All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish

wanted letting him have his
way. The next day Carl Pratt said “Hi” to the fat girl, and even managed a weak
smile in her direction. For that Pinny paid him with two kisses. 
    Day by day
Carl Pratt paid attention to the fat girl, causing a huge stir. Though he had a
reputation as a ladies’ man, his interest in the fat girl still couldn’t be
fathomed. Someone said Josh Silverman, one of the wealthier students who’d
spent money on gags before, was up to his old tricks. What a good joke it would
be to build up the fat girl, only to let her down, everyone said.
    Pinny kept
the truth quiet by letting Carl Pratt kiss her for up to an hour, often with
his hands inside her shirt. She liked it a little better than she used to, but
still not too much.
    “Do you
kiss her, too?” Pinny asked. The fat girl didn’t say what she did with Carl
Pratt after school at his house while his father sold insurance and his mother
slept off her night shift at the hospital. She just drifted around with a quiet
light in her eyes, and a rosy glow on her round, smooth cheeks.
    “Not like
this,” said Carl Pratt.
    Pinny
hadn’t really thought that Carl Pratt kissed the fat girl. She had expected him
to say no, she realized. She had gotten the idea that all they did was talk,
because Carl Pratt had once said, “Man, she talks a lot.”
    Pinny was
deeply jealous of the fat girl, because all of a sudden she, too, had fallen
for Carl Pratt.
    She
refused to let either the fat girl or Carl Pratt know. When the fat girl talked
about him, her voice all soft and dewy, Pinny listened with a blank face and an
occasional nod. After school, on the days when the fat girl had to go straight
home and had waved goodbye to him from the pushed down window of the school
bus, he’d find Pinny, take her behind the building and she wouldn’t lean into
his kisses no matter how much she wanted to. When he finally pulled away, she
made her hands let go and not clutch his hard shoulders.
    One
afternoon, with the end of the year only eight days away, Carl Pratt wanted to
go home with Pinny after school. The fat girl had left early for a dental
appointment, but Pinny still didn’t think it was a good idea. The fat girl
might call and she’d feel weird about answering the phone. If she didn’t
answer, the fat girl’s voice on the machine would be hard to hear. But since
there was no good way to explain this to Carl Pratt, she agreed.
    A little
while later, as Pinny led Carl up her back stairs, she suddenly stopped. “What?”
he said.
    She turned
around and looked down at him from two steps above.
    “You said
you dad’s at work, right?” he said.
    She
nodded.
    “So don’t
worry, okay?” He stroked her arm and she shivered. She was afraid he wouldn’t
like her room, that he would think it too girly. The princess costume her
mother had bought her for Halloween when she was four years old was tacked to
the wall above her bed. The thought of her mother seeing her that way—as a
princess—if only that once sometimes made her sad. Pinny had gone from not
caring that her mother was gone to caring more than made sense, and somehow
that sadness she felt—that deep longing—was all to do with Carl Pratt.
    Carl Pratt
didn’t say anything about the costume, or the flowery scarf she had across her
lamp, or the rocking chair, or the stuffed yellow mouse in the corner. He put
down his backpack and took her in his arms.
    A few
moments later they were lying on her bed and he was wrestling with her shirt.
    “Stop it.”
    “Come on.”
He stopped. Then he said, “Let’s screw.”
    “It’s
dangerous.”
    “No, it’s
not.”
    Pinny lay
in a state that swung between fear and joy like the heavy brass pendulum of the
clock downstairs. To stop that swing she held Carl Pratt’s hand and squeezed
hard.
    “I don’t
want to get pregnant,” she said
    He let go
of her hand. “You won’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well,
because thin girls like you don’t get pregnant