Mr. Larson waited until she slammed her door shut. “Have you seen the nurse today?”

“I don’t need to see the nurse,” I mumbled, too embarrassed to tell him about my plan. The R5 train barreled by a Planned Parenthood on my way to Bryn Mawr every day. I just had to get there after school and everything would be fine.

“Whatever you tell her will be confidential.” Mr. Larson jabbed his finger into his chest. “Whatever you tell me will be confidential.”

“I don’t have anything to tell you.” I strained to inject my words with attitude. With all the dark, tortured teenage angst that I actually had now.

Mr. Larson sighed. “TifAni, she can make sure you don’t get pregnant. Let her help you.”

It was like that time my dad came into my room and said he was doing laundry, reaching for a pile of dirty clothes in the corner. I was lying in bed, reading Jane, but when I saw what he was doing I shot upright. “Don’t!”

Too late, he was holding a pair of my underwear stained maroon with period blood. He froze like a bank robber holding a bag of bills and stuttered, “I’ll, uh, get your mother.” I don’t know what she was supposed to do. Dad never wanted a daughter, never really wanted kids I don’t think, but probably could have dealt with a boy. He married Mom five months after they met, a few weeks after she found out she was pregnant. “He was furious,” my aunt told me once, her lips purple with Merlot, “but he came from a traditional Italian family and his mother would have had his head if he didn’t do the honorable thing.” Apparently, he perked up when the doctor told them they were having a boy. Anthony, they wanted to name me. I don’t like to imagine the look on Dad’s face when I was actually born, when the doctor chuckled. “Whoops!”

“I’m taking care of it, don’t worry,” I told Mr. Larson. I pushed back my chair and slung my book bag over my shoulder.

Mr. Larson couldn’t even look at me. “TifAni, you are one of my most talented students. You have a very promising future. I would never want to see that compromised.”

“Can I go now?” I put my weight on one hip, and Mr. Larson nodded sadly.

The HOs and the Hairy Legs were piled up at their usual table, which had never been big enough for them. A few outliers always ended up at the adjoining table, their chairs angled at a sharp diagonal so that they could catch every word of the conversation they weren’t really a part of.

“Finny!” To my immense relief, Dean held up his hand up for a high five. “Where have you been?” Those four words—“where have you been?”—chased all but one fear out. Liam was sitting far too close to Olivia, the lunchtime sun brilliant on her slick nose, spotlighting the fray in her beer brown curls. She was someone who, years later, I could have seen as beautiful. A little oil control powder, regular keratin treatments, her whippet limbs made for loose, drapey, bra-adverse pieces by Helmut Lang. I would have hated myself next to her, come to think of it.

“Hey, guys.” I stood at the head of the table, clutching the straps of my book bag like it was a life jacket attached to my back, like I’d float away without it.

Olivia ignored me, but Hilary lifted one lazy corner of her mouth, lashless eyes regarding me with an amused glaze. I expected this when I agreed to Dean’s terms. It may seem like it wasn’t the smartest move to betray the HOs, but Dean was a powerful force. Get in with him and the rest of the guys, and it didn’t matter if Olivia and Hilary secretly hated me. They would hide it, and that was all that mattered.

Dean shifted left in his seat, patting the open sliver next to him. I sat down, my thigh pressing against his thigh. I swallowed a scorching mouthful of acid, wishing it was Liam’s leg next to mine.

Dean leaned in, his French fry breath in my ear. “So how you feeling, Finny?”

“Fine.” A film of sweat was collecting between our legs. I didn’t want Liam to see this, I didn’t want Liam to think that out of the three, I’d chosen Dean.

“What are you doing after practice?” Dean asked.

“Going right home,” I said. “I’m grounded.”

“Grounded?” Dean practically shouted. “What are you, like, twelve?”

I flushed when everyone laughed. “I know. I hate my parents.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with. . . .” Dean trailed off.

“Bad grades.”

“Phew.” Dean wiped his brow. “Because I mean, I like you, but if my parents find out about that party, well, I don’t like you that much.” He laughed aggressively.

The bell rang and everyone stood, leaving their greasy paper plates and candy wrappers on the table for the janitor to collect. Olivia made a beeline for the quad, which she would cut across to get to Algebra II before anyone else. She was a good student, a nervous student—breaking down in tears over a B+ on a pop quiz in Chem that pretty much everyone else failed. She didn’t notice when I hurried after Liam.

“Hey.” My head lined up perfectly with Liam’s shoulder. Dean was too tall, too big, a circus gorilla who would rip you limb from limb if you didn’t hug him back.

Liam looked at me and laughed.

“What?” I laughed back, uneasily.

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and, for just a brief moment, I entertained the relief. Maybe he hadn’t been acting aloof, maybe it really was all in my head.

“You’re crazy, girl.”

The cafeteria had emptied out. I paused in front of the door, anchoring Liam to me. “Can I ask you something?”

Liam tilted his head back and groaned. The way he said “Whaaaat?” was how I imagined he spoke to his mother, when he sensed the thing she had to ask him about was when he would ever get around to cleaning his filthy room.

I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. We were in this together. “Did you use a condom?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” His bright eyes rolled in a complete circle, like a ventriloquist had given him a stern shake. For a moment, his eyelids hooding the blue, he wasn’t nearly as attractive as I’d thought he was. There was something about his eyes, you could have named a Crayola crayon after them, that made him extraordinary.

“Should I be?”

Liam put his hands on my shoulders and brought his face close to mine, our foreheads almost grazing. “Tif, you only have a twenty-three percent chance of getting pregnant.”

Oh, how this random number has stuck with me through the years. The stodgy old head of the fact-checking department at The Women’s Magazine won’t even accept stats lifted from an article in The New York Times. “YOU MUST PROVIDE ORIGINAL SOURCE,” her all-staff e-mails remind us, at least once a month. Yet I was willing to accept this number, espoused by the person who I later learned found me on the floor of the guest bedroom, the square of my body from my belly button to my upper thighs naked (Peyton made a halfhearted attempt to pull my pants up for me). He dragged me into bed, wrestled my pants off my dead weight legs, and plunged inside of me without even bothering to take the rest of my clothes off. He said I woke up and moaned when he did that, and that’s how he knew I was okay with it. I lost my virginity to someone who’s never seen my breasts.

“Well.” I shuffled my feet. “I was thinking maybe I should go to Planned Parenthood. Get the morning-after pill.”

“But”—Liam grinned at me, his sweet little idiot—“it’s not the morning after.”

“It works for up to seventy-two hours.” This is how I’d spent the rest of my weekend, researching the morning-after pill on the family computer in the basement, then researching how to hide my search history.

Liam read the clock on the wall above my head. “We had sex around midnight.” He closed his eyes, his lips moving as he did the math. “So you can still make it.”