As for Macon, I hadn’t talked to him much since that night in my side yard. He seemed to be coming to school even less, and when he did I was skilled at avoiding him. But I still felt a pang whenever I saw him, the way I still felt a soreness in my wrist every morning, or a pain in my ribs when I lay a certain way at night. In March, when I heard his mother had kicked him out, I worried. And in mid-April, when I heard he was dating Elizabeth Gunderson, I cried for two days straight.

I made myself concentrate on something more important: the baby. I saw it, small and hardly recognizable, when we had the ultrasound during Month Six. It had hands and feet and eyes and a nose. The doctor knew the sex, but Scarlett didn’t want to know; she wanted it to be a surprise.

We had a baby shower at my house, inviting Cameron and his mother, the girls from the Teen Mothers Support Group, and even Ginny Tabor, who bought the baby a huge stuffed yellow duck that quacked when you squeezed it. But something was wrong with it, and it quacked whenever you picked it up, and then wouldn’t shut up until you took its head off, an option we never had with Ginny herself. Cameron’s mother sewed a beautiful layette set, and my parents gave Scarlett ten babysitting coupons, for whenever she needed a break. For my gift, I had blown up a recent picture of me and Scarlett, sitting on her front steps together. Scarlett’s belly was huge, and she had her hands folded over it, her head on my shoulder. I had it framed and Scarlett immediately hung it over the baby’s crib, where she or he would see it every day.

“The three of us,” she said, and I nodded.

And then we just waited, circling in a holding pattern, while the due date got closer and closer.

We planned. We bought a baby name book and made lists of good ones: something simple, not bringing to mind someone else, like Scarlett’s, or needing a paragraph of explanation, like mine. We both knew how far a name could take you.

We went to Lamaze classes, me sitting in a long row of fathers, her head in my lap. We were the youngest ones there. We breathed and we pushed, and I tried to tell myself that I could handle this when it happened, that I could do it. Scarlett was scared and tired, with all that huffing and puffing, and I always nodded at her, confident.

And Marion had come around. She acted like she was firm on adoption until about Month Seven, early March, when I walked in on her in the nursery. The sun was slanting through the window, warm and bright, bouncing off the yellow walls, and the constellations Cameron had painted on the ceiling. Everything was ready: the clothes all folded in the drawers, the crib and changing table in place, the stroller finally assembled (with the help of a neighbor, who was an engineer and the only one who could figure out the instructions). She was just standing there, arms crossed, surveying it all with a smile on her face. And I knew it then. There’d never been a question of where this baby was going or who it belonged with. Of course, when she saw me she turned around and scowled, muttering something about paint fumes, and hurried out. But that was Marion. I knew what I had seen.

And lastly, I walked with Scarlett to the mailbox as she carried the letter we’d worked and re-worked, all these months. Dear Mrs. Sherwood, it began, You don’t know me, but I have something to say. She dropped it in, the mailbox door clanked, and there was no going back. If we heard from her, we heard from her. If not, this baby had enough love to carry on.

And now, on May twelfth, we were going to the prom. I was doing this for Scarlett; it was important to her. When Cameron asked her, I had to go, too. Which is how I ended up with Noah Vaughn.

Actually, it was my mother’s fault. She brought up the prom one Friday night when the Vaughns were over, Mrs. Vaughn lit up like the sun, and it went from there. Of course I keep telling Halley she should go, my mother said, I mean, it’s the prom. Well, Noah, I can’t believe you haven’t mentioned this, said Mrs. Vaughn. Well, Halley’s best friend is going, you know Scarlett, but Halley hasn’t been asked, said my mother, and now I was realizing what was happening, how awful this could be, as Noah watched me from across the table and my father giggled at his plate. But Noah doesn’t have a date either, said Mrs. Vaughn, so I don’t see why you two couldn’t ... And then my mother, who had learned something, looked across the table, realizing too late, and said quickly, Actually I think Halley might have plans that weekend, but of course now it was too late, way too late, and Mrs. Vaughn was already clapping her hands together excitedly, and smiling big, and my mother kept trying to get me to look at her but I wouldn’t. All I could see was Noah across the table, eating a slice of pizza, with cheese all over his chin.

Of course Scarlett was ecstatic. She dragged me out to buy a dress and shoes, and insisted we get ready together. And I went along, trying not to complain, because I knew somehow that this was the end of something for her, before the baby came and everything changed.

“Smile!” my mother said, stepping back across the kitchen with her camera’s red light blinking. My father was leaning against the kitchen door, making faces at me. “Oh, you two look just great. So glamorous!”

Scarlett put her arm over my shoulder, pulling me closer, tighter in for the shot. I saw the red in her hair, her easy smile, the small sprinkling of freckles across her nose.

“Okay!” my mother said, now against the far wall, crouching down. “Now say prom night!”

“Prom night!” Scarlett said, still smiling.

“Prom night,” I said, more softly, my eyes on her, and not the camera, as the flash popped bright all around me.