It was around that time, I think, that my aunt began to worry about me, though she tried to downplay her concerns. As we were eating Thanksgiving leftovers, she casually mentioned that I hadn’t seemed particularly chipper lately. That was the word she used: chipper. She’d also eased up a little on the tidiness thing—or maybe I was doing a better job of cleaning, but for whatever reason, she hadn’t been complaining as much recently. I could tell she was making an effort to engage me in conversation.

“Are you taking your prenatal vitamin?”

“Yes,” I answered. “It’s yummy.”

“In a couple of weeks, you’ll see the OB-GYN in Morehead City. I set up the appointment this morning.”

“Swell,” I said. I moved the food around my plate, hoping she wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t really eating.

“The food has to actually go in your mouth,” she said. “And then you have to swallow it.”

I think she was trying to be funny, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I simply shrugged.

“Can I make you something else?”

“I’m not that hungry.”

She brought her lips together before scanning the room, as if searching for magic words that would make me chipper again. “Oh, I almost forgot to ask. Did you call your parents?”

“No. I was going to call them earlier, but you took the phone cord with you.”

“You could call them after dinner.”

“I guess.”

She used her fork to cut a bite of turkey. “How are your studies going?” she asked. “You’re behind in your homework and you haven’t been doing that well on your quizzes lately.”

“I’m trying,” I answered, even though I really wasn’t.

“How about math? Remember that you have some pretty big tests coming up before Christmas break.”

“I hate math and geometry is stupid. Why does it matter whether I know how to measure the area of a trapezoid? It’s not like I’m ever going to need to use that in my real life.”

I heard her sigh. Watched her cast about again. “Did you write your history paper? I think that’s also due next week.”

“It’s almost done,” I lied. I’d been assigned to do a report on Thurgood Marshall, but I hadn’t even started it.

I could feel her eyes on me, wondering whether to believe me.

Later that night, she tried again.

I was lying in bed with Maggie-bear. I’d retreated to my room after dinner, and she was standing in the doorway, dressed in her pajamas.

“Have you thought about getting some fresh air?” my aunt asked. “Like maybe going for a walk or bike ride before you start doing your homework tomorrow?”

“There isn’t anywhere to go. Almost everything is closed for the winter.”

“How about the beach? It’s peaceful this time of year.”

“It’s too cold to go to the beach.”

“How would you know? You haven’t been outside in days.”

“That’s because I have too much homework and too many chores.”

“Have you thought about trying to meet someone closer to your own age? Maybe make some friends?”

At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Make friends?”

“Why not?”

“Because no one my age lives here.”

“Of course they do,” she said. “I showed you the school.”

The village had a single school that served children from kindergarten through high school; we’d ridden past it during the tour of the island. It wasn’t quite the single-room schoolhouse I’d seen in reruns of Little House on the Prairie, but it wasn’t much more than that, either.

“I guess I could head to the boardwalk, or maybe hit the clubs. Oh wait, Ocracoke doesn’t have either of those things.”

“I’m just saying that it might be good for you to talk to someone besides me or Gwen. It’s not healthy to stay so isolated.”

No doubt about it. But the simple fact was that I hadn’t seen a single teenager in Ocracoke since I’d arrived, and—oh yeah—I was pregnant, which was supposed to be a secret, so what would be the point anyway?

“Being here isn’t good for me, either, but no one seems to care about that.”

She adjusted her pajamas, as though searching for words in the fabric, and decided to change the subject.

“I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea to get you a tutor,” she said. “Definitely for geometry, but maybe for your other classes, too. To review your paper, for instance.”

“A tutor?”

“I believe I know someone who’d be perfect.”

I suddenly had visions of sitting beside some ancient geezer who smelled of Old Spice and mothballs and liked to talk about the good old days. “I don’t want a tutor.”

“Your finals are in January, and there are multiple exams in the next three weeks, including some big ones. I promised your parents that I’d do my best to make sure you don’t have to repeat your sophomore year.”

I hated when adults did the logic-and-guilt thing, so I retreated into the obvious. “Whatever.”

She raised an eyebrow, remaining silent. Then, finally, “Don’t forget that we have church on Sunday.”

How could I forget that? “I remember,” I finally muttered.

“Perhaps we could pick out a Christmas tree afterward.”

“Super,” I said, but all I really wanted was to pull the covers over my head in the hope of making her leave. But it wasn’t necessary; Aunt Linda turned away. A moment later, I heard her bedroom door close, and I knew that I’d be alone the rest of the night, with only my own dark thoughts to keep me company.

