"Selfried and the Secret" - Excerpt

I've been working on a novel, my first novel. It's called Selfried and the Secret. The story follows a social media influencer whose secret is exposed in a very public way. But Selfried isn't the only one who's harbouring a secret. It would seem that everyone in her life has something to hide. I hope you enjoy the following excerpt.
​(copyright Amanda Sterczyk 2019, all rights reserved)

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Brooke hadn’t planned to be a young mother, just as she hadn’t planned to be a dropout. Before everything went to shit, she was an aspiring singer, studying music at a midwest—somewhat decent—public university, with dreams of moving to New York and performing on Broadway—not as an actor that could sing, as a bona fide singer—but that was before the shitstorm, a period in her life that left her conflicted. Because the After, after the shitstorm, that is, was more than she could have ever imagined. There were challenges, she wasn’t going to lie or try to sugarcoat it, but the After, well, that was all about Lincoln, her new love. And although her life went to shit before Lincoln, the shitstorm had partly produced him, so she determined that she would begin referring to the shitstorm as the In-Between. 
In-Between the Before and the After, that was a better way to think of the time that had produced her beautiful baby boy. Sure, she had had to drop out of school, delete her social media accounts, move to another town where no one knew her, and cut ties with family and friends. Dropping out was a no-brainer, she would have lost her scholarship anyway. If the Chrisitan college had discovered her pregnancy, she would have been shown the door, and she never would have been able to show her face back home. 
Many of the students recruited to attend Go with God College came from lower income families who couldn’t afford tuition, Brooke included. And so, they signed the draconian celibacy agreement on the first day of classes, thankful for the opportunity of better jobs that came with higher education.