From the author of Oprah''s Book Club pick and Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck. The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood. Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, <The Girls Who Grew Big< confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

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Leila Mottley

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**From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling comes an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

“Blistering, wise, empathetic. . . . Mottley writes with unabashed reverence for these young mothers. . . valuing them on the page in all the ways they are not valued in their lives.” —New York Times Book Review**

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

Leseprobe
Simone

Nobody ever warns you about the placenta. Like, you spend days seizing and stretching open to get some shoulders out your coochie and then the baby, or babies in my case, are writhing in your arms, and you realize it’s not even over. You’ve still gotta push out this pulsing purple heart bigger than your man’s head—and my man had a big-ass head—and find a way to cut the cords.

I guess if you’re in the hospital, then maybe somebody hands you a fancy pair of scissors to cut them or mentions the placenta in between the choke of contractions to get that second baby out, but I gave birth set up in the bed of my boyfriend’s red pickup truck, so I wouldn’t know. I’d tell you I did it that way ’cause I couldn’t afford the hospital without no insurance, which was true, but really I just didn’t want people looking at me funny like, girl what are you doing having a baby with this gangly man who keeps telling us to call him Tooth? I knew how it looked. I was sixteen. He was twenty-two.

But really, at the time, I didn’t think it mattered any more than the birthmark on my ankle and so I didn’t wanna have to explain to some nurse as I chewed ice that I love him, have to say, They my babies, I wanted them, I want them, even though at that point I don’t think I knew what I wanted or who I loved or how I ended up in the back of a pickup truck in Florida giving birth at thirty-six weeks.

At least in the truck, no questions was asked. Except, why didn’t nobody tell me about the placenta? I thought it would come out with the rest of that fluid, but nope, I had to do all the work while Tooth just stared at me, repulsed.

The twins was still attached to the fleshy heat of my body, slippery and smaller than one of his shoes, and I’d passed them to Tooth when I felt the faint cramps begin and knew I had to push one more time, maybe twice ’cause I’d been told there was two placentas up in there. But now Tooth was tryna give the babies back like they wasn’t half him, holding them out to me like grocery bags with the handles torn off.

“Should we go to the hospital?” Tooth asked, trying not to look between my thighs even though I saw his eyes drift there and shoot back up, his lashes fluttering in disgust.

I didn’t respond, mid-push, and then one soft big placenta slipped right out, two cords dangling from it, and I glared up at Tooth. “You think after all that, I’m about to go to the hospital now? No.”

I didn’t care none about the mess or the fact we ain’t known what we was doing, ’cause all those months of torment—when I’d been stretched out like an old sock by a big foot, expelled from the only family I’d known, whispered about among the throngs of a town high on contempt—was suddenly worth something. My babies.

I was exhausted, but I knew I couldn’t rest yet. “We have to cut the cords.”

“I think I got my pocketknife,” Tooth said.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the dirtiest pocketknife you’d ever seen, popped the blade and it was all crusted in dried brown blood, shed fur from some long-dead animal, and Lord knows how many fishes’ yellowed intestines.

“Where do I cut it?” he asked.

I looked at him. He stared back.

“Are you fucking with me? You can’t cut ’em with that,” I said.

“Why?”

I gawked. “It’s dirty.”

“So is that thing,” he said, nodding to my placenta.

“That thing fed your children for nine months. I’m not cuttin’ nothing with that.”

“Then what you gonna do?”

I looked around again, like I was gonna find some spare scissors among the pooling fluid, and then I looked back at the placenta, and I knew. This was the moment I became a mother, when I was the only person in the world that knew what needed to be done to keep my babies safe, to excavate myself just to feed them.

“I’ll bite it,” I said.

Tooth’s face twisted up like I’d just said I was gonna eat my own shit. “The fuck you talkin’ ’bout? I’ll go find another knife, just stay here and—”

Before he could do nothing, I had one cord in my mouth and I was gnawing. It didn’t take much work before my teeth found each other and then I tied it and moved to the next cord and my teeth ripped through that too. I expected them to be chewy, dense, but they felt like nothing but pasta before it’s cooked through. And then it was done, both cords severed.

The babies now fed on breast and body, each of their little mouths searching my skin for nipple. My girl found it first, and she was lucky ’cause my right breast had been leaking for days and was ready for her, far more full than the left one, so when she latched, the yellowish liquid came out thick and spilled right into her mouth. My boy kept searching but he was stuck around my heart, and he turned his head and opened his mouth wide and let out a roar. With a new fever, he continued until he found his life source and I helped get it in his small mouth. …