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“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

She taps her chin. “When was your last period?”

I blink and then realization dawns on me. With wide eyes, I meet Ginny’s gaze and pull my phone out of my pocket, searching through my calendar for the bright red dot I put on the date that I started.

“Oh God…” Covering my mouth with my hand, my heart pounds as I realize my last period was way more than four weeks ago.

“Shit,” Ginny mutters and then drops her voice. “I just said that because it’s one of the things we’re supposed to ask patients, you know? Not because I actually thought you could be pregnant!”

I shake my head as tears fill my eyes. “No…I—I can’t be.”

“Are you only a few days late?” she prods.

“If you consider twenty-one a few.”

Her eyes widen now. “Shit.”

“Yeah, shit.”

Ginny blows out a breath. “Okay, well the only way you’re going to know for sure is if you take a test.”

“Ladies, are you coming back in to join us sometime soon?” Diana, our instructor, interrupts our conversation from the doorway to the lab.

I swallow roughly and nod. “Yes, we—we’ll be right in.”

Her eyes move to the ground where my regurgitated food is now lying. “You all right, Lennon?”

“Yeah, just an upset stomach today.”

“Would you like to go home? You can make up the lab hours another day…”

“No, I’m fine,” I interject, cutting her off and plastering a smile on my face. The last thing I want to do is fall behind on my work this early in the semester.

She eyes me warily, but my answer seems to placate her. “Okay. Come back in, please.”

Ginny and I share a look as Diana holds the door open for us, and then we go right back to our task at hand, avoiding the conversation we didn’t get to finish outside.

Time crawls as I wait for my school day to end while my impending reality awaits me on the other side of it, contemplating if I’ll even have the privacy at home to face the answer I know I need but don’t want to see.

And yet, when I go home later that night and lock myself in the bathroom to face my fate, there’s no denying the two pink lines that appear and the point they convey.

I’m pregnant.

Sliding my back down the bathroom door, I land on the floor with a thud, staring at the piece of plastic that just changed my entire world. “This…this can’t be real.”

Resting my head on the door, I stare up at the ceiling.

I’m having a baby.

I’m in my last year of nursing school.

The father is a man I’ve only known for a few months.

And I have no health insurance, since I don’t have a full-time job.

Once my twenty-sixth birthday came around, I got kicked off of my parents’ health insurance and decided to just go without it.

I don’t even take birth control—which would probably have helped prevent my current predicament. But it made me feel crazy and gain a bunch of weight when I tried it after high school.