The doctor smiled sympathetically. “So the father is…”
Evie almost said, Dead, ma’am. The father is dead. Instead she mumbled, “He’s not around.”
“Right,” said the doctor, rolling her chair away from Evie. Her manner had gone brittle in an instant, though Evie felt it was directed more at the absent father than at her. If she only knew. Shaun had so wanted this. Tied together forever. He would have loved it.
“Well, from what I can tell, you are pretty far along, kiddo.” The doctor wrote something on a large pad of pink paper. She signed the bottom and tore it off. “This is a requisition for an ultrasound,” she said, handing it to Evie. “I want you to take this downstairs to the lab, and tell them you need this done today, okay? You’ve waited an awfully long time, and we just need to make sure everything is hunky-dory.”
Evie took the paper, staring at its puzzle of words and body parts. “Okay,” she said quietly.
“This is the suite number.” The doctor put her finger at the top of the page. “You go down there now, and then you come right back up here, okay?”
Evie swallowed again, feeling so, so guilty—not just for everything, but for the baby now too. What if something was wrong with it? God, she thought, I’ll die if there is.
Then the doctor put her hands on Evie’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “You’re not on your own anymore, sweetie. I’m with you now, and everything is going to be just fine.”
Evie only wished she could believe that.
She left the doctor’s office and walked back toward the stairs, head bent to the pink page. Did the doctor really think there was something wrong with her baby? Evie thought back to being drunk at Nan’s, or stoned with Alex, the sunstroke and the skinny-dipping and the beer, all the while knowing exactly what was inside her.
She felt like a troll. What kind of person does that to an unborn thing? Her chest was so tight she could hardly breathe.
As she reached the stairs at the clinic’s second-floor mezzanine, she noticed a group of girls her own age coming out of an office down the hall, and her eyes went round with surprise. Sunny was with them.
The group came toward her in a cloud of chatter. If Evie didn’t hide fast, Sunny would surely see her, and then she’d have to explain why she was here, what the pink paper was for. She slipped past a pillar to the left of the staircase.
Sunny’s group was nearing the stairs. If Evie was lucky, Sunny wouldn’t notice her running the other way.
By the time Evie reached the opposite side of the mezzanine, Sunny was already at the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t see Ev. She was too busy smiling at that bunch of strangers. Happy smiles. Not the fake, mean, bitter smiles she usually wore.
Evie tried to pick out a familiar face among the girls, but saw none.
Even though she was still pissed at Sunny for cornering her at the Olympia yesterday, Evie felt a little stab of jealousy—who were those other girls? How did Sunny have friends she’d never seen before, friends from some clinic? Sunny’s whole life was a noisy, brash, screeching open book. She had no secrets.
But then, there was Réal…
She looked at the requisition in her hands and felt like running right out the front door. Like putting her head back in the sand until it all magically disappeared. Instead, she kept going around the mezzanine, circling back to the stairs as Sunny’s voice faded below. As she passed the door the girls had all come out of, Evie glanced at the plaque pasted to the wall: The Cold Water Center for Mental Health.
What?
Evie peered through the window. Inside was a pale-yellow doctor’s office like the one she’d just left, with the same potted plants and ugly, tweedy chairs.
“Can I help you?” said a voice behind her.
Evie turned to see a man trying to get past her through the door. The tag pinned to his blazer said Dr. Sharma. “No, sorry,” she muttered, and stepped back from the window.
Holy shit, she thought. Sunny’s crazy?
She backed toward the stairs, heart knocking in her chest. Did the others know about this? Was this, like all their other secrets, something everyone knew but her? If Sunny was crazy, that explained a few things, Evie thought, without a trace of sympathy.
She turned and ran for the stairs. She took them quickly, feeling lighter than she had since the Olympia. No—since the band shell. Whenever it was that Sunny had started picking at her armor, trying to figure out what was happening with her and Réal.
At the bottom of the stairs, she wheeled to the right, heading to the lab at the back of the building.
Sunny stepped out from behind a wilted palm.
Evie slid to a stop in front of her, almost falling to the floor.
“What are you doing here?” Sunny asked, dark eyes slicing at her.
“I, uh—” She raised the pink form to her chest like a flimsy shield, stepping back. “N-nothing,” she stammered. “What are you doing here?”
Sunny’s jaw tightened. “I had a thing.”
Evie sneered. She always has a thing. So were those things all here? At a mental clinic?
The girls stared at each other silently, neither giving an inch. Then Sunny snatched the pink paper from Evie’s hand.
Evie dove for it, but Sunny turned, blocking her. As Sunny’s eyes flew over the paper, Evie saw her face change, like water soaking through sand. Everything teetering, tipping, threatening to fall. No, no, no, no, she begged as her insides dissolved.
“What the fuck?” Sunny said, her edge gone soft with genuine surprise. “What is this?” Her eyes ran over the page twice.
“Never mind,” Evie said. She snatched the page back, face on fire, tears threatening. “It’s none of your business.” Her voice pleaded for a mercy she wasn’t sure
