Excerpt from Girls In Trouble by Caroline Leavitt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As soon as Abby had known Sara was pregnant, that it was too late to abort, Abby had told Sara that it was, of course, impossible for her to keep the baby. Impossible for them to adopt and raise it as their own because how could Sara get a clean start then? Instead, she found Sara the adoption agency in Newton, the adoption lawyer who insisted Sara call her Margaret. "Thank God we live in modern times," Abby had told her. She sat down beside Sara. "When I was growing up, there was a home for wayward girls right in my town," Abby said. "The Girls in Trouble House" we called it, even though its name was just St. Luke's. It was terrible. Just terrible. The stories we heard! There was such a stigma! You went to a place like that and your life was over and everyone knew it. The girls couldn't even keep their real names when they were there, just first names, because they didn't want to encourage friendships. They couldn't go outside the grounds. It was a relief when they closed the place down, put a Star Market there instead."

"Did you ever see the girls?" Sara asked.

Abby sighed. "I saw them standing at the gates sometimes, like they were prisoners. Asking for cigarettes. Asking us to call their boyfriends for them."

"Did you?"

Abby straightened up. "Of course I didn't." She rubbed at her temples and then studied Sara. "You're lucky you don't show. I didn't either until nearly my eighth month. And if, God forbid, you do start to pop, the school can't make you leave. Not the way they used to."

"Leave--I can't leave--" Sara tightened. What if Danny came back? How would he find her if she was at another school?

"Look," Abby said. "This is a private matter. No one's business but ours. With baggy clothes, you can finish the school year. You can stay inside this summer until the baby's due. Then, fall comes, you'll be back in school with no one the wiser."

Abby and Jack didn't even want Sara to know who was taking the baby, but how could she do that? As terrifying as it was to contemplate having a baby, giving it away was like giving away a part of Danny. She had to have some contact, some connection, or she'd be undone. "Closed adoption," Abby suggested, and then, to Abby's annoyance, Margaret had presented open adoption. Sara was sleepwalking then, as silent as a closed box. She was going through the motions. But when she heard about open adoption, she felt the air-conditioning cooling her skin, and she sat up straighter. "Yes. That," she said.


Margaret warned them open adoption was enforceable only in Oregon. "You'll want an agreement with everything spelled out," she said, but by then Sara trusted Eva and George. She kept thinking of that corny Joni Mitchell song her mother sometimes sang about not needing any piece of paper.

"We'll all talk about it," Jack said, but once they got outside the office, all he said was that he thought it was a bad idea. "It's what I want," Sara said, stubborn. Her father shook his head. "You don't know what you want. You're too young to know," he said.

Late at night, while she lay in bed, Sara heard them talking, their voices rising and falling like crashing waves. "They said it's not really that open," Abby said. "Contact almost always diminishes. People get on with their lives. They make new lives."

"Are we doing the right thing?" Jack asked, and then there was silence again.

Abby had gone to the agency with Sara and looked through the photo albums of couples wanting her baby, read the ridiculous letters that all seemed the same. "Dear birth mother, we know how brave a sacrifice you are making. " The handwriting spiked and curlicued, the paper always soft blue or yellow. "We want you to know we will love your baby the same way you would. The words were insinuating. As though they knew something about her. The photographs were worse. Bland-faced couples staring out at her. "Here we are at the beach, but we love the city, too!" One couple posed with two big dogs on their bed. 'Every child needs a dog or two! This is Scruffy! He loves kids!" All those 800 numbers so you couldn't know where they were calling from, or how they might lie to you, like a childhood taunt: Nyah nyah, I can see you but you can't see me.

Copyright Caroline Leavitt 2004. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.