would be the best news in the world, but Grace didn't even have a high school diploma yet, let alone a husband or a house or a job. Blinking back the tears, she continued to sit on the toilet, not sure where she was going to find the courage to leave her bathroom ever again. When she closed her eyes, she could see herself from above - a bird's-eye view of her own private train wreck. Stuff like this wasn't supposed to happen to girls like her.

Lined up like dead soldiers on the marble counter, the first six test sticks all displayed the same maddening plus sign. Three more pregnancy tests waited unopened in a brown bag under the counter, but Grace was beginning to realize that no matter how many times she took it, the results were going to be the same. Denial, though it had kept her from losing her mind for the past couple of weeks, was no longer a viable option. Finally Grace pulled up her pants and stood staring down at the evidence, her damp palms resting on the cool marble counter. Slowly and deliberately, she picked up each test stick and snapped it in two, as if physically destroying the messengers could somehow destroy the bad news itself.

Grace finally looked up and squinted at herself in the mirror. Deciding that she didn't look any different and almost convincing herself that all seven pluses had to be wrong, that it was just her irregular period being a little more irregular than usual, she was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea. She dove for the toilet and was just barely able to avoid puking all over the floor. Even after there was nothing left inside her, she continued retching, spasm after spasm, grateful there was no one home to hear her body turning inside out. Afterwards, Grace crawled into her bedroom and curled into the fetal position next to her bed, her cheek resting on the fluffy white rug as she stared blankly at a stray Q-tip that had missed the wastebasket. The smell of furniture polish and laundry detergent tickled the inside of her nose, threatening to bring on another bout of hurling. She wondered why it was called morning sickness. It was four o'clock in the afternoon.

Her cell phone rang repeatedly. On the third round she finally felt strong enough to reach up to her bed, where her phone lay, buzzing and vibrating relentlessly. "Hey," Grace whispered.

"What's wrong with you? Where have you been? You sound like death." Jennifer had never been one for small talk.

"I, um, have a problem. More like a disaster." As much as Grace didn't want to say it out loud - speaking the actual words would make it a historical fact - she didn't feel she could last another minute without talking to someone about it. Ready to collapse under a mountain of guilt and fear, she hoped telling Jennifer would somehow lighten her load. Maybe her best friend would have a solution, or maybe she could imagine a scenario in which seven plus signs didn't mean what Grace already knew they meant.

"Did you wreck your mom's Lexus? Your parents are going to go apes.h.i.t." Jennifer whistled into the phone. "Do you want to hide out over here for a few days until they cool down?"

"I didn't crash the car. I wish that were it." Grace longed for a problem that could be undone with a trip to the body shop and a fresh coat of paint.

"Well then, it can't be that bad. You always get straight As, so it can't be your report card. You gained a pound, and you're not size negative two anymore. Is that it?" Jennifer sighed impatiently into the phone, eager to hear what minor mishap Grace deemed so tragic that she could hardly speak. A chipped dinner plate from her mother's wedding set or a stain on the Oriental rug in the dining room was the worst Jennifer could imagine from Miss Goody Two-Shoes.

"I think I'm pregnant." Barely whispering the last word, Grace wasn't sure her voice had carried over the phone line.

There was a squeal followed by a thud as Jennifer dropped the phone. "What the ... that's impossible. Only people who have s.e.x can get pregnant. We had a pact - no hooking up till college. When did you change your mind? Who'd you do it with? Why didn't you tell me?"

"It's not always all about you, J."

"Whatever. Answer the f.u.c.king questions. Who was it?" Jennifer sounded like a hard-nosed cop trying to break down a suspect.

"It was Nick." Looking back, Grace herself could hardly wrap her head around it. Going all the way on the third date was so not in her playbook.

"Nick Salter, all-American? No way. He doesn't know people like us exist." People like us were kids who went to the school library to actually study, and who hoped to look back on high school as not the best years of their lives. "Who was it ... really?"

"I knew you'd say that. That's why I didn't tell you we were going out."

"I don't believe you. Are you sure you didn't imagine this whole thing? Maybe you just dreamed you had s.e.x with Nick. Maybe you're just bloated."

"I'm not imagining it. I took seven pregnancy tests."

