Sora was feeling okay again on Monday morning, so she went back to school. Everyone looked at her like she might throw up again, but she managed to keep the nausea at bay until she left early to go to her doctor’s appointment.

The hospital was only a few bus stops away from the school, so Sora made it in good time. It was a big, white building that she had visited on numerous occasions – including the time she’d broken her toe, which Jongdae seemed to find so funny.

She found her thoughts drifting to him while she sat in the waiting room on the third floor of the hospital. She hadn’t told him she was sick, because she didn’t want him to worry. When he’d called her, she had faked a smile and laughed at his jokes, and it had helped her forget about the flu or whatever it was she had. And when she’d been too busy throwing up to answer, Dami had made up an excuse for her. She really was an invaluable little sister, Sora thought.

“Kwon Sora,” a nurse called, beckoning her back. Grabbing her bag, Sora hurried after the nurse.

She ended up in a tiny little examination room with too bright lights and a computer. The nurse gestured for her to sit down on the examination table and she pulled up Sora’s information on the computer, cross-referencing with the chart she had.

“Okay,” she finally said, turning a bright and practiced smile on Sora. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I think I have the flu,” Sora said.

“Let’s see,” the nurse said, tapping her clipboard with her pen. “Have you had a fever?”

“Well, no,” Sora admitted. “But I’ve been throwing up a lot. It sort of comes and goes. One minute I’ll be fine, and the next I’ll be vomiting.” She blushed. “I even threw up on my teacher’s shoes one day.”

“So nausea but no fever,” the nurse repeated, marking it down. “Have you had a sore throat or a runny and stuffy nose?”

“No, my sinuses have been okay for the most part,” Sora explained. “A little sniffly, maybe, but nothing bad.”

Another note on the clipboard. “What about headaches and fatigue? Have you been especially tired lately?”

“Oh yes,” Sora nodded vigorously. “Some mornings it’s all I can do to get out of bed. And I have had more headaches, yeah.”

The nurse finished marking some things down on her clipboard and got to her feet. “Well, it certainly sounds like the flu. I’ll just take a culture and, since we’ve got a lab here at the hospital, we’ll be able to tell you in about fifteen minutes whether it’s positive or negative.”

Sora thanked her, though she dreaded the part where the back of was swabbed. Then she was left alone while her flu test was being performed. She felt nauseas again, there in the examination room at the hospital, and she had to work very hard to keep her lunch from coming back up. Throwing up on her teacher had been bad enough. Throwing up here would be even worse, though at least here they would probably be used to it.

It took about half an hour, but eventually the nurse returned. This time she was with the doctor.

“Is it the flu?” Sora asked, wrinkling her nose. She’d rather not have the flu. Then she’d be confined to her bed for sure, and boredom was not her friend.

The doctor smiled a friendly sort of smile; she was very beautiful, Sora thought to herself. “I’m afraid we don’t know yet. We’re still waiting on the results. The lab is taking a bit longer than usual. I’m sorry about your wait. Is there anything we can get you to make you more comfortable?”

“No, I’m fine,” Sora said, though of course her stomach was churning at the moment. “Dr…?”

“Dr. Lee,” the pretty doctor introduced herself. “Sora, right? Would you mind if we took some blood? I’d like to do a more thorough testing.”

Sora was worried immediately. Further testing meant the doctor probably thought something was wrong, something more serious than the flu. Was it cancer? Was she dying? She nodded numbly.

The nurse, with the well-practiced air of someone who had done this plenty of times, quickly set up her equipment and effortlessly and painlessly withdrew a vial of blood from Sora’s arm. Then the two left again, promising fast results.

This wait was longer than the last one, mostly because now Sora suspected that something was really wrong. Something that was worse than the flu.

Eventually the doctor returned, carrying the results of Sora’s tests on a clipboard in her hand.

“Is it the flu?” Sora demanded.

Dr. Lee sat down in the little rolling chair, balancing the clipboard on her knee. Sora tried to look at the chart, but she couldn’t understand what all of it meant. “No, it’s not the flu,” she said, shaking her head.

“Am I dying?” Sora blurted out. She felt like an idiot for saying it, but she was starting to get really scared.

Dr. Lee laughed, and that relieved Sora more than anything. A doctor surely wouldn’t laugh if she was about to deliver terrible news to a patient. “No, Sora. You’re not dying. Far from it, in fact. You’re pregnant.”

Sora stared at the doctor as if she’d suddenly grown an extra head. “I’m sorry, what?”

Dr. Lee smiled kindly. “I see that this must be coming as quite a shock to you. Do you want me to phone someone? Your mother, perhaps?”

“No!” Sora said quickly. “No, please don’t call anyone! I’m of age, so you don’t have to call anyone.” She worried her bottom lip between her teeth. How was this even possible? Pregnant? The possibility hadn’t even crossed her mind. “But you have to have to get pregnant!” she burst out.

Dr. Lee nodded gently. “That you do, Sora.”

