What Good Girls Do

Chapter One

Smashing Kyle Swanson's windshield with his golf club hadn't been the problem. Or at least it hadn't been the only problem. Vomiting on the smashed-up remains of his car was. At 9 am. In front of the entire school. And when you're a teenage girl, and you throw up publicly, it's assumed to be for one of two reasons—you're drunk or you're pregnant. I would argue the inaccuracy and misogyny of this reductive view, but in my case, it just happened to be true. I was pregnant. And as I stood there, wiping vomit from my chin, I realised every single person I knew was about to put the pieces together and realise it.

I'd fallen still as I felt their wide, glassy eyes burn into me through the windows of classrooms. As a deafening silence fell across the car park, across the grounds, and across the school. Only Kyle's wails as he tugged on his hair, leapt around, shrieking about his car, broke the unbearable silence. And I knew then, with an earth-shattering certainty, that everything I'd worked for, strived for, suffered for, had just turned to dust. My life as I knew it, scattered along the pavement with glittering shards of windscreen and the contents of my stomach.

I lean back into the soft leather seat of Mum's jeep, my arms folded tightly across my chest. Every now and then, she peers at me, her lips pursed tightly. We're sitting unmoving in the afternoon traffic, cars on either side of us. Mum revs the engine, though we can't go anywhere. The radio plays a cheerful pop tune, making our dark moods darker.

"I can't believe you're making me do this."

Mum purses her lips. Her hands grip the steering wheel so tight I can see the bones of her knuckles through her fake tan.

"You didn't really leave me with any other options after this morning's theatrics, did you?" I huff and turn away.

I hadn't planned on telling Kyle yet—the words had just slipped out of my mouth as we were getting out of his car. He'd insisted it couldn't be his, even though, immaculate conception aside, there were no other options. We'd both been virgins before the night of my seventeenth birthday. I'd hadn't had sex with anyone, not even him since. I was mad, humiliated, but I'd swallowed this as the desperate plea of a dying man. What had made me so furious, so enraged I'd dragged the golf club from the backseat was when he admitted the condom had split. That he'd just been too embarrassed to tell me.

Smashing up his car was certainly more pleasurable than the sex.

I wouldn't miss Kyle. We'd been together nearly a year, but it was not like we cared much for one another. Not really. We just made sense. It was easy, and it was expected. We didn't have a spark, or a connection, or chemistry. Not that I believe in those things, anyway. The only connections I'm interested in are the ones that get you places. And Kyle's parents have connections. But I'm pretty sure if the four-hour screaming match in my headteacher's office was anything to go by, my connection with them was officially severed.

"We could have had a little more time, at least told Stephen in a way where I could have... prepared him. But no, you decided it would be more fun to make a spectacle of yourself and smash up a Lamborghini." She hisses, hitting her horn as a car cuts her up on the ring road. I sigh and sink deeper. My stomach is finally settling, and the gnawing emptiness that grows after the morning sickness passes has returned.