TED SUGGESTED I HAD MONO. FOR A WEEK I’D BEEN DRAGGING my feet around the shop, slumping at the counter, yawning through the customer small talk. I’d never been so tired in my life, even though I was sleeping nine, ten hours a night. “Who’ve you been kissing?” he said.
“Shut up,” I said. “No one.”
“Get it checked out,” he warned. “Don’t go wiping out my customer base.”
I was too tired to bike, so I drove to work and back clutching the wheel like a senior citizen. The insurance had run out on my poor Dodge Colt, and for the last few months the car had sounded like it was dragging a metal ladder from the undercarriage.
At home, a cloudy bubbling pot of rice was threatening to spill over on the stove while Summer stirred another steaming pan. The scent of garlic and chilies was nearly unbearable. “I made you dinner,” she said. “Extra spicy.”
I slung myself into a chair and said I wasn’t feeling well.
“Even better. A little heat clears out the system.”
“Seriously, Summer.” I covered my face with my hands. “Don’t get too close. I might have mono.”
“Oh my god, who could have given it to you?”
“No one. I just . . . got it.” I wondered if I should try to call Ryan in Austin. I was ready to be pissed if he’d given it to me.
“Does your throat hurt?”
“No.”
“It will. Here, eat while you can.”
While we ate, she said there was something she needed to tell me before she told everyone else at family dinner. “You should hear it from me first.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” I leaned in. “I’m so good with secrets.”
“I’m moving in with Marcy.”
I slumped back. “Seriously?”
Marcy had a notorious pattern: instantly in love, and instantly out, on a precise one-year cycle. Always the girlfriend moved in with her too soon, and always it ended in explosion or collapse.
“Yes.” Summer was crestfallen. “Aren’t you happy for me? I’m in love.”
“Of course,” I said, and apologized. “It’s wonderful.” What else could I say? I thought of how I’d felt when I first moved in with Flynn, the thrill of certainty sweeping away all pessimism, only the supremest optimism. Lucky Summer. That feeling was worth the pain of losing it. And there was no warning a person away from someone they wanted, even if they knew better. See also: self.
“But she’s allergic to dogs,” I remembered. “What about Bullet?”
Summer was ruefully, stubbornly in love; she looked at Bullet as if the dog were a favorite Goodwill sweater she had outgrown. “I have to find her a new home. A really good one.”
“Can I stay in the house?”
“I’m sure you can.”
“Then I’ll keep Bullet.” I was already feeding the neighbor’s abandoned orange cat. I’d started calling her Edith Head, after the gown designer in old movies, and she had moved more or less permanently to our front porch, sneaking inside through a tear in the screen door on warm days. I wasn’t sure how to afford feeding the dog on top of it, but I couldn’t let a pit bull loose into the wilderness of noncommittal punks whose housing situations changed quarterly. Especially not Bullet.
“Really? You would be the best parent.” Summer stroked Bullet’s big hard head and tears filled her eyes, but they were fond tears of life change, not remorse. She had already moved on as if the dog were just another roommate. “You be a good girl for Andy.”
“You’re not gone yet,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “But I have to go to work now.”
Before she headed out, strapping on her bike gloves, Summer said, “Go to the doctor.”
“Okay.”
“Tomorrow.”
I handed her the helmet hanging by the door. “Be safe,” I said, as I always did.
“Be good,” she croaked, E.T.-style, and held out her index finger. I pressed mine to it.
“Always am.”
Her blinking red bike light weaved down the block and around a dark corner.
I had come to love this stupid little bungalow with its narrow kitchen and the walls we’d painted peacock blue and pumpkin orange and pool-table green, the overstuffed bookshelves, the fig and pear trees in the yard, the slanting porch, my Christmas-lit basement with its carpet-scrap corner and drum kit. I loved Summer, even with her unorthodox hours and her long red hairs trailing across the bathroom floor. That feeling of being left behind crept darkly into my peripheral vision, and I tried to blink it away. After all, I got to keep the house. I could stay. I just had to find someone to live with me.
