by Anna Roberts
Busted.
My Inner Goddess looks far too pleased with herself. I appeal to my subconscious for help but she is currently wearing a pointy tinfoil hat bearing a paper flag that says Finnegan’s Wake. I expect it’s supposed to have something to do with her current mute performance of an interpretive dance about the life cycle of herrings, but I’m in no mood to interpret her nonsense.
“Actually,” I say. “In my head I call her Miss Pretty Wonderful Lawyer Lady.”
Kate’s eyeroll is visible from space.
“And she is, because she’s going to get Crispian out.”
“Is she?”
“Yes. Next Tuesday.”
“For another hearing?”
“No. Out. He’s coming out.”
Kate stares at me. “Yeah,” she says, slowly. “Not touching that with a bargepole.”
“He’ll have to wear an electronic tag, but they’ll probably let him take it off when they realise he’s not a ‘flight risk’. That’s what they call prisoners who have helicopters. And then we can start arranging the wedding and maybe his awful mother will quit bitching about how I’m probably pregnant.”
“You can’t be pregnant,” says Kate, as we reach a red light.
“I know.”
“You had your period like two weeks ago, in Florida.”
I glance at Kate in the rearview mirror and frown. “How do you remember that?” I ask. Kate is famous for her lousy short-term memory.
“Dude, I’m going to remember the tampon-bidet-amnesia incident forever. I’m gonna be telling that story to my fucking grandchildren."
“I’m glad I’m a source of entertainment to you,” I say, with heavy sarcasm.
“Oh come on,” she says. “You’re much more than that to me.”
“I am?”
“Sure. Every time I think my life is a disaster area I think ‘At least I’m not Hanna,’ and hey-presto – everything’s motherfucking kittens and puppies and roses again.”
“It is hard being me,” I agree. I’m so bookish and brown-haired, and just look at my fondness for brooding, complicated men.
“Honestly – I don’t know how you get from one end of the day to another.”
“Thank you.”
She gives me a long, strange look.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No – you’re looking at me weird.” Maybe she thinks I’m being brave, considering that I could be pregnant. Oh God, what if I am? Wouldn’t that just be so typical of me?
I wouldn’t put it past you, meaningless drama factory that you are.
- Oh, look who’s back.
I’m hardly going to sit quiet when you could be knocked up with the spawn of Neigh. Talk about Rosemary’s Baby. Do you think he’ll feed you roofies and raw liver and then invite his brony friends round to chant and draw cutie marks on your swollen belly?
I appeal to my subconscious for help, but she is the middle of an arabesque. Her tin-foil hat is at a jaunty angle and she holds a giant, billowing flag bearing a ‘NO BEES’ sign.
I stop the car. “I think I’m pregnant.”
“What? When? Hanna, he’s been in prison for the last week. The only time you could have got to him between now and your last period is when he got out of the hospital after smacking his head on the bi...” She trails off and stares at me. “...det. Oh my God.”
“What? Does this mean I could be pregnant?”
“Dude, who knows. It definitely means you’re fucking creepy though.”
Chapter Six
An Even Bigger Mess of the D'Urbervilles
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if there’s one thing idiots are really good at, it’s making more idiots. Apparently the instructions on condom packets are needlessly complicated, and so our shell-shocked planet reels into the 21st Century with seven billion of us aboard, most of us no brighter than we should be.
This may very well account for the otherwise inexplicable popularity of badly written books about neurotic billionaires and the skinny, self-loathing girls who fuck them. One such self-loathing girl is now contemplating the possibility that she may very well be about to squirt out one more nitwit into a world already heaving with the dense, the silly and the startlingly unwise.
Considering that the old maxim ‘there’s one born every minute’ should properly be adjusted to more like ‘there’s 4.45 of them coughed out every second’, it’s probably time the human race sat down and had a serious talk about it’s increasingly bleak outlook.
On the bright side, the future of reality TV has never looked rosier.
