Grace channeled that energy. “Wow,” she said, turning around to look at Zach. “Nothing gets past you, does it? You’re very observant.”
Grace was pretty sure that instead of a lion, she was the equivalent of a mewling kitten.
Zach just smirked and took his baseball cap off, smoothing down his hair before putting it back on. “Whatever, Baby Mama,” he said.
“Zach, seriously,” Miriam joked. Grace would have given her kingdom to grab Miriam by the shoulders and shake her until her head wobbled on her neck.
But then Mrs. Mendoza started talking (“Zach, take off your hat, you know the rules in my classroom”), and Grace found her pen and opened her notebook. Just act normal, she told herself.
She acted normal through English and second period (AP Chem), but third period was where it all fell apart. If, by fell apart, you meant crumbled into oblivion.
Third period was U.S. history.
Third period was with Max.
Janie wasn’t the only person who hadn’t realized Grace was coming back to school, judging by the look on Max’s face. He was laughing with Adam, one of his friends, and when Grace walked into the room, his eyes got so big that he looked like a cartoon. If Grace hadn’t hated him so much, it would have been funny, but the only thing she felt was a sick thrill for surprising him. She liked the idea of keeping him on his toes, popping up where he least expected her, a flesh-and-blood ghost to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Grace knew it wasn’t possible, but it felt like everyone in the room stopped talking when she walked in, their heads swiveling between her and Max. As if this period was suddenly the new episode of a soap opera, and the long-thought-dead evil twin had just sauntered back into town.
She sat down in her normal assigned seat, which, unfortunately, was right across from Max. She had chosen that seat back at the beginning of the year because it was easier to talk to him that way. Now she cursed Past Grace for making such a terrible decision. Past Grace, it turned out, was a real idiot.
Adam was giggling and saying, “Dude, dude,” quietly, the way you do when you have a secret.
“Shut up,” Max hissed at him. Adam had been (and, Grace assumed, still was) as dumb as concrete, one of those guys who thought he was a football star when he really just watched from the sidelines and high-fived other people when they made the winning touchdowns. Grace had never liked him, and Max knew that.
Unlike her first two teachers, Mr. Hill ignored Grace and got down to business, which she appreciated. Sympathy was sometimes worse than being ignored. “Okay, bodies,” he said loudly. (Mr. Hill always referred to his students as “bodies.” It was a little distressing at times. Grace couldn’t help but picture a roomful of corpses.) “Let’s focus!”
Grace dug her pen out of her bag, willing herself to not even look at Max. She could see his feet, though, and he was wearing new shoes. That blew her mind. Somewhere in the time between when she’d had his daughter, met her half siblings, and returned to school, Max had gone shopping and bought new shoes, like his life was still normal; like it hadn’t changed at all.
And the truth was that it hadn’t. Somewhere in the world, another couple was raising Max’s biological child. And he had new shoes.
By the time Grace found her pen, her cheeks were bright red. The urge to use it to scribble all over Max’s shoes was strong, painfully so, but she just set it down on her desk and looked forward.
“Hey,” Adam whispered across the aisle as Mr. Hill turned toward the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. “Hey, psst! Grace!”
She didn’t turn around. She knew Adam wasn’t going to ask about how she was feeling, or wish her a good first day back, or see if she needed anything.
“Grace! Hey, are your boobs all saggy now?”
Someone—Grace didn’t know who—giggled behind her, and over the rushing sound in her ears, she heard Max say, “C’mon, dude.” Grace would have preferred if Max had, oh, gone all Game of Thrones on him and mounted his head on a stick, but Max just said, “C’mon, man,” again.
Grace gripped her pen and wondered when Max had become such a weakling, with a spine made out of cotton candy. Maybe it had happened while they’d waited in line at Target that day, buying pregnancy tests, or maybe it was that day when his dad talked about the “good girl” Max was dating instead of Grace. Or maybe it had happened at homecoming while Grace was squeezing a baby out of her body and he danced, wearing a cheap plastic crown.
This version of Max wasn’t the boy Grace had dated, or slept with, or loved. And it seemed crazy to her that, somewhere out there, there was a child who was half him and half her, when she suddenly couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him anymore.
“Grace!” Adam hissed again.
Mr. Hill was still up at the whiteboard, apparently writing out an entire soliloquy, so Grace turned to look at Max. Even his face looked weak. How could she have ever dated someone with that jawline? Thank God Peach hadn’t inherited it.
“Would you tell your friend to shut the fuck up?” Grace hissed at Max. She could tell that he was sorry, it was written all over his (pathetic) face, and she spun back in her seat, cheeks flaming like she had a fever.
That’s when Adam’s phone made the noise. It was a baby’s cry—a newborn baby’s cry. It sounded like Peach, like the first sound Grace had ever heard her make, that crazily desperate wail that announced her arrival into the world.
Grace didn’t know what moved first, her body or her hand, but then she was flying over her desk like she was running the hurdles in gym class, her fist out so it could make clean contact with Adam’s face. He made a sound like someone had let the air out of him, and when he fell backward, his desk trapping him against the floor, Grace pinned him and punched him again. She hadn’t had this much adrenaline since Peach had been born. It felt good. She even smiled when she punched Adam for the third time.
It eventually took Max, Mr. Hill, and this guy named José (who really was on the football team) to pull her off Adam. José sort of spun Grace away, setting her down on her feet so hard that her teeth rattled together, and then Grace was gone, leaving her backpack, Adam, Max, and U.S. history class behind.
She stumbled toward the bathroom at the end of the quad, the one that no one ever used because it was near the biology classroom and the smell of formaldehyde sometimes leaked into the vents. It was disgusting, but she didn’t care. She just needed somewhere to contain the hurricane inside her chest when it eventually burst out of her.
The sound of Peach roared through her ears as she cried out.