"I still don't believe you. Are we talking about the same Nick Salter? Nick Alexander Salter, captain of the lacrosse team?"

"There's only one, Jennifer. The day after school let out he asked me if I wanted to go to the movies, and then we went out again, and on our third date it happened. It was my first time, and I got pregnant."

"Who the h.e.l.l are you, and what did you do with my best friend?" shrieked Jennifer, certain Grace was the second-to-last person who would have the confidence to put out with an actual boy (Jennifer being the last), and the last one dumb enough to make a baby. "Best friends don't keep secrets, especially secrets the size of big, fat pregnant bellies."

"I didn't tell you because I'm embarra.s.sed. It was such an idiotic thing to do, and I thought if I pretended it never happened, and I never told anybody, it would be like it hadn't." As Grace tried to explain her reasoning, she realized what a moron she was. This wasn't like pretending you hadn't refilled your Slurpee without paying for it at the 7-Eleven, or didn't have the answers written on your palm during a Spanish quiz. This was not the bad dream that would go away if she ignored it long enough.

"That's one way to deal, I guess, unless, of course, you get yourself knocked up. Didn't you make him use something? What were you thinking?" Jennifer was practically screaming into the phone.

Although she knew she should be more sensitive - it was too late for shoulda, coulda, woulda - Jennifer was so frustrated with her friend's foolishness, and the fact that she had been left out of the loop for so long, that she wanted to strangle her. Scolding her would have to do, for now. Teen pregnancy was for girls in the life skills program, not a girl with a perfect GPA who spent her spare time trying to solve the twin prime conjecture.

"I thought he did. He said he did. It was dark. I couldn't tell. Oh s.h.i.t, I'm such an imbecile. What do I do now?"

Shutting her eyes tight, rocking back and forth as she gripped the phone in her suddenly sweaty hand, Grace prayed for a quick fix ... or a painless death. She felt like she'd taken a long nap, and while she'd been sleeping, someone had ruined her life. Except that someone was herself, and this was no dream.

"Did you tell lover boy what happened? It's his responsibility. He has to step up." Jennifer was reeling, but she owed it to her friend to stay calm and help her figure out how to get through this. She made a silent vow to herself to stay a virgin until she was at least twenty, maybe thirty. No matter how great s.e.x was supposed to feel, it couldn't be worth feeling the way Grace sounded over the phone.

"Nick's in Europe. When he took me home he said he was leaving the next day for a backpacking trip with his cousin, and he wasn't coming back until Labor Day."

On the one hand, Grace couldn't wait to tell him that she was pregnant with his baby. Would he say it had been love at first sight and he couldn't wait to marry her, take care of her? She floated off into fantasyland for a second, envisioning a bright future married to this budding professional athlete who looked like a model in a cologne ad. They would have a perfect child and a perfect life, just a little bit sooner than she had thought. But even as she daydreamed, she knew that wasn't how things worked out on MTV, or in real life. And truthfully, she was so humiliated by the whole thing that she couldn't imagine getting the words out if he was even around so that she could tell him, which was stupid, because what they'd done together in the back seat of his Jeep was way more embarra.s.sing than talking about it, or at least it should have been.

"I hate to be the one to tell you, but either your babydaddy lied to you about his summer plans, or he has an evil twin, because I saw him out on the lake last weekend with a bunch of kids from school. Just because he looks like a movie star and all the girls want to jump him doesn't mean he's a good person - in fact, it's usually just the opposite. The hotter a guy is, the more likely he's going to be a total tool." As much as Jennifer liked being right, she hated having to tell her best friend that she'd made the worst mistake of her life with a guy who was nothing more than an empty box wrapped in fancy paper and tied with a shiny ribbon - take away his beautiful packaging and the only things left would be six feet of hair gel and half a bottle of Armani cologne. "Not that I'm saying I told you so. Not that I'm saying if you'd told me what was going on from the very beginning I could've saved you from f.u.c.king everything up, big time."

Unable to hold it in, Grace let loose a tidal wave of tears. In the back of her mind - well, really in the front of her mind - she knew that three dates with a boy didn't make a relationship, but she had let herself get tangled up in his adorably messy hair that he was always brushing off his forehead, and lost in his eyes, which, when they looked at her, made her feel like anything but a math troll. And it had all just been a setup, she realized way too late, so that Nick could add another name to his "I did her" list.

