Broken Dolls

man. Like, waaaaay older. Nearing his thirties, ata.” Kelsey shook her head with a smirk.

“Damn, do you think she’ll get an abortion or something? I honestly feel bad for her baby...Yna’s way too immature to give him or her a good life. Besides, how could she throw away her future like this?” Clarissa, the girl running for batch valedictorian, added.

Kara gripped her ballpen hard, her palms sweaty. Kelsey was Yna’s friend for years, but friendship was a fact that became fiction at the mention of pregnancy. Kara knew this because it wasn’t the first time a girl in their batch had been turned against. Pregnancy was like a plague that people like Kelsey used to feel good about themselves.

Despite this, Kara found herself feeling relieved that it wasn’t her. Somehow, she found a part of herself agreeing with Clarissa. How could a child raise children?

*

Kara was now twenty, and though the early days of blood on the sheets had both shocked and disgusted her, they couldn’t compare to this. “This” being the two clay babies that were sitting on her desk, both no bigger than the size of her palm. The baby girl was putting her fist in her mouth, looking at her with shiny eyes while a string of drool dribbled down her chin. The boy had fallen asleep, his chest rising and falling to the beat of his steady breathing.

Her predicament started two nights ago: clad in her white nightgown, she had gone to bed early to remedy a blunt but persistent stomach pain that appeared out of nowhere. Beforehand, she had received the news that Yna’s two year old drowned in the bathtub of their small apartment. “Yna went to pick up something from the kitchen, but she forgot to turn the water faucet off. Reckless and irresponsible, as expected,” Kelsey had said in their batch’s group chat—which Kara thought she muted once it no longer served its use for an-

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