double batch /'d?b?l baCH/: noun
1: preparing twice the standard recipe yield.
2: two best friends, two bellies, two futures rising side by side.
The smell of coffee and bacon draws me down the hallway. I’m basically floating on my toes with my nose tethered to the aroma like a cartoon character. I’m just now realizing that I did not actually consume food yesterday, and I’m getting hangry.
I’m halfway to the kitchen and the promise of sweet, sweet calories—when fingers close around my wrist and yank me sideways.
“Wha—?!”
The bathroom door slams shut. Water blasts on. Both the sink and the tub faucet, from the sound of it, creating a wall of white noise that swallows my startled yelp.
“… Yas?” I recognize her deodorant, that jasmine-and-sandalwood all-natural blend she’s worn since college that neverworks as well as she claims it does. The tang of her scared sweat is detectable beneath it, too. “Yasmin, what the hell is going on?”
“We need to talk.” I can hardly hear her over the gushing water. “Privately.”
I reach for her hand and find it shaking.
That immediately sets off all my alarms. Yasmin does not shake. Not when Brandon cornered her in her apartment. Not when we fled Chicago with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Not even she thought Zeke might die. My best friend is made of titanium, pad thai, and spite. But right now, her fingers are trembling against mine like she’s standing in a snowstorm.
“Yas, sweetheart.” I clutch her fingers, trying to ground her. “You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
She takes a breath. More of a gasp, really.
Something’s wrong.
But despite the panic bubbling up in my stomach and throat like a backed-up garbage disposal, I wait.
It’s something I’ve learned about Yasmin over the years: When something really matters, she needs space to find her words. Pushing only makes her clam up tighter. So I stand there in the accumulating steam and the white noise, holding her trembling hand, and let the silence go on, even though I want to shake her like a rag doll until whatever awful truth she’s hiding pops out.
“It’s just—” She stops. “I’ve been thinking about— The thing is?—”
My stomach knots ever-tighter with each aborted sentence. Is this about Zeke? Did something happen while I was with mymother? Are the men planning something stupid and suicidal that they didn’t tell us about?
“Yas, whatever it is, just spit it?—”
“I’m pregnant.”
My jaw flops open. All the panic bubbles go still.
“I found out yesterday,” she continues in a rush. “I took, like, four tests because I didn’t believe the first three. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you, but every time I opened my mouth, nothing came out—and then Bastian showed up not-dead and your mom was there and everything was so chaotic, and I just—” She sucks in a shuddering breath. “I didn’t know how to say it.”
For a second there, I can’t process what she’s saying. It just doesn’t compute. It’s a word in a foreign language.
Pregnant.
Preg-nant.
P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T.
From the Latin “praegnantem,” meaning “with child.”
But the word keeps circling around and around in my head like an airplane with nowhere to land. Is this a danger? A new crisis? How does Yasmin’s worrying aura here factor in? Yasmin is shaking, Yasmin is scared, Yasmin is?—
Pregnant.
Yasmin ispregnant.
