She never felt ashamed, not with Peach inside her. They were like a little team. They walked, slept, and ate together, and everything that Grace did affected Peach. They watched a lot of TV on her laptop, and Grace told her about the shows and about Catalina and Daniel and how she would have a great home with them.
Peach was the only person Grace really talked to. All her other friends had fallen away. Grace could see it in their eyes, their uncertainty about what to say about her rapidly expanding stomach, their relief that it was she and not they who had gotten pregnant. Her cross-country teammates had tried to keep her updated at first, talking about meets and gossiping about other teams, but Grace couldn’t handle the way her jealousy pushed against her skin until it felt like she would explode. Even nodding silently became difficult after a while, and when she stopped responding, they stopped talking.
Sometimes when she was almost asleep, when Peach pushed up into her rib cage like it was a safe little space for her, Grace could feel her mom standing in the doorway to her room, watching her. She pretended to not know she was there, and after a while, her mom would leave.
Her dad, though. He could barely look at Grace. She knew she had disappointed him, that even though he still loved her, Grace was a different person now, and she would never be the same Grace again. He must have felt like they swapped out his daughter for a new model (“Now with baby inside!”), a Grace 2.0.
Grace knew this because she felt the same way.
Grace was forty weeks and three days when homecoming rolled around. Janie had kept asking her to go, saying they could go in a group with friends or something, which was probably both the dumbest and sweetest thing she had ever said to Grace. Her words were always tinged with apology, like she knew she was saying the wrong thing but didn’t know how to stop herself. It’ll be fun! she texted Grace, but Grace didn’t respond.
When school had started up that year, Grace hadn’t gone back with everyone else. She was too pregnant, too round, too exhausted. Also, there was the risk of her going into labor one day during AP Chem and traumatizing everyone in the junior class. She wasn’t exactly disappointed by this decision. By the time summer vacation had rolled around, she had grown tired of feeling like a sideshow freak, people giving her so much room in the hallways that she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched her, even accidentally.
Peach was born at 9:03 p.m. on homecoming night, right when Max was being crowned homecoming king because, Grace thought bitterly, boys who get girls pregnant are heroes and girls who get pregnant are sluts. Leave it to Peach to steal Max’s thunder, though. The first thing Grace’s daughter ever did and it was genius. She was so proud. It was like Peach knew she was the heir to the throne and had arrived to claim her tiara.
Peach came out of her like fire, like she had been set aflame. There was Pitocin and white-hot pain that seared Grace’s spine and ribs and hips into rubble. Her mother held her hand and wiped her hair back from her sweaty forehead and didn’t mind that Grace kept calling her Mommy, like she had when she was four years old. Peach twisted and shoved her way through her, like she knew that Grace was just a vessel for her and that her real parents, Daniel and Catalina, were waiting outside, ready to take Peach home to her real life.
Peach had places to be, people to see, and she was done with Grace.
Sometimes, when it was late at night and Grace let herself drift to that dark place in her brain, she thought that she would have been okay if only she hadn’t held Peach, if she hadn’t felt her skin and smelled the top of her head and seen that she had Max’s nose and Grace’s dark hair. But the nurse had asked Grace if she wanted to, and she ignored her mother’s worried eyes, her lip caught between her teeth. She reached out and took Peach from the nurse, and she didn’t know how else to explain except to say that Peach fit, she fit into Grace’s arms like she had fit beneath her rib cage,