“Please,” she begged us. “Please don’t do this. Don’t do what I did.”
I think she wanted us to believe she was holding her own aborted fetus. My adrenaline kicked in, because for a minute I forgot about the pain and forgot to be scared. I defaulted to my usual emotion when things weren’t going right: anger. Without really thinking, I wrestled my arm free from Agnes and I shoved the woman.
I didn’t mean for her to fall, but she did. Everyone gasped, even me. Theresa tried to catch the jar as it floated up in the air, but she couldn’t. It landed hard on the walkway and shattered.
The woman yelped like a coyote and, with lightning speed, gathered up her fetus. But not before I could see that it was a plastic fake. We just stepped around her and went inside.
“You fucking bitches!” she screamed after us. My sisters had to stop me from turning around and kicking her.
The waiting room was small. There were half a dozen chairs, a small pile of magazines on a coffee table, and pamphlets and posters everywhere about reproductive systems and reproductive rights. There were two other people there: a girl about my age reading a book called Crossing to Safety, and a guy in his thirties holding a clipboard. I figured he worked there.
“Hi,” he said, coming up to us before we were all the way in the room.
I was too out of it to answer, so Agnes took charge.
“Hello,” she answered. “My sister needs to see a doctor right away.”
“Oh,” he said as his face went flush. “I’m sorry, I don’t work for Planned Parenthood. You need to check in at the desk.” He nodded to the registration area, which was basically a wall of what I guessed was bulletproof glass with a small sliding window. An older and tired-looking woman sat behind it, watching the four of us.
“So what,” Theresa snapped at the man, “are the fucking protestors coming inside now?”
“What? No, no. I’m not a protestor.” The guy, who had jet-black hair and the bushiest eyebrows I’ve ever seen, was knocked way off his game. “I’m here working for Planned Parenthood, registering gir—women, I mean registering women, to vote.”
Agnes, Theresa, and I looked at each other. My sisters burst out laughing. If I hadn’t felt like I was going to die, I might’ve laughed, too.
“Yeah, Mister,” Theresa said. “I’m sure all the girls coming in here”—and she underlined girls—“are in the right frame of mind to perform their civic duty or whatever.”
I was feeling worse by the second, so I touched Theresa’s arm. She looked at me and understood right away.
She brushed past the guy, maybe a little rougher than she needed to, and escorted me to the desk.
The room was too small for the guy to get far enough away from us, so he called out to the woman behind the glass that he was taking a break and left through the front door.
“Don’t be too hard on him, girls,” the woman said, and she underlined the word, too. “He’s actually donating his time to help raise awareness about what we do here. As long as we have those lunatics out front, we need people like him in here. Now, does one of you have an appointment?”
“No,” Agnes said. “My sister is—how pregnant are you?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. I think about four months.”
“My sister is four months pregnant, and she’s bleeding a lot. And her stomach hurts a lot.”
The woman, who had been calm, almost sleepy, sat up straight. She pushed a clipboard at Agnes through the glass window. “Fill this out for your sister. And you,” she said to me, “come with me.”
“Can one of my sisters come, too?” I asked, my voice a squeak as another wave of pain hit me. Theresa, who still had her arm locked through mine, gripped tighter.
HARBINGER JONES
An eighteen-year-old kid applying to college shouldn’t be a big deal, but for me, it was.
When the band was gearing up for our first tour, during my senior year of high school, I lied to my parents and told them I’d been accepted at the University of Scranton, that I would be attending in the fall. I hadn’t even applied. It was a pretty elaborate lie—I forged all the admission documents and pretended to mail my dad’s check to the school—and I rode it all the way to the end, until I got caught. My parents did not take it well. The idea of college now was, for me, like a career criminal deciding to go straight.