IT WAS THE SUMMER THAT JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s plane went down. God, wasn’t that the worst. Anyway, Nicky and I spent six weeks together on a “teen trip” through Europe. Rhiannon, my advisor at Lawrence, was the leader. We traveled in a group, but it might as well have been just Nicky and me. We were crazy for each other—making goo-goo eyes on the Metro, feeling achingly in love in the haunted beauty of the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which overlooked Paris. All that cheesy stuff. We slept in a barn on an organic farm in the south of France and put goat’s milk in our coffees; we visited Salvador Dalí’s tomb in his museum in Figueres; we frolicked on Portuguese beaches surrounded by red rocks and purple water. It was very romantic.
Then Nicky and I were apart all of August. Agony! When I returned to Groton in September 1999—a week before my seventeenth birthday—I ran across the campus until I found my boyfriend. Then I jumped into his arms.
Senior year was going to be the best of my life. I could feel it! My new dorm, Loomis House, was slightly off campus, down by the soccer fields. I was rooming with Canadian Wendy, a friend since sophomore year. She was superathletic, healthy, and popular, and her boyfriend, Beau, was a varsity hockey star. Alistair had graduated and Greta T. was back in Germany, but that was okay, because I was all about my boyfriend, all the time. I was so proud of Nicky! He’d been elected to the student council, which meant he would sometimes lead the whole school in morning assemblies in the auditorium. He was so cute up there on the stage; he always winked at me.
We were full-on Selena and Justin, you know? We talked every night on our dorms’ pay phones after everyone else had gone to sleep. When we hung up, I’d go back to my Ritalin and my homework. By the end of fall term I was tied with Marcus, the German genius, for the top GPA in the entire class: a 3.87.
After Thanksgiving, Nicky and I both became very busy with our new class, Directing Seminar. We were two of only three seniors chosen to produce one-act plays. It was a special honor but tons of work: auditions, rehearsals, all that. The showcase was in March. Nicky and I were with our casts two hours a night, four nights a week. So we weren’t seeing as much of each other.
In December, Nicky took me to his family’s house in the White Mountains and we drank Hawaiian Punch–rum cocktails in front of the fire, and we exchanged gifts. I gave him a DVD box set of Akira Kurosawa films. The next day I went to my parents’ house for the long Christmas break.
Back at Lawrence in January, it occurred to me . . . that I hadn’t had my period for a while.
“You’re on the pill, right?” Wendy said.
“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I was always forgetting to take it, though.
“Then don’t worry,” Wendy said. But I did. I put on my L.L.Bean boots and sloshed through the snow and slush—it was a vicious winter—to the supermarket downtown. It was embarrassing to hand the e.p.t to the old lady cashier. I stuck the bag into my coat and hustled back to Loomis House. Then I peed on the stick.
I was pregnant.
Thank God I had my amazing boyfriend of fifteen months to get me through it all. Oh, wait, no I didn’t.
I can’t remember if I realized that Nicky was fucking the hot junior girl he’d cast in his one-act play—who lived across the hall from me—before or after I realized that I was pregnant. I don’t remember how I found out it was happening; I don’t remember Nicky and I “officially” ending our relationship, which was already over, obviously. I think I blocked a lot of this out. All I know for sure is, I melted down faster than a stick of butter in the microwave. I was completely destroyed.
What a horrible, horrible time. I mean, even writing about this period still makes me want to take a huge blunt full of PCP to the face—and it’s fifteen years later! Nicky stepped right out of a relationship with me and into one with her. Now all eyes were on the three of us. And I was the pregnant (though no one knew) Bridget Moynahan to their Tom and Gisele. Remember that scandal? When it was in the papers in 2007, I flashed back to my own triangle at Lawrence in 2000. Mr. Student Council would smile at the new girl from the stage, and kids would turn their heads and look at me. Humiliating.
It went so dark inside of me. And it was dark outside, too, in those miserable after-Christmas months: cold and wet and icy. I felt like I was trapped inside a snow globe with Nicky and the girl. Every time I saw them together—and they were always together—my whole world got shaken up. The Loomis pay phone was right outside my door, and it rang for her every night just like it used to for me. This girl would sit out there murmuring to Nicky until two in the morning. They were falling in love. He brought her roses on Valentine’s Day. Can you imagine? It was such a nightmare. It was beyond a nightmare, because I couldn’t wake up.
