Lymber craft's Arc

Chapter 6 of 70

Lymber woke in her own bed at Willowbrook House with her phone buzzing against her ribs. She had fallen asleep in the gown. The crown sat on the nightstand next to the test strip. She unlocked the screen and the notifications kept scrolling past her thumb. Class group chats. Reposts. A clip of her at the microphone, slowed down, with a laughing sound over it. Someone had already started a poll asking who the father was. The top guess was a boy on the football team she had never kissed. The second guess was a teacher. She sat up fast. Her mother's rule was to stay home and wait. Her own rule, the one she had learned before she could name it, was that a story you did not shape got shaped for you. She went down the hall in bare feet and knocked on her mother's door. Polly opened it in a cardigan and jeans, phone in hand, already halfway through a call with the lawyer. Lymber held up her own screen and let her mother read the poll. Polly ended the call. Lymber said she wanted to post one thing, just a name, and then put the phone away for the week. Polly said no. Polly said a name on the internet was a name in every kitchen in town by lunch. Lymber said a wrong name was already in every kitchen. She said Paul lived ten minutes down the road in the next town over and no one at school had ever met him. If she did not say his name, they would keep picking one from the hallway. Polly sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor for a long minute. Then she said, one sentence, no photo, and let me read it first. Lymber typed it at the kitchen table while her mother watched. The father of my baby is my boyfriend Paul Craft. He does not go to our school. Please leave the guessing alone. She read it out loud. Polly nodded once. Lymber posted it to her main account and set the phone face down on the wood. The strip was still upstairs on the nightstand, the pink line as bright as it had been the night before. Nothing about that had changed. Only the name attached to it had. The phone lit up again in under a minute. The poll closed. New threads opened. Classmates who had never heard of Paul started searching him, tagging strangers with the same last name, screenshotting her post next to the crown photo. A cousin of the queen bee replied under the post asking how long she had been sneaking off to the next town. Polly turned the phone all the way off and slid it across the table. She told Lymber the doctor's appointment was at two. The story was Lymber's now. So was everything that came with owning it.