She knew that Nick Salter was way out of her league in every respect: a jock, captain of both the soccer and lacrosse teams, and winner of the junior cla.s.s hot body contest at the spring picnic. When he asked her out, she was at once flattered and baffled. Able to choose from an array of more suitable candidates from the diving team and the cheerleading squad, what could he possibly see in her? She was a perennial benchwarmer on the junior varsity tennis team, whose major accomplishments were in the arena of mathletes, not athletes. It was so beauty and the beast, and she was the beast.

At first Grace thought maybe Nick was playing a joke on her, like one of those movies where a bunch of cool guys bet that one of them can't transform the cla.s.s dweeb into a prom queen. But when he took her to the movies, he seemed genuinely interested in Grace as a person, just as she was, asking questions about her family and her future when she would have been perfectly content listening to him talk about himself, as long as she could stare at the perfect line of his jaw and the way he always looked like he almost - but not quite - needed a shave. On top of that, he had behaved like a gentleman, opening doors for her, ordering for her, never letting her pay for anything. Perhaps he was totally different from his public persona, and with her he could be his authentic, not-too-cool-for-school self. It had been too good to be true, and if she'd thought about it for more than a nanosecond she would have figured it out, but Grace had allowed herself to get caught up in the daydream.

Nick was a member of the high school elite, the ruling cla.s.s in the microcosm of Silver Lake High School, and Grace, though not quite part of the peasant cla.s.s, fell somewhere in the lower bourgeois rankings. Crossing cla.s.s ranks happened rarely in friendship, and practically never in boy-girl relationships. It was an unwritten rule that the n.o.bility didn't go slumming and the lower cla.s.ses didn't try to raise their status by a.s.sociating with those above them in the hierarchy. How could she forget the unbreakable laws of the high school jungle? How could she believe that the rules didn't apply to her? It was pure arrogance, she realized, and she was being punished for it, in a really big way.

It wasn't as if her features would turn people to stone if they looked at her. But they would probably offer her cookies and milk and ask her if she was lost. Sweet, freckled, innocent - definitely sneakers, not stilettos - appealing, but not exactly a guy magnet. Like someone's squeaky-clean little sister, she could still get into the movies for the under-twelve price, and when she went out to eat with her parents, the hostess handed her a children's menu and a box of crayons. What normal guy would be into that unless he was a burgeoning pedophile? That and the fact that she was scary smart placed her firmly on the geek side of the fence, and there were no geeks among Silver Lake royalty. But now she was questioning her intelligence. How could someone with a 2350 on the SAT end up naked in the back of some sleazebag's car, seduced by a few well-chosen words whispered in her inexperienced ears? Book smarts and street smarts were clearly two very different things. Looking back, Grace would have gladly traded a couple of hundred points on the test for some good old-fashioned common sense.

"So what do I do now?" Grace stuttered through her tears, trying to catch her breath. Having spent the first four weeks of summer at a Habitat for Humanity build upstate and the last two weeks panicking about the little construction project that was likely going on inside her uterus, Grace had been completely unaware that Nick was on the same continent. So his story about Europe had been nothing more than a kiss-off. Did the fact that he took the trouble to make up a white lie mean he was more or less of an a.s.shole? She couldn't decide. Much too late, she realized that the fact that he hadn't given her his cell number or friended her on Facebook meant she wasn't even a footnote in his life. He had used her up, spit her out, and hadn't wanted any reminders that she had ever existed. All the road signs had been there, complete with bright flashing lights, but she had been too blinded by the glare of his shiny white teeth to read them.

"I'm so scared, Jennifer."

"It's simple. You're going to get rid of it. How many weeks did you say you were?" Jennifer asked.

Always practical, rarely emotional, when they were both eight and their pet goldfish died the same week, Jennifer had flushed hers down the toilet without a word, while Grace's fish had been treated to the piscine equivalent of a state funeral, buried in a Macanudo cigar box under the old oak tree in the backyard. For a week, Grace had worn a black armband to honor Goldie's memory, while Jennifer had simply gone to the mall and bought another fish. It shouldn't have surprised Grace that her friend's approach to this situation would be equally matter-of-fact.

