Angie shakes her head. “I don’t believe in God,” she says, “But if I did, I’d thank him every day for both of my abortions.”
I sign some papers, and I swipe my bank card to pay for it, thinking that this certainly wasn’t what I had intended to do with my birthday money, but oh well. I wonder what happens to girls who don’t have $659 they can get their hands on this easily.
Then Angie walks me back into the exam room, and she hugs me. Her skin smells like vanilla.
The nurse practitioner comes back in. She pops open a pill packet and taps a single white pill, as innocuous-looking as an aspirin, into a little clear plastic cup. She fills a second cup with water.
“You’ll need to come back for a follow-up ultrasound next week,” she says before she hands me the pill. “It’s very important. We’ll need to make sure that your uterus has expelled everything. Otherwise there’s a risk of infection. Okay?” Her face is very serious. This is important.
“Okay.”
She nods. “The rest of the prescription is here,” she says, unclipping a little white pharmacy bag from her clipboard and handing it to me. “In twenty-four hours, you’ll take this medication. You don’t swallow it, though. There are four small Misoprostol tablets. You’ll put them in your mouth between your lower lip and your gum and hold them there until they dissolve—about thirty minutes. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say again.
“There’s another medication in there, too, to help with the nausea you will probably feel tomorrow, and I recommend you take Midol to help with the cramping.”
I nod. “Anything else?”
“That’s everything. The abortion begins after you take this first pill. A pregnancy can’t survive without the progesterone to support it. So take a few minutes if you’d like, for yourself, before you take it. Then make a follow-up appointment at the front desk before you leave.”
I don’t need a few minutes. I pick up the cup that holds the pill and tip it into my mouth and swallow it down with the water.
I wipe my mouth with a tissue from the box on the counter. “Thank you,” I say.
???
I stop at the drugstore on my way home to buy maxi pads and Midol. While I’m at it I pick up some chocolate chip cookies and a few bags of microwave popcorn. Before I drive home, I text Bekah.
Hey R U BZ 2morrow
She texts back almost immediately. No whats up
It feels weird to text about the abortion. So I call her.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
The words are almost painfully hard to get out—“I’m pregnant and I’m taking these pills so that I can stop being pregnant and the doctor said I shouldn’t be alone”—but I say them and then feel this jolt of fear that she’ll hate me or judge me or ask me how I was dumb enough to get pregnant in the first place.
But she says none of these things. Instead she answers, “It’ll be like a slumber party!” Her voice is ironically chirpy.
“I did buy snacks,” I say.
“I’ll bring nail polish,” she says, facetiously or sincerely, I have no idea.
Either way is fine with me. I’m just glad she’s going to come.
???
It turns out that it’s a perfect weekend to have an abortion because my parents decide to drive up the coast for a couple of nights, something they do every now and then. They used to hire the lady who cleans for us to sleep over, but now that I can drive, they just tell me to be good and keep my phone charged, and to answer if they call. They put a few twenties on the kitchen counter, which I won’t need to spend because my mother has stocked the fridge and there are still leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner, anyway.
They leave.
I text Bekah and she says she’s on her way.
Part of my brain wants to think about Seth and how we still haven’t talked and all the ways I feel about that, but I push the whole mess to the corner of my mind. One thing at a time.
There’s this writer who writes about writing. She says that when her brother was a kid, he had to do this bird project for school. He was supposed to draw a whole bunch of birds and write description of them. It was intended to be a semester-long project, but instead he waited until the last minute, and the night before the project was due, he started freaking out about how he couldn’t possibly get it done in time. Then their dad, all calm and kind, told her brother to just take it bird by bird. One thing at a time.
“Bird by bird,” I say, and I pop the four pills out of their four individual plastic bubbles, and I slip them into the space between my lip and my gums, imagining them as four little eggs.
At first when she began to feel sick she thought it was something she ate. It didn’t occur to her that perhaps the problem was instead something she had done, not until she was so sick that she could no longer hold it back, hold it down, hold it in.
Not vomit. She heaved and choked and then up it came. It was slick with saliva, but solid at its core. And as soon as it rose up from her throat and into her mouth and then out onto the light yellow duvet of her bed, she felt much better, indeed.
It was pellet shaped, about as big as a chicken egg, a mass of feathers and hair. At first she poked at it with a pen, wondering that she could have produced such a thing—was it possible that this had grown inside her?—but then she set the pen aside and picked at the thing with her nails, her fingers, her hands.
The hair was her own, that was clear—dark brown, almost black, and long, tangled together in an impossible snarl. Woven in were feathers—white feathers, brown feathers, pinfeathers and tail feathers. These she pulled free from the knotted hair and laid in a row, side by side on the yellow duvet.
And then there were the bones—little bones, like the bones inside a Barbie doll, if a Barbie doll was made of human stuff—strangest of all a tiny skull, with sockets for eyes, a hole where a nose could be.
And teeth—incisors, molars, canines. Some bright white, others stained yellowish as if from time and use.
She pulled free the teeth, and laid them beneath the bones that she had placed beneath the feathers that she had pulled from the pellet that she had disgorged from somewhere deep inside.
The sight of it—of all of it—fascinated and disgusted her, both at exactly the same time, and to the same degree.
And when she had finished examining all the separate parts, she pushed the teeth and the bones and the feathers back into the tangled web of hair and she slipped the whole of it beneath her pillow and rested her head and pulled the duvet up to her chin and she closed her eyes and slept.