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Jackman’s name from Madeline Horsley, the New Zion High guidance counselor who promised she’d be the soul of discretion about the entire situation, a lie so barefaced Opal doesn’t know why her tongue didn’t fall out.
    The first thing Opal noticed about Emily was that she was a good listener. Her own family isn’t tops in the listening department, and she never realized how good it could make you feel to be heard, to be listened to as if what you said really mattered.
    Opal thought Emily would try to convince her to give the baby up, but she never did. What she did do was make Opal talk about her family.
    She learned from Emily that the “majority of unwed, pregnant teenagers” came from homes with at least one dominating parent, usually the mother. According to Emily, becoming pregnant was often used as a way of escaping, of establishing independence. Opal hated being a teenage statistic, being lumped with the other unwed mothers.
    She insisted her pregnancy was an accident. She certainly hadn’t tricked Billy the way Suzanne Jennings trapped Jitter Walton.
    â€œPerhaps not deliberately,” Emily said. “Unconsciously.”
    â€œNo,” she replied, remembering how relieved she was those months when her period came right on schedule.
    â€œWhy didn’t you use contraceptives?” Emily pushed.
    â€œWe did. Sometimes.”
    â€œ ‘Sometimes’ is the Russian roulette method of birth control. You know that.”
    But even when she was directly confronting her, Emily never judged her or made her feel ashamed. And one day, after she had again asked her about whether or not she had wanted to become pregnant, she said something so true that Opal wrote it down on paper the moment she got home.
    Emily said that it wasn’t sex that had gotten her in trouble, it was loneliness. “Never underestimate the power of a hungry heart,” she said.
    When she is honest, Opal has to admit she always liked the idea of having a baby. Even the Modern Living class hadn’t dimmed this desire.
    Modern Living—an idiotic name that sounded more like a magazine than a high school class—was a requirement for New Zion juniors. Miss Grady, the Home Ec teacher, lectured them about things like relationships and money management and budgeting. Mid-semester, for one week, the juniors had to experience make-believe parenthood.
    The year before, the class had been given eggs that they had to pretend were babies and cart everywhere—even football practice. If an egg got broken, the student flunked. Of course, everyone in town heard how the football players hard-boiled their eggs, although Miss Grady professed not to know. Opal’s class got dolls instead of eggs, computer dolls named Baby Think It Over that the school received a state grant for. They each weighed nine pounds and had a computer that was set to go off at certain times—day and night—so the doll would cry and the only way to make it stop was to pick it up and insert a key and hold it and find out if it needed changing or feeding or just to be rocked. And you had to keep a log of how you cared for it, when you fed it, how long it slept.
    Most of the New Zion faculty complained that the dolls disrupted their classes, and by the end of two days half the kids in the class hated their dolls, but Opal, who’d never had a younger brother or sister or even a pet, really took to hers. She didn’t even mind waking in the night to hold the doll. Of course after she had Zack, she found out there was a world of difference between a doll, even a computer doll, and a for-real baby.
    But had liking Baby Think It Over made her want to get pregnant? She doesn’t think so. If she were going to set about getting pregnant, she would have chosen someone better suited to fatherhood than Billy Steele.
    When Emily asked her if she had fallen for Billy because he was a star basketball player, she had to