Madi Collins 18 And Pregnant ((free)) -

The nurse placed a warm, squirming bundle on Madi’s chest. A girl. Six pounds, seven ounces, with a shock of dark hair and Leo’s crooked frown. Madi looked down at that small, wrinkled face and felt something crack open inside her—not her ribs, but something deeper. Something she didn’t have a name for.

The next week was a blur of appointments and conversations. Leo took the news better than she expected—or maybe just quieter. He stared at the ultrasound image, a grainy black-and-white blob with a flickering heartbeat, and his jaw tightened. madi collins 18 and pregnant

Leo tried. He really did. He came home greasy and exhausted, ate the cheap pasta she made, and fell asleep on the couch more nights than not. They stopped talking about the future—college, travel, careers—because the future had shrunk to the size of a due date. November 15th. The day everything would change again. The nurse placed a warm, squirming bundle on Madi’s chest

“Hey, little one,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’m your dad.” Madi looked down at that small, wrinkled face

Madi’s mom, Cheryl, was a night-shift nurse at Mercy Hospital. She was a woman built of efficient love and exhaustion, a single parent who had raised Madi on a diet of leftovers eaten between shifts and lectures about birth control delivered with the bluntness of a surgical scalpel. Madi had nodded along to those lectures, convinced she was too smart to become a statistic. She was the class salutatorian, had a partial scholarship to community college, and worked thirty hours a week at the local diner. She wasn’t that girl. And yet, here she was.

The first thought wasn’t fear. It wasn’t sadness. It was a bizarre, clinical realization: I’m going to have to tell my mom.