I wound my fingers through the hair at the base of his neck and tilted his face down, pressing my lips hard against his. They were so sweet, so familiar. He moaned into me, and I started pulling him with me lower, to the ground, our bodies becoming tangled on the bed of old sleeping bags.

I can do this. I will do this.

But suddenly, just as I started to crawl on top of Nate, everything felt wrong. His skin became rough and coarse, like sandpaper scraping bits of me off with even the slightest brush of our bodies. His breathing and groaning was loud, too loud, so piercing and terrible that I wanted to put my hands against my ears and scream at the top of my lungs to hide the noise. When I opened my eyes, his face was entirely blurred and unrecognizable in the moonlight that spilled through the tree house window. Shapes, lines, colors that had just been Nate’s features, all shifting and transforming right in front of me.

I tried to push away, but Nate—or the boy who had been Nate at least, had looked like him on the surface—whispered that he loved me, wrapped his rough arms around me even tighter.

But did I really love him? Did I even know him at all?

My phone rattled against the nightstand and I jerked up from my pillow, my heart still thudding fast and heavy against my rib cage. A wave of chills swept up my spine, tingling along the back of my neck. The dream had been too real and three-dimensional, the senses all so magnified and heightened, swirling around me still as I lay shaking under my covers. The sounds, the smells, the heat. Suddenly the idea of touching Nate, of being with him like that, felt abhorrent. I was never more glad that whatever had happened—whatever was happening now, this little human kicking inside of me—hadn’t been confused with other potential explanations. If Nate had been the father, if he even just believed he was the father, I would have been tied to him forever, our lives sewn up for good. It scared me now, that I’d come so close. It scared me to think that just one night together could have changed everything. Nate could have been my first, and my last.

I pushed back the strands of sweaty hair that clung to my forehead and reached for the phone. Hannah was calling. It was just barely past six, way too early for any normal morning check-ins.

“Han?” My throat croaked, and I realized how dry my entire mouth felt. The dream flashed in my memory, the horrible sounds, the screaming.

“Meen. Listen to me. Start getting ready, and I’m going to be at your house in ten minutes, okay? And I need you to promise me something really important.”

“What’s going on? What am I promising?”

“Seriously, please just trust me on this.”

“Okay. I’m playing along. I promise.”

“Thank you. Don’t touch your computer until I get there. Nothing, okay? I’ll be there soon.”

She hung up and I glanced over at the computer resting just a few feet away, the screen black in sleep mode. Why couldn’t I touch my computer? What couldn’t I see without Hannah being there first? Every last part of me wanted to frantically start scouring any recent e-mail, news, classmates’ blogs—but I made myself look away. I had promised.

I threw on a loose sweater and a pair of stretchy jeans, and ran a brush through my tangled hair. Without even a glance at the computer, I grabbed a pen and crossed out another day on the pregnancy countdown hanging above my desk—Friday, November 16. Sixteen weeks until my March 7 due date. It was a morning tradition I’d started when I’d realized just how quickly the days were flying away from me. I had my midpregnancy sonogram hanging above the calendar, a constant reminder that this was real. This was happening.

I still had time before Hannah would get there, and I couldn’t wait around in my room, staring at the computer I wasn’t allowed to touch. I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face, still trying to wash away every last trace of that dream. I didn’t want to think about how good it had felt at first to have Nate’s skin against my skin—or how horrible it had felt by the end. I had been getting better at keeping that part of my brain locked up, and I wanted it to stay that way. A few swipes of mascara and a little blush made me look slightly more awake, but nowhere in the mirror did I detect the glow that Pastor Lewis had claimed to see. It was funny to me that my face could still look the same as it had months ago—just a bit paler maybe, more tired-looking—when the rest of me was so entirely different.

There was a knock at the front door, and within seconds my mom was in the foyer, greeting Hannah. They started talking in hushed, hurried whispers. Cold beads of sweat prickled along the back of my neck. What could have happened since last night?

Their footsteps started up the stairs, and I walked toward them, meeting my mom and Hannah at the top. One look at both of their anxious faces, and I knew that something was most definitely wrong.

“What is it? What’s happening?” I gripped the banister next to me.

“Let’s go into your bedroom, sweetie,” my mom said, her eyes blinking down at the carpet. “We’ll talk there, okay?”

I followed her numbly into my room and leaned against the edge of the bed. Hannah shut the door behind us and turned to face me.

“So I was up pretty late last night, working on that essay for Sweeney’s class, and I was chatting with Elise, you know, the girl who sits behind me and always has a thousand questions.” She paused, twisting a spiral of hair so tightly around her finger, I could see the tip losing color. “Anyway, she asked if I’d heard about the website that everyone was talking about. The website . . . It’s about you, Mina. It was two a.m. when I saw it, so I decided I’d wait until this morning to tell you about it.”

“A website about me? What kind of website?” The words sounded tinny, distant in my ears, as if I was anywhere else but in my own body.

She sat down at my desk, typing on the keyboard as the computer flicked back to life.

“Here it is. I think you should come see for yourself.”

The first thing I could clearly make out was a picture of me at the top of the page, a photo from last year’s Halloween party at Peter’s house. Izzy had dressed as the devil and Hannah and I were angels, and the three of us spent the entire night mock-fighting one another with cheap light-up plastic swords. The picture showed just me, though, dressed in a puffy short white dress that I’d coated in clear iridescent sparkles, big yellow wings strapped to my back, and a pipe cleaner halo hovering on the side of my head. Someone from the party—a friend—must have taken that picture. And now they’d posted it here, for anyone in the world to see, with the caption THE VIRGIN MINA in massive capital letters that screamed at me from the screen.

There was more just below it, a long paragraph. The letters were swimming in circles in my vision, and I closed my eyes.

“I’ll read it out loud to you,” Hannah said, her voice shaking.

All Hail the BLESSED VIRGIN MINA, the miraculous Mother Mary of the twenty-first century! At long last, after two thousand years of waiting . . . the promised second coming of the Messiah is upon us! (Repent, repent!) With his all-knowing wisdom, God has chosen Mina Dietrich of quaint but lovely Green Hill, Pennsylvania, to be the blessed mother of this sacred child. Mina is a senior at Green Hill High, a straight-A student in line to be the class valedictorian, admired throughout the community for her many achievements and aspirations. Beauty and brains, kindness and virtue, a solid gold reputation—it’s no surprise that the Father would choose Mina out of every other female on the WHOLE ENTIRE PLANET to help him in his holy plan. Though Mina was in a long-term relationship at the time of the Second Messiah’s conception, she claims that she has never engaged in any form of intercourse, and thusly, there is NO OTHER EXPLANATION other than DIVINE INTERVENTION for the creation of the child that she is now carrying. (Side note: this relationship has since been terminated, as for some inconceivable reason way beyond our grasp, the partner refused to BELIEVE that such a miraculous event could ever happen in these modern times. Shocking! Outrageous! Ex-boyfriend, be damned!)