You think that if your life were a Choose Your Own Adventure story—let’s call it Intern!—this would be the point where it would say THE END. You would have made enough poor choices for the story to have had a bad ending. The only redemption would be in going back to the beginning and starting again. This isn’t an option for you, because you are a person and not a character in a Choose Your Own Adventure.
The rub of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if you don’t make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you’re always good, the story will be very short.
You wonder if the congressman ever read Choose Your Own Adventure stories. He’s probably too old, but you think he would get a kick out of them and what a good metaphor they are for life.
If you call him.
If you don’t call him.
You decide to call him even though you know you shouldn’t. In fact, you’ve explicitly been told not to. You haven’t been alone with him or even spoken to him since the night of the crash.
He doesn’t answer his phone so you leave a message. As you are babbling abut Choose Your Own Adventure stories, you realize that the thought that seemed deep sounds incredibly lame over the phone.
A few days later, Jorge Rodriguez shows up at the house. He’s important in the congressman’s organization. You don’t know exactly what his title is now, but he used to be the head of fund-raising. You’ve spoken to him a few times, but you’ve never had much interaction. He’s charming, and very handsome. He looks like the congressman, but he is shorter, Cuban, younger. He’s maybe five years older than you.
He knows your mother because of an event she did for the congressman at the school. “The beautiful Grossman women,” Jorge says. “Good to see you, Rachel. How are you? How’s BRJA?”
“I was fired,” your mother says to him, in an odd, spiky, almost confrontational way.
“Sorry to hear that,” Jorge says. “Well, Aviva, I’m actually here to see you.”
You go out to the back patio, and you sit under the bougainvillea, and your mother brings you both iced teas. Jorge waits for her to leave before he says genially, “You can’t contact him anymore, Aviva. It’s best for everyone that you move on.”
“It’s best for him,” you say.
“Everyone,” he insists.
“I’d move on if I had anywhere to move on to,” you say. “My whole life is ruined,” you say. “No one will ever hire me. No one will even fuck me.”
“It seems that way,” Jorge says, “but it’s not that bad.”
“Respectfully,” you say, “how the hell would you know?”
Jorge doesn’t have an answer.
“You know about politics. You know about PR. What would you do if you were me?”
“I’d go back to school. Get a degree in law or a master’s in public policy.”
“Okay,” you say, “let’s assume I can get a single teacher to write me a recommendation letter. Let’s assume I can manage to get accepted to a school. I incur an additional one hundred thousand dollars or so in student loan debt, and then I apply for jobs again. How is it different? You search my name, and everything’s still there, fresh as the year it happened.”
Jorge drinks his iced tea. “If you don’t go back to school, you could do volunteer work. Make a new name for yourself—”
“Tried that,” you say. “They don’t want me either.”
“Maybe what you need is witness protection,” he jokes. “New name. New town. New job.”
“Probably so,” you say.
“I honestly don’t know what you should do,” Jorge says. “But I do know something . . .”
“Yeah?”
“You said no one would fuck you. That’s not true. You’re a beautiful girl.”
You are not a beautiful girl, and even if you were, you know that is not related to how much sex a person has. Plenty of ugly people have sex. Plenty of ordinary people have sex. Plenty of beautiful people spend their nights alone.
You are not beautiful. You are interesting looking, and your large breasts signify to men that you are sexy and easy and a little dumb. You know exactly what you are, and since the scandal and its ensuing coverage, you know exactly how people see you. There is nothing that anyone could say about you or to you that is surprising. You have not spent the summer in your parents’ pool and suddenly turned beautiful. And again, there are always people to have sex with, if you set your standards low enough. What you’d meant is, No one I’d want to sleep with will want to sleep with me.
This is to say, you know that Jorge is flattering you.
If you decide to sleep with Jorge anyway.
If you ask him to leave.
You walk over to where he is sitting, and you kiss him. You don’t want him, so much as you want anyone. You take him upstairs, and you decide you’d rather have sex in the guest room than your childhood bedroom, surrounded by high school yearbooks and framed drama club ephemera.
You go in the guest room, and you lock the door.
You can tell he’s experienced, which is fortunate. You, despite being the star player in a sex scandal, remain as inexperienced as can be.
When he touches you, you shiver with pleasure. You feel like a blade of grass, and he is a warm summer wind.
“So much lusciousness,” Jorge says.
Click here.
You miss a period, but you don’t even notice.
Click here.
You miss another period.
A few days later, you find yourself with your head over the toilet.
“Aviva,” your mother calls. “Are you sick?”
“Perfecting my eating disorder,” you reply.
“That’s a repulsive thing to say,” your mother says.
“Sorry,” you say. “I think I am getting sick.”
Your mother brings you soup, and you pull the covers over your head.
You’ve seen movies, you’ve read novels, and you have a pretty strong inkling what this might be.
You had been on the Pill, but maybe you’d gotten sloppy with taking the prescription. What was the point? You weren’t having sex.
You take a pregnancy test.
Blue line, but it looks smudged.
You take another pregnancy test, just to make sure you did it right.
Blue line.
You consider having an abortion. Of course you do. You know there is no earthly reason you should bring a child into this mess you call your life. You have no job, no prospects, no partner. You are profoundly lonely. You know that this is not a reason to have a child.
You believe in a woman’s right to choose. You would never vote for someone who didn’t believe in a woman’s right to choose.
If you decide to have an abortion.
If you continue with the pregnancy.
Your last semester of college, you took an advanced political science seminar called Gender and Politics. The seminar was led by a silver-haired woman in her late forties, who had recently had a baby. She would bring the baby—a boy—to class in a papoose. Despite the fact that he was the only male in the seminar and the discussions sometimes got quite heated, the baby never cried and almost seemed soothed by the discussion. You were jealous of that baby. You wished you might be brand-new, male, and in a papoose on a political scientist’s back.
The class, however, was something of a wash. Maybe it wasn’t the class but the mood you were in at the time. The scandal had passed, but you were filled with bile and rage. Around the middle of the semester, the professor stopped you after class.
“Don’t give up on us feminists,” the professor said.