Free Forever in Blue by Ann Brashares

call me back before five if you can, Tib,” Brian said.
    Tibby lay on her bed as she listened to the end of his message. She didn’t want to call him back. If she actually spoke to him, rather than leaving him messages when she knew he was at work, she probably wouldn’t be able to be angry at him.
    “It’ll be okay, Tib,” he said in closing.
    Why was he always saying that? What power did he have to make it so? Maybe it wouldn’t be okay. Maybe she really was pregnant.
    Anyway, okay for whom? Maybe it was her body and not his.
    And what if she was pregnant? What would he say then? What if he wanted her to keep the baby? He had talked about babies before. What if he secretly wanted something like this to happen?
    Meta-Tibby had something to say about this, but regular Tibby shut her up fast.
    Brian probably romanticized the notion of having a baby. He probably thought it would be this beautiful thing between them. Well, Tibby had seen the whole process up close and personal, and it wasn’t pretty. She had seen her mother’s gigantic belly, pregnant with Nicky, with all the scary red stretch marks across it. She knew how little you slept and how much babies cried. And in one of the most surreal experiences of her life, she had weathered the whole bloody, bloody thing as Christina’s unwilling labor partner. She knew the power of birth, both for beauty and terror. She was the last girl in the world who could write it off as cute and sexy.
    She couldn’t be. What if she was?
    If her last period had ended on the fifth, say…or maybe it was the sixth? And then you counted twenty-eight days. No, it was twenty-one days, right? From the last day? From the first day?
    Tibby had puzzled over this question at least one hundred times, and still she got confused in all the same places.
    Brian worked as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant in Rockville on Wednesday evenings. She waited until she knew his shift had started to call him back.
    “I don’t think you should come this weekend. I think I’m going up to Providence to hang out with Lena. Okay? Sorry about that.”
    She hung up quickly. She felt her face twisted in an unpleasant shape. She was too preoccupied to feel her own shame at lying or even to do it convincingly.
    If it had been the fifth, then her period—if it was going to come—was going to come by the twenty-sixth. But what if it hadn’t been the fifth? It could easily have been the sixth or seventh. Then she would have to wait until Sunday. How could she wait that long?
    And what if it didn’t come on Sunday? What if it didn’t come at all?
    No. She couldn’t think that thought. She couldn’t bring herself to think it, and yet she couldn’t fully think any other.
    She wasn’t really going to Providence. She didn’t want to see her friends now. Not until she got her period. If she went, she would have to tell them what was going on. They knew her too well to accept her evasions or her lies. She didn’t want to say the feared word out loud to her friends, because that would make it feel true.
    She hated not telling them that she had finally done it. She needed to tell them such an important piece of information. But the aftermath of having done it was too painful to share, and the two things were inextricable.
    She couldn’t see Brian right now. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened. What if he wanted to have sex again? He would, wouldn’t he? What would she do?
    Brian shouldn’t have been so insistent on it, she found herself thinking. We should have just stayed how we were.
    She didn’t feel like eating, she didn’t feel like sleeping. There was nothing to look forward to, nothing to feel happy about, and nothing she could bring herself to do.
    And yet she had very specific plans for the weekend. She would wait and hope for the one thing she really wanted. She would wait and hope that it would come.
    “Oh, my God. It’s a piece of a skull. Somebody get Bridget.”
    Bridget laughed