I’d just been to church to pray. My last visit was Christmas (it was April). I believed only a spiritual force could save me now. The priest had spoken of desire, the necessity of avoiding dark temptation, reaching instead for the light.
After church, I went to the contraception aisle at Walgreens, the same aisle where they stock the baby supplies, both a warning and a taunt. I saw the ovulation kits for those women trying to conceive while I, for forty bucks, wanted to crush any seed of life inside me.
In my car, I tried to pry open the Plan B box, but the plastic wouldn’t give, not even after I sawed at it with my key. Heat rose under my fleece jacket. Every second I wasn’t taking the pill was one second closer to pregnancy. I shouldn’t have waited three days. Beyond the third day, the box stated, the pill was useless.
Once home, I ran to my room, locked my door, hoping Mom or Dad wouldn’t catch me. I got the plastic off after stabbing it several times with scissors. Dad knocked on the door, calling my name.
I pried off the plastic and opened the cardboard box.
Dad knocked again.
‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ I said. ‘I don’t have clothes on.’
That was enough to scare him away.
Inside the cardboard box sat a pill, small as a pea, but white and flat. All that packaging for this tiny circle that I couldn’t imagine working any kind of magic in my body.
I pushed the pill from its foil coating and realized I had no water. If I left my room, Dad would hear and come out of his office.
I tried to swallow the pill. Its bitterness released itself into my saliva, and I wondered if the pill was losing its potency, dissolving in my mouth instead of my body. I swallowed hard, but the pill got stuck in my throat.
I ran from my room to the bathroom, but Dad was in there, so I raced to the laundry sink, slurped the lukewarm water from my cupped hands, splashing my face and shirt. My scalp itched as if tiny bugs were clawing at it.
My sister Maggie came into the laundry room with a full basket of clothes.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said, wiping my mouth. The pill should’ve been safely inside me, but I still felt a thickness in my throat.
‘You look weird,’ Maggie said. She always had deep intuition, developed from boyfriends who left her or she abandoned with the tepid excuse, ‘It’s not you; it’s me.’ Her struggles, unlike mine, led her to a path of understanding.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just nauseous.’
In my room, Dad stood by my bed, the Plan B box in his hand. He didn’t look angry as he had when he found the weed and vape disposables in my desk drawer. Confusion knitted his brow.
The filter in my turtle tank let out a steady stream of water, the room’s only sound. My turtle, Swifty, thrashed his limbs in the yellowish water. Time to clean the tank.
‘It’s Plan B,’ I said, as if he were illiterate.
‘I see that,’ he said. ‘What’re you doing with it?’
I shook my head and closed my eyes.
‘Do I really need to explain it to you?’ I asked. He hadn’t met Brandon, but that didn’t matter.
‘What kind of guy doesn’t use a condom? Why didn’t you insist on a condom? Beth?’
Brandon had said he wanted to feel me, but I couldn’t tell Dad that. I couldn’t even tell Mom, if she were here, standing in judgement or compassion; I couldn’t predict which.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, the same reply I gave him when he found the weed and vapes.
I was inclined toward destruction, but I didn’t understand that, not then. I simply thought I was stupid.
‘Does this guy love you?’ he asked.
I laughed, more out of nervousness than the ludicrous possibility of Brandon feeling more than typical teenage lust. And what had I felt? I hoped he’d be my boyfriend, that was sure, but I got a sense, even when we were as close as we could be, that he was far away. He didn’t look in my eyes as our bodies met each other’s. I left his house that day with a terrible ache.
As he drove me home, I remembered the dream catcher over his bed.
‘Do you have bad dreams?’ I’d asked after he took off his shirt.
‘What?’ he asked.
I pointed to the wall.
‘I used to,’ he said.
‘So, I guess it works.’ I thought of the dreams that often plagued me. The most recent: I’d stabbed a robber in the neck with nail-clipping scissors, again and again.
Brandon pulled at my sweatshirt. ‘Take this off,’ he whispered.
In his bed, I thought of the dream catcher above us, believed it would protect me, protect us, so when I asked about the condom and he promised he’d pull out, I believed I’d be okay.
Was that Plan A? I wondered. Trust in him? The belief that we could be more? The hope he’d protect me, even though I felt no imminent danger, beyond the realm of dreams?
Brandon texted me later, hours after the pill had dissolved. Want to get together?
I wanted to say no, but couldn’t find the courage.
I sat there holding my phone, Dad gone now, the weight of his judgement still heavy in the room, the crumpled Plan B box in the garbage bin.
Swifty’s limbs clicked against the glass stones at the bottom of his tank. He climbed up on the fake rock, stretched his neck like an ancient saint toward the light.
Christine C. Heuner has been teaching high school English in New Jersey for over two decades. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Philadelphia Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. Find Christine on Twitter at @cheuner and at christineheuner.com.
Photo by Jason Holland on Unsplash.
