This Will Only Hurt a Little(22)

“What if I get pregnant?” I asked him one night while we were lying on the side of the storm wash by his house, smoking pot and cigarettes and looking at the stars.

“You won’t. I promise.”

I already was. I’ve now been pregnant three times. And all three times, I knew immediately. Again. I’m one of those people. I knew the whole time I was pregnant. I knew the morning I woke up at Ella’s house. I was just hoping against hope it wasn’t true. I waited a few weeks, and then one night at my acting class, I told my teacher, Mary, that I thought I could be pregnant. I’m not even sure if I had missed a period. Mary had known me since I was seven years old, over half my life at that point. She looked at me, not heartbroken exactly, just resigned like, Oh, fuck. Then she said, “Well, I guess we’re not gonna get much work done until we figure this out. I’ll go buy a test at Walgreens.”

I took the test in the bathroom of the theater and those two fucking lines showed up long before the three minutes were up. I started crying and then went outside with my friend Bailey and we smoked a million Marlboro Reds. Mary told us a story of an abortion she’d had in her twenties. She told me to talk to my mom.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “I can’t do that!”

I mean, I literally had never talked to my parents about anything having to do with down there. When I got my period, I hid it for months; I just stole my older sister’s pads and figured it out. I don’t know why exactly. My mom was so cool about so much, but she was also raised very Catholic and it wasn’t ever discussed in a real way. We had the where-do-babies-come-from discussion when I was little, but sex was just something that I knew was shameful. Bodies were shameful. There was no fucking way I was going to tell my parents I was pregnant.

“Well, then,” she said. “I think you need to go to a Planned Parenthood.”

I need to interject two separate entries in my diary here. Written in gray marker in my messy swirly teenage-girl handwriting, the first is dated October 8, 1994: “I think I may be pregnant. I’m really scared. Oh well.”

The second, dated October 11, 1994; “Mary got me a pregnancy test at Actor’s Lab tonight. I’m pregnant & I’m getting an abortion on Fri. Ben’s paying for it and he’s been great. I’m glad I know he’s there for me. That’s all now. —Busy”

When I read those entries again recently, I was truly shocked. I’m not sure why I wrote about it so casually when I know that I was freaking out. But I think there was a part of me that was trying to do emotionally the same thing I’d done with Trey: to keep it under control so that it wouldn’t affect me.

Bailey had agreed to drive me to Planned Parenthood on Friday after school. As it turned out, another friend of ours, Tasha, ALSO thought she was pregnant and needed to go in for an appointment. So the three of us hopped into Bailey’s open-air Jeep and drove to the Planned Parenthood in Scottsdale, smoking cigarettes on the way. We went in and the two of us filled out paperwork and waited our turns to pee in a cup and talk to a counselor. My name was called and I went in. She asked me how many sexual partners I’d had (two), if I’d ever used protection (no), if I knew my options (yes, ONE ABORTION, PLEASE).

It turned out it wasn’t as easy to get an abortion as I thought in my diary entry. She gave me a phone number for a clinic I could call and make an appointment. Then she also encouraged me to talk to my parents about what was happening. I explained that they would not understand this at all and that I didn’t want to bother them. An abortion at the time was around three or four hundred dollars, I think. I called the clinic from the pay phone in the mini mall where the Planned Parenthood was and made an appointment based on the information they had given me. Bailey said she would drive me. I would have to skip school, but that was okay. I would probably get in trouble, but that was the least of my worries. The worst part, as far as I could tell, was that I had to wait almost three weeks before I could get the abortion, so I had to be pregnant for two more weeks. When we left, Bailey said she’d drive me to Smitty’s so I could tell Ben what was happening. Tasha hopped in the car with tears in her eyes. I offered her a cigarette and she shook her head no.

“So. I . . . ummm. I think I’m gonna have the baby, guys.”

We agreed that it was the right decision for her and that we would be there and help in any way we could. We dropped Tasha off at her house. She was going to tell her mom that night. Then Bailey drove me to Smitty’s, where Ben was pulling carts in from the parking lot. He came over to give me a hug, and then I told him I had to wait and go to a clinic in a few weeks. Neither one of us knew how it worked, clearly.

“I’m so, so sorry, baby. I can get the money. Did they tell you how much?”

I told him, and he assured me he would get it as soon as possible. Then he kissed me and promised to call when he got home from work.

The next week was fucking awful. I had to go to school, obviously. I had to pretend I was fine to my parents, obviously. I started getting morning sickness and my boobs felt like they were going to explode. I threw up in the trash can in the main building of my school in between first and second period as Kendra and our other friend Kate were walking over.

“Holy shit! Are you okay??”

“Yeah. I’m fine now,” I said wiping my mouth. Kate gave me some water from her backpack and I went on my way.