I blushed. “Ava. I’m not exactly looking.”
She put an arm around my shoulder. “Oh, don’t pull the fallen woman thing on me. That’s such horseshit. You think guys feel the need to punish themselves for the heinous crime of having a body?”
“I need some time for myself.”
“That’s different. Need some time, okay. Nobody can ever love me after this, not okay. I can’t love myself after this, not okay. Would you feel bad for meeting a cute boy if Oliver was the one having the appointment?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She bopped me on the shoulder. “Think about it.”
Ava was big on think about it these days.
We came to the dorm and went inside. While Ava was taking a shower, I took her laptop to the common room and curled up with it on a couch. Noe had uploaded a million pictures of the River Rats game and the tiki party, with Noe, Lindsay, Rhiannon, and Kaylee grinning in bright orange clothes. I’d come back from Half Moon Mountain in an expansive mood, but as I gazed at the screen my temples began to throb. There is something haunting about seeing pictures of your friends having a good time without you, even if you were having a good time in parallel, even if you were having the time of your life. Suddenly, you have one memory and your friend has another, and you’ll never be able to say, Remember that time? and never laugh together, remembering. A part of me would rather have had a mediocre time at a River Rats game with Noe than a great time on Half Moon Mountain, because the River Rats game would have increased the space where the circles in our Venn diagram overlapped, and Half Moon Mountain made it smaller. Maybe that was why so many people chose to do mediocre things, as long as their friends were doing them too: it was all about making the circles overlap, even at the expense of greater adventures, even at the expense of life itself.
Ava appeared in the common room doorway wearing one of Nan’s old bathrobes, her damp hair giving off a scent of cedar. “Ready for bed?” she said.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” I said.
But while I was looking at the last of Noe’s photos, my mind kept darting to the procedure I was going to have the next morning. What if it hurt? What if something went wrong? I started loading the websites I’d looked at on the day I took the pregnancy test, the ones that explained what was going to happen during the abortion. From there, I started reading stories that other girls had posted, scanning forum threads, clicking link after link, getting more and more wound up until suddenly it was six a.m. and I hadn’t even gone to bed.
I shut the laptop. My ears were ringing and my eyes were dry. Climbing the stairs, I could feel the quiet of the house, unbroken by so much as a birdcall. Four more hours, I thought, and my heart began to beat so hard I had to pause and lean against the wall.
In Ava’s room, I set the laptop on the desk and crept over to her bed. After a moment’s hesitation, I shook her shoulder gently.
“Ava?” I said. “I’m scared.”
She let out a sleepy murmur and lifted her blanket. I slipped in beside her and she pulled me close. Within a few minutes, pale dawn light was creeping into the room. I had just started to drift off when the first birds of morning began to sing.
59
AVA AND I DIDN’T TALK MUCH on the way to the clinic. I was too nervous, and Ava was still waking up. She sipped the coffee she’d dumped into a travel mug on our way out of the dorm and honked at a trucker who cut us off.
“Dickhead,” she grumbled, then, “Sorry, Annabeth. I tend to be a bitch until about noon.”
She smiled at me, then patted my leg. “You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you?”
I shook my head.
“You think you’re scared now,” said Ava, “imagine if you didn’t have a choice.”
She flicked the turn signal on and pulled into the parking lot. “Well, chickie. Here we are.”
The nurse called me in to sign some papers and talk over what was going to happen during the abortion, and then I had to go back out and wait for almost another hour. The waiting room was filled with teenage couples and twentysomething college students and grown women with kids. I wished I’d brought my headphones to tune out all the chaos. Instead, Ava and I hunched over a crossword puzzle in a magazine.
“What if the doctor goes out to lunch before she gets to me?” I kept saying. “Do you think the nurse forgot I’m here?”
“It’s okay, Annabeth,” Ava said. “The waiting is the worst part. Just remember, by the time you go to sleep tonight, this will be over.”
Finally, the nurse came out and called my name. Ava squeezed my hand. “I’ll be right here,” she said.
In the exam room, I undressed and put on the paper gown the nurse had left for me, then took out the tiny bottle of lavender oil Ava had given me in the car.
“Take a deep breath of this if you’re feeling scared,” she’d said. “It helps.”
Now I dabbed it on my wrists and under my nose, anointing myself like a priestess about to enter a holy mountain. I couldn’t believe that in five or ten minutes, this would be over. They would take it out of me, and when I walked out of this room it would not be there anymore. Good-bye, I thought, and then there was a knock on the door, and the nurse and doctor came in.
60
AVA’S FRIEND WAS RIGHT. THE awkward, tense, scary thing I’d been bracing myself for all night had barely gotten started when the doctor said, “And we’re done.”
I couldn’t believe how quickly it was over. I kept thinking there were other steps, but no, said the nurse, I was really done.
As I walked out with Ava, the world was bright and snowy, noisy with traffic. I wondered what Noe was doing. I wondered if Mom was having a good day at work. It was amazing that things could go back to normal so quickly. I guess I hadn’t realized it, but part of me had expected something terrible to happen. It was taking my brain a moment to get reoriented to the new, disaster-free reality.
I was hungry, and a little crampy, and woozy from the sedative drugs. On the drive home, Ava stopped at a coffee shop to get us blueberry scones. When we got back to the dorm, Ava’s roommates had pooled together to buy me flowers. They were sitting in a vase on Ava’s desk, dahlias like fireworks, yellow bursting out of pink. Get Well Soon, said the card, with a picture of a cartoon frog. Love, your friends at Mackenzie House.
“What do you feel like doing now?” said Ava. “Want me to stay with you, or would you rather be alone?”
“I think I want to be alone for a while.”
“You can use my computer if you want. Or take a nap or a shower. Eat whatever you want in the kitchen. You know where the tea is, right?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled at me, her blue hair bright against the white wall.
Funny, the people you end up being close to in the end.
61
WHEN AVA LEFT, I WENT THE kitchen to make tea. The dorm was quiet. While the water boiled, I took my time choosing from a dozen jars of flaky stuff with names like Peppermint Passion and Ginger Fairy. When my tea was ready, I carried the mug up to Ava’s room and started to read one of her theater books.
Outside Ava’s window, people were trickling across the quad like colored dots, hurrying to their classes. A few intrepid squirrels were venturing out to inspect post-lunchtime contributions to the garbage cans. I imagined that this was my life. Curling up in a dorm room, reading a smart book, waiting for my friends to get back from their classes so we could cook something delicious and figure out what we were doing that night. On the weekends, I’d go rock climbing or hiking, or lie in the grassy quad watching leaves fall. I wondered if I’d think about this day—if I’d remember myself at seventeen, throwing up on the Greyhound, sliding down Half Moon Mountain, going to the clinic with Ava, sitting on her bed and looking out the window after it was all done.