And then there was the issue of my “condition.”
What I am supposed to do about this pregnancy? I’d e-mail Nicky. You have to help me. He always wrote back, and he said he would help, but we never spoke in person.
I had no idea who to call. The Internet wasn’t superhelpful back then like it is now. I literally looked up “abortion clinics” in the telephone pages. Once I found some numbers, I didn’t know where to call them from. I didn’t have a cell phone; no one did. Everyone could hear everyone else’s business on the Loomis pay phone. My dorm parent, a math teacher, was a known eavesdropper; she was always lurking at the bottom of the stairs. We were only allowed to use it at night anyway, when the clinics would be closed. It was one roadblock after another. Plus, I was a procrastinator.
It took a few weeks, but one day in late February, I skipped out of English and cut back across Main Street to Loomis. The dorm was finally empty: everyone was in class, including the math teacher. I called a number I’d scribbled down and tried to book an appointment.
“How old are you?” the woman asked.
“Seventeen,” I said. She told me minors needed parental consent in the state of Massachusetts.
I hung up.
A few weeks passed before I started researching my options again. Eventually, I booked an appointment for a few weeks later in New Hampshire. Nicky promised he would drive me. In the meantime, I was about as stable as a suicide bomber! I had no idea how to process the devastation and rage I was feeling all day, every day. And hell hath no fury like a pregnant teenage girl scorned: I was out for blood. Fuck secrecy! My life had already gone down in flames. It was time to take Nicky down with me.
“Guess what?” I stopped the class gossip, Vivian, in the schoolhouse. “Nicky got me pregnant before he dumped me.” Her eyes bulged. “And I’m still pregnant!”
“Omigod . . .” She didn’t know what to say (for once).
“Don’t tell anyone,” I said. Sure enough, within a week, half the kids in the school were looking at me sideways. Blabbing had been a spectacularly self-destructive move, but I couldn’t take it back.
Here’s a life lesson for you kids: it’s much easier to go through something upsetting when you’re on drugs. The more intense the drug, the more you forget your problems! It’s basic science, really. I numbed my bad feelings with Ritalin (and whatever else I could get my hands on). I was tweaked every night, grinding my teeth at my desk until five in the morning. Wendy started wearing headphones to bed. And a sleep mask.
During the day, I started hanging with another druggy senior—wild, WASPy George, who kept a beat-up Oldsmobile sedan parked outside Spaulding Hall. We snuck off campus in it on a Tuesday (very against the rules) and drove to another boarding school, Northfield–Mount Hermon, to buy ecstasy from Shady Leo. Have you heard of him? He was a prep school–circuit teen dealer legend in 2000! I wish he’d write a memoir. Anyway, it was snowing hard on the drive back to Groton.
“AHHHHH!” we screamed as the car slid across the road—it was somewhere near Athol—and slammed into a mailbox. We got out and inspected the damage. The front was crumpled on one side, like a curled lip. A headlight was out.
“Whoops!” George said.
Back at Lawrence, all of the spots were taken except for one directly in front of the dining hall, where faculty parked, too. The smashed-up car sat there sneering conspicuously like Johnny Rotten.
That Friday night at an “AIDS Awareness” dance, we sold all the tablets to freshmen and sophomores, who rolled their faces off like little champions. George and I were fucked up, too; I didn’t care who saw.
“You need to be careful,” Wendy said, an hour into Sunday study hall. She’d been avoiding our room, spending more and more time with Beau. I wasn’t talking much to anyone besides George lately, anyway.
“Huh?” I said. Playing dumb.
Sure enough, on Tuesday night my advisor stopped by after study hall, car keys in hand. Rhiannon was only twenty-six and had long, white-blond hair. She cared about me more than anyone in the school.
“Pack an overnight bag,” Rhiannon said. Sleep over at a teacher’s house? We had a special relationship, but not that special. But I could tell by the look on Rhiannon’s face that it wasn’t optional.
Her pretty rental cottage was only five minutes off campus. Rhiannon made me a bed on the sofa and brought me a mug of peppermint tea. She sat down and stared at me for a minute.
Then it began.
“Were you drunk at the AIDS dance?” Rhiannon asked.
“No,” I said.
“Were you on drugs at the AIDS dance?”
“What?” I said. “No.”
“Were you selling drugs at the AIDS dance?”
“Rhiannon!” I said. “No!”
“What happened to George’s car?”
“I have no idea!”
