"So he just started telling me that I should quit, that I should grow a backbone. And I was irritable so I told him that I didn't want to end up like him. It spiraled from there and at the end, I told him not to come back for a while so I think that I broke things off with him. I've been so moody lately though, I'm totally PMSing so I think maybe I overreacted."

"He'll come back," Bella assures me as we walk into the Walgreens so that I can get some tampons because I realized that I'm out. Bella wants to get some junk food for a movie night too so she tagged along. "He'd be stupid not to. And you were obviously stressed so he shouldn't have instigated anything."

"I don't know," I mumble.

"Even if he doesn't, don't worry about it. He was just a fling, wasn't he? I think that it could be good for you that you got all of the crazy out of your system at once. Now you can move on from everything and get back to your life."

"Yeah, I guess you're right. It's not like we had a future anyway so it's good that I ended things now. I was just wasting my time with him," I decide. "And he made it pretty clear that he doesn't think very much of me. It's for the best."

We head over to the food section of the store and Bella grabs are favorite snacks from the shelves. I see the Fritos in front of me and decide to grab a bag of those too.

"Fritos?" Bella frowns at me in confusion. "You hate Fritos."

I just shrug at her. "I don't know, I'm just craving them. So are we going out tomorrow night?"

"I was planning on it. You want to tag along?" She asks me curiously.

"Yeah, sure, it's Saturday night, I want to do something," I decide with a nod. "I can't stay grumpy for the rest of the week, I need to cheer up and just stewing in my room won't help."

"Alright, yeah, it'll be fun," She agrees with me as she grabs a paper coffee cup and fills it with the coffee blend in the brewer near the snacks.

When I get a whiff of her coffee, I cringe from the smell. "Are you sure their coffee is good? That smells horrible."

"What?" She wonders with a small laugh. "Wren, this is your favorite blend."

"Maybe something is wrong with the brew, I feel like I'm going to throw up just standing near it," I mumble as we head toward the feminine hygiene aisle so that I can grab my stuff before we head out of the store. We're spending our Friday night in with her roommate, Esther, and I'm pretty excited to just spend some time with Bella.

"You feel nauseous," She says slowly. "I mean, you are on your period, right? Have you actually started your period yet?"

"No but I can tell that it's coming. What's with the sudden interest in my cycle, Bell?" I ask her in confusion as I grab a box of tampons from the shelf.

"Wren," She says my name to get my attention so I turn to look at her and see that she's holding a pregnancy test.

"Fuck off," I walk past her toward the front of the store to check out.

"I'm serious."

"I'm not pregnant."

"You sound like you are," She tells me. "Coffee makes you nauseous, you're craving Fritos. Do you do that every month? Because I don't think so."

"Bella," I start walking away again. "Stop."

"I'm buying it," Bella decides. "And you're peeing on this stick. Just to make me feel better."

I just let her buy the stupid stick because I know that I can't be pregnant. It's time for me to get my period so it lines up that I'm having weird cravings. One time, I ate an entire jar of pickles in an hour because of my period. Not to mention the fact that every time that I've had sex, it's been protected. I know that condoms aren't 100% effective but I'm on birth control too so those odds are on my side. I can't be pregnant.

"What would you do?" She asks me in the car. "If you really are pregnant?"

"I'm not."

"But if you are," She repeats.

"I don't know," I admit. "Just thinking about that situation freaks me out. You're just being paranoid. I want some Fritos, that doesn't mean that I'm pregnant. And I use condoms, I'm on the pill."

"I know. You probably aren't," Bella finally sides with me. "But don't you want to be 100% sure?"

"Well, I'm 99% sure and that's good enough for me," I sigh. Pulling into the parking lot of the apartments, we take our plastic bags of food with us into the complex and then into my apartment just to put my stuff away before we head over to her room for our movie night.

"It's not good enough for me," She holds out the pregnancy test for me as we get into my apartment. When I don't take it right away, she puts her coffee up to my face and I get a big whiff of it. It makes my stomach churn again and I start gagging. Luckily, I don't start throwing up but it feels like I might. That doesn't usually happen so I'm starting to get nervous too. "Just pee on it."

"I don't have to go to the bathroom right now," I mumble, staring at the pregnancy test in her hand but I don't take it from her. What would I do? And then it suddenly hits me that if I was pregnant, I wouldn't know who the father is. How would I tell my parents? They'd kick me to the curb for sure because not only am I unmarried but I don't even have a boyfriend at all.

Would I even be able to finish this semester? How can I take the LSATS seven months pregnant?

Bella, not taking any of my excuses, goes to the fridge and gets a bottle of water and gives that to me. "Then start chugging," She insists.

"Bella, you're being ridiculous."

"My coffee almost made you vomit," She reminds me and then she gets her phone out. "I'm looking up other symptoms."

