Strange but True Read Online Free PDF Page B

these years later, I’m pregnant and I don’t know what to do. Because somehow, I don’t know how, but a strange sort of miracle has happened. This baby inside me belongs to him.”

chapter 2
    FOUR YEARS, SEVEN MONTHS, FIFTEEN DAYS, AND FIVE HOURS BEFORE Melissa Moody shows up at the Chases’ house and delivers this unthinkable news, she is sitting on the cushioned seat by her bedroom window, waiting and watching for the white limousine to round the corner with Ronnie inside. On this warm June evening, she is still a high school senior, still an innocent teenager with the same kind of sweet, flawless face as those girls in the department-store circulars that come with the Sunday paper. Melissa doesn’t know yet, of course, that this will be her last night with that face. For now, she is happily dressed in her lacy, pearl-colored Gunne Sax gown. It is a vintage dress that she bought for twenty-nine dollars at The Rusty Zipper in Philadelphia, since she couldn’t find anything decent at the King of Prussia Mall given the fifty-dollar budget set by her stingy parents. Melissa is so grateful that they consented to let her and her sister go to the prom that she hasn’t dared utter a single word of complaint.
    Down the hall, she hears the sounds of Stacy getting ready. A hair dryer whirs on and off. A brush clanks against the vanity. The medicine cabinet opens then slams shut. Stacy opted for an emerald green dress off the clearance rack at Filene’s that their mother took in on the sewing machine. Melissa warned her that it was a mistake, but Stacy didn’t listen. Now her sister is sorry because it looks, well, it looks like an emerald green dress off the clearance rack that their mother took in on the sewing machine.
    â€œMissy!” Stacy yells in a nails-against-the-chalkboard voice. “Please come save me from this fashion nightmare!”
    â€œI’ll help you in a minute,” Melissa calls back, gazing once more toward the end of the street and past the white clapboard church on the corner. The limo is nowhere in sight. All she sees is a group of young girls Rollerblading near the stop sign. They’ve built a makeshift ramp with scrap plywood and two large rocks borrowed from a neighbor’s stone wall. So far none of them has made it over without crashing to the ground. I used to babysit for those girls back in junior high, Melissa thinks, now here I am going to my prom. For the first time in her life, she feels grownup and free—or close to free anyway—from the prison of her parents’ rules. Much of that feeling has to do with Ronnie and the plans they’ve made for tonight, not to mention the plans they’ve made for their lives after graduation.
    â€œMissy! Ronnie and Chaz will be here any second, and I look like a mermaid!”
    Melissa can’t help but laugh. “I’m sure Chaz will love you as a mermaid. It’ll be like that movie they always show on TBS with Daryl What’s-her-ass and Tom Hanks.”
    â€œVery funny,” Stacy says, pushing open the bedroom door and holding the brush in front of her like a small sword. “I’m serious. I need your help.”
    â€œIt’s not like I didn’t warn you.”
    â€œOkay, so you warned me. I admit it. You are hereby officially dubbed the all-knowing goddess of prom-dress wisdom. So can you come down from your throne and tell me what I should do?”
    Stacy puts her hand against her hip, a hip that Melissa can’t help but notice looks twice its normal size thanks to the dress. The thing fits her like the slipcovers their mother made for the donated chairs in the lounge of the church basement—tight in all the wrong places, baggy everywhere else. The color hurts to look at.
    â€œIs there a dimmer switch on the back of that thing?” Melissa says, shielding her eyes with her hand.
    Her sister lets out a huff. “Make fun of me all you want, but