The nurses who are taking care of Andrea now are pretty nice. Some of them, like Juliet who has read hair and wears pink scrubs a lot which always seems strange to me, bring me things like plastic cups of apple juice with foil tops that you peel off just a little to make for smallish sips. Juliet calls me Jules and I think that’s how she remembers me, because our names are almost the same. Most of the other nurses talk to me about Andrea. They say things like, She’s looking good today. Or, the baby is doing fine. But Juliet asks what I’ve been up to and how I’m handling school. I tell her fine. She asks me how the people I am staying with are and I tell her fine too because I haven’t told anybody that I’m staying by myself.

                                                                 *

Andrea’s known Loren since they were in high school. He transferred in from Antonio High halfway through their sophomore year. He’s never been quiet and he’s never been mean until he came home this last time. I think that’s why Andrea liked him. Because he’s always let life slide off his back and he showed her how to do that too.

                                                                *

I stayed home from school on the day we found out Andie was pregnant. Loren had been around for two weeks a month before but had to ship out and back to Iraq so it was just us at Rite Aid, looking for the yellow sale tags in the pregnancy test aisle and then dancing around in the kitchen when the plus sign came up and Andie got over the shock of it all. She always wanted a little baby girl, she said and I told her she’d make the best mom because look how good I turned out and we laughed and later spent fourteen dollars on two steak dinners with pie and ice cream at Applebee’s because she was eating for two now.

                                                          *

We hadn’t come up with a name that Andie liked yet so I’ve just started to call her baby Annabelle.

Annabelle looks like a pink bread loaf when she’s all bundled up in the basenette. And when they have her splayed out under heat lamps, she looks a little like the fermaldahide soaked frogs we cut up last year in science class.

                                                        *

At night, after I visit Andrea, I catch the bus home and sit at the kitchen table with the light on overhead and do my homework. Then I go to the freezer and pull out on one of the pot pie dinners that Andie got for me to eat on the nights she worked late.

I punch fork holes in the plastic wrap and watch it turn circles in the microwave until pockets of gravy bubble up under the plastic.

Some nights, after all that I go up on the roof. It’s quiet and the stars come out and the milky way smears itself over them like somebody just ran by and dragged it along behind their outstretched fingertips.

The dogs at the McAllister’s house trot by sometimes, collars jingling. And sometimes one of the Lucky brothers comes home, so there’s the snapping sound of studded tires on the road and the whine of breaks before the crunch of gravel when the truck pulls into the driveway and the engine cuts off.

But mostly, it’s just the breeze moving tree branches and the vibrations of the house, ticking and whining and falling still again, underneath me.