“‘Partially or completely reabsorbed,’” I say to myself, tapping a fresh pencil against my lip.
My desk is a mess of papers and scribbled notes, half-drawn illustrations of various stages of embryo development with question marks penciled on the sides. I’ve been fending off texts from Heath all evening, responding with nonanswers and varying degrees of meh when he tried to invite himself to dinner. He’s usually good about respecting my space, but when he calls I capitulate and answer.
“What?”
“Well, hello to you too,” he says.
“I’m kind of busy,” I tell him, my pencil sketching a version of myself in the margin, bored and on the phone.
“Do you have a minute to talk to your boyfriend about this rumor that you’re pregnant?”
My pencil skids across my notes, jerking the whole paper sideways and exposing the pig-heart diagram I’m supposed to be studying. The tip of the lead shakes along with my hands, the stuttering of my heart dotting Morse code across the aorta.
“Wait, what?”
“I don’t know what you said in biology today, but Charity told Cole you were asking about abortion.”
“Resorption,” I clarify. “It’s when one twin absorbs another in the womb.”
I expect a sigh of relief, Heath’s usual noncombative tone restored so I can handle him and go back to what I was doing. Instead I get: “Why were you asking about that?”
“Why does it matter?” I shoot back. “It’s not like I’m pregnant. We don’t have sex.”
“Just because we don’t have sex doesn’t mean you can’t be pregnant.”
Lead punches through sheets of paper down to the wood of my desk.
“Heath.”
It’s one word, his name. But I know how to use it. I’ve heard girls adopt the cajoling tone to calm down their man, an upward lilt with a flirtatious accent that changes the subject. I say his name like a brick wall. One he can run into and break his damn face on. Heath is still talking, but I’m not listening, my brain derailed by the fact that I just swore. Only in my head, but it counts.
What is wrong with me?
I can’t get Isaac Harver—who is a total scumbag—out of my head. I practically stuck my tongue down his throat right in front of his parole officer for the love of God. I’m arguing with a perfectly nice, useful boyfriend over gossip. I’m using bad words and . . . my foot nudges my clarinet case, safely stowed under my desk.
As in, put away. There’s a thin film of dust across the top.
I realize I haven’t practiced all week.
This is not who I am. This is not me.
“This is not me,” I say, interrupting Heath.
“What? Sasha? What do you mean?”
“I have to go.”
I hang up, my phone dropping to the floor next to my clarinet case as my eyes devour chambers of the fetal pig heart, so similar to ours, the colors of the diagram—red, blue, purple—vibrant against the dull grays of my ultrasound, still half curled, hiding in shame. One corner touches my notes, the sketch of myself, bored with my perfect boyfriend, now surrounded by a heavy script, all caps, vicious lines meeting at sharp angles to create a message I didn’t write.
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?
I think of Isaac Harver and bad words, my heart racing.
This is not me.
six
“Mystery solved,” Brooke announces as she drops her stuff on our breakfast table. “Cole has a little dick.”
Lilly stops peeling her banana. “You didn’t seriously do it?”
“Sure did.” Brooke tosses her ponytail off her shoulder as she swipes an orange off my breakfast tray. “I put in my run this morning, and he was working on sprints. I asked him to satisfy my curiosity, and while that may be taken care of, it’s the only thing he’ll ever be satisfying.”
“You are unbelievable,” I say, taking back my orange and tearing off some segments for her.
She shrugs. “The funny thing about dicks is that we never get to see them limp, you know? It was chilly this morning, Cole was a sweaty exhausted mess, and I’m all, ‘Hey, pull down your pants,’ and it’s like boom—erection.”
Lilly nods like this is an AP class and Brooke is spouting high wisdom.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I reassure Lilly, worried she’s going to take too much direction from our less-than-modest friend. “The female G-spot is typically only three inches deep, so as long as he’s past that it’s a perfectly serviceable penis.”
“Thank you for the medical analysis, Sasha,” Brooke says, squishing a piece of orange. “When you’re making out with Heath do you instruct him to create a vacuum on your areolae?”
“No,” I shoot back, ignoring the blood I feel rising to my face. “And I don’t think that’ll be happening anytime soon, anyway.”
“Oooooo . . . why’s that?” Lilly leans in closer to me, and Brooke steals what’s left of my orange again. This time I let her. There’s something reassuring in the nearness of them, our body heat comingling with shared words, the little bit of orange skin I can see clinging to Brooke’s teeth that I might tell her about. I may not like my friends all the time, but when you go to a small school you cut your losses.
And I know they feel the same way about me. So I spill.
“Heath called me last night, totally pissed. Apparently Charity”—I raise my eyebrows at Lilly, as if she’s accountable for her cousin’s actions—“told everyone I was asking about getting abortions in bio. So of course this means I’m pregnant.”
“Uh, except for the whole you’re-a-virgin thing,” Brooke says. “When they showed us those pics of syphilis in sixth grade they might as well have signed you up for nun school.”
I want to correct Brooke with the word convent, or inform her that I’d have to be Catholic to be a nun. Instead I shudder, remembering the picture she means in perfect detail.
“I’d have to be stupid to have sex,” I say, repeating the first words out of my mouth when I walked out of that doomed health class years ago.
“Yeah,” Brooke agrees. “Or normal.”
“Whatever,” I shoot back. “Herpes. Gonorrhea. Pregnancy.” I tick off the cons with my fingers, each one a solid fact that came with its own explicit slide in sixth grade that burned into my mind, confirming that sex could only ruin my life.
“Pish,” Brooke argues, raising her own fingers. “Oral. Vag—”
“Stop,” I say, but she only shrugs.
“They didn’t tell us the good parts, you know?”
“And no pics either,” Lilly says sadly.
“Regardless,” I go on, trying to get the conversation back to the fight with my boyfriend. “Heath and I don’t have sex, which I pointed out to him. And then he says—and I quote—‘Just because we don’t have sex doesn’t mean you can’t be pregnant.’” I stress the pronouns exactly the way he did, so that the implications are perfectly clear.
“Wait . . . what?” asks Lilly.
Brooke smacks her on the forehead, leaving behind an orange seed. “He’s saying if she’s pregnant, it’s not his. And that, my friend, is top-tier bullshit.”