the force when she got mad. Janie had sported a red handprint on her face lots of times after she had smarted off to her mother. Evidently, that was another sin, somewhere down below pregnant before marriage but still on the list.
Janie had looked up the history of Whitesboro in the school encyclopedia to make sure it was true, not merely some lore her mother had made up and told her from the time she was big enough to listen. That’s when she found out that after the Civil War, the women in Whitesboro were prohibited from going out on Saturday nights because shootings were so common. Like the men from the Adams family were not involved in a single one of those shootings—truth probably was that they just didn’t get caught. What Janie thought didn’t matter one little, tiny bit. Her mother’s precious family tree wasn’t so pure and spotless, and it was all Janie’s fault.
“How old are you?” Greta broke the silence between them.
“Fifteen, but I’ll be sixteen on March fifteenth,” Janie answered.
“Beware the Ides of March,” Greta said.
“Mama brought that up a lot, especially this last month, when she found out that I’d brought shame upon the almighty family tree. You would have thought that there was a book in the Bible called the Gospel According to Shakespeare, and the first verse had to do with the Ides of March. The rest would have been about wayward daughters who ruin the family name,” Janie said as she watched her father drive away.
“Amen!” Greta raised a hand toward heaven. “I bet every girl in here has heard all about that. Who’s the father of your baby?”
Janie whipped around and glared at the girl. “Kind of nosy, aren’t you?”
“All we’ve got is each other for the next six weeks. We’ll be escorted to classes like we’re prisoners,” Greta informed her. “Actually, I guess we are. We’re being punished for messin’ around before we were married all legal-like. Our sentence is the time we have left in the months it takes to produce a baby and give it away. We don’t have much choice in whether we want to keep it or not. Our parents put us here because we’re underage, and the law says they have authority over us. I know because my dad’s a lawyer, and, believe me, he read me chapter and verse from the law books about his rights and mine. My mama raises Thoroughbred horses. And yes, I’m nosy. If we talk to each other, maybe it’ll help us both keep from losing our minds in this place.” She swung a hand around to take in the whole room.
“A boy who worked on my grandpa’s farm last summer. He told me he loved me and that I couldn’t get . . .” Janie struggled with the word, even though she was mad enough to spew cusswords.
“Pregnant,” Greta filled in. “We can say the word in here. The devil won’t come up and pull us down to hell for saying it out loud.”
Janie took a deep breath and continued. “Pregnant, except on two days each month. He said that it was the rhythm method.” Evidently, Greta hadn’t been raised in the same atmosphere Janie had. “I guess he was wrong about those two days, because here I am.”
“Guys will tell a girl anything when they want sex,” Greta said. “Crazy, ain’t it? The guys brag about it, and we’re not supposed to say the word above a whisper. They must enjoy sex, the way they chase after it, and no one tells us jack squat about how to keep from getting pregnant. I found out too late that there are ways and means. Of course, since girls like me and you aren’t married, we can’t have that new pill they’ve come up with. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. I hope I live to see the day when we can brag about having sex if we want to and we don’t have to be ashamed that we’re pregnant and not married.”
Janie smiled for the first time. Greta had rocks for brains if she thought that her lifetime was going to be long enough to change the world that much. “I hope that someday unmarried women can get the pill. My mama fusses about the world going to hell in a handbasket because women are demanding their rights. She says that women should be content to do what God intended them to do, and