Page 35 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

"When?"

"When I know what to say," I replied pushing my glasses up a little on my nose.

That was a lie and she knew it. I knew exactly what to say, because I had written it in my head eleven times. I owed Bobby Jo a huge apology with no explanation attached to it.

What I couldn’t survive was calling him and finding out he had already decided that he absolutely didn’t want me anymore.

Then Tuesday hit…

I was tired in a way sleep couldn’t seem to touch. Mornings came with a faint roll of nausea that lingered until around ten before disappearing. My bra suddenly dug into me, every shift of the fabric making my breasts ache, which I blamed on the dryer.

I snapped at a sophomore for tapping his pencil against his desk, something I never did. The second the words left my mouth, guilt twisted through me. I apologized in front of the entire class, then had to blink back tears over the fact that I’d snapped at him in the first place.

Thursday morning, Regina came into my classroom during first block carrying two coffees and set one on my desk.

The smell reached me, warm and bitter, and my stomach immediately rolled.

“Take that away from me,” my stomach threatened to spill its contents right then and there.

"Take what away?"

"The coffee, Regina. Please."

She moved it to the windowsill, and when she turned back around she had a look on her face I did not care for at all.

"Rue Boo..."

"Don't."

"When was your last period?"

I opened my mouth to tell her, then I stopped, because I didn’t actually know. I’d had never in the last twenty something years not known.

I pulled up the calendar on my phone with my hands going cold, and I scrolled back, and then I scrolled back further.

"No," I whispered.

"Rue..."

"No!"

"Rue!"

"REGINA, I HEARD YOU!"

"Just go buy one," she said at lunch.

"In Irondale?"

"Nobody cares what you're buying."

I put my fork down and looked at her.

Regina thought about it. I watched her remember the pharmacy counter, and the deacon's wife, and Patti Shoemaker, and every single person in that town.

"Okay. Drive to Roanoke."

Which is how I came to be standing in a chain pharmacy forty minutes from home, in a neighborhood on the opposite side of the city from where my mother works, at six fifteen on a Thursday evening. I picked out three different brands, because if I was going to do this I was going to do it with a control group.