Far from the Tree(27)

“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.

She sank down on the floor under the sink farthest away from the door, hugging her knees to her chest. The floor was cold, which was good, because Grace was fairly sure that her skin was on fire, and also, her hand was throbbing. Punching someone in the face, it turned out, hurt like hell, and she pressed her knuckles against the tiled wall, hissing a little.

It was hard to catch her breath. Like it had been when Peach was being born, like her body was working separately from her brain, and she closed her eyes and tried to breathe. The room was cool and quiet and there were probably twenty people now looking for her, but Grace didn’t care.

She just wanted it to stay quiet.

After a few minutes, the door swung open and a boy walked in. Grace had never seen him before, but it wasn’t like she had been super present during her last few months at school.

Either way, it was pretty obvious that the guy wasn’t expecting to see her on the floor.

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that anyone was . . .” he said, then glanced back at the door. “Wait, is this the girls’ bathroom or . . . ?”

Grace shook her head, still crying. She hadn’t even realized she was crying, but her cheeks were wet and her hair stuck to them when she moved her head.

“Are you . . . ?” The boy backed up, then took a step forward, a slow-motion cha-cha. “Shit, I’m sorry, I’m so bad when people cry. Are you . . . okay?”

“I’m fine,” Grace said, and apparently it was Opposite Day in her head, because fine was definitely not the word to describe her at that moment.

He continued standing by the door. “I’m not calling you a liar or anything, but you don’t look fine.”

Grace started crying again.

“What’d you do to your hand?”

“I punched Adam Dupane in the head three times,” she told him. There was no way to make it sound nicer than that, so Grace didn’t bother trying. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t find out, anyway. There was probably already video online. Grace was going to get expelled, she realized, and was surprised by how nice that sounded to her.

“Wow.” The guy’s eyes widened. “Well, I don’t know who Adam Dupane is, but you seem like a nice person, so he probably had it coming.”

“He’s a dick,” Grace said.

“A total dick,” the guy agreed. She couldn’t tell if he was humoring her or teasing her, but Grace didn’t care.

“Um, you probably need to put something on that,” he said, motioning to her swollen hand, then set his backpack down and pulled some paper towels off the machine and ran them under the cold water. “Here.” He passed them to Grace. “It’s not exactly an ice pack but it’ll help.”