A tired Maddie woke up hours after first being placed into a bed. He was groggy, though he hurt less. As he looked at the outside window, he noted it was already dark. I must have been out a while, he thought. What's going on? He didn't have much time to think about things, because the door opened a minute later, and a doctor in her white coat entered the room. Maddie sleepily looked up at the tall Asian woman from his bed.
"Hi, Madison," she greeted the patient. He looked at the lab coat which was embroidered with her name, Nao Wanzhou, M.D., OB/AND. "My name is Dr. Nao Wanzhou, and I'm an andrologist here at Virgil Mason."
"An andrologist?" Still in a bit of a haze, Maddie tilted his head.
"Yes, lady. I must inform you... that you just had a miscarriage."
"A—wait, WHAT!?" The word "miscarriage" jolted Maddie's thoughts.
"I'm afraid so, dear. I'm so sorry."
"How is that possible!?"
"You were stressed, you were exerting yourself... Obviously you didn't know you were pregnant, because no pregnant boy would have been allowed to continue performing such vigorous physical activity."
"I hadn't been feeling well for a while, and I suspected I might have been pregnant, but..." Maddie looked around, hesitant of whether he should say more. "Well, I would have been bullied at school if people found out. In fact, one of my cheerleaders already had."
"Don't get too emotional, Madison, your body is healing right now. You're going to need to take it easy and you'll probably be in the hospital for a day or two. We need to monitor you after this," Dr. Wanzhou explained.
In a nearby waiting room, Callie Schmidt and Mina Carlyle were processing the news, which doctors had delivered to them just moments prior.
"I didn't think it'd come to this..." Mina put his hands between his face.
"Neither did I," the cheer coach replied. "I had no clue. And, understandably, Maddie was hiding this for his own sake."
"...I had him young and I didn't want him to repeat that mistake," Mina sighed. "Yet here we are... He's gonna be out of commission for weeks."
"I'm probably not getting him back in time for state. I mean... He's got so much to process," Coach Callie replied. "My brother had a miscarriage a few years ago and it still just eats at him from time to time."
"Not to mention the social shame..." Mina added, thinking about his own experience.
"I didn't even think of that. I'm scared for him to go back to school tomorrow. So many rumors."
"Do we know who the mother was?"
Coach Callie shook his head, causing his earrings to sway. "I'd have to ask him, and...honestly, that's not my place."
"Well, I know who the baby's grandmother would have been."
"Yeah, so?"
"Lin Gibson."
"Wait what?" Callie, caught off guard, jerked his head back a bit in surprise.
"Jonatha and Maddie are half-brothers, something I hid from Maddie until recently. I used to work with Jonatha's mom, and, well..."
"But—"
"She..." Mina sighed loudly. "She ended up marrying a man named Rogera Merlin and had her three kids, and then they divorced. Rogera moved down to LA to work for some beauty company, I think."
"I see. I feel bad for Jonatha, too. Not knowing and all."
"What can you do?" Mina vented. "They don't like boys knowing too much. And Lin was too powerful for me to mess with."