Sora thought back to the night she’d spent with Jongdae. That night that she’d been so desperately trying to forget about was now being dragged front and center again. “It was only once,” she said, and her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Surely you can’t get pregnant on the first time?”

“I’m afraid you can,” Dr. Lee said, and she reached out to take Sora’s hand reassuringly. Normally Sora would shy away from any unsolicited touch from an unknown adult, but right now the touch seemed to bring her back down to earth.

She swallowed thickly, and the nausea she’d been fighting seemed to increase a hundredfold, though this time she was sure it was because of her shock. “A-are you sure?” she asked, her voice suddenly very quiet.

“Yes, we’re quite sure,” Dr. Lee nodded. “We checked your HCG levels when we did your blood test. HCG is the hormone that a woman’s body produces when she’s pregnant. Your levels were over one thousand, which means that you’re definitely pregnant. From these levels, it looks like you’re about seven weeks along, though we can confirm a more accurate timeline once we perform an ultrasound.”

“Seven weeks?” Sora echoed. Then she quickly did the math in her head. “That’s impossible. I’d never even had seven weeks ago.”

Dr. Lee smiled kindly. It was obvious that she wasn’t used to explaining things like this to girls as young as Sora, but she was taking it in stride. “We begin counting a pregnancy from a woman’s last menstrual period, or LMP. Has it been seven weeks since you’ve had your period?”

“I don’t know,” Sora muttered, rather sullenly. She wasn’t sure, but now that the doctor mentioned it, her period was running late. Very late, actually, but this wasn’t really anything new. Whenever Sora got stressed, her period would go MIA – not that she missed it. She had just assumed that she was stressed about Jongdae and about school. She had never in a million years thought that she was pregnant.

“You’ll have to decide what you want to do about it pretty quickly,” Dr. Lee said gently. “You have three options. You can get an abortion. They’re illegal here in Korea unless the pregnancy endangers the life of the mother. In a case where the mother is as young as you are, we can make the claim that the pregnancy would be damaging to your health if you wish to pursue that avenue. However, if you choose to go that route, you will have to decide soon. Abortions can and will not be performed after the twelfth week of pregnancy, which is only a few weeks away for you.”

Sora felt like throwing up again, but for an entirely different reason. Her voice was small when she spoke. “And what are my other two options?”

“Adoption is another option,” Dr. Lee continued. “In this instance, you will carry the fetus full term and then another family will legally take responsibility for it. You can opt for an open or closed adoption. Open means that you will still be able to see the child, while closed means that you agree to never see the child again. And of course, there’s the third option. You can keep the child yourself.”

Sora was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know what I want to do,” she finally said. She suddenly felt exhausted, more tired than she’d ever felt before. “I-I need some time to think about it.”

“Of course. This is a big decision to make,” Dr. Lee agreed, scribbling on her prescription pad. “I’m going to write you a scrip for some prenatal vitamins, in case you decide to continue with the pregnancy. I’ll also prescribe you some ginseng capsules, which will help with the morning sickness.” She ripped the scrip off her pad and held it out to Sora, who took it with trembling hands. “So go get these filled immediately. They’ll make you a lot more comfortable. I’ll be in touch so we can discuss your options.”

Sora nodded numbly, crumpling the scrip up in her fist. She thanked the doctor numbly and left the hospital with the note still in her fist.

She stopped at a pharmacy near the hospital to get the prenatal vitamins and the ginseng capsules – she couldn’t risk someone in her own neighborhood recognizing her and reporting in to her mother or father – and then took the bus home.

Her mother had just walked in the door from work when she got home, and was spreading some papers across the coffee table in anticipation of spending an evening poring over her cases. “Hey, love,” she called. “How’d the appointment go? What did the doctor say?”

“Flu,” Sora lied, feeling as if the bottles of pills in her backpack weighed a ton. “I-I have the flu.”

Dr. Cha was genuinely sympathetic, which of course made Sora feel all the worse for lying to her. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Why don’t you go lie down? I’ll bring you some tea.”

Sora tiredly thanked her mother and went into her bedroom. She quickly stashed the bottles of pills in her sock drawer, where hopefully nobody would find them. Then, still wearing her school uniform, she crawled into her bed and faced the wall. Underneath the blankets, her hand played out across her stomach.

Pregnant. The word sounded foreign and dirty to her. She couldn’t really be pregnant, could she? That only happened to girls who slept around, and Sora wasn’t one of those girls. She carefully tapped on her abdomen with her index finger, but nothing happened. She didn’t know what she was expecting anyway.

What was her mother going to say? And her father and Dami? What about her friends and neighbors? What would Jongdae say?

What would Jongdae say?

Jongdae, with his computer engineering classes and his girlfriend down in Busan. Jongdae, with his bright smile and teasing voice. Jongdae, who could lose everything because of this.

Sora had no idea what she was going to do about the thing growing inside her, but she made a decision at that moment that, no matter what she chose to do about it, Jongdae would never know. She would go to her grave keeping this secret from him. She would not ruin his life like this.