Lymber craft's Arc

Chapter 16 of 70

Monday morning Lymber sat on the kitchen counter while Paul poured cereal for both of them. Her phone buzzed against the tile. She flipped it over and saw the screenshot from a girl on the council who still spoke to her. A classmate had built a countdown post. Days until Lymber's due date, pinned to a photo of her at the dance in the gold gown, crown crooked on her head. The caption said tune in daily. It had ninety shares in one night and was climbing. Paul read it over her shoulder and set the cereal box down. Lymber slid off the counter and went to find her mother. Polly was at the sink in her robe, rinsing a coffee cup. Lymber showed her the phone. Polly dried her hands and read it twice. She said, you can't sue a countdown. She said, you can drown it. Lymber asked how. Polly said, post first. Post every day before she does. Make her post the boring one. Lymber understood. If she owned the countdown, the classmate owned nothing. She went upstairs to the nursery with Paul. He sat on the floor by the crib and she sat in the rocker with her phone. They picked the small knit hat with the bow off the mattress and photographed it against the white sheet. Lymber wrote the caption herself. Ten weeks until Violetta. She tagged Paul. He read it before she posted and nodded once. She hit share. Within an hour it had two hundred likes and a row of hearts from girls who had been quiet since October. By dinner the classmate's countdown post had been buried under Lymber's, and the comments on the classmate's page had turned. One girl wrote, weird flex, leave her alone. The classmate deleted the post before bed. Lymber watched the notification vanish from her screenshot folder and felt her shoulders drop for the first time in a week. She stayed up after Paul went to the guest room. She scrolled her own post again and read the comments. Most were kind. A few counted weeks in the replies, quiet math under a baby hat. She closed the app and put a hand on her stomach. The baby rolled under her palm, slow and full. She thought about the ten weeks on the caption and how short that was. The countdown was hers now. She had won the post and lost the cover. Every day forward the number would get smaller, and every day people would look at it and count backward from the dance. She turned off the lamp. She would post again tomorrow. She would keep posting until the number reached zero, and then the baby would come, and the math would stop being a question and start being a person in the room.