Rhiannon studied my face. I took a little slurp from my mug.
“People are saying you’re pregnant.”
“I know,” I said. Carefully. “You know how the rumors are around here.”
“If you are, I’ll help you. You have to let people help you.”
“But I’m not.”
“Are you lying?”
“Why would I lie?” I said. It was a moot point anyway, wasn’t it? My appointment was coming up. “Rhiannon! I’m not pregnant.”
Rhiannon didn’t answer. She just looked at me. So I just . . . looked at her.
Finally, my teacher gave up and went to bed. I lay awake for hours in the dark, listening to her wind chimes banging around.
A week and change later, Nicky picked me up in his mom’s SUV. It was snowing, as always; the drive to Manchester was long and slow. And silent. We weren’t speaking. We got to the doctor’s office, and I went in the back. Nicky stayed in the waiting room. I was so nervous. The doctor put cold jelly on my belly and gave me a sonogram.
“We can’t proceed,” he said.
“Pardon?” I was on an examination table in a paper gown.
“You’re fourteen weeks pregnant,” he said. “We don’t perform second-trimester abortions in New Hampshire. It’s against the law.”
“What?” I said.
“I can refer you to a clinic in Massachusetts,” the doctor continued. “But you’ll need parental consent.”
“But I can’t!” I started to cry. “I can’t get parental consent!”
“I know you’re frightened,” the doctor said. “But at this point . . .”
“You don’t know my dad,” I bawled. The nurse took my hand. I got dressed and walked back out to the waiting room in a stupor.
Nicky drove me back to school. I wept in the passenger seat the whole ride. We were both in shock. He dropped me off at Loomis House and we never spoke again. We stopped e-mailing each other. I just did not know what to do.
And so I shut down. Winter raged on, but I stopped thinking about my pregnancy. I pretended it all wasn’t happening.
Boarders were required to stay on campus on the first weekend in March to study for finals. I was glad. This ensured a fantastic turnout at the one-act plays on Friday and Saturday nights. I was so excited about my production of Naomi in the Living Room (by one of the funniest writers of all time, Christopher Durang) that I didn’t even care that Nicky’s play, starring his new girlfriend, was debuting, too. Rhiannon would be grading from the front row.
I peeked into the black box theater on opening night. The house was packed! Even the varsity hockey team had showed up. I was wearing those ridiculous twenty-three-inch-waist high-waisted Sergio Valente jeans I’d ordered sophomore year. They’d fit me once, but now they felt like they were compressing my insides. To this day, I blame them for what happened next.
I was giving my cast final notes when the cramping began. I went to the girls’ bathroom, sat down in a stall, and pulled down my jeans.
I apologize in advance for what I am about to describe.
Imagine a jellyfish as big as an ashtray. Now turn that jellyfish dark bloodred and multiply it by a few hundred. Now imagine pulling down your Sergio Valente jeans and seeing hundreds of ashtray-size bloodred jellyfish pouring out of you. That’s what happened to me.
“AUUUUUUGHHH!” I started screaming. “AUUUUGHHH!”
The bloody pieces—the lining of my uterus, I guess—kept gushing from my body and into the water. It was like my insides were falling out. I tried to catch them in my hands, to stop it. There was too much. Plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. It was endless. A deluge!
“AUGGHHHHHH!” I was still screaming. “HELP ME! SOMEONE!” Someone ran in.
“Hello?” a girl called. “Are you okay?”
“NO! GET RHIANNON!” I hollered. I was still sitting in the stall with my pants down. My hands and legs and the toilet seat and the floor were covered with blood. “IT’S CAT! I NEED RHIANNON!”
My advisor burst in a few minutes later.
“Cat?” she shouted.
“I HAVE TO GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM!” I sobbed.
“Stay right there!” she said. I stood up and stuffed my jeans with paper towels as she ran for her car keys.
I moaned and cried all the way to the hospital.
By the time my legs were in stirrups, the hemorrhaging had stopped. The ER doctor prodded at my uterus and poked very long Q-tip-like things inside me and pulled out any straggler clots. He put them into a hazmat bin next to him.
I was—again, forgive me—hoping I’d miscarried. But no.
“You’re still pregnant,” the doctor confirmed. I stared up at the fluorescent lights.
On the ride back to campus, Rhiannon stared straight ahead—as one does while driving, I suppose. But still. It was tense in that car.