"Can't we just go watch movies like we planned?" I whine to her but she's already ignoring me, looking it up signs of pregnancy on her phone.

"Food aversions or cravings," She reads after a moment of typing. "Check."

"Alright, I'm drinking the water," I relent to her in hopes of that making her stop talking. She's really starting to freak me out. I'm just starting my period, she's totally overreacting.

"Mood swings," She continues. "Check. Feeling bloated. Check."

"What? How can you tell?" I ask her with a small laugh.

"You're wearing sweats," She points out.

"Okay, well I'm always bloated before my period," I defend myself.

"Frequent urination, fatigue, and sore breasts," Bella reads off the next three symptoms and then to check if I have sore breasts, she brings her hand back and then slaps my left boob.

"Ow!" I shriek, quickly moving away from her so that she can't reach me anymore.

"Check," She continues.

"Well, it's sore because you just slapped it, dumbass," I tell her.

"Nausea," She reads the next one. "Check. The last one is a high temperature so we'll check that later. Wren, that's at least five of the ten symptoms. Don't blame it on your period, just pee on the stick and prove me wrong."

I don't want to pee on the stick. I'm a firm believer that if you ignore a problem long enough, it'll just go away. So if I don't know that I'm pregnant or not, nothing will happen. Even though I'm still sure that I'm not because I can still blame my period for those symptoms that she's pointed out.

"I know that it's freaky but even if you don't take the test, you'll know in a few days if you don't get your period," She points out. "So you might as well just get it over with now."

I open my mouth to tell her she's being ridiculous, but a knock at the door interrupts me. For a second, I'm excited for the distraction but when I open the door and see Clayton on the other side, I deflate again.

"Jesse isn't here," I tell him.

"I need you to blame me for everything," He blurts out without so much as a greeting. His face is red like he's been crying. "Okay? Make me the villain in this story, I'll take it. Jesse has been begging me to break up with you this entire time. He'd end things for months at a time because I wouldn't do it and I just kept wearing him down each time."

"Unless you put a gun to his head and forced him to lie to me, I don't see your point."

"I made you feel like shit and you still stayed with me," He says while Bella mutters something about him being a sociopath. "So clearly, I have some awful ability to manipulate the people I love into staying around despite a million red flags. Because I'm the villain and I fucking suck, okay? And I sacrificed you so that I could be with Jesse. Our relationship made it easier to see him without people getting suspicious and I'm not saying it was easy, because I fucking adore you. You are... You were my best friend. But I can't breathe without him and I was going to do whatever I had to do to keep him, which meant cheating on you and convincing him that it was okay."

"Why are you telling me all of this?" I asked once he let me get a word in. "Are you trying to get me to hate you more than I already do?"

"If Jesse loses you because of this, he's never going to forgive me." He starts and then an unexpected sob rips through him. I don't know if I've ever seen him cry like that before. "I'm still being selfish, but at least I'm being honest, right?"

"This is truly pathetic," Bella says from the couch. "You did all of that to be with Jesse and now you're going to lose him because of it."

"Yes, I fucking realize that, Bella," He snaps at her. "Clearly, it was a stupid plan that's now completely backfired and now I've hurt literally everybody that I care about and it's all been for nothing. I'm not asking you to do anything for my sake, but Jesse loves you and I know you miss him. He won't tell you it's all my fault because it'll sound like a cop out coming from him. You're not stupid so I know you won't believe that he's done nothing wrong. Of course he made bad decisions, but I was the one convincing him to do it, even though it was eating him up inside the entire time."

I swallow hard. "Like you said, he made his own decisions."

"Wren-"

"We're kind of in the middle of something here," Bella interrupts him, getting up from the couch to join us by the front door. "So throw your pity party somewhere else, Dr. Evil."

With one swift nudge out the door, Clayton stumbles tearfully into the hallway and she slams the door shut. It's such a pitiful scene that I almost feel bad before I remember who I'm almost feeling bad for.

I suppose I should be upset at what Clay said, but I was really kind of refreshed. It was the first honest conversation I feel like I've had with either him or Jesse since shit hit the fan. 

"Well. That was weird," Bella said, pointing to the pregnancy test still in its box on the coffee table. "Now, where were we?"

"Fine." I'll get this over with now, to show her that she's crazy, and to get back to our movie night plans and discussing whatever the hell just happened with Clay. So I start chugging water until I have to pee and then hurry into the bathroom.

"What's it say?" Bella calls through the door after I've only been in there for a minute or two.

"Nothing yet, Bell," I assure her. Once I've eventually succeeded in getting some pee on the stick, I sit it on the sink and wash my hands.

"I heard you flush, what about now?" She asks me.