Outside In, the free youth clinic, was quiet and clean. Gray carpet and gray late-morning light. Two teenagers cloaked in green army jackets and a taupe odor sprawled across three chairs, making out, facial piercings clicking against each other. A blond girl with no makeup and a band T-shirt sat in a corner, legs crossed, ankle jiggling. A sick, skinny kid who was maybe thirteen, young enough to be gender-indeterminate without even trying, slouched on the carpet, hood up, knees up, and glowered wearily as if still on the sidewalk warning off predators.
I’d been luckier than they were, and I didn’t forget it. I’d had half a great education, enough work to keep myself afloat, good health so far, and good friends abundant with love and favors and job tips and housing connections. I’d had the foundations, at least, of a family who schooled me and taught me how to work within the system, and when that net tore, my chosen family stepped up to catch me. But in this room we all shared something: broke, uninsured, and under twenty-seven.
“Andrea Morales?”
I followed the nurse back to a clean, quiet room.
The nurse had her graying hair pulled back in an easy low ponytail and the corners of her eyes turned downward in a forgiving curve. “I think I have mono,” I said. She asked me about my symptoms as she measured and weighed me and looked at my throat. Then she handed me a urine cup and sent me down the hall.
Back in the exam room, I was only a few pages into the foreign mainstream universe of People before the nurse returned and delicately closed the door behind her. “You don’t have mono,” she said.
“Thank god.”
“You’re pregnant.”
It’s always obvious in retrospect. But my periods had often been erratic and light, and I never paid attention to them. Why would I? Stress had rendered my cycle unpredictable—it was not unusual for it to disappear for a month or two. I’d suffered a few waves of nausea, but it was flu season, and I’d never had a great immune system. In one very slim folder of my mind, the one labeled RYAN, I had remembered that condoms were important, because god forbid I carry an STD back over the lesbian border; but in my main operating system, I was simply gay, always had been, always would be. Pregnancy was not a possibility you even considered.
“But I’m a lesbian,” I said.
Kindly, she asked, “Did you have sex with a man?”
“Just a little.”
“It can happen on just one go.”
“But I used condoms.”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “I have to ask you some questions now as a matter of procedure.”
Yes, I knew who had gotten me pregnant. Yes, it was consensual. No, I was not afraid of him. No, I had not told him yet.
“Let’s get a blood draw,” she said. “Do you have an idea of how far along you might be?”
I thought back to when the drum lessons started. There’d been the time we tangled on the basement floor, but that hadn’t led to sex in the straight sense; I was too cautious about the possibility Summer would come home. The only time it could have happened was the night I’d faked it, a month ago. I started to explain and found I could not stop. For once, confession felt like a true unburdening. The seal on my secret split, and I told the nurse everything. I talked while she pumped the armband tight around my bicep and I paused while she checked my breathing with the cool stethoscope, because she asked me to be quiet for a moment and breathe, and then I picked up again as she drew my blood.
The nurse sat on her swiveling stool and rested her clasped hands on her knees. She asked what I wanted to do. “You do have options.”
I looked down at my abdomen, the opening in my gown where a tender stripe of my skin peeked out. Options? It was a cluster of new cells versus me, my whole life. I’d barely even had a chance to start living it.
“There’s only one option,” I said. “I can’t have a baby.”
She nodded calmly and wrote down the names of three clinics.
“Are you sure I’m pregnant?” I said.
“We’ll have the blood test results tomorrow. We could try an ultrasound today.”
“Would I see it? The . . . thing?”
“It’s possible.”
“God no.”
I couldn’t believe it was real, even as I dialed Planned Parenthood from a pay phone three blocks from Outside In. The voice on the line was kind, matter-of-fact. They called me “dear.” They said they could see me next Tuesday. I said Tuesday sounded good. That was five days from now. How much could the cells multiply in five days? Not much, I figured. And I didn’t want to know.
