I’m never going to forget my seventeenth birthday.

It started fine, I woke up, opened some cards, some presents… you know, general birthday stuff. My back had been aching for most of the previous night, but I lied about it and went bowling with my friends like we agreed to a month ago.

Amina had just gotten her second strike of the game when it happened. Or when I realised I needed to go to the toilet, at any rate.

“Guys, I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, and only Jackson acknowledged that I’d even spoken.

With my back still aching (even more now I was actively thinking about it), I stumbled into the bathroom and locked myself into a cubicle.

I don’t know if words can describe how shocked I was to feel what honestly felt like a miniature waterfall gushing down my legs. I won’t even lie, I thought for a moment that I’d wet myself.

But something told me that wasn’t the case.

I’d been having regular periods — mostly. PCOS isn’t exactly great for that, but there you go. And yet here I was, with wet trousers and feeling like I was on my period again with some of the worst cramps ever… even though I’d had my last period only two weeks earlier.

I didn’t think I could move.

Then I heard the bathroom door opening.

“Erin?” Amina called. “Jackson said you’d be in here, it’s your turn! Are you okay?”

Cramps, what seemed like my waters breaking (even though I wasn’t pregnant)…

“I think I might be going into labour?”

“You’re not pregnant…?”

“Well, yeah, I know that much! But it seems like I’m going into labour at the same time!”

I could tell Amina was grimacing. “Push, then? Do you feel like you, uh, need to…”

“I guess?”

I think we gave Jackson the shock of his life when he hesitantly stuck his head through the door of the bathroom to hunt us both down again. Being the only one between him, Ethan and Zachary who could even hope to get that close to where we were (being born in a girl’s body with the most rubbish grandparents on the planet is good for one thing, I guess), it was his job to do the one thing he hated doing most.

“Amina, Erin —“

“OH MY GOD THERE’S A F*CKING HEAD!”

“WHEN THE HELL DID YOU GET PREGNANT?!”

“I DON’T KNOW?!”