"This cannot be so!" I sobbed. "My parents are going to kill me! I won't be able to go to college! I wish I were dead!" Hysterics - - I was in pure hysterics.

"Listen..." said Ves, "Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. I mean, think about it Penny; you are going to bring a new life into this world. That's a beautiful thing!" But all I could think about at that particular moment was the reaction of my parents. They were Catholic; I was going to go to Hell or worse: be disowned!

"You don't get it Ves, I can't tell my parents or the teachers. I'm going to be stripped of my Head Girl title and kicked out of Hogwarts! I'm sure that in all the centuries this school has been here, I'm the only Head Girl to ever have this happen to her! This wasn't supposed to happen - - only loser whores get pregnant at sixteen!"

Ves hugged me tightly. "It'll be alright, I'm sure of it. Listen, want me to pretend to be your mother so that you can practise what you're going to say to her?"

That forced a smile out of me. Just the thought of Ves acting like my Italian mother would crack anyone up.

"Ok." she said, taking on the heavy Bronx accent of my mother, "Now Penelope, what did you want to tell me?"

It was rather hard for me to see it as realistic as it would be, for my best friend and mother were two totally different people. Either way, I just blurted out, "Mama, I'm pregnant!" Of course that was not how I planned on telling Mum, but this was just Ves, who then clutched her hand to her heart as if she was about to keel over.

"Oh good God, Penelope Elaina-Marie Clearwater! Where did I go wrong?! I thought I raised a good girl, but no amount of confession can save your soul now! You are a sinner...SINNER, and I whore! That is it! My life is over. You just killed me Penelope, you just put a gun to my heart and shot your own mother, you useless tramp!"

Alright, she did a really good impression of my mum, so good that it made me start crying. That just resulted in more hugging.

*******************************************************************************************

After the Christmas holiday was over and everyone had returned for school, I knew that it was time to tell Oliver. At first I was going to Owl him, but I thought it would be better to tell it to him face-to-face, then to just do it by letter. So, I called him for some time alone in the Prefect lounge. True, Oliver was not a Prefect so he did not technically belong in there, but it was the only vacant room at the time.

"Oliver...I have something to tell you..." I have something to tell you."I said slowly.

He just took a seat on the couch, suddenly seeming to have taken up a keen interest in a spot on the floor.

"You're pregnant, aren't you?"

I just nodded. It was one of those moments where the seconds seem to reap a sort of coldness that makes you either want to vomit or cry; a moment in which you know that you just want to run away from the answer that you have not yet heard, as you fear it to be the worse. Once that time was over, Oliver finally said:

"Well...it's sorta good that we're having a baby young, so that way we can play with it and stuff."

At the time I thought what he said meant that everything was going to be fine, and it actually made some sense to me. But looking back now I see that those were just the words of a seventeen year old boy who just a few minutes ago had a strong future in Quidditch and a girlfriend that he could fool around with without a single care in the world, and who had just had his freedom and boyhood ripped from him by the simple word "Pregnant". He was merely saying what he thought he should say, Oliver was always the type to hide his feelings by trying to pull off the facade of the 'strong man'. Perhaps he should have just collapsed on the couch and cried as he probably wanted to. Of course I didn't see that then. He was the man, which meant he was obviously alright with it if he wasn't angry. But now I realise that he was not a man, he was just a boy. We were both children.