The receptionist suggested I bring a friend or partner for support. I said, “I’ll be fine.” I wanted it out, quick. The sooner it was gone, the more over this would all be. I was done with affairs. I was done with faking it. I was done with secrets. It was time to clean up my mess, all by myself. In five days I would expel this last trace of Ryan from my life. He didn’t even need to know. No one did. I would box up the whole weird affair and store it in the farthest corner of the attic. Better yet, recycle it.
If it was even true. I bought a three-pack of pregnancy tests in a downtown drugstore and stowed them deep in my backpack. It wasn’t until nearly midnight, alone in the house, that I had the nerve to try them.
Positive, positive, positive.
I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. When I tried to drink from it, my hands shook so much I had to set the glass on the counter and brace myself. I walked out the front door and stood on the porch in the cool damp night. I slid my hand under my shirt and touched my flat abdomen. All I could feel was my own warm skin. Whatever was inside me was tiny and deep, secreted away.
I started walking. My eyes were so wide they ate everything. Everything I saw, I thought, This is what I saw on the night I found out. The neighborhood was tucked into itself. Small bungalows, cracked sidewalk, lopsided fences. Green grass and bare trees. Who was born here? What did it mean to grow up here? Where were the secret places the neighborhood kids knew? The Portland horizon was close and dark with trees, a basin packed with houses, the sky plum and cloudy with city light. My eyes filled with windows and rooftops and cars and chain-link. I wanted prairie and field and a black sky with translucent cloud-streaks gauzing the moon. I wanted a single house like an answer at the end of a long dark driveway, a window glowing beacon-yellow. I wanted my mother. I nearly choked on such a want.
The next morning I wrapped the used tests in a plastic bag and threw them into a Dumpster on MLK while walking Bullet.
I borrowed Summer’s dog-eared purple copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. The embryo was probably the size of a lentil or maybe a pea. That was nothing! A mere legume. It hardly even existed. Five days couldn’t go quickly enough. I was seized by the urge to eradicate, eradicate.
I opened my closet and dresser and pulled out all the clothes I hadn’t worn in more than a year. Jackets from high school, wrecked jeans from college, oversize T-shirts for bands I didn’t even like anymore, socks cross-pollinated with Flynn’s: I was like a bird who’d stashed every feather it molted. I had nested in old selves for too long, afraid I’d need them again.
The Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center was housed in a cinder-block building on Belmont Avenue. I unloaded four bags of clothes into the free box in a soft cascade, and three street kids dove right in and started pawing around like puppies. I thought, You’re all babies. One immediately wriggled into an old acrylic ski sweater. “Looks good,” I said, and the kid gave me a thumbs-up. A surprising wave of love caught me off guard. I wanted to defend them all with knives and fists. Fuck everyone who let you go, I thought. I would never. Ever.
I ran my fingers over the lead type on the press bed. The sweet plasticky smell of the sticky ink filled my head and throat, as if I were drinking it; it smelled strangely delicious and I wanted to suck it in, then worried that I shouldn’t even breathe it, then thought, Oh, what does it matter.
I spread glossy gold ink over the drum of the Vandercook and cranked through a test run of Save the Date cards. By the time these people’s wedding arrived in September, this whole fiasco would be seven months behind me and still receding. Eventually it would shrink to the vanishing point and disappear.
I looked down at my torso. Nothing looked different. My body was still entirely my own. It still looked like the body I knew. At this point, what was inside me was only a cell cluster. It was just knowledge, really.
But how could I ever un-know it? You can burn the book but not the story. I did not like this thought.
Just to scare myself, I imagined another September. Big as a house. Me, as a house. I adjusted the leading in the bed and thought of what it would be like to hold a brand-new human in my hands. What would it be like to be raised by me and my friends? To grow up here, in this rainy lush place where it almost never snowed and everyone could be in a band? To become one of those Portland kids who had always seen piercings and tattoos, who knew what a heroin addict looked like, what a gay person looked like, what a protest looked like? Who carried a bus pass and hung out on the steps at Pioneer Square, who knew how to compost and the safest way home by bike, who never carried an umbrella and never knew parental rejection? I would have liked to be such a kid.
Get real, Andrea.