Stella. You have every right to be here. You deserve to be here. Pick up those shards of your love and your trust and tuck them all away in a little box deep inside. You’re not going to throw away this opportunity because of somebody else’s bullshit. You know exactly who you are, so embrace it. Your name is Stella Evangeline Bradleigh and fuck if you’re going to let anybody else lead this damn parade anymore. Your life may be a shitshow, but it’s your shitshow, and you decide who gets to stay and play and who can get the fuck out.
My alarm trills, and I roll out of bed, as ready as I can be to face another day.
I walk in the front doors, trying my hardest to appear confident and strong. By my side, Sunday's filling the space around us with tidbits of gossip and movies and her mother’s latest craziness on her quest for eternal youth. We wind our way through the halls to our lockers, and I see the guys roughhousing and laughing together up ahead. Almost like magic, Poe stops and looks up, finding me in the crowd immediately. Our eyes meet for a few brief seconds before he looks away, returning his attention to his friends.
Sunday and I close our locker doors, the sound of metal meeting metal cold and hollow, and make our way to homeroom, my hard candy shell revealing nothing of the mess I’ve become underneath.
My skin mourns the loss of Poe’s touch. The only one who knows the tightrope I’m teetering on right now, the only one who clearly sees, is sworn to secrecy. She looks at me now, sadness in her eyes even as she smiles and chatters on next to me—my beautiful best friend, the moon to my velvet night sky. As long as I have her by my side, I can get through anything, right? It doesn’t matter that it feels like my insides are slowly dissolving and that one day soon, there will be nothing left of the Stella I was becoming, the one I had hidden inside the whole time. The one I was always supposed to be.
My phone vibrates with a call in our second-period class. Pulling it out of my blazer pocket, I keep it lowered in front of me and check who it is. When I see the hospital's name on the display, I let it go to voicemail but raise my hand and ask to use the restroom. I’m half-way down the hall when Sunday pokes her head out of the classroom door and looks right and left. Spotting me, she slips out and jogs over.
“Who was it?” she asks breathily.
“The hospital,” I answer, and we both stare at each other for a second.
“Test results,” we say in unison. Dialing my voicemail, I listen to the message asking me to please stop by the clinic at my convenience in the next day or two as they don’t give results over the phone. I disconnect the call, and Sunday is already back at the door of our classroom.
“What are you doing?” I whisper yell to her.
“Grabbing our stuff,” she says back. “There’s no time like the present, right?” My stomach churning, we stow our books in our lockers and head out to my car, not even bothering to sign out.
The drive to the hospital is short and quiet. Once we’ve parked, we find our way back to the clinic that took my blood on Monday. The same kind nurse is there, and she asks if I want Sunday to stay with me or if I’d rather get the results in private. I tell the nurse there’s no way I’m doing this alone, and she nods in understanding. Ushering us into an exam room, she hands me a document.
“If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me, okay?” She smiles reassuringly and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
Trying desperately not to overthink what these results typed on this report could mean, I sit down to read it and my eyes are immediately drawn to the words printed in red.
THE ALLEGED FATHER IS NOT EXCLUDED AS THE BIOLOGICAL FATHER OF THE TESTED CHILD. BASED ON TESTING RESULTS OBTAINED FROM ANALYSIS OF THE DNA LOCI LISTED, THE PROBABILITY OF PATERNITY IS 99.9998%.
I’m not sure what I expected to feel once I had the results, but I don’t think it was nothing. Rage, maybe. A little sad. But I feel nothing. It’s