“I can’t believe you fucked him while he had amnesia,” says Kate, as we turn into the drugstore parking lot.
“Will you let that go? He was faking it.”
“Dude, you didn’t know he was faking it. You thought it was for real and that he didn’t even know who you were!”
She’s relentless. Ugh. “He knew who I was.”
“Bull. Shit. You said he called you Bella. Who the fuck is Bella?”
Good question. “Look,” I hiss, as we enter the store. “It doesn’t matter...”
“It totally does. If you didn’t know he was faking that’s just wrong.”
“Maybe subconsciously I knew he was faking.”
avert avert my sinuses enlarge preposterously
- No, not you.
forbidden elephant. Bad! No!
I shake my head to clear it. It’s getting kind of crowded in there. Oh crap – what am I doing here?
“I can’t do this,” I murmur, clutching a shelf for support. I know what it is we’ve come for and I try to picture myself picking a pregnancy test from the shelf, nonchalantly dropping it into a basket and paying for it at the checkout. It doesn’t work. I can’t do it.
“Then maybe you’ll think twice the next time you feel like fucking an amnesiac,” says Kate, in a carrying voice. She takes a package of caffeine pills from the shelf. “Cool – I didn’t know these were still legal.” She dumps several boxes in the basket and drags me up the aisle.
“You don’t understand...I can’t...”
We get to the aisle in question. Oh God. Kate grabs a two for one offer on condoms and then picks out a blue and pink box with a baby on it. My head’s gone all swimmy and I think I might faint.
“I don’t...” I murmur.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” says Kate, and marches towards the checkout. “SHE HAD SEX, EVERYONE!” she yells, in a singsong voice. “THIS IS HANNA AND SHE HAD SEX. BECAUSE IT’S THE FUCKING NINETEENTH CENTURY OR SOMETHING LET US ALL NOW PELT HER WITH ROTTEN POTATOES FOR HER GREAT AND DIVERSE WHOREDOMS.”
A couple of shelf-stackers stare and she grins at them. “Or, you know,” she says. “Not give a fuck. That was always an option, apparently.” She turns back to me and yanks me by the wrist. “It’s almost like you’re not that interesting, isn’t it?”
My humiliation is far from over. Once we leave the drugstore Kate eviscerates the pregnancy test right there in the parking lot, pushes the box and instructions into my hands, points me towards the restrooms and says, "Now go pee on the stick."
"What?" I gasp.
"Fucking read the instructions," she snorts. "Do you want me to come in with you?"
“No!"
"Good. Because holding a stick for you to pee on is so not on my Bucket List. Now, come on. Let's get this over with."
Jeez, she's so bossy. I wonder why Jesús puts up with her? She even gives him orders while they're...you know. Put in there, no, not like that, like this. Jiggle up and down, do that thing with your tongue. She frogmarches me to the restroom door and practically pushes me into a stall.
"Panties down," she says, through the door. "That's gotta be step one, remember?"
"I remember."
"Well, you obviously don't because twice, dude? That's beginning to look like you're even more fucked in the head than I previously thought."
I lower my jeans and panties and
stand clutching the box, the instruction sheet and the little sealed white wand with the window in it. I'm going to need an extra pair of hands, as I don't want to put anything down in here - it's none too clean and there's what appears to be a fist-hole in the partition. Above it someone has written JESICA IS A WHORE in red Sharpie and below it is a smear of something suspiciously brown.
"Kate, it smells in here."
"So get on with it. All you have to do is hover over the toilet and pee on the stick."
"Do you think it's that simple?"
"Of course it's that simple. They make these things for people who are too fucking stupid to read the instructions on condom packets."
"Then why did you give me the instructions? I don't have my hands free to read them."
"I don't know. Just pee on the damn stick already. Unwrap it first though - did I mention that?"
"I'm not stupid."
