my puke pools at my feet, shining and stinking. My period is three weeks
late, a fact that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
A few gasps and I regain my breath, so I straighten and step away
from the window. My hands are cold and my fingers are aching with it
and I wonder how long it takes for a baby to grow fingers. Maybe that’s
what mothers are actually feeling when they think their baby is kicking;
just the baby drumming her fingers on the uterine wall. She is impatient.
She is pissed off. She has been ignited and the world outside comes to her
through slime, murky light and thick sounds and she wants to get out.
This is how I will come to picture Jamie, quietly but persistently wanting
the things that I can’t give her.
The next morning I will take a pregnancy test and it will be
positive. I will lay on my side on the bathroom floor and hold my knees
close to my chest and cry, my tears mingling with the dirty shower water
that clusters in little puddles across the tile, slicking down strands of hair
into sickening loops and curves like cursive script. I will hate Ted for
refusing to use the condoms I bought. A yellow tampon wrapper from my
roommate will poke out from the rim of the trashcan, garish. Suddenly,
I’ll imagine what my position must do to my insides. My stomach will
feel all squished up and I will have never been so aware of how it feels to
have ribs, and maybe to have those ribs poking around at other organs
and I will panic suddenly at the thought and flip so I’m laying on my
back and then my ribs and my guts won’t all squish her. I won’t even
know her yet, but she will already terrify me.
Tonight, however, I put her from my mind. I wipe my mouth
with the back of my hand, slip a piece of gum I’ve stored in my pocket
into my mouth, and turn to go back into the party. It’s Ted’s birthday, his
twenty-first, and midnight is approaching. When I open the door to his
apartment, I am greeted with a wall of sweaty, beer-soaked air. Ted is on
one knee in the middle of the room, funneling a beer while a crowd of his
friends stand around him cheering. He finishes in a few long gulps, and
when he sees me stands, opens his arms. I pull in close to him and as his
friends count down backwards from thirty, to midnight, to the first day of
his real adult life, I tilt my head up and he kisses me. The thwack of the
bass pulses through my chest and tingles in my shoulder blades and even
though his friends count down louder the closer they get to midnight it’s
almost like there’s nothing there but the two of us. His lips are wet, and I
114