Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,54

up, caught the teacher’s searching gaze, and looked over her shoulder. “I have Algebra next,” she said.

“All right,” Ms. Guthrie said. “Go on. But if you need to talk to somebody, I’m here.”

Jennifer had fled. Now, she wondered what exactly she’d thought she’d been escaping from.

Not much, as it turned out, because that night, after dinner, her mom asked her the same thing. Afterwards, Jennifer realized that Ms. Guthrie must have called her.

“Of course I’m not having sex,” Jennifer answered. Well, she wasn’t now. “How could I? I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

Her mom said, “Baby. Let’s just check. Pull up your sweater.”

Jennifer didn’t. She just stood there, the blood draining from her head, her body suffused with heat, then with cold. Her mom pulled up the sweater instead, saw the safety pin on her jeans, and said, “Oh, honey.”

Jennifer would never forget the sound of her voice. The sadness. The disappointment. The sound of her dreams dying. Part of her had curled up small and tight in that moment, and it had never quite uncurled again.

After that, nothing got any better. Especially not once her mom went to the cops, and everybody in town found out. And knew she was a slut.

She knew that was what they thought. They spray-painted it on her locker.

“I don’t get why you didn’t just get an abortion,” Dyma said now. “I would have. I bet you’d have told me to. And don’t tell me that if you had, I wouldn’t be here. That’s a logical fallacy. Of course I wouldn’t be here. That’s the whole point. It also means I wouldn’t know, because my consciousness wouldn’t exist. And you could’ve had a better life.”

Oh, great. This conversation was getting better and better. Harlan and Owen still weren’t saying anything, either.

One thing, though, she’d learned by now. Wishing didn’t make anything go away, and problems stuffed under the surface always swam back up again. Problems were like seals that way. They popped up exactly when and where you didn’t expect them. Like, for instance, now.

She said, “I’d love to have you think it was some noble reason, but in fact, it was pretty late by the time Grandma forced me to face reality. We could’ve gotten somebody to do it, given the circumstances, but you were kicking so much that even a first-time mom could feel it, and …” She laughed. “Again, I’d love to sound nobler here, but in reality, I had these notions of myself with an adorable blonde baby who smiled all the time and loved me best of all. Our hair backlit, both of us laughing as I lifted her high over my head. Hallmark Channel all the way. What can I say. I was young. I had no clue. I only got two things right. You were a girl, and you were blonde. I didn’t quite anticipate the furious bundle of personality you ended up being.”

“I wasn’t your dream daughter, huh?” Dyma asked.

“Nope,” Jennifer said. “You were better. Well, once I got over the shock of the ‘furious’ part of your equation. You sang and you danced and you talked like crazy, and you learned how to add and subtract when you were four years old. I didn’t have to imagine you anymore, because let me tell you, you were right there. I did imagine my future great romance with a guy who’d fall in love with both of us, though, preferably while I was still in high school, which would instantly elevate my social status. He was going to raise you as his own, while I went to … law school, or something. I was always a little fuzzy on that part. But you know what? It worked out anyway. Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, and I’ve had a great life. It’s not over yet, either.”

“And meanwhile, Grandma reported him, and he was arrested,” Dyma said, refusing to get sidetracked. “That part, I know about, because that part, I heard. All about it. How you wrecked his life.”

Jennifer abandoned all hope of getting out of here with her dignity intact. She wasn’t looking at Harlan. He’d think what he thought. Nothing she could do about that. One advantage of not having all those romantic notions anymore was that hopefully you learned to live in the moment just a little, and this was the moment she was in. She said, “Yep. She did. It’s hard to fight that statutory rape charge when there’s a