15.

I took the SATs on a Saturday morning at a dank-smelling vocational school near my house. The test room had rows of puke-yellow chairs with holes in the back that made them look like lifesavers. A week later, on the morning of “the procedure,” Mom sat on my bed, pulling a feather out of my comforter. “Do you want me to come? Because I will if you want me to,” she said. It sounded almost like a threat.

“It’s okay, Vanessa’s meeting me,” I lied. For some reason I’d gotten it in my head that it would be easier to go alone, to just go alone without anyone feeling sorry for me or worrying about me. I’d have to fudge the exit—someone was supposed to take me home—but I’d figure some way out of it.

“Okay,” she said. She seemed both hurt and relieved. She pressed her red fingernails up against her eyebrow, fanning it out. “Call me if you need anything, okay? I know this probably feels hard, but you’re doing the right thing.” She patted my leg and stood up.

I put on sweats, thinking, If it really hurts, they’ll be easy to get back on when it’s time to go home. I tasted rotten orange peels in the back of my mouth on the subway. Was that a pregnancy symptom? I looked at a woman in front of me wearing a thick, bulky cardigan that disguised her shape and thought of something my friend David told me: that there were hundreds of people in New York City walking around with guns, you just couldn’t see them. It might be the same with newly pregnant women like me who aren’t showing yet, I thought. Little secret pocket dolls, hiding from you.

The office was packed with rows of women sandwiched between fake birds-of-paradise. I took a seat and pulled out my yarn, thinking my scarf-in-progress could stand in as a security blanket. My hands were shaky and I pulled at the yarn like a skittish kitten. A door swung open and I spotted three empty cots in a row. They reminded me of giving blood with Vanessa in the basement of school freshman year. I remembered sitting next to her, both of us squeezing the red balls, racing to fill up our bags. Then we ate four-packs of Fig Newtons and drank apple juice while the nurse had us recline for twenty minutes. Vanessa said the apple juice looked like urine.

A redhead in a flowered pajama top and a name tag that said Annie Kay walked by. The young-looking woman across from me in a khaki pantsuit burped. I focused on my yarn, embarrassed for her. I looked up again and she was staring at the wall, clearly worried. I thought of Mom’s sister, Pat, who’d had a hysterectomy when she was thirty, and I began to wonder why the fuck I’d come alone. Annie Kay stepped into the doorway and called my name into the room, like we were all there for an audition and it was my turn to read.

“Do you have someone here with you to take you home?” she asked me, scanning the seats around me.

“Yes,” I lied. “She’s downstairs getting a magazine.” I wondered if I was making a big mistake but thought I could always call Vanessa and have her come get me if I was dying from the pain or out of it. Annie Kay made a motion to follow her down the hall and I hoped that was the end of it.

Dr. Moore was the kind of person you’d want to get an abortion from. Blond hair cut very straight above her shoulders, and skin that clearly got frequent, maybe compulsively so, peels. She stepped quietly into the room, followed by a nurse, and everything immediately grew very serious.

“Thea Galehouse,” she said, looking at her chart. “So, you think you’re about eight weeks along, correct?”

“Something like that.”

“We’ll just take a quick look.” She asked me to scooch down the table and picked up the phallic-looking magic wand. It was dark in the room and the screen illuminated her face, making it bright blue. She stared at the screen for a long time, then took the mouse and moved it around, clicking and clicking.

“Okay,” she said, letting out her breath. Something was printing out. “Eight, nine weeks looks about right. I’ll be back in a minute and we’ll start.”

She and the nurse left. I sat up on my elbows and pulled the screen toward me without thinking. A circle inside a larger gray circle, frozen on the screen. The littler circle was shaped like a comma that you could color in, or a cartoon bubble for voices.

I looked away from the screen and looked back again, and when I looked back, I got scared. For some reason I thought of Sam Negroponte, the artist guy who died across the hall in our building. I bugged Mom until she fessed up that he’d hanged himself. He was dead in his apartment for almost a week. I was in fourth grade, and when I got off the elevator one day, the smell crept into some part of my brain that registered exactly what it was without needing words. You’re not ready for this, my brain said. Not ready to know this smell and what it is or what it means.

The same thing happened when I looked back at the screen. Not ready. I’d just take a little more time. I got off the table and threw on my clothes like you’d imagine putting your clothes on in the middle of the night if your building’s on fire. As fast as you can, thinking and not thinking at the same time. I sped down the narrow, empty hallway and ducked past the receptionist, who was deep in discussion with a woman at the counter about her insurance co-payment. No one noticed me leaving, and it struck me how easy it was to become invisible when you needed to.

I walked outside, gathering my down vest around me to fend off the December wind. Someone had discarded a perfectly healthy-looking pine tree on the corner. Christmas was still a couple of weeks away. I imagined some perfectionist Upper East Side housewife throwing it out because it was too short or something and immediately connected the unwanted tree, with its wide, wet stump, to whatever was growing inside me. I got a smoothie on Seventy-Second Street and sat on a hard stool in front of the window for an hour. Then I went home. Mom was at the dining room table paying bills when I walked through the door. She asked how it was. I told her Dr. Moore was very competent and professional, that it hardly hurt, that Vanessa was a huge help, that I was glad it was done.

“Anything for insurance?” she asked.

“They’re mailing.”

“You don’t feel crampy?”

“No,” I said, making a mental note to complain later. “Not yet.”

“I bought a big thing of Advil,” she said. “You can take more than the bottle says. Take some the second you feel anything.” I started for the kitchen, but she was swinging an envelope between her second and third fingers like a little white flag. “Something came for you this morning.” She smiled.

“No way,” I said. “You opened it?”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t stand it, and I wanted to prepare for bad news in case there was some. But you’re in. Early decision.”

I grabbed the envelope. “New York University” in purple letters in the top left corner. My SAT scores had been online for a couple of weeks, but I’d been too afraid to look. I rubbed my thumb along the mangled edge where Mom had opened it and felt an almost dizzying surge of relief and pride: I’d done it. I thought about all the nights with that freaking SAT phone book on my lap, the desperate hope that I could somehow absorb the contents via osmosis. All the Saturdays I’d spent that fall staring at the backs of plastic red chairs at the Princeton Review, missing Will and desperate to be with him instead of there. I’d done it. Maybe all the stressing over econ and calc had somehow been enough to maintain a B-plus average. Maybe stressing was as effective as working, because I definitely did more stressing than working. But it had all somehow come together.

“Well done, you clever girl, as my mum used to say to me once in a blue moon,” Mom said, standing up and coming toward me. “You pulled it off and now my baby is flying the coop at last. But you’ll be a stone’s throw away. I’m getting the best of both worlds. I can hardly believe it.” She stood up and walked over to me with her arms extended, and I saw myself in our flecked mirror above the stereo console as she hugged me: a smiling, rooty blond girl with a thorny secret.