17 year old Callie is at her lowest point. Alone and depressed most of the summer, she feels fat and ugly-and school starts Monday. Her mother Michelle is about to have a baby, and won't tell anyone who the father is. The reality TV show that Michel...
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Welcome back . . . and meet Callie's goth girlfriend, and her cool, handsome crush.
On the Saturday morning before she was to return to school Callie sat with Fiona at the Starbuck's inside Target. Her first venture outside the cocoon of the family, not counting Zam. Her first effort at lying to people in person.
Fiona was pretty much Callie's total opposite. Small and wiry, she had dark hair and dark eyes, to which she added a lot of black shadow and mascara. She had a wicked sense of humor but she was Callie's best girlfriend, the person she most relied on, besides Zam, but trusted even more. Callie regretted that she had to lie to Fiona, who had become an instant friend in freshman English, where they worked together on a presentation about The Pearl, a story about how a great hope ended in major, major problems. Since Zam had been the accidental witness to the birth, he knew the truth. But Callie felt like she could control him. No one else could know, so it was a fine line she had to walk with Fiona.
Fiona made it harder by being excited. "I can't believe you tried to hide from me that you were preggers. Course, I could tell..."
"Don't say that." Bollocks, this was uncomfortable!
"Oh, don't be so self-conscious. It happens to enough girls."
"Don't say that, either." Callie had to find a way to talk about the true bits, not the lies.
"Well, I didn't know why you were hiding out all summer, but I knew there was a reason." Fiona smiled. Shoppers milled around in the sportswear department behind the Starbucks-slash-snack bar where they sat. A huge poster of a pastel-addicted blonde hung right behind Fiona in Callie's line of sight.
"I like to focus on Boomer, not me." Callie took a slow, calming breath. "Boomer is the thing that is important, that he's in our family now. He's with us."
"That's so sweet," said Fiona, but she had a somewhat mystified look. The piano key teeth of the blonde in the poster formed a halo behind Fiona's Gothness. "How come you didn't bring him? Five pound sack of flour and all that."
Callie remembered that exercise in junior high, in which girls were supposed to care for their flour bag twenty-four hours a day. It was supposed to teach them that babies destroyed your teenage life. "He's home with my Gumms. Me and mom had to get out for a little bit. Get a break. It does change your life. But getting back to what I wanted to tell you, there's something... I can't tell you."
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