"We did it on July second, so I'm about six weeks." This was exactly what Grace wanted from Jennifer, wasn't it - a take-charge, take-no-prisoners att.i.tude? "You think I should get rid of it?" Grace couldn't yet bring herself to say the word abortion.

"Duh? What else were you planning on doing? Spending senior year puffing up like a balloon and popping out a mini-Nick next spring? How's that going to go over with Betsy and Brad? Something tells me they're not ready to be grandparents. It would make a h.e.l.l of a college essay, though. What I did over summer vacation ...."

"I don't know. It's a baby, or it will be. It didn't do anything wrong. Some people think it's like murder to ... to terminate a ... you know."

Before this summer, Grace had never spent any time thinking about pregnancies, unwanted or otherwise. Pro-choice and pro-life were nothing more than slogans on b.u.mper stickers. In a million years she couldn't imagine those words would matter to her. Babies were for married people, like monogrammed towels and mortgages - that's just how it was. She had never even held a baby before, and now she was going to have one. Her life was out of order; things couldn't get any worse.

"You're well within the first trimester, so it shouldn't be a big deal to take care of this. It's not a baby yet. It's just a bean." Jennifer wasn't totally sure she believed that, but under the circ.u.mstances, it seemed the most useful and helpful position to take.

When Jennifer put it that way, it didn't sound so terrible. Unsure how Jennifer had become an expert on pregnancy, Grace was nonetheless grateful that she was taking the lead.

"I don't know what to do. What are my parents going to say?" Grace's voice grew shrill as she thought about telling Betsy and Brad.

When she had gotten a B on the physics midterm, they had lectured her for two hours about how irresponsible she had been, how immature for not realizing how diligently she needed to study to get an A, the only acceptable grade. They didn't work as hard as they did for her to get mediocre grades and waste their money sending her to a second-tier college. The prospect of breaking the news to her parents was even more frightening than the tiny sea monkey that was growing somewhere deep inside of her. She would rather tell them she had flunked every subject including gym.

"What about them? Why would you rat yourself out to the chairwoman of SYFM? Then you'll be stuck with it forever." Jennifer was astonished by her friend's naivete.

"I guess you're right, but they're my parents. Don't I have to tell them?"

SYFM stood for Save Yourself for Marriage, a teen support group advocating abstinence that Betsy had helped establish at their church. Grace's mother seemed convinced that monthly meetings in which she and the pastor talked about virginity being the ultimate gift of love to one's future spouse would be enough to keep a bunch of h.o.r.n.y teenagers from gifting and regifting each other in the backs of cars and boats all around Silver Lake. Well intentioned but seemingly trapped in some 1950s health cla.s.s film, Betsy actually believed that all twenty-six members of the group, boys and girls, were saving it for their wedding nights, when in fact only Grace, until six weeks ago at least, and four others, two of whom probably couldn't have gotten laid if they stood naked in the middle of Main Street, had actually taken the vow to heart.

"Exactly. They're your parents, the Super Christians, and they would never let you get rid of it. As much as they'd hate it, they'd make you keep it. So if you don't want to spend the next eighteen years staring at the five minutes of bad judgment that ruined your life, you'd better keep your baby news to yourself. We can handle this on our own, and then it will be like nothing ever happened. Betsy and Brad don't need to know everything that goes on in your life just because they're your parents." Jennifer found it hard to believe that as smart as Grace was when it came to calculus and chemistry, she was just that dumb when it came to real life.

"I'm not sure I can keep such a big secret from them. Besides, if I'm not going to tell them, then why would I tell Nick?"

If she and Jennifer could make this problem disappear without anyone else ever having to find out, then perhaps someday it would be like it had never really happened. To be able to erase this chapter from her life story was an incredibly appealing prospect.

Trying to keep her growing impatience out of her voice, Jennifer explained the situation. "Do you have a few hundred dollars for an abortion lying around? I'm broke since my parents started making me chip in for gas, and last time I checked, Habitat for Humanity was a volunteer job, so I'm guessing your pockets are empty, too. Nick has to know, because he's going to pay for the doctor. Get it? But n.o.body else needs to be in on your dirty little secret."

