"There's a note for you on your bed," Marisol said to me when I walked into our dorm room.

On my bed was a tiny, white envelope. All it said on the front was Kayleigh.

I opened it and slid the paper out. Meet me in my dorm room when you get back, it said. From, Aspen.

After I knocked on the door twice, Aspen said, "Come in."

I pushed open the door and saw her laying on her back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Celia Howell, who was her roommate, was nowhere to be found.

"I needed to talk to you again," Aspen said to me, not taking her eyes off of the ceiling.

"What's up?"

"I made my decision." She sat up on her bed against the headboard. "And I regret it."

"You got the abortion? Did Foster want you to?"

"Yeah, I got it," she replied, picking at a hangnail on one of the fingers of her left hand. "But I never told him I was pregnant. After dinner, I drove myself to the clinic and got an abortion, thinking that once I went ahead and did it, I could pretend the whole thing never happened. I can't forget about it, though. It's all I've thought about for the past few hours."

"Foster doesn't have a clue?" I asked.

"Nope. I probably should tell that we had a child, and that that child," her voice cracked and she tried to blink back tears, "is dead now. Thanks to me."

Right after she muttered those last three words, she burst into one hundred and fifteen pounds of hysterical crying. I sat down beside her on her bed and tried to comfort her, but comforting was one thing that I was never good at.

"It's okay," I said to her. "It'll be okay."

"I murdered a baby." Her body shook as she spoke. "An innocent, little baby. My baby. I can't believe I did that."

I smoothed her hair and repeated, "It'll be okay, Aspen. It'll be okay."