“I’m sorry we missed the plays,” I finally said.
“It’s okay,” Rhiannon said.
“I’m sorry I lied,” I said. “Please don’t tell my parents.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Please, Rhiannon.” I started crying again. “Please.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Rhiannon repeated.
She dropped me off at my dorm. I carried my bloody Sergio Valentes inside in a plastic bag.
At breakfast, I got a nice surprise: everyone was raving about Naomi in the Living Room! That night, I got to see it for myself. It was perfect, beat for beat. My brilliant actors got whoops and whistles as they took their bows. Nicky’s play was a dud. Rhiannon gave me an A in Directing Seminar.
What did the pregnant senior-class pillhead get on her Algebra 3 exam? Drool! It was the week after the one-acts. I was sitting with some kids at breakfast the morning of math final day.
“Wanna try something?” the shadiest kid in our school said. His name was Bruce, but people called him “the Iceman.” He was only seventeen, but rumor had it that he’d already had a meth-induced heart attack. The Iceman held out a white pill. “It’s Super-Ritalin!”
“Really?” I said, and put it in my mouth like the moron that I was then and remain today. Then I swallowed.
It was a sunny morning—almost spring break. I sauntered across the grassy quad (where, increasingly, fewer and fewer people were saying hello to me, but whatever) and into the gymnasium-size hall in the schoolhouse where every senior at the school would be taking their math exam at the same time. Dude, I was so prepared for this final. I felt very confident. I took a seat and pulled out my pencils and hundred-dollar graphing calculator and all that horrible stuff, which you truly couldn’t pay me to think about ever again after I finish typing this sentence.
The papers were handed out, and I got crack-a-lacking. Everything was going great until about twenty minutes in, when I suddenly felt . . . underwater.
Huh, I thought.
I couldn’t read the page in front of me. The words were swimming. I looked around. Kids were hunched over their desks, but they looked like blobs; the teachers walking around supervising were blurry, too. And that’s the last thing I remember.
The next time I opened my eyes, I was in an entirely different building: the infirmary. Jaclyn, one of my actors, was holding my hand like she was the nurse in A Farewell to Arms. The actual nurse was glaring at us from across the room. I was on a twin bed.
“What happened?” I croaked.
“You passed out in the math exam,” Jaclyn whispered. She pressed a Dunkin’ Donuts bag into my hands. “I got you a bagel.”
“Fuck,” I groaned. My head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
“You were rolling around on the ground,” Jaclyn whispered. “You fell out of your chair.”
“I’m gonna get kicked out,” I mumbled.
“What did you take?” the nurse asked later.
Good question, I thought.
“Nothing!” But my eyelids were heavy. “I just didn’t eat breakfast!” I found out later that Bruce had given me Zyprexa—a powerful antipsychotic. Stupid Iceman!
I didn’t get expelled, but I did receive a suspension—of sorts. Lawrence’s signature two-week specialized study program, Winterim, was always right after winter term exams. There were loads of options, from scuba diving in Belize to Habitat for Humanity in Peru. Junior year, Nicky and I had stayed on campus together for a filmmaking course. I don’t remember what I’d chosen senior year, but it doesn’t matter. I was sent home for the two weeks instead.
What did the school tell my parents? What did I tell my parents? No idea. But I had two more weeks off for spring break after that.
So in total—and I only understand this in retrospect—Lawrence gave me an entire month to take care of my “situation.” Which—still—I did not do.
I was still pregnant when I returned to Groton for spring trimester in early April. If you’re confused about the timeline—how far along I was—well, that makes two of us. I don’t know, man. It was so crazy. I was sick. Truly. Just . . . messed up.
Let’s say . . . eighteen weeks?
I started acting out.
“Oh no!” I said, dropping a baby doll on the floor of the library. George and I had found it in the prop closet of the theater department, and I’d smeared stage blood on it. Very Michael Alig at Disco 2000. “My baby!” George and I laughed and laughed. Nobody else did.
My flamboyant friend and I were trouble together. We’d both been accepted into Bard College, a dope school about an hour outside of New York City. After we got our letters, we sat in the library and went on the Bard Accepted Students Message Board together. We messed with other students-to-be and posted provocative replies on their threads.
It was dumb (most social media self-sabotages are). George and I thought it was a big joke, but Bard’s Department of Admissions didn’t feel that way. They tracked the posts back to Lawrence and reported us to the college counselor.
