“I wasn’t naked before!” I said. “People keep looking at me!”
She dropped her backpack to the ground and plopped down next to me. “People always look at you,” she said. “You stop traffic. I don’t think anybody’s really figured it out.”
“Lumberjack did,” I said. My ex-boyfriend, boy toy, whatever he was, a TA from astronomy last fall, had been calling me nonstop since the photos hit social media over the weekend. I’d ignored him. He didn’t seem to care about how I felt about the pictures, but kept asking if we could go to the beach sometime.
Jerk.
The station must have successfully squelched a lot of the illegally recorded segments of the show, as they weren’t getting out nearly as much as my naked butt picture on the beach. I had quit logging into anything so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at myself.
Fortunately, the dreadlocks were so new that my family hadn’t put it all together. My name had been in the segment and in the tabloids, but wasn’t attached to any of the viral images.
I was possibly getting off luckier than I could have.
“You heard from the hunky singer?” Corabelle asked.
“I don’t expect to.” I picked at a leaf near my plum Uggs boot. The color cheered me up a bit. “It wasn’t like we exchanged numbers or anything.”
“Just bodily fluids, I know. You keep saying that. Still, he has your name if he noticed.”
“Chance didn’t strike me as the type to follow celebrity gossip,” I said. “Besides, he was on the road. Hitchhikers don’t exactly get cable.”
“You think he’s gone already?” Corabelle asked.
I looked up through the spindly trees at the pale sky. “Probably. If I were him, I’d be done with LA.”
We sat for a bit in companionable silence. Corabelle was good at that. Just being outside and away from people and devices and news magazines made me calmer.
I squirmed a bit on my rock, feeling a little strange in the girl parts. “That’s what I meant to do,” I said aloud, then wished I hadn’t.
Corabelle looked up from her notebook. “What’s that?”
“Never mind,” I said.
She put her pad down with a look I recognized from my mother. It was new to her. She’d taken to being a stepmom to Gavin’s adorable four-year-old like a kid to a cookie. She had the mom voice and the mom stare and the mom hug. She was born to it. I hoped they’d get to have a baby of their own eventually, although I knew they had a long way to go to get there.
Just not now.
I needed her more.
“Spit it out,” she said.
“I think I need to go to the clinic,” I said.
“Oh,” Corabelle said. “Right. You didn’t end up with a condom, did you?”
I shook my head. “And I feel a little weird.”
“Let’s go over there right now,” she said. “You can make an appointment. The doctor there is super nice. I went for the exact same reason as you last fall.” She tucked her notebook in her backpack.
“Really?” I asked. “A VD screen?”
“Yeah, and a pregnancy test. Not a fun combination. You feel like a two-bit tramp with no common sense.”
I got up from the rock and brushed the dirt off my wool miniskirt. “I feel like that most of the time.”
“You don’t have to keep trading them out, you know,” she said as we cut back through the trees. “You can find a good one and hold on to him.”
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “There aren’t any good ones.”
She didn’t point out that Gavin was her husband, or that even Tina, who had always sworn off second dates, was also engaged now. Corabelle was good at letting the I-told-you-so go unsaid. That’s probably why we were friends. Otherwise there would be nothing else to say. I screwed up at the speed of ejaculation.
I balked as we approached the small door of the health clinic. “I can’t be seen going in there,” I said. “I’ll just call them later.”
“I don’t think anyone is watching you,” Corabelle said.
I looked around. Students walked in every direction, talking on cell phones, listening to earbuds, or chatting with friends. They all looked legit, but then, I hadn’t known I was being watched on the beach.
“Can’t do it,” I said. “I promise I’ll call.”
“Don’t put it off,” Corabelle said. “Waiting will make you crazy, and you need to focus on your grades or you won’t graduate.”
“I don’t know. Another term at good ol’ UCSD probably wouldn’t kill me,” I said. “Not like I have anything else to do.”
We passed by the health building without going in.
“I have to get to class,” Corabelle said. “Maybe it will get quieter in a little while and you can sneak in.”
“Maybe,” I said. I really did want to get that over with.
She reached over for a quick hug. “I’m glad you came to campus today. You can’t let this derail your life.”