Kate is silent. I unwrap the stick and try to position myself over the toilet and hold the stick underneath me. I wonder if it's worth mentioning that I don't especially need to pee, but I hear the rasp of Kate's lighter and I know that she's doing what she's been doing in girls' bathrooms since Catholic school. My hands are too full, but if I put anything down in here it's going in land in some kind of grossness. As I juggle my purse, the box and the instruction sheet under one arm the stick gets away from me. With a weird, inevitable kind of slow-motion it tumbles from my fingers and lands in the bright blue detergent water of the toilet bowl.
I stare at it for a moment. It floats. The water has a worrying greenish yellow tinge under the blue and I suspect that recent bathroom visitors were not the kind of people to perform a courtesy flush. Not when they could be writing JESICA IS A WHORE on the wall in red sharpie. Oh God. What am I going to do?
My Inner Goddess is worse than useless. She is currently face down, pounding the floor with her fists as she wheezes and shrieks with silent laughter. Tears pour down her cheeks.
Shit, shit and shit again. I don't want to touch the damn thing, let alone pee on it. How the hell am I going to get it out of there? I dump the box, wrap my hand in the inner plastic bag and attempt to scoop out the stick with the box. The fucking thing bobs under the water. I try again and get it this time, but I've scooped out a boxful of toilet water, which soaks through the cardboard and splashes onto the floor, perilously close to my favourite pair of Converse.
I stifle a small scream. My Inner Goddess shows no such reservations and howls with malicious laughter.
"Oh my God - are you peeing on the floor in there?"
"No!"
I dump the instruction sheet. My hand is still wrapped in toilet-watery plastic but it's the only goddamn way I'm touching that stick. "This never happened in Tess of the D'Urbervilles," I wail, as I hover above the toilet seat and try to think of Niagara Falls.
"No. She just got quietly dragged off into the woods and raped. Things were much nicer in nineteenth century England, right?"
It's really hard to pee when you're not properly squatting; your brain won't let you. Of course, the alternative is sitting down on that grody toilet seat and there's no way I'm doing that. There isn't even paper or a seat cover. "I mean, she never had to sit around in a stinky bathroom trying to pee on a stick," I murmur.
"No, she just did it the old fashioned way - skipped a couple of periods and realised her life was fucking ruined."
"Huh?" I finally pee. I gingerly hold the stick in the stream and wince at just how gross this all is. "Tess Durbeyfield had a pregnancy scare?"
"Hanna, Tess Durbeyfield had a fucking baby. It's like the plot of Tess of the D'Urbervilles."
I come out holding the disgusting pee-covered stick. Kate holds out a paper cup and I dump it in there. "That's not the plot," I say. "She has to choose between the man who's bad for her and the man who's good for her."
"No she doesn't," says Kate, heading back across the parking lot. "She gets raped, gets pregnant, the kid dies and her mom tells her to start over where nobody knows her. Then she falls in love with Angel Clare and he says he'd love her no matter what so she tells him about her past and he - like the unbelievable spineless shitbag that he is - leaves her destitute and alone so that she has no choice but to go back to rapey Alec D'Urberville. Then she stabs him to death after he makes a joke about her ex-husband and she dies on the gallows."
I frown. "Where are you getting all this from?"
"Um...the book?"
"Did you do a class on it or something in Freshman year?"
"No. I read the book." She opens the car door, removes an old Pepsi can from the cup-holder and in it places the paper cup containing my fate and my future. I stare at her in her daiquiri stained shirt and wrinkled toe-nail polish and wonder what she could possibly gain from reading classic British novels. My classic British novels.
"Don't look at me like that," she says.
"Like what?"
"Like you're pissed that I read Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Because I'm a loud, slutty stoner and I have no business reading the Victorian novels you think are oh-so-fucking highbrow and set you apart as a special, porcelain-vaginaed delicate motherfucking snowflake. They're books - Hanna. They're a form of entertainment. Anyone can read them. That's the idea."
I gape at her. "I didn't say anything of the sort," I say.
"You don't have to. You're just that obvious. People have been reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles since 1891 - you're not the only person to