Does she miss her eggs? Did she love them? It doesn’t matter. Her life is to lay and lie and lay again. The eggs fill the cartons and the cartons fill the fridge, and the white French doors seal them tightly away.
Once upon a time, chickens laid eggs only during mating season, only as many eggs as the hens could manage were they to become chicks. But the farmer wanted more—more eggs for his omelets, more eggs to take to market. More, more, more. And so the farmers and the scientists chose the chickens who were the very best producers and selected them for breeding, to make hens who laid even more eggs, and so on and so on. And now a hen can lay an egg almost every day. She can lay three hundred eggs a year, in her best laying years, and she can keep laying eggs for years to come—up to a thousand eggs. A thousand eggs the hen can lay, and then, when she cannot lay any more, she can still give—she can lie on the roasting pan, and lie on the table, and the farmer and his family, with a fridge full of a thousand eggs behind them, can carve her open at the table, and when they have finished their supper they can find one thing more—a bone, her wishbone—and the laughing farmer’s children can grasp it with hands still oily from her meat, and they can wish and they can break it into two.
“Ms. Faye.”
I look up. I had been fooling around on my phone, not that there was anything interesting on it, just to disappear as much as I could. I’d driven myself there, to the Costa Mesa Planned Parenthood, which was a joke of a name because no one went there planning for parenthood, they all went planning for un-parenthood.
There isn’t a Planned Parenthood in Irvine, where we live. Irvine, California. Named the safest city in America, two years in a row. Safest for fetuses, too, I guess, since we don’t have any abortion clinics at all. You have to go to Santa Ana or Costa Mesa for that.
I hate driving. It scares me, especially driving to new places. I don’t drive very far, usually—I have my set schedule that takes me to predictable places at predictable times. Irvine is utterly predictable. It’s what they call a “planned community,” meaning that each neighborhood was developed by a builder. So each neighborhood has a name and a feeling. A theme. Orchard Hills, Irvine Grove, The Colony. Like the different lands in Disneyland—Tomorrowland, Fantasyland.
We live in Shady Canyon. It’s not that shady, and there’s no canyon.
When my parents handed me the keys to my car last spring on my sixteenth birthday, a three-year-old Toyota Prius that Mom had picked out for herself during her “global awareness” phase, they made me promise that I wouldn’t drive on freeways. This wasn’t a hard promise to make since freeways scare the crap out of me. But I broke that promise, today, to come here.
I tuck my phone into my jacket pocket and stand. Follow the nurse. Maybe she is a nurse. She’s wearing scrubs, anyway, so she must do something medical.
She weighs me first, and measures me. Average. I filled out the forms in the waiting room, and I hesitated over the birth date, considering making myself a little older, like eighteen or nineteen, even though I know from their website that they won’t turn me away for being young. But I ended up being honest, because maybe it would matter somehow, my age, for the dosage or something.
Then she hands me one of those blue paper “gowns,” they call them, which is a joke, and tells me to leave it open in the front for the breast exam.
“There’s nothing wrong with my breasts,” I tell her.
She smiles. It’s a nice smile. “I’m sure there isn’t, honey, but this is a well-woman exam. We routinely check for breast abnormalities along with doing a Pap smear. Okay?”
Sure. Why not? As long as they’re at it, what’s a little boob play, between friends?
“Is this your first time?”
I look up, embarrassed.
“For an exam,” she clarifies.
“Oh. Yeah. It is.”
“It’ll be fine,” she says. “Just get changed. The nurse-practitioner will be in soon.”
After the door closes behind her, I consider placing the still-folded paper gown on the exam table and just getting the hell out of there. But then I picture Seth’s brown eyes, the way they look up at me from between my thighs, and I stay.
My clothes form a growing pile on the chair by the door. Boots. Socks. Jeans and underwear, yanked down together. Flannel shirt. Tank. Bra.
I’m cold. On second thought, I pluck the socks from the pile. They couldn’t need to see my feet, too. Feet have nothing to do with it.
The paper gown is as stupid and uncomfortable as it looked, but at least my socks are still warm.
I perch on the end of the exam table, waiting. I wait for fifteen minutes.
Finally I figure they’ve forgotten about me. I scoot off the table and am just about to get dressed and leave when the door finally opens.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” says the woman. As she enters the room, she squirts sanitizer from a jar by the door and rubs her hands together. She’s wearing a white coat over black slacks and a gray blouse. “Complications.” She doesn’t elaborate, just motions for me to climb back up on the table.
She’s Asian, and younger than my mother. She isn’t pretty, but I don’t need her to be pretty. She has, I notice, small hands. In this current situation, small hands seem radically more important than pretty.
She has my chart in her small hands. It’s basically just a folder with a single piece of paper inside. I’d filled out the paper in the waiting room. Name: Nina Faye. Date of Birth: May 25. Age: 16. Sexually Active? Yes.
Other questions follow—the first day of my last period, the type of birth control I am currently using, history of sexually transmitted diseases. I checked all the boxes honestly, though I flinched to admit that I didn’t use birth control. That is why I am here, after all—to get on the Pill. Or maybe to get that shot. Though I hate needles.
She looks up from the chart.
“You’re here for birth control?”
“Yes.”
“The shot?”
“No,” I say, certain, suddenly. “The Pill.”
“The shot is safer. You can’t forget to take it.”
I shrug. Say nothing.
She sighs and pinches the top of her nose, just beneath her glasses. Then she looks again at my file. “It says here you’re not currently using any birth control, but that you’re sexually active.”
I want to kick myself for not checking the other box.
“You know, the Pill will prevent pregnancy, but it won’t do anything about sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS, herpes, genital warts . . . the Pill won’t stop any of that.”
I look right into her eyes and don’t blink or answer, and after a second she looks down. “Okay,” she says.
She washes her hands and then snaps on a pair of gloves. “We’ll start with listening to your lungs.”