Pregnant For my School Rival

Terminal Six

Emma didn't make it to first period.

She made it to her locker, which was a different thing. Row C, bottom tier, the one that stuck. She hauled the door open with her hip and dropped her bag on the floor and unzipped it so hard the teeth caught.

Folders. Chem notes. A paperback with a cracked spine. And in the blue plastic sleeve where she kept everything that mattered, the printout of her slides, draft three, stapled at the corner.

She flipped to slide four. Second line.

14,000.

Her handwriting. Her blue pen. The same slant on the four, the same little hook at the bottom of the one that she'd been told in fourth grade to fix and never had.

She laid the page from the stairwell beside it on top of her chem book and looked at them for a long time. Same header. Same font. Same coffee ring, even, a faint brown crescent in the lower corner, as if someone had set her cup down on the original and then copied the stain too. Only the number was different.

Somebody had made a second draft three. A good one.

"Wilson. Late slip?"

Mr. Brandt, with a clipboard, doing the rounds. Emma slammed the locker so fast the metal rang.

"Bathroom emergency," she said.

He wrote it down. He didn't look like he believed her, and he didn't look like he cared.

The library didn't open to students until second period, but Mrs. Oduya was at the desk with her cardigan on and her reading glasses pushed up into her gray hair, stamping a cart of returns. She looked up when Emma came in with her bag still on her shoulder.

"You're early. Or very late."

"Mrs. Oduya, the printer tray. When do you clear it?"

"Seven-thirty, every morning. I do it myself." She tapped the stamp on the desk. "Why? Did you lose something?"

"Somebody told me they found a page in there. An hour ago."

"Then somebody's mistaken. Tray was empty at seven-thirty and I haven't touched it since." Mrs. Oduya studied her. "Is this about the Hartwell?"

"No."

"Mm." The glasses came down. "You're a bad liar, Emma. It's one of my favorite things about you."

Emma tried to smile and couldn't make it work. "Can I use terminal six?"

"They're all open."

Terminal six sat at the end of the row under the window, the one with the sticky F key. Emma pulled out the chair and logged in. Her student account loaded. Her files. Her drafts. Draft three, saved Tuesday night, 11:14 p.m., and when she opened it the number on slide four said 14,000.

So the file was right. Her bag was right. The page in her hand was wrong.

She clicked into the print history. She almost didn't. Her finger sat on the mouse for a long second.

Draft_3_Final.pdf. Printed 7:02 a.m. Terminal 6. 1 copy.

She read it twice.

At 7:02 this morning Emma had been standing at the Maple Street bus stop with a pair of sleeping earbuds in, waiting on the 7:05, next to an old man walking a beagle. She remembered the beagle. It had peed on the sign.

She hadn't printed anything. She hadn't been in this building.

Someone else had been at terminal six, logged in as her.

She ate lunch on the back steps of the science building, because it rained but the overhang held, and nobody ever came there. A turkey sandwich, the bread gone soft. She'd made it at five-thirty that morning in the dark so she wouldn't wake her mother.

She called anyway.

Three rings. Then the clatter and the hiss of a kitchen, and her mother's voice, rough and brisk. "Lindy's. Hold on. Hold on, Dev, I said hold on. Emma?"

"Hi, Mom."

"You okay? You never call in the middle of the day."

"I'm fine. I'm just." Emma picked a piece of crust off the sandwich. "The list went up. For Hartwell. I'm in the final."

A pause. Then something hit the floor on her mother's end, a pan or a tray, and she said a word she usually saved for the landlord. Then, in a different voice, thick: "Of course you are. Of course you are, baby. I told Dot. I told Dot you'd make it."

"There's two of us."

"Who's the other one?"

Emma looked at the rain. "Alexander Blake."

"The boy with the father."

"That's the one."

"Well." Her mother breathed out. Emma could picture her, one hand on the pass-through, the dish towel over her shoulder. "Then you'll just have to be better than him."

"Yeah."

"You are better than him."

"Yeah, Mom."

"I mean it. I gotta go, the eggs are-" A shout. The line clicked, then went dead.

Emma sat with the phone in her lap for a while. She didn't tell her mother about the page. She didn't tell her about the printer, or the beagle, or the number. Her mother had put that notice on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon, and there was no way to take a lemon off a fridge once it was up.

Alexander was on the library steps at four, alone, on the top step with his bag between his feet. He wasn't doing anything. No phone, no friends, just elbows on his knees, watching the rain run off the gutter. He looked up when her shadow crossed his shoes.

"Wilson."

She held out the page. He didn't take it.

"Where'd you get this?"

"I told you. The tray."

"Mrs. Oduya clears the tray at seven-thirty. She says it was empty."

He said nothing.

"You said an hour before assembly. That's what, seven-forty? And she says nothing was there." Emma's voice was getting thin, and she hated it. "So either she's lying or you are. And she doesn't lie."

"Maybe I'm bad at telling time."

"Where did you get it?"

Alexander stood up. Slowly, the way people do when they don't want to spook a dog. He was taller than she liked on the steps, and he had a smudge of something dark on the heel of his hand, ink or graphite. He looked at the page, then at her face, then back at the page.

"Somebody handed it to me," he said.

"Who?"

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"It doesn't change what's on the paper." He pushed his hair back with one hand. "Look, you want to hate me, that's fine, that's been your hobby since sophomore year. But if you walked into that room with a bad number, I'd have heard about it, and I'd have-" He stopped.

"You'd have what?"

"Forget it."

"You'd have loved it," Emma said. "Admit it."

A beat. The rain filled it.

"Yeah," Alexander said, quietly. "I would've."

Then he picked up his bag, hooked it over one shoulder, and went down the steps past her, close enough that his sleeve brushed her arm. He didn't look back. Wet gravel crunched under his shoes until a car door shut somewhere beyond the hedge.

She went back inside. The library was nearly empty by then, just a boy asleep over a physics text and Mrs. Oduya's cart parked by the periodicals. Emma sat down at terminal six again and opened the account settings.

The password field wanted the old one first.

She typed it, hands cold. Then she picked a new one, a long one, with a number in it that meant something only to her, and the first try came back invalid. The second came back invalid. Her fingers kept landing on the wrong keys, and on the third try she had to hold her right wrist with her left hand to get it to stop shaking.