In the cafeteria, Louise sidles up to me in the food line, her tray clacking against mine. “Are you okay?” she whispers, too loudly. “I heard what happened with you and Seth.”
How could she have heard what happened? I don’t even know what happened.
I say nothing. I take an apple and set it on my tray.
“I heard you guys broke up this weekend,” she says, trying again.
I walk away, leaving my tray on the metal rails, appetite gone.
After lunch, Mr. Whitbey wants to know how our projects are coming. Each of us has had to pick a literary genre and create our own short portfolio of work in that style. Our proposals are due today, and I have a short paragraph typed up saying that I’m focusing on magical realism, but not much more than that.
So far I have written one story about a girl who grows vaginas all over her body, a couple of weird little things about chickens and eggs, and I have a growing collection of stories I’ve written about the deaths of virgin martyr saints, but I’m not ready to share any of it with him, or anyone.
So I hand in my too-short proposal and tell him I’m still working on figuring it out, which makes him purse his mouth and shake his head.
“Pick up the pace, Nina,” he says, rapping his knuckles on my desk.
Mr. Whitbey’s hands, I decide, are exactly two sizes too small for his body.
When the egg did hatch at last, it wasn’t the cracking of the shell that was surprising, but rather what emerged.
All chicks are ugly at the very first. Their feathers, wet and thin, stick to their body. Their weird scaly legs are weak and useless. Their beaks look too large for their heads, and their wings are terrible stumps.
But within hours, the feathers dry and fluff and obscure their veiny thin skin and ugly skulls. The transformation is so quick that you can forgive the way they looked to start.
But this chick, from this egg, was different. Where there should have been wings, instead there were hands. Tiny fingers, each capped in a little bird claw. The hands flapped at the newly hatched chick’s sides, the fingers thrumming against the wet pinfeathers of the chick’s distended body.
Between the lizard-scaled legs of the tiny bird thrummed a distended orange ball—the yolk sack, improperly absorbed. It beat like a heart, like a threat, like a promise.
And the farmer, coming to check his newly hatched flock, plucked up the freakish chick at once, grasped its ugly head between his forefinger and thumb, and before the chick could peep her protest, he crushed in the thin-skulled head as easily as breaking an egg.
Life resumes, even though my heart has been cut out of my chest. On Tuesday I go to the shelter, where the familiar despair and hopelessness is sort of comforting as it exists outside of my body. Bekah lifts her chin in greeting. Her eyes stay fixed to her phone.
“Ni-na,” says Stanley from his bench outside the kennels. “You’re back.”
“I was just here last week,” I tell him, kind of sharply I guess, because his expression freezes like I’ve slapped him. I try again. “Hi, Stanley. It’s nice to see you.”
He smiles, my sharpness instantly forgotten, totally forgiven. “I missed you,” he says.
“I missed you, too,” I say, even though I haven’t given one second of thought to Stanley or Bekah or Ruth or even the dogs since I was here last Thursday.
I grab three leashes and head for the Chihuahuas. But there’s just Ginger and one of the little black males.
“Hey,” I say to Stanley, “Where’s the other little black guy?”
“He got adopted,” Stanley says, a big, loose smile on his face. “A family took him to his forever home.”
I leash up Ginger and the remaining black Chihuahua. It’s the uglier one, the one with a rough patch of gray hair on the top of his head and the kinked tail.
But still. One of the guys made it out. For the first time since Seth dropped me off on Saturday afternoon, I feel sort of happy.
???
Seth is back in school the next day. By the time I pull into the parking lot, the hood of his Acura is already cool. The print of my hand on the black metal disappears almost as soon as I lift my hand away.
Is that like a metaphor for the effect I’ve had on Seth? Has the mark I made on him faded, just as quickly as my handprint?
???
Thanksgiving comes. I don’t feel thankful, and after we consume a portion of the giant dinner my mother has made, my parents and I disappear into separate rooms, just like always.
There are lots of things I am not thankful about. The very top of the list is the fact that my period doesn’t come. I’ve finished the first pack of pills, so I should have started by now. I’ve never missed a period. I’ve never been late, even.
I know I’m pregnant before the second line appears on the test that I bought at the grocery store Thanksgiving morning, when my mom sent me out to buy more butter. I don’t feel pregnant, and I don’t look pregnant, but I know I am.
When the second pink line darkens parallel to the first, though, I stare at it as if it can’t be true. How can it be true?
I took all of the pills.
Well. I did take them all, but it was sort of hard getting into the routine at first, and so when I missed one that first week I took two the next day, and when I forgot for a day and a half later in the month, I did my best to catch up.
I took the rest of them, though, right on time. After breakfast, on my way to school. Once I figured out that keeping them in my purse and taking one each morning while I drove made it easier to remember, I didn’t miss any more.
But here is this second pink line.
At the clinic, the day after Thanksgiving, I see the same nurse practitioner. She makes me take another pregnancy test, and even though the first one at home was undeniably positive, I find myself practically praying that somehow it was defective. But no luck; though this test’s second pink line slashes across the first test to form a cross rather than appearing parallel to the first, like my test from the grocery store, it’s irrefutably positive.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice choked, my eyes stinging. I’m sitting on the end of the same exam table, the stirrups splayed on either side of me, and though I’m fully dressed this time, I feel as exposed as I was the first time.
She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Honey,” she says, and at her gentle touch, at the kind tone in her voice, I fall apart.
I cry until I choke, and she lets me cry, pulling me close and rocking me back and forth like I’m a baby, shhhing me, petting my hair, and I cry and cry.
I feel like the world’s biggest fuck-up. I feel like such an idiot. I feel stupid and ugly and lame and so, so ashamed.