 | | mysterious and mechanical than my new ten-speed bikefrom a copy of
Our Bodies, Our Selves
stolen from my school library. I had learned enough to know I could be pregnant.
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| | I tell my mother about what happened the next morning as we sit in the car, in the driveway, in the sun. I want her to help me, to take care of me, because there is something unraveling, unzipping inside of me that I can't name. Her white knuckles grip the steering wheel and she cries, wringing those white hands together, "Oh no, what will we do?" I am slowly becoming wooden.
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| | My sawdust voice tells her my plan, carefully constructed with the phone crisis worker last night while everyone slept, it seemed, but me and that strange woman. She was fantastic to me, the first adult who ever spoke a word about sex to me. Her voice is calm, steady, explaining to me a thing called "the morning after" pill, giving me the names of doctors progressive enough to prescribe it.
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| | The doctor examines me, writes a prescriptionfour pills, one for each of the next four days. "They'll make you pretty sick," he warns me. Then, "I can give you a prescription for birth control pills, too...."
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| | "No, thank you," I answer primly, as if being passed a tray of cookies at a tea party, "No, I don't think so." A week later I walk the school hallway with wooden legs. Glen and David don't speak to me, but their eyes are amused, knowing. I wonder what they know, and I am marked, branded. I want to slink away, not even a mother would take me in
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