Stalker Girl by Rosemary Graham Read Free Book Online

plastic cup.
    “So I guess this means—”
    Her father sighed into his phone, sending a crackly static into her ear. “Yeah. That’s the bad-news part. I’m really sorry. Ann said I should go. That there’s nothing I can do here, and with the grant and everything . . . She’s already at sixteen weeks, and the doctor thinks we can breathe easy since the miscarriages were both at eight weeks—”
    “Sixteen weeks? That’s four months!? And you’re telling me now?”
    “I know. It’s crazy, but we didn’t realize it ourselves until two weeks ago. Ann’s cycle’s been off since the fertility treatments, which also made her gain weight.”
    “Mm-hmm.”
    “We’ll go next summer. I promise. No matter what.”
    “Mm-hmm.”
    “Listen. Ann and I were talking, and we have an idea. Why don’t you come out here for the summer?”
    “To Greenville ?”
    “Yes, Carly, to Greenville. You say it like it’s Mars. It’s really a great place to be in summer. I’ll pay you to be my research assistant. We can still get a lot done even if we’re not at the site.”
    “Like what?”
    “I’ve got findings that need writing up. There’s correspondence. You could take a summer-school class, get to know the campus from a student’s point of view.”
    Greenville, Ohio, population 3,167, home to Denman College, was the last place Carly wanted to spend the summer. Holidays and school vacations were boring enough. But in a little over a year she’d be moving there to start her freshman year at Denman, where as the child of a faculty member, she would get free tuition and was pretty much guaranteed admission.
    Before he and Ann bought their house and spent something like fifty thousand dollars trying to get Ann pregnant, Carly’s going to Denman had been talked about as a “possibility,” a backup plan if there wasn’t enough money for her to go elsewhere. But now, if she was going to college—and neither of her academic-professional parents could so much as imagine she wouldn’t—she was going to Denman.
    Denman was a perfectly fine school. And if it had been on one of the coasts, or closer to a real city (Columbus didn’t count), or if her father didn’t teach there, she might have been interested. It did have a good, if small, archaeology department.
    But it was surrounded by cornfields.
    And Amish people who sometimes drove their horse-drawn buggies into town.
    And the one friend Carly had in that town, Jolie Albright, who lived next door to her father and Ann, had not only become a meth-head, she’d robbed a 7-Eleven and gone to Juvie. (Which, Jolie’s mother had confided to Carly on her last visit, Jolie’s parents were actually glad about because they figured she might at least get clean that way.)
    No way Carly was spending any more time in Greenville than she absolutely had to.

6
    AN HOUR after that conversation with her father, Carly and Val sat at the SJNY bar, contemplating life’s injustices.
    “How far along is she?” Val asked.
    “Sixteen weeks.”
    “Sixteen weeks? And he’s just telling you now?”
    “I know. I hate that baby. Or embryo or whatever it is.”
    “Fetus.”
    “What? ”
    “First it’s a zygote. Then it’s a blastocyst. After it makes its way down the fallopian tube it’s an embryo. After eight weeks, it’s a fetus.”
    A year had passed since Val aced the AP Bio exam, and she still had that stuff down. If anyone was ever destined to be a doctor, she was.
    “And you don’t hate it.”
    “Yeah. I do. I’ve waited years for this trip. Years .”
    “You can’t hold that against the kid.”
    “Wanna bet?” Carly knew she wouldn’t, though, not once it was here. “And no way am I going there for the summer.”
    “Of course not. But what are you going to do?”
    Carly shrugged. “Maybe volunteer at the Brooklyn dig again.”
    “Okay. Good. And you’ll work here nights.”
    “Is your mother okay with that?”
    “She will be. Hey, mamá— ” Val’s mother