Articles Available Online

We’ve been quarantined in the school gym for three weeks when we realise just how much we’ve forgotten Not just about the inseminations, the mysterious stomach-swelling sickness that spread like chicken pox at Elmwood last fall, but everything, way back We make a list, chalk the outlines:   The name of the fourth grade teacher we loved, with the soccer cleats and hair like notebook spirals; the names of boys, their smell; the quadratic formula; what our knees look like   Our mothers visit and they ask, again and again, how could you forget? How could your brain just slide over something as monumental as losing your virginity? Some of you are in National Honours Society Some of you play the oboe/viola/bassoon   When Riley arrives in the gym — late because no one realised she was hiding a baby under that pear shape — she brings reports from the outside ‘Everyone is talking about us,’ she says, awed ‘Our parents are on TV’   She’s smuggled in an issue of Time, with our school portraits tic-tac-toed across the cover We crowd to read it, almost tear the pages we’re so eager Lila Hanson was Miss Teen Indiana and her talent was public speaking: a performance of Yeats in a dress sequined and feathered, to flaps of applause She rips the magazine from our hands and stands on a stack of aerobics steps to read:   “‘Half the honour roll The entire starting squad of the basketball team Why have twenty-three students at Terre Haute’s Elmwood High School fallen pregnant this year? Ed Coolers reports from Indiana’s Gomorrah of Underage Sex”‘   We swear to our mothers we didn’t have sex We sit with them on the bleachers and down the slope of the drained pool, squeeze their hands and vow we’re telling the truth We show them the chastity contracts we signed in health class, the ones they laminated and made us keep in our wallets like drivers’ permits We show them the promise rings our dads gave us, at a ceremony in a banquet hall with Styrofoam Greek columns and napkins folded like swans   Our mothers look back at us as