Free The Implosion of Aggie Winchester by Lara Zielin Page A

thinking that I could always glare at and threaten people, even if I didn’t actually hit them.
    “Prom tickets!” called a cheerleader as we walked in. She was sitting at a table near the door. “Court nominations are today, so you’d better get your prom ti—” She stopped in midsentence when she spotted Sylvia and me. Her eyes slid to Sylvia’s belly.
    “Hold on a sec,” I said, thinking I’d prove to Sylvia I could defend her. I walked over to the cheerleader, put both my hands on the table, and leaned in. The cheerleader’s freckled face, framed by wavy red hair, was suddenly pale.
    “You have a problem?” I asked. I picked up one of the tickets she was selling—a heavy cream cardstock with embossed silver lettering—and tossed it to the floor. I put the heel of my black boot on it and pressed.
    “Y—you have to pay for that,” the cheerleader whispered. She was starting to tremble. I glared at her while my heart shriveled inside my chest. She was just a freshman, and I was scaring the shit out of her. God, what was I doing? There had to be a better way to get people to stop staring at Sylvia. I just had no idea what it was.
    “Your dance is a fucking waste of time,” I said, “and so are you.”
    I turned and walked back to Sylvia, leaving the prom ticket where it was—scuffed and torn.
    “You gonna do that to everyone who looks at my stomach?” Sylvia asked as we made our way to her locker.
    “No,” I said under my breath, “because they’re all staring.” Every eyeball in the place was trained on Sylvia’s midsection. The halls practically quieted as we walked through them.
    “No shit, Sherlock,” Sylvia said, twirling her locker combination. I thought maybe she’d start yelling at everyone, telling them to get a life and stop looking at her or she’d punch a few of them in the crotch. Maybe that’s what everyone else thought she’d do, too, since none of them dared to utter a word or a comment. But instead, Sylvia just opened her locker like it was any other day.
    “Aren’t you freaked out?” I whispered.
    Sylvia rounded on me. “Look, you need to relax, okay? Act like it’s cool because if people in this school think for one second I’m ashamed of this kid, they’ll think they own me. Everyone will try and use it to make me feel like I’m worthless.” Sylvia grabbed a box of granola bars from the top shelf of her locker and stuffed one of them into her bag. “So do what we always do. Be cool. Act like we don’t give a shit. It’s just another day. You got it?”
    I nodded. Sylvia always knew what to do. I reminded myself how lucky I was to have her as a friend. She plotted our course and kept everyone off our backs. I’d be lost without her. “Yeah. Okay.”
    She shut her locker, and we headed toward mine. “Dude,” Sylvia said, “I forgot to ask. Did your mom get off to the hospital okay? For her lumber section or whatever?” My brain raced to catch up with her abrupt change of subject.
    I nodded. “Lumpectomy. And yeah, she’s fine. My dad took her in just as I was getting up.”
    Still half asleep, I had given my mom a hug before she’d headed out the door. “I’ll be back by the time you get home from school,” she said. I noticed she’d been wearing lipstick, like she was going out for drinks.
    “So, when you were fishing on Saturday, I went to Tickywinn’s,” Sylvia said, switching subjects again , like her brain was ping-ponging around just so it didn’t land on how everyone knew about her pregnancy, “and I met this new girl there. Beth. She moved from New York, like, last week.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Is she cool?”
    “Totally,” Sylvia said as I opened my locker. “And she’s Goth, if you can believe it. She says in New York, everyone looks like us.”
    I yanked off my coat and grabbed my chemistry book, thinking that there were millions of people in New York and they couldn’t all be Goth. I was so lost in Beth’s illogic that I