“Are you okay?” she asked, sitting on the step beside me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m fifteen, I’m pregnant, and my family is broken.”
“Your family isn’t broken,” Lucia corrected me, looking toward the window where my dad was seen sitting next to my mom, holding her hand. “The rot is gone. Now you can actually grow.”
She handed me a small photograph. It was a picture of her sister from three years ago, smiling at a graduation.
“Don’t let them take your future, Valeria. That’s what they want. They want you to think you’re a ‘stain.’ But look at me. I stayed. I finished. And you will too.”
The First Step
That night, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t have “calming” tea. I ate a full meal. I sat at my desk and opened my math notebook. I took the positive pregnancy test out from between the pages of algebra equations.
I didn’t hide it this time. I placed it on my nightstand.
I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My belly wasn’t showing yet, but I placed my hand over it.
“We’re going to be okay,” I whispered.
The road ahead was going to be the hardest thing I had ever faced. There would be court dates, whispers in the hallways, and the reality of being a teenage mother. The “poor parents” comments wouldn’t stop overnight. The “girl with no future” label would haunt me for a while.
But as I watched the moon rise over the quiet street, I knew one thing for certain:
The father might have denied me. My aunt might have tried to erase me. The world might have watched me fall.