As miserable as the rest of the week was, Sundays were the absolute worst. Back in Seattle, I didn’t really mind going to church because there was a family there named the Taylors with four boys, all of them from one to a few years older than me. They were boy-band perfect, with white teeth and hair that always looked blow-dried. Like us, they sat in the front row—they were always on the left while we were on the right—and I’d sneak peeks at them even when I was supposed to be praying. I couldn’t help it. I’d had a massive crush on one or the other pretty much as long as I could remember, even though I never actually spoke to any of them. Morgan had better luck; Danny Taylor, one of the middle ones, who at the time was also a pretty good soccer player, took her out for ice cream one Sunday after church. I was in eighth grade at the time and desperately jealous that he’d asked her, not me. I remember sitting in my room and staring at the clock, watching the minutes pass; when Morgan finally got home, I begged her to tell me what Danny was like. Morgan, being Morgan, simply shrugged and said that he wasn’t her type, which made me want to strangle her. Morgan had guys practically drooling if she so much as walked down the sidewalk or sipped a Diet Coke in the food court at the local mall.

The point is, back home there was something interesting to see at church—more specifically, four very cute somethings—and that made the hour pass quickly. Here, though, church was not only a chore but an all-day event. There was no Catholic church in Ocracoke; the nearest one was St. Egbert’s in Morehead City, and that meant catching the ferry at seven in the morning. The ferry generally took two and a half hours to reach Cedar Island, and from there, it was another forty minutes to the church itself. The service was at eleven, which meant we had to wait yet another hour for it to begin, and the mass lasted until noon. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ferry back to Ocracoke didn’t leave until four in the afternoon, which meant killing even more time.

Oh, we’d have lunch with Gwen afterward, since she always came with us. Like my aunt, she also used to be a nun, and she considered attending services on Sundays the highlight of her week. She was nice and all, but ask any teenager how much they enjoy eating lunch with a couple of fifty-odd-year-old former nuns, and you can probably guess what it was like. After that, we’d go shopping, but it wasn’t fun shopping like at the mall or the Seattle waterfront. Instead, they’d drag me to Wal-Mart for supplies—think flour, shortening, eggs, bacon, sausage, cheese, buttermilk, various flavored coffees, and other baking stuff in bulk—and after that, we’d visit garage sales, where they would search for inexpensive books by best-selling authors and movies on videocassette that they could rent to people on Ocracoke. Added to the late-afternoon ferry ride, all of that meant that we wouldn’t get back to the house until almost seven, when the sun had long since set.

Twelve hours. Twelve long hours. Just so we could go to church.

There are, by the way, about a million better ways to spend a Sunday, but lo and behold, as Sunday morning dawned, I found myself standing at the dock in a jacket zipped to my chin, stamping one foot and then the other while the frigid air made it appear as though I were smoking invisible cigarettes. Meanwhile, my aunt and Gwen were whispering to each other and laughing and looking happy, probably because they weren’t slinging biscuits and serving coffee before the crack of dawn. When it was time, my aunt pulled her car onto the ferry, where it crammed alongside about a dozen others.

I wish I could say that the ride was either pleasant or interesting, but it wasn’t, especially in winter. Unless you enjoyed staring at gray skies and even grayer water, there was nothing to see, and if the dock had been freezing, riding on the ferry was fifty times worse. The wind seemed to blow right through me and after less than five minutes outside, my nose started running and my ears turned bright red. There was, thank God, a large central cabin on the ferry where you could escape the weather, complete with a couple of vending machines offering snacks and places to sit, which was where Gwen and my aunt hung out. As for me, I crawled into the car and stretched out on the back seat, wishing I were anywhere else and thinking about the mess I’d gotten myself into.

The day after my mom had me pee on a stick, she brought me to see Dr. Bobbi, who was maybe ten years older than my mom, and the first nonpediatrician I’d ever seen. Dr. Bobbi’s real name was Roberta, and she was an OB-GYN. She’d delivered both my sister and me, so she and my mom went way back, and I’m pretty sure my mom was mortified by the reason for our visit. After Dr. Bobbi confirmed the pregnancy, she set me up with an ultrasound, to make sure the baby was healthy. I pulled up my shirt, one of the technicians put some goop on my tummy, and I was able to hear the heartbeat. It was both cool and utterly terrifying, but what I remember most was how surreal it felt and how much I wished that all of it was just a bad dream.

But it wasn’t a dream. Because I was Catholic, abortion wasn’t even an option, and once we learned the baby was healthy, Dr. Bobbi gave us the talk. She assured both of us that I was more than mature enough physically to carry the baby to term, but emotions were a different story. She said I was going to need a lot of support, partly because the pregnancy was unexpected, but mainly because I was still a teenager. In addition to feeling depressed, I might feel angry and disappointed as well. Dr. Bobbi warned that I was also likely to feel alienated from friends, making everything harder. Had I been able to check in with Dr. Bobbi now, I would have told her, check, check, check, and check.