And that was it. That was what the school finally used to nail us. Between the drug-dealing rumors, my pregnancy and emergency room trip, my math exam blackout, the baby doll dropped on the quad, the crushed Oldsmobile in the parking lot, and now the Bard mess . . . they’d had it with George and me. It wasn’t a total shock when Lawrence finally summoned our families. It was a little shocking, though—since it was late April, and we were both seniors. Graduation was only six weeks away.
My parents arrived from the airport in a rental car. My dad was stone-faced; my mom looked very nervous. I wasn’t allowed to go into the assistant headmaster’s office with them, so I sat on a bench in the rotunda. It was very quiet in the schoolhouse on this weekday morning. Everyone else was in class. I stared at the floor, where the school motto was set in marble: Omnibus lucet. “The light shines for all.”
The door to the assistant headmaster’s office opened. Rhiannon was the first to step out. I didn’t know she’d been in there. Her eyes met mine. She’d told them everything. I could tell.
Sure enough, my dad emerged looking like a ghost had stepped into his body. His face was white. And my mother was crying. Crying and crying and crying. When her eyes met mine, she started crying harder. When I stood up to comfort her, my mother . . . recoiled; I will never forget it. She absolutely did not want me to touch her. I was too toxic.
I don’t remember much about those last few hours on campus, only that my mother and I packed up, fast. Over at Spaulding, George and his parents were doing the same thing. I never saw him again.
My parents were quiet in the car to the airport, but I couldn’t escape the voices in my head. You failure. You disaster. You disgusting girl. The self-loathing was like a radio station between my ears. Loser. You mess. Over time, I’d learn to turn the volume down on SHAME FM, but I could never totally shut it off.
As for saying good-bye to Boston, well . . . When the plane took off, I stared out the window as the city got smaller and smaller for the last time. I never could spell “Massachusetts” anyway.
The only thing worse than getting abortions is reading about abortions. Am I wrong? Please skip ahead if you are squeamish. Life-murdering can get rather gory, you know.
My mother took me to a clinic in DC soon after we returned. She filled out her parental consent forms while I sat in the waiting room. It was jam-packed with girls and their partners because the doctor was running late. He was driving in from Philadelphia. It was hot outside. I killed time at a thrift store in the shopping center parking lot.
A few hours later, it was my turn. I put my legs into the stirrups. The doctor injected my cervix with a numbing agent, but I was awake the entire time. My mom had declined the anesthesia that puts you under—she just didn’t know better. Huge mistake. (Always ask to be put to sleep before an abortion—then it’s over in the blink of an eye.) It was brutally painful. More than pain, it felt like . . . torture. I was splayed out there on this table just . . . vibrating—all guh-guh-guh-guh-guh from the sheer force of the vacuum machine. Remember the scene in The Princess Bride when the mustachioed bandit guy is getting pumped full of water—is that what’s happening to him?—and his whole body is thrashing and shaking and straining? And it’s almost unbearable to watch? That’s how I see me in this memory of my life. I also saw what was coming out of me, since there was a tank that was covered by a paper cone with a slit in it, and the paper cone was off-kilter. I saw it all.
Then it was done. I sat in the recovery room with the little cookies they give you. I was crying and crying. Loud. I mean, uncontrollably crying. I couldn’t believe what I had just been through. I was in shock. Still shaking. It was like the machine was still in there, shaking me from the inside out. The procedure had been so awful. So violent. It looked like murder. It felt like murder. I’m not saying that in any kind of political way. I’m just telling you how it felt.
My crying was starting to freak out the other girls. A nurse went out and found my mom. She came in and sat down next to me.
“Shh,” my mom said, patting me awkwardly on the back like she was trying to burp me. Awkward as fuck. She didn’t know what to do. I was still doubled over when we finally walked out to the parking lot. We got in the hot car and just sat there for a few minutes. I guess my mom was waiting for me to calm down, but I was still sobbing all crazy-like right in the passenger seat. Finally, my mom couldn’t take it anymore. She got out and made a call on her cell phone. Then she got behind the wheel.
My parents’ house was empty when we got there. It was about one o’clock on a weekday. By then, I’d stopped crying. I went right to bed. When I woke up, it was dark out. I could smell the blood. There was a paper bag on the nightstand. I opened it. It was a little orange plastic bottle with just a few pills inside. I read the label: Xanax. The prescribing doctor was my dad.