The Quarterback's Love Child (A Secret Baby Sports Romance Book 1) by Stephanie Brother Read Free Book Online Page B

wait for her to speak. She moved me to the side to keep us away from prying eyes and ears, but there was no such thing here. Everyone was already talking about us being huddled in a corner talking.
    “So, her mom came in and asked for stuff for her to be homeschooled, because she was really sick.”
    What?? Michelle wasn’t coming back?
    This whole thing was getting out of control.
    “I don’t know, this feels like last time,” she sighed as she ignored my stare.
    I shook my head, “Last time?”
    She nodded, “Uh-huh, last time she didn’t come back to school after the summer. The same thing. Her mom said that she was sick and then they both went to stay with her Grandma in Kansas. Then the weird thing happened.”
    It was as if she was reliving it and while doing so, she started to put the pieces together.
    “What weird thing?”
    “Oh, Michelle came back. She had put on weight and I remember thinking that if she was sick, would she have really put on so much weight?”
    I didn’t see what that had to do with anything.
    “Anyway, that’s when her mom turned up a few weeks later, with Mia. She said that she’d been pregnant and, after miscarrying so many times before she had Michelle, she’d needed to rest. So, Michelle was with her mom the whole time.”
    Memories of what my mom had said flooded through my mind. I wanted to ask Faith if she was thinking the same thing, but the whole thing seemed so obscure. I was going to ask Faith how long ago this was. It couldn’t have been last year, because she’d started in the fall like everyone else and that was when we started dating. If you could call it that, so it must have been the previous year. I couldn’t because Harmony came over and said, “Something’s up with Michelle. I don’t think she’s sick.”
    “Why?”
    I could hardly speak as I started to think of my first time with Michelle, the fact that she was so experienced. The rumor must have been true, but asking Faith meant that I was starting gossip. Rumors that I didn’t want to start, especially about the girl I loved.
    “Well, for one, the doctor’s not been to see her. She hasn’t been to the hospital. In fact, since Wednesday, she hasn’t left the house.”
    Harmony lived across the street from Michelle so she would have a better idea of what was going on.
    “And to make things worse, on Wednesday night, Ben - who’s a senior - said that he could hear screaming and crying from the house. He said he thinks that it was Michelle, but he wasn’t sure.”
    They knew.
    They’d found out.
    Michelle was being punished for it.
    My heart felt as if it had stopped beating as I walked away from them both. Now, I understood why Michelle had said that Harmony would make a good journalist. She had more information about the fate of Michelle than any of us did; the question now was what was I going to do with this new information? I had to do something, but what?
     
     
     
    Chapter Fifteen
    Michelle
     
    I gave in when the smell of my feces and urine became unbearable. I hadn’t bathed since I had been locked in the cage and the whole idea of starving myself and dying became the furthest thing from my mind. I thought about the people that I had read about in history class, the ones who had gone on hunger strikes for things that they had believed in.
    Why couldn’t I be like one of them?
    In 2013 the Californian prisoners had gone on a hunger strike, because they were being treated like animals and not humans. I remembered watching it on TV, one of the very few times that I was allowed to watch it in our house. Dad, at one point, said that the TV was part of the demons’ way of communicating with us all. Until he heard about the Three Angels Broadcasting Network when he went on one of his annual fellowships. For a full week he hadn’t been in the house, and even Mom was a different person and would take us out for ice cream treats when he wasn’t around.
    I sat on the chair and started to