With the talk ringing in her ears, my mom brought me to a support group for pregnant teenagers in Portland, Oregon. I’m sure there were the same kinds of support groups in Seattle, but I didn’t want anyone I knew to accidentally find out, and my parents didn’t want that, either. So, after almost three hours in the car, I found myself in a back room at a YMCA, where I sat in one of the fold-out chairs that had been arranged in a circle. There were nine other girls there, and some of them looked like they were attempting to smuggle watermelons by hiding them under their shirts. The lady in charge, Mrs. Walker, was a social worker, and one by one, we introduced ourselves. After that, we were all supposed to talk about our feelings and our experiences. What actually happened was that the other girls talked about their feelings and experiences, while I simply listened.

Really, it was just about the most depressing thing ever. One of the girls, who was even younger than me, talked about how bad her hemorrhoids had gotten, while another one droned on about how sore her nipples were before lifting her shirt to show us her stretch marks. Most but not all of them continued to attend their various high schools, and they talked about how embarrassed they were when they had to ask their teacher for a hall pass to go to the bathroom, sometimes two or three times during the same class period. All of them complained how their acne had gotten worse. Two of them had dropped out, and though both said they planned to go back to school, I’m not sure anyone believed them. All had lost friends, and another had been kicked out of her house and was living with her grandparents. Only one of them—a pretty Mexican girl named Sereta—still spoke with the father of the child, and aside from her, none intended to marry. Except for me, all of them planned to raise their babies with the help of their parents.

When it was over, as we were walking toward the car, I told my mom that I never wanted to do something like that again. It was supposed to be helpful and make me feel less alone, but it left me feeling exactly the opposite. What I wanted was to simply get through this so I could return to the life I had before, which was the same thing my parents wanted. That, of course, led to them making the decision to send me here, and though they assured me that it was for my own good—not theirs—I wasn’t sure I believed them.

After church, Aunt Linda and Gwen dragged me through the lunch/shop-for-supplies/garage-sales routine before heading to a graveled lot near a hardware store, which held so many Christmas trees for sale that it resembled a miniature forest. My aunt and Gwen tried to make the experience fun for me and kept asking my opinion; for my part, I did a lot of shrugging and told them to pick whatever they wanted, since no one seemed to care what I thought anyway, at least when it came to decisions about my life.

Somewhere around the sixth or seventh tree, Aunt Linda stopped asking, and they eventually made the selection without me. Once it was paid for, I watched as two guys wearing overalls tied the tree to the roof of the car, and we climbed back in.

For whatever reason, the ride back to the ferry reminded me of the ride to the airport on my last morning in Seattle. Both my mom and my dad had seen me off, which was kind of a surprise, since my dad had barely been able to look at me since he’d learned I was pregnant. They walked me to the gate and waited with me until it was time to board. Both of them were really quiet, and I wasn’t saying much, either. But as time inched forward toward the departure, I remember telling my mom that I was afraid. In truth, I was terrified to the point that my hands had begun to shake.

There were a lot of people around us and she must have noticed the trembling, because she took my hands and squeezed them. Then she led me to a less crowded gate, where we could have some privacy.

“I’m afraid, too.”

“Why are you afraid?” I asked.

“Because you’re my daughter. All I do is worry about you. And what happened is…unfortunate.”

Unfortunate. She’d been using that word a lot lately. Next, she’d remind me that leaving was for my own good.

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

“We’ve talked about this,” she said. “You know it’s for your own good.”

Bingo.

“I don’t want to leave my friends.” By that point, it was all I could do to choke out the words. “What if Aunt Linda hates me? What if I get sick and I have to go to the hospital? They don’t even have a hospital there.”

“Your friends will still be here when you get back,” she assured me. “And I know it seems like a long time, but May will come more quickly than you realize. As for Linda, she used to help pregnant girls just like you when she was at the convent. You remember when I told you that? She’ll take care of you. I promise.”

“I don’t even know her.”

“She has a good heart,” my mom said, “or you wouldn’t be going there. As for the hospital, she’ll know what to do. But even in the worst-case scenario, her friend Gwen is a trained midwife. She’s delivered lots of babies.”

I wasn’t sure that made me feel any better.

“What if I hate it there?”

“How bad can it be? It’s right on the beach. And besides, you remember our discussion, right? That it might be easier in the short run if you stay, but in the long run, it will surely make things harder for you.”

She meant gossip, not only about me but about my family as well. It might not be the 1950s, but there was still a stigma attached to unwed teenage pregnancies, and even I had to admit that sixteen was way too young to be a mom. If word got out, I would always be that girl to neighbors, other students at school, the people at church. To them, I’d always be that girl who got knocked up after her freshman year. I would have to endure their judgmental stares and condescension; I’d have to ignore their whispers as I walked past them in the hallways. The rumor mill would churn with questions about who adopted the baby, about whether I ever wanted to see the child again. Though they might not say it to me, they would wonder why I hadn’t bothered to use birth control or insist that he wear a condom; I knew that many parents—including friends of the family—would use me as an example to their own children as that girl, the one who’d made poor decisions. And all this while waddling the school hallways and having to pee every ten minutes.