Trent said he heard screaming from biology class, but Trent was a pathological liar. In second grade, he’d told us his head was so big because it’d gotten stuck in a beehive. “No one could survive something like that,” we said. “I did,” he said. “I survived it, only now my head is this way for life.” The janitors closed the science wing girls’ bathroom for the rest of the week, out of respect. No crime scene tape or anything like that. Just a lock on the door. Monday morning it was open again. We squatted in the back stall and examined it for signs.

“Look—blood,” Haley said, pointing at a red blot on the floor.

“Afterbirth,” Kendall whispered. Someone came into the bathroom. We climbed onto the toilet so that only Kendall’s feet showed under the door. Piss sounds and the long puff of a quiet fart. Whoever it was didn’t wash her hands.

But it wasn’t afterbirth. Haley touched it. It was just a piece of plastic or something.

“Miss Karla said it looked like some kind of amphibian,” Ryan told us. Miss Karla the janitor had been the one to find her in there last week, the day it happened. Ryan wasn’t a pathological liar like Trent, but he was known to exaggerate about girls. He’d sworn Amy couldn’t even feel it when he fingered her with two fingers. We knew Amy was scared to use tampons because we'd seen the wings of her maxi pad when she changed for gym class.

 “When did you talk to Miss Karla,” Kendall said. Then Ryan wagged his tongue between his fingers like he’d gone down on Miss Karla, and we knew he was full of shit.

All we wanted was evidence. Had it been alive? The adults obscured tragedy until it took on the air of myth. No one ever let us see anything. When Chase died in the car crash in seventh grade, there hadn’t been a casket. After Jacob fell off his bike last summer and came back to school in a wheelchair that he couldn’t wheel by himself, the student council organized a fundraiser selling helmets. We just wanted to know whether it was true about his brain—was part of it really liquid? “Don’t be morbid,” our mothers told us. “Nice girls aren’t morbid.” Or maybe they’d said, “Morbid girls aren’t nice.” We weren’t nice girls anymore. We could see it—the way Coach Willet stared at our tits. The way we were forced to change if our skirts didn’t make it past our fingertips. The way our fathers started looking at us sideways if we wore shorts around the house, like we were an eclipse, too bright to stare at directly.

“If it was Tyler P.’s baby then it would’ve been the size of a pear,” Haley said in computer class. She’d looked up fetus size on her assigned computer, and the results came back as fruits. No real pictures. “They hooked up at Megan’s party.”

I imagined trying to flush a pear down the toilet. I imagined the water gushing up over the seat, the pear lodged in the toilet hole. I imagined a pear with the half-moons of tiny fingernails.

pear size fetus real, we searched on Haley’s computer, fetus real, baby in toilet, bathroom stall baby

But nothing came up.

Wednesday morning, we saw Miss Karla standing in front of the bathroom, pinching her cross necklace.

“What did you see in there,” Kendall said.

“Nice girls don’t ask questions,” Miss Karla said. “This bathroom’s closed for cleaning.”

We watched from the lockers as Miss Karla went into the bathroom where it happened. On the other side of the door was everything we wanted to know.

In gym class I told Coach Willet I had cramps and went to check the bathroom by myself. I sat on the toilet in the back stall with my gym clothes on. On the metal wall was a series of scratches in the mauve paint. I traced them with my fingers. They were shaped like claw marks, I thought. Yes, they were claw marks, she’d clawed the paint off the wall when she pushed out her pear baby. I thought of telling the other girls what I’d seen but I didn’t want to share. I visited them sometimes in private. The stalls were repainted over summer break. But I had seen them. I knew they were real.