Girls in Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

ours. With baggy clothes, you can finish the school year. You can stay inside this summer until the baby’s due. Then, fall comes, you’ll be back in school with no one the wiser.”
    Abby and Jack didn’t even want Sara to know who was taking the baby, but how could she do that? As terrifying as it was to contemplate having a baby, giving it away was like giving away a part of Danny. She had to have some contact, some connection, or she’d be undone. “Closed adoption,” Abby suggested, and then, to Abby’s annoyance, Margaret had presented open adoption. “As much contact as both you and the adoptive parents want,” Margaret said. Sara felt the air-conditioning cooling her skin, and she sat up straighter. “Yes. That,” she said.
    Margaret warned them open adoption was enforceable only in Oregon. “You’ll want an agreement with everything spelled out,” she said, but Sara kept thinking of that corny Joni Mitchell song her mother sometimes sang about not needing any piece of paper.
    “We’ll all talk about it,” Jack said, but once they got outside the office, all he said was that he thought it was a bad idea. “It’s what I want,” Sara said, stubborn. Her father shook his head. “You don’t know what you want. You’re too young to know,” he said.
    Late at night, while she lay in bed, Sara heard them talking, their voices rising and falling like crashing waves. “They said it’s not really that open,” Abby said. “Contact almost always diminishes. People get on with their lives. They make new lives.”
    “Are we doing the right thing?” Jack asked, and then there was silence again.
    Abby had gone to the agency with Sara and looked through the photo albums of couples wanting her baby, read the ridiculous letters that all seemed the same. “
Dear birth mother, we know how brave a sacrifice you are making.
”The handwriting spiked and curlicued, the paper always soft blue or yellow.
“We want you to know we will love your baby the same way you would.”
The words were insinuating. As though they knew something about her. The photographs were worse. Bland-faced couples staring out at her.
“Here we are at the beach, but we love the city, too!”
One couple posed with two big dogs on their bed.
“Every child needs a dog or two! This is Scruffy! He loves kids!”
All those 800 numbers so you couldn’t know where they were calling from, or how they might lie to you, like a childhood taunt:
Nyah nyah, I can see you but you can’t see me.
    She wouldn’t let her parents be around her when she called the 800 numbers, though they offered. “We can help you,” Abby said. “I know just the questions you should ask.” But Sara shook her head. If she were going to give something up, if she were going to ruin her life, then she wanted to ruin it all on her own. She sat upstairs, her heart racing, the door firmly closed. She spoke to the women, who cracked bad jokes, who were eager to please, who said her name in every sentence, over and over like an incantation.
    And then one day, Sara was having a conversation with a woman in Maine, when the woman blurted, “Do you knowT who the father is, Sara? Do you realize why it’s important to know?” And then Sara heard her sigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t really want to denigrate you—” The woman cleared her throat. “I mean I don’t intend that remark in a bad way.”
    “In a pejorative way, do you mean?” Sara asked.
    “Oh,” the woman said. “Whoops.”
    “I know what
denigrate
means. I’m an honor student.”
    “Of course you are!” The woman laughed politely.
    “And I know who the father is.”
    “All I wanted to know!” The woman sighed, relieved, but Sara never called her back.
    The adoptive couples skirted around her, acting like she was white trash or stupid, their voices fake and bright as tinsel. Chatting, they told her they were having fried chicken or McDonald’s, that it was Shake ‘n Bake night again, even as she heard