VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
USA * Canada * UK * Ireland * Australia
New Zealand * India * South Africa * China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Katelyn Detweiler
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Detweiler, Katelyn.
Immaculate / Katelyn Detweiler.
pages cm
Summary: Mina, seventeen, has everything going for her until she discovers she is pregnant and no one, especially her boyfriend and her father, will believe that she is a virgin except for the few who have faith that miracles are possible and that her unborn child could be the greatest miracle of all.
ISBN 978-0-698-15564-0
[1. Pregnancy—Fiction. 2. Faith—Fiction. 3. Virginity—Fiction. 4. Family life— Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.D48Imm 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014049410
Version_1
To Carebear & Denny,
because your faith makes all things possible.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
the beginning
the first trimester
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
the second trimester
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
the third trimester
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
Acknowledgments
About the author
“There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
—ATTRIBUTED TO ALBERT EINSTEIN
the beginning
Whenever I think back to that night at the restaurant, that night that changed everything—and I do mean absolutely everything—I wonder if I could have done or said anything different, somehow convinced the old woman that she had the wrong girl. That my life was just fine as it was, no life-altering, world-altering miracles necessary, though I appreciated the once-in-a-few-millennia-or-so offer.
Or maybe . . . maybe there’d never been a choice at all, no right or wrong answer.
Maybe the decision had already been made for me from the second my life began.
• • •
At the time, she was just one more obstacle standing between me and my freedom, one more slice of wilting pizza to heat up in the oven, one more sticky table to wipe down before I could untie my apron and savor the last precious minutes of my Friday night. It wasn’t even just a regular Friday—this Friday had been the last day of junior year, a night to rejoice, to be giddy and high on all the gloriousness of the summer that stretched out ahead. But instead I was scraping grease off pizza pans and stacking towers of plastic dressing containers in the refrigerator.
I’d never seen her there before, an occurrence which in and of itself was something of note at Frankie and Friends’ Pizzeria. Between me, my parents, and my seven-year-old sister, Gracie, we were somehow known or connected to most people in the town one way or another. More often than not I was serving overflowing plates of fettuccini Alfredo to one of my old elementary school teachers or one of my mother’s colleagues from the Green Hill Historical Society, someone who would much rather talk about how I’d scored on the SATs or where I was applying to college than about our dinner specials for the night. The same was true for any public place in all of Green Hill, Pennsylvania—not that “all of” means that much in a town that spans about ten miles and has five thousand or so residents, give or take a few recent babies or nursing-home casualties—so, really, Frankie’s was no exception. No grocery store, coffee shop, or doctor’s office was safe from the threat of discovery and the inevitable and generally unnecessary conversation that followed.
I was staring at the clock by that point in the night, swirling a spoon through the vat of day-old garlic knots and oil, when I heard the bell above the front door jingle. I straightened and glanced back, hoping it was just Frankie or one of the guys from the kitchen coming in after a cigarette break out on the front lot. But instead there was a very short, very wrinkled old woman in a worn patchwork jacket, struggling to keep the front door open as she strained against her tall black cane. After successfully making it across the threshold, she lifted her hunched shoulders and took in the view, bright green eyes scanning the booths and the counter until her gaze met mine. She grinned at me, her lips curling to reveal two scattered rows of broken, yellowed teeth.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” I asked, shifting as best as I could into my perky waitress mode, an automated tone that probably did little to hide the fact that helping her was actually the last thing I wanted to do at 9:55 on a Friday night.