Echoes

Part 7

"People know, don't they?" I asked, despite knowing intuitively that it was true.

"Heather told a few people and it spread," Michele said, her voice almost monotone. "I tried to stop it, I've said it's a lie every time I've heard it, but no one seems to believe me." I noticed that she was clenching her fists and...was that blood on her hand? I looked her over, and realized that there was blood on both her hand and the front of her shirt.

"Michele, what happened?" I asked.

"Oh, this?" she asked, looking towards her shirt and her hand. "I punched Asher in the face. Hard. He got a nosebleed and it got on me."

I gasped. "Why would you do that?"

"He was saying things he shouldn't have," she said softly.

"You hit him just because he said something you didn't like?" I demanded. "What's wrong with you?"

"I didn't say he said something I didn't like, I said he said something he shouldn't have."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Well, someone asked him about you being pregnant. One of his friends was like 'Wow, you knocked up a cheerleader? Nice going' and he said..."

"He said what, Michele?"

By now my eyes were welling up with tears, but I choked them back. There were only so many things he could have said that were bad enough to make my best friend hit him like that.

"He said 'I didn't knock her up'," she finally told me. "That's what that asshole said."

"Are you serious?" I exclaimed. "He's telling people our baby isn't his?"

"He only denied it directly once," she replied. "But I don't care. That's bad enough and I want to rip his trachea out. It's spreading and he's going along with it."

I clutched my stomach and closed my eyes tightly to keep from crying. This was awful. He might as well have told the entire school that I'd been cheating on him with someone else, hell he might as well have told the whole town. He'd made me look like some reckless slut who liked unsafe sex with multiple guys. He was supposed to defend me against things like this, not throw me under the bus.

"Congratulations baby," I sighed. "Your dad is a complete dick."

Michele put her arms around me. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't want to tell you this now. At first I was going to wait till after school but...I didn't want you to find out from some idiot talking shit to you."

"It's okay. I'm just glad you had my back," I said. "I love you."

"I love you, too, Shir," she replied.

I used the last bit of my free bell to go to the nurse's office. I pretended to have a terrible headache, and my temperature was a bit high. I knew my elevated temperature was likely due to my pregnancy, but the nurse didn't know that. I was able to go home early, and it was the best thing that happened to me all day. I didn't want to risk seeing Asher at all today. I couldn't handle it. I wanted to claw his eyes out, but I still loved him more than anything. I didn't have the energy to be around someone who caused such torturously conflicting feelings at the same time. I put on headphones and clipped my iPod to my jeans as I grabbed my stuff out of my locker, hoping that anyone who might see me would think I couldn't hear them and therefore not bother to talk to me. As I left the building, I saw two girls whose conversation abruptly halted the moment I passed them. Their eyes seemed to fixate on my stomach. I ignored them, but their conversation became audible once I got a little further away.