"The box says that you have to wait five to ten minutes," I open the door and she comes into the bathroom as we wait for the test to show up negative to prove her wrong.

"Alright, that's not too long to wait."

"You sound more nervous than I am," I notice with an amused laugh. Although her nerves are starting to rub off on me, I think that I'm doing well with hiding that. Fake it 'til you make it, right?

"I don't want you to be pregnant, Wren," She tells me. "But if you are and you don't find out now, it could be dangerous. You know, what if we go drinking tomorrow? Or you get into another fight or something?"

"I just... I wouldn't even know who the father is," I admit to her. "That's so bad. That's the kind of shit people get put on Maury for. I'm going to be on Maury, Bell."

"No, you aren't," She promises me.

"I slept with Clay just a week before we broke up and then Shaw after that. Josh was only a week ago so I don't think that it could be him but maybe. That's three guys," I say slowly. "What do I tell them?"

"You don't have to tell them anything."

"I think that they'll notice when I run into Shaw in the food court and he sees that I've swallowed a fucking watermelon or when Clay comes over and I'm throwing up because of his seafood I have to tell them but how do I tell them that they just might be the father because I've been sleeping around for the past month and I don't really know who the baby inside of me belongs to."

"Okay, now you're freaking out. Like you said, you're probably just having some bad period symptoms. It's probably nothing, just your period," Bella says from beside me. "And if it's not, we'll deal with it."

"Would I raise it? I would be a terrible mother. I can't even take care of myself most of the time. And child birth? I can't even handle getting shots." I was keeping it together so well until the reality of the situation hits me like a tidal wave. An entire, horrible future starts flashing before my eyes.

"Wren."

"Bella, why'd you make me do this oh my god I'm going to have a panic attack or something, I can't breathe," I start slowly hyperventilating and the room starts spinning. I'm coming to terms with the fact that there is a very real possibility that I could be pregnant. I'm never nauseous when I get my period so the whole reaction to coffee thing is starting to terrify me. "And Shaw liked it really rough so those condoms could have easily broken. He was just a phase, oh my god, he can't be the father of my child. But Clay... I don't want a kid with him either. I would have when we were actually sleeping together but now? How would that even work?"

"Wren," She says my name again. "Everything is going to be fine. Just breathe, alright? You're probably not pregnant. And if you are, you don't necessarily have to have the baby. You had your last period so you're less than a month pregnant probably. If you actually are pregnant, you can get an abortion."

"My parents would murder me," I tell her. "There's no way. Well, they'll murder me either way, I guess. I just won't tell them. I can go nine months without seeing my parents, right? I'll cancel Christmas and Thanksgiving, I'll just stay here and then I'll have the baby and I'll give it up for adoption and they'll never know."

"They'll never know if you get an abortion either," She adds. "Obviously, if you're not comfortable with that, you don't have to consider it but it's just a thought.

"I'm such a mess," I exhale, wiping a few tears from my cheek bones. "I'm such a fucking disaster, what am I even doing? How have I let Clay get to me so badly that I just ruined everything about myself? Having sex with strangers, doubting myself, hating myself even. How have I let him ruin me?"

"He didn't ruin you," She promises me. "He just hurt you is all but you'll be okay. Baby or not, you will get your shit together and move on from Clay. Someday, you'll laugh about this whole thing and say 'Clay? I can't believe I ever saw anything in him' and you'll be a superstar. He won't even matter at all."

"Is it ready?"

She looks over at the test on the sink and shakes her head. "Nope, nothing yet."

"I'm never having sex again," I mumble, leaning against the wall of the bathroom. I don't know how long it's been but I'm just going to let Bella worry about that because the whole world is spinning around me.

"That's drastic and I don't believe you," Bella informs me with a short laugh. "But if that's what you feel like you need to do, I will totally support you. I will barricade you from all guys who want to sleep with you and tell them that you've joined a convent."

"I'll appreciate that one, Bell," I sniffle and then laugh as well. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Me neither, really," She jokes in hopes of improving my mood which I desperately need because I quickly went from totally fine and sure that I'm not pregnant to a completely panicked mess. I'm not so panicked because of the potential of pregnancy but mostly because I've come to a realization about just how far down the rabbit hole I've fallen since I walked in on Clay and Jesse in my garage. I'm terrified of being pregnant, sure, but I'm also terrified that I've lost myself in all of this madness.

"I see something," Bella announces after a short silence.

"Tell me what it is, I can't look," I stop breathing altogether.

"Alright, I'm on it," She steps closer to the sink and she leans over to see what it says. I close my eyes so that I can't read her expression either. My hands start getting clammy too. I feel like I might collapse.

"Hurry up," I hiss when she doesn't respond immediately. "What is it?"

"Shit, Wren," She mutters quietly. "It's positive."