"You're right about the money - I've got nothing." Grace's parents didn't believe in giving their daughter an allowance when they already provided her with the necessities, and Grace hadn't been allowed to get a paying summer job because she needed to focus on college applications and volunteer work. "But what if Nick doesn't have the money, and what if he wants me to keep it?" She couldn't shake that white picket fence fantasy with Nick playing the doting husband and father, no matter how absurd she knew it was.

"Really? You believe a guy who thinks with his d.i.c.k is suddenly going to turn into Father of the Year?" As harsh as she knew she sounded, Jennifer wanted to knock some sense into Grace before she fell too far down the rabbit hole.

"I guess, but I still think I have to tell my parents. They'll know something's wrong. It'll come out in the end, somehow, so I might as well get it over with."

Keeping a secret this major from her mother and father seemed impossible. Parents had the right to know everything about their children's lives, didn't they? Grace wanted to believe that in spite of her parents' strict, somewhat prehistoric views on premarital s.e.x, their love for their only child would overcome their prejudices. She was their baby - their love for her was unconditional. Hate the sin but love the sinner, and all that. It had to be that way.

"Fine. It's your funeral, Grace. But consider yourself warned. Life isn't that simple, and parents are just regular people, full of flaws and prejudices and lots of good old righteous anger. So don't expect too much from them. Trust me: you'll be disappointed." Even as she pointed out the pitfalls that awaited, Jennifer hoped she wasn't right, but she had a bad feeling that her prediction was going to be directly on target.

"I hope you're wrong," Grace whispered, knowing in her heart that Jennifer was rarely wrong, and feeling even more alone and confused than she had before she'd spilled her dark secret.

"I hope so, too," Jennifer whispered back, wiping away the tears that were rolling down her own cheeks.

CHAPTER 2.

Waking at 10:30 the following morning, Grace pressed her hand against her stomach, halfway expecting to feel her uninvited guest pushing back. Each day was one day closer to an ending she hadn't figured out yet, and this uncertainty about what to do next was a sensation she wasn't used to. Grace was the kind of person who always had everything all figured out.

She contemplated pulling the sheet over her head and going back to sleep for the rest of the day. As agitated as she was, she was also exhausted, and sleep was a welcome escape from her bulging new reality. In her dreams, Grace was still her old self, a zit on her nose being a major tragedy, breaking out in hives about a history exam even though she knew she was going to ace it. Life at seventeen had seemed so complicated before. The issue of what to wear to school or out to the movies, should she cut her hair or let it grow, red nail polish or purple. There had been so many decisions to make, decisions that seemed to matter: her happiness had actually hinged on picking the right pair of shoes. Now the easy perfection of her old life made Grace want to weep - pretty much everything made her want to weep - her life had been so ridiculously simple and she hadn't appreciated it for a second. Her world had collapsed, and there was no going back, no matter how hard she cried or how many times she threw up, and nothing would ever be simple again. In the last few weeks, she felt as if she'd lived three lifetimes.

The doorbell sound effect on her phone roused her from her miserable reverie. Maybe Nick was texting her to apologize. Maybe he had a good reason for blowing her off all summer. Maybe ... not. It was Jennifer. MEET ME AT JOE'S.

"Two coffees, please, milk, no sugar, and two sesame seed bagels with nothing on them." Grace had been placing this same order for the past three years, since they'd entered high school and decided that they were too old to order chocolate milk.

"Make that one decaf and one regular," Jennifer corrected. "Caffeine's not good for the baby," she whispered in Grace's ear.

"But ...." Grace couldn't understand why Jennifer was suddenly worried about the bean's health when she was pushing Grace to get rid of it as soon as possible.

"Just in case," Jennifer said.

Not at all sure that Grace had it in her to go through with the quick and dirty solution to her little problem, Jennifer thought it didn't hurt to play it safe. There was a baby in there somewhere, or there almost was.

The two girls sat on a bench in the park, sipping coffee and gnawing on their breakfast, just as they had so many times before, but as with everything else, today was different. Everyone who walked by was pregnant, or pushing a stroller, or holding hands with a kid. There were little people everywhere, and they all seemed to be wailing, snot streaming out of their miniature noses. Grace wasn't sure whether she simply hadn't noticed those things before, or this was just the beginning of the vast karmic joke that had become her life, and all the ironies of her situation would now be displayed before her at every opportunity. A wave of nausea washed over her, and she took several deep breaths, clenching her teeth until it pa.s.sed.

