“Now?” Yasmin sounds surprised. “Helen will be here in, like, an hour.”
“I just need a couple things. Won’t take long.”
“Want me to come with?”
“No!” I clear my throat. “I mean, uh, no. I need to practice navigating on my own anyway, right? That’s the whole point.”
She hesitates—I can feel her uncertainty in the quality of her silence—but eventually concedes. “Okay. But take your phone. And be careful at the crosswalk. The traffic here doesn’t stop for shit.”
“I will.”
Fifteen slow, shuffling, stumble-filled minutes later, I’m standing inside the CVS three blocks from our apartment. The lights hum overhead. I can’t see them, but I can hear their electric buzz mixing with the tinny pop music bleeding through the store’s speakers.
I approach the counter, where I can hear someone shuffling papers. “Excuse me,” I say in my most carefully neutral,I’m-not-spiralingvoice. “Where are the pregnancy tests?”
“Aisle seven, about halfway down on the right.”
“Thanks.”
Excalibur leads me there. The shelf is right where the clerk said it would be. My fingers find the boxes easily enough, all those identical rectangular packages lined up like cheery little harbingers of doom. I’m glad I can’t see the nauseating pink color these companies always choose in an attempt to split the difference between their two main customer groups: those women sayingOh-God-please-noand the others sayingYay, finally!
I grab one at random. The brand doesn’t matter. They’ll all do the same thing: confirm what I already know in my gut.
The walk to the register feels like it’s a mile long. I pay in cash, fumbling with the bills until the clerk takes pity on me and counts out my change into my palm. The transaction is mercifully brief. No small talk or questions, just the sound of a plastic bag and a mumbled “Have a good day.”
I clutch the bag in my fist and walk out into sunshine I can’t see.
I make it back to the apartment without incident, though my nerves are so frayed that every car horn makes me jump about a foot in the air. The pregnancy test burns like contraband in my pocket.
Inside, Yasmin is getting ready for her shift at the diner. She’s been picking up some under-the-table gigs, washing dishes and bussing tables. I hear her moving around, gathering her things.
“I’ll be back late tonight,” she says. “Get what you needed?”
“Yeah. Just some… toiletries.”
“Cool. I’m heading out in a sec. You good until Helen gets here?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
“Alright, hon.” She kisses my cheek on her way out. “Call if you need anything.”
The door clicks shut behind her. I count to sixty, then sixty again, making sure she’s really gone. Then I lock myself in the bathroom.
The tile is cold against my bare legs as I sink down onto the floor, my back against the tub. My fingers find the plastic bag and pull out the box.
I fish the test out, but my hands are shaking so badly that I drop it and have to go hunting for it along the grooves in the tile. When I finally find the test again, I sit back against the tub and cradle it in both hands.
It’s funny how tiny the things that change a person’s life can be. A squirmy little retina. The pearl of an oyster. A few grams of plastic certainty wrapped in my fist.
My thumb passes over the smooth surface. Such a small thing. Such a stupid, simple mechanism. Pee on stick, wait three minutes, learn if your world is about to split in two.
But it helps. Having the test here, as-yet-unused buthere, gives me something I haven’t had in weeks: a choice I can make on my own terms. Not yet. Not today. But when I’m ready.
If I’m ever ready.
A knock pulls me back to reality. I shove the test back in its box and bury it under the bathroom sink behind the ancient bottle of Drano, then splash cold water on my face.
“Coming!” I call out.
