The first warning bell rang, and the crowd splintered off in all directions. Someone knocked me from behind in the frantic rush, and I turned to see Sara Fritz timidly peering up at me through her long, floppy bangs. Sara was a quiet, solitary sort of girl who had transferred in from a private Catholic school only at the beginning of our junior year. She kept to herself mostly, spent her lunches and free periods hunched over a keyboard in the computer lab. I barely knew her, though I was pretty certain she was right behind me in class rank. Had been, anyway, before our current grades were factored in. I was doing decently enough, given the circumstances, now that I was more settled into the semester—a B average in most of my classes, thanks to some extra credit and to what I suspected were a few sympathy points from teachers who pitied the not-so-private derailing of my personal life. That wouldn’t be enough to keep topping Sara, but I was surprisingly proud of those Bs, as proud as I used to be of my standard 100s. I was keeping my head above water, despite everything.
“So s-sorry,” she stuttered, dashing off down the hall before I could respond. I stared after her, confused by how jittery she’d seemed. Or maybe that was just her way—after all, I’d never really talked to the girl, and I had been her competition.
“Maybe you should go to the nurse, just in case?” Jesse asked. “Go home and take it easy for the rest of the day?”
“I think I should stay.” I turned back to my locker and reached for the last notebook.
“You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, Mina. Like you said, that was a lot of stress for one day.”
“Jesse’s right,” Hannah said, picking my backpack off the floor. “It’s one day. No one’s going to think you’re weak. I think you’ve already more than proven that you’re not running away. But between everything you saw online this morning and everything that just happened with Nate, and, well, Izzy, too . . . it’s just a lot. A lot to take in, even for a superhuman like you. Go home, Mina. Do it for the baby if you won’t do it for yourself.”
Do it for the baby. I forfeited my armful of books over to Jesse, who started loading them back into my bag. That was all it took. Hannah knew that I couldn’t say no, not when it came to the baby. Not when it came to protecting and nurturing the little life growing inside of me.
“Fine.” I sighed. “You guys win.” Though now that I’d decided—or had been decided for, more accurately—I was relieved to have a whole day by myself to catch up on homework. “But just for today. And I expect a full report this evening, Han, about anything that you happen to hear about me. I want to know what people are saying. I want to know what I’m up against. No secrets, okay?”
“No secrets,” Hannah said, slipping the backpack around my shoulders.
“No secrets,” Jesse echoed. “Now let me walk you to the nurse.”
“Absolutely not. You two are already going to be late.”
“I have Mrs. Royer for Physics II first period, and we’re totally compadres. We share a very deep, obsessive love of old-school science-fiction novels. Anyway, she won’t be upset. She’ll understand when I explain that you needed an escort.”
I nodded—because he was right, I really didn’t want to be alone—and gave Hannah a quick hug before she ran off to first period. Jesse and I started for the nurse’s office, walking the first few minutes in silence.
“So do you think Mrs. Royer knows all the rumors?” I asked. “About me, that is. Do you think all the teachers know about the baby, Virgin Mina, everything?”
“No secrets, right?” he asked, glancing over at me. “Yes, Mina. I think teachers know about all of it. I think they know a lot more about all of us than we’d like to think, and this doesn’t seem like a story that could slip past their radar. But it’s like that old saying—‘those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.’ My mom’s favorite catchphrase for my entire childhood and, even if I wouldn’t admit it to her, pretty mind-blowingly true, don’t you think?”
But Izzy and Nate had definitely mattered, I wanted to say. Hadn’t they? I nodded anyway. We were already outside the nurse’s office.
“Thanks for walking me, Jesse. And thanks for . . . for putting up with all this. I still say it’s not a fair trade-off, not anywhere close, but I hope you at least know how grateful I am to have a friend like you. I hope I can pay it all back someday.”
“Mina, stop, you don’t—”
“Things won’t always be this hard. Life will settle into place, and then it will all be different for us. You won’t always have to be guarding me like this, I promise.” But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized how hollow they were. When would things stop being hard? When would life be any shade of normal? When would people stop talking, stop staring, stop pointing their bored, ignorant little fingers?
“You’re not forcing me into anything against my will, Mina. I like you—I really like you—complicated or uncomplicated. And you’re right, things will settle down someday. And maybe when they do . . . I don’t know, maybe when they do things really can be different for us.”
I wanted to ask exactly what he meant by like, wanted to pore over every last bit of it with a magnifying glass, determine the exact tone and emphasis and meaning behind each individual word, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even meet his eyes, not without giving away every thought spinning through my mind.
So instead I muttered a quiet thanks as I gave him a weak, one-armed hug and ducked into the nurse’s office, my head so dizzy with a weird blend of confusion and curiosity and hope that, suddenly, I felt quite in need of a sick day after all.
After Hannah showed me the Virgin Mina website, I couldn’t stop myself from compulsively checking for updates every opportunity I had. Refresh, refresh, refresh—attached to my computer for hours on end with the fear that if I got up, walked away, I’d miss the latest, most horrendous accusations yet. I had to know what they were saying about me, and I had to know as soon as it was said. It became an addiction, and I knew it couldn’t possibly be healthy, not for me, certainly not for the baby, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop waiting for whatever was going to happen next, because it was becoming clearer every day—every hour, really—that this was growing to be much bigger than any high school kid’s amateur web page. This was becoming a national story. I was becoming a national story.
I watched the number of comments grow—nine hundred to twelve hundred, two thousand, five thousand—as more and more sites spread the link across the Internet. My parents had both started to press the idea of involving the police, now that it was clear that we had, in fact, not reached “as bad as it gets” after all. Or anywhere close, for that matter. Jesse had been keeping constant tabs on the Virgin Mina page, too, and he cited the numbers in my ear so often that it was almost pointless for me to check on my own. I knew, of course, that something had to be done—but what could I do, really? Maybe we could have the website taken down—the police could do that much—but it wouldn’t stop people from talking. It wouldn’t erase the whole story from their minds. Where did the line of free speech cross over? What was slander and what was just plain old permissible cruelty? I couldn’t very well slap handcuffs on practically the entire school population.