Free Tell Me a Secret by Holly Cupala

parents would tighten the chains until I couldno longer breathe. Like they did to Xanda. The only escape would be death.
    If I said no? I could pack that suitcase and plan that escape and maybe, just maybe, Kamran would come. If I said no, there was still a chance for everything to change.
    “I’m keeping it!” I shouted, upsetting the teacups. “You can’t force me to give it up. I won’t!”
    Miz Wrent never did leave a doctor recommendation.

Thirteen
    Before she spent her days and nights with Andre, Xanda and I would climb out the bathroom window to the side roof under Mom and Dad’s bedroom window. Xanda would smoke while I drank one of Mom’s contraband diet sodas. She dangled her feet over the edge, flicking her ashes into the garden below. I sat as close to the house as possible, always afraid of falling off. There we would listen to our parents’ latest strategies for keeping Xanda in line.
    Now I availed myself of the next best thing: hiding in the bathroom with the window cracked.
    They were arguing. Or rather, Mom was yelling, and Dad was listening. Their voices were like jackhammers—my name, said over and over. Mandy…Mandy…Mandy .
    They were arguing about me. More precisely, what to do with me. The options were limited.
    “We could send her to stay with my parents,” Dad was saying.
    “Oh, no we won’t,” seethed my mother, as if he had suggested parading me around with a big red A . “You want her spending time with your sister? The one who can’t keep a job and is still living with your parents in a trailer ?” I knew the next part by heart: I didn’t have to see Dad wince to know it happened.
    “Well, if my parents aren’t right, then how about yours? They could—”
    “You can’t be serious!” she countered. “I can’t send a pregnant girl to go live with my family….” She was as ashamed to send me to the white collars as she was to send me to the white trash.
    “Fine,” said Dad.
    “There’s only one thing to do. We’ll stick it out, let her finish the school year, and then after it’s all over, maybe we can move—”
    Move? We didn’t move because of Xanda, but they would move because of me ?
    “Hillary, we are not moving.”
    But Mom was not listening. “After this is all over, we could move back to Connecticut, or we could go to New Jersey…”
    “Hillary.”
    “…Nobody there would know, and then we could send her…”
    “Hillary!”
    Silence. Then: “What? You would let her ruin our lives here? Ruin everything we have worked for?”
    You have worked for, I wanted him to say. The status, the money, the house on the hill. It was all about her, the rest of us be damned.
    But he said nothing. A groan of disgust came from my mother. “I am not going to let you ruin everything again. I won’t .” I thought she was finished. Then, in a much smaller voice, she said, “I’ve done everything different with Mandy. Where did I go wrong?”
    Her words trailed away from the window, footsteps stomping into the hall before I could escape. I was trapped there in the dark, with only a night-light to guide me.
    “Mandy?” The shrillness startled me. “Are you in there?”
    What would Xanda do? I thought in a panic. Under other circumstances it might be funny, like I should have a WWXD bracelet on my wrist or tattooed around my ring finger.
    I flushed.
    Silence, for my mother, spoke volumes. It stretched out between us like hairs pulled from my head. She could control me with a few strands.
    “Just going to the bathroom, Mom. Sorry I woke you up.”
    “Hmmmf,” she said through the door. “Well, I’m going back to bed, then.” Her feet shuffled away. The door of their bedroom shut.
    As I crept down the hallway, their bedroom door sprangopen and my mom pounced.
    “Your father and I have decided something.” As if Dad had anything at all to do with it. “Since you have decided to keep this baby,” she said with something clearly resembling revulsion, “you