Free A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson

the yard?
    “Sorry,” I made myself say, and I pushed out past Mrs. Lynch and ran into our tiny cube of a bathroom and slammed the door loud as I dared. I yanked off my stupid skirt and left it on the floor. I stomped on it for good measure. I dug in the hamper for my favorite jeans, and under them I found a T-shirt of Liza’s from her job’s last Hal oween party. It had a leering, pervy skeleton on it, and it said, I GOT BONED AT THE CROW. It was a girl tee, cut curvy with room for boobs I didn’t have, but I put it on anyway. It smel ed like my mom’s fig-leaf body lotion, and for some reason I busted out crying.
    Only for like thirty seconds, four big whooping sobs, and al these hot tears spil ed out so fast it was like both my eyes streamed. I gulped in a big breath, and then, snap, it stopped.
    I went looking for Big and found her flopped into one of the patio chairs. She had her back to me and her head hung down. She didn’t so much as twitch when I pushed the door open. The yard looked crazy-wrong, with a chunk of blue sky and some slats of the fence where the wil ow should have blocked my view. The side gate was open, with Tyler’s truck stopped halfway through. It was stil trailing the chained-up tree trunk with al its twisty roots dragged out behind it. Tyler stood in his truck’s bed, leaning with his legs crossed and his butt perched on the roof. Our chief of police, Rick Warfield, was standing by the hole and the open silver box, glaring at two men I didn’t know, one an old guy in saggy-butt khakis and a younger fel ow with a scraggly beard and those kind of round black glasses like the Santa at the Moss Point Mal wore. Officer Joel was there, too, and it was so weird to have him in our yard. He’d come to school and done the Drugs Are Bad talk every year since I was in the second grade.
    I saw I’d left my cel phone on the patio table behind Big. I grabbed it and was about to stuff it into my pocket when it buzzed in my hands. I flipped it open and saw I had about fifty mil ion texts from Roger piled up. The first one said, What did ur mom mean, her baby?
    I flipped through the rest of his texts fast, skimming, and they were either asking if I was dedded or trying to puzzle out when my mom could have made another baby without the overinterested folks of the nosiest damn town in Mississippi noticing.
    I had no idea. Liza’d told me a thousand times how she’d lost her virginity in the sandpit with Carter Mac. Only six months later, she’d met my nameless sperm donor at a carnival, so she couldn’t have had another baby before me. A few weeks after I was born, we hit the road. No way a baby she’d had in Texas or Arkansas would end up buried here, in Big’s backyard. Then once we came back home, people would have noticed her being pregnant again. I texted back, Dear U, hi, I am not ded and the bones can’t be mom’s baby. Unpossible.
    His answer came back thirty seconds later:
    Dear U, Also unpossible: I am treed by cops in ur yard. 0.o
    I texted back, quick as I could, Y R U stil here anywai?
    Thirty seconds later he came back with, Duh, I had 2 c what happened. Stuck now. HA!
    Al I needed, on top of baby bones in my yard, was for Big to find out I was skipping to hole up with a boy in the tree house. I could tel her al day long I didn’t think like that about Roger, but technical y speaking, Roger had a wiener. Big didn’t like me to be alone with those things. She acted like I could get pregnant if I so much as stood downwind of one.
    I had to move everyone long enough to get Roger down and away. Looking at Big, though, she didn’t seem like she had any plans to go inside anytime soon, or even stand up. Her legs looked like noodles.
    “Big,” I said. Big’s head lifted, and she turned it toward me real slow. I didn’t know what to say after that to keep her attention away from the tree house. Al I could think was, Hide and seek, Big? Close your eyes and count to a hundred. That would