"So?" Jennifer prompted, facing Grace, sitting with her feet tucked under her, as if waiting to hear a bedtime story.

"So what?" Grace knew what Jennifer was asking, but she wasn't sure she was ready to put it on the record yet, to describe all the lame-brained things she had done that had led to this horrible place.

"Aren't you going to tell me how it happened?" Jennifer asked.

Her curiosity was eating away at her, and she a.s.sumed that Grace would want to talk about it. Wasn't catharsis supposed to be good for the soul? Besides, there had to be way more to this story than Grace suddenly deciding she wanted to live life in the fast lane.

"Well, the boy takes his boy part and puts it in the girl's girl part ...." Grace's closed lips smiled, just barely.

She really did want to tell Jennifer about that night, but she was sure her friend would lose all respect for her, maybe even want nothing to do with her for so casually abandoning her dignity. At this moment, Grace wanted nothing to do with herself.

"I'm glad you at least have the basics down. Now stop it. I want to know how he managed to cross the moat and storm the castle. You're not one of those dimwitted, insecure girls who gets talked out of her clothes by the first boy who says that she's pretty and that n.o.body else understands him." Jennifer was growing impatient. "What made you decide that July second was freaking opposite day?"

"It's really pretty simple. I was a moron, and I talked myself into having s.e.x with him. That's how it happened." Even though Jennifer was her closest friend in the whole world who knew almost every secret Grace had ever carried, Grace still had enough pride to be ashamed. "I can't say it was his fault. He didn't hold me down or anything."

"You're not getting away with that. You need to talk about it. What made him so special? Besides the obvious."

Like an amateur detective, Jennifer was determined to figure out the mystery of the lost virgin. As hot as Nick was, it still didn't make sense that Grace would drop her knickers on the third date. Jennifer could never imagine being desperate enough to do naked gymnastics with some random guy in the back seat of a dark car, no matter how hot he was. Not that any guy had ever come close to asking.

Knowing that Jennifer had been out on exactly one date in high school, Grace never talked to her best friend about her own dating experiences. Jennifer was pretty, but there was something about her that sent guys screaming in the opposite direction. Maybe it was her mouth, which felt compelled to say whatever she was thinking, even if it was rude, or maybe it was because she had no patience for anyone who wasn't as smart as she was, which meant she was impatient with pretty much everyone.

"Somehow I just felt different that night, like I was the last virgin in our cla.s.s, and that I was just tired of being the good girl who never did anything on a whim, who always researched everything and made thoughtful, mature decisions. I wanted to be young, instead of always being middle-aged and responsible. I thought he liked me, and I needed to do what he wanted so he would stay interested, and then my life would change. Blah, blah, blah." It didn't make much sense to Grace either, now. But at the time, it had felt perfectly logical and right.

"Your life changed, all right. But that kind of thinking is so not you." Jennifer placed her hand on Grace's forehead, feeling for a fever.

"I was tired of being a geek. Haven't you ever felt that way?" Grace a.s.sumed that Jennifer considered herself a card-carrying nerd as well - if you did really well in school and were lousy at sports, what other label was there?

"No, I've never felt that way. Just because we're co-captains of the math team doesn't mean we're geeks. I resent that." Jennifer crossed her arms defensively. Intelligence was a gift, not a curse, and Jennifer had the foresight to understand that in ten years the head cheerleader who studiously ignored her now would probably be answering the telephone and making copies at the law firm where Jennifer would be an up-and-coming young a.s.sociate with a window office and a Porsche. High school was just a brief layover before real life started. "Someday you and I are going to be running the world while all those idiots who rule the school are going to be working for minimum wage and spending their weekends flipping through their yearbooks, dreaming about the good old days."

"I know you're right, but it's hard to think about life so far in the future. When he looked at me, I could see myself as important right now. It was a stupid reason to give it up, but it's the truth."

"But in your heart you knew it was a load of bulls.h.i.t, because otherwise you would've told me about your pretend love affair the day he asked you out. He scammed you, and then you scammed yourself."