Theresa tensed up and looked at me. Agnes must’ve sensed it, because she looked at both of us and said, “Seriously, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I answered. “It’s just my period. Can we let it go?” But I was feeling too crappy and was too freaked out for Agnes to buy my excuse. In that moment I don’t think I could’ve convinced a three-year-old that Santa Claus was real.
Agnes waited a beat, looking from me to Theresa and back again. Theresa was staring at the floor, which was a pretty obvious sign that something was wrong.
“Wait, are you pregnant?” Agnes didn’t know how loud her voice was.
Theresa and I both shushed her.
“If Mom and Dad find out, they’re going to kill you!”
“I know,” Theresa said, shushing her again, “which is why we need you to keep it down.”
Agnes nodded and then looked at me. “But why are you bleeding if you’re pregnant?”
I started crying.
“C’mon,” Theresa said, taking charge. “We’re getting you to an emergency room. Now.”
“But Mom and Dad can’t find out,” I blubbered.
“Fine. We can go to Planned Parenthood. It’s cheaper, and they won’t call home.”
They helped me up and got my clothes off. There was a lot of blood. Well, not all blood. I don’t really know what you’d call it. It was a brownish, reddish, stickyish fluid, and it smelled awful. It smelled like death. I thought I was going to throw up again.
My two sisters—my two younger sisters, both still teenagers and both still in high school—helped clean me up. They loaded a fresh pair of panties with so many pads that I could barely walk. Agnes gave me a pair of her sweatpants and a loose-fitting shirt, and we left.
HARBINGER JONES
When I finally got up the next day, it was almost 11:00 a.m. I’d stayed up late the night before, leafing through this thick paperback guide to colleges that had been lying around my house since I’d been a sophomore in high school. My dad had given it to me in this big show of what he thought was moral support. Where my mom always surprised me with fun presents, like a new comic book or a package of blank cassette tapes, my dad would lie in wait with college guides and articles from the New England Journal of Medicine on the latest advances in plastic surgery, like that was supposed to make me feel better.
But the more I looked at that guide, the more I liked the idea of college. I don’t know if college was exactly what I had in mind when I started thinking about a life change, but it made sense. Applying would make my parents happy, and like it was for so many other people, attending would be the path of least resistance.
It was fun to read about all the different programs of study offered; fun to read the sections called “campus life” and imagine myself fitting in somehow, and fun to lose myself in the student population totals, the number of applicants versus the number accepted, and the outrageous tuition costs.
I had made notes in the margins back when I was thinking of applying the first time. Leafing through the second time, after I’d been out of high school for six months, I saw what an amazing exercise in self-delusion a book like that can be. I had notes next to Yale, Brown, and Cornell. Until you start sending out applications, the possibilities are limitless and they are real. It’s kind of like Schr?dinger’s cat. The college has neither accepted nor rejected you until you apply.
Of course, the listings also showed what grades and SAT scores you needed to get in, so maybe the cat was more dead than alive. For the record, my grades sucked. Like, Hoover-vacuum-cleaner sucked. As for my SATs, well, let’s just say that both the reading and math scores started with a four. I couldn’t have even gotten into Transylvania University if I tried. And, yes, there really is a school called Transylvania University. It’s in Kentucky. You can look it up.
CHEYENNE BELLE
I was feeling so bad and so scared that I don’t really even remember how we got to the clinic. I know we took a cab, but I don’t remember the drive there at all.
When I stepped onto the curb I was pulled back to reality because, of course, there were protesters. Just a handful, which I suppose isn’t bad for a Saturday morning, but it was enough. They were in our faces the second the cab pulled away.
Some were women, some men, all of them yelling at us. They were like a disorganized pack of wild dogs.
“You fucking whore,” one old bat screamed.
“Don’t listen to her, child,” a middle-aged man said. “But don’t confound the sin of fornication with the sin of murder.”
“Just ignore them,” Agnes whispered in my ear. She locked arms with me on one side, Theresa on the other.
Just before we got to the last part of the walkway—I don’t think the protesters were legally allowed to go right up to the door—this Stepford wife jumped in front of me, holding what was supposed to be a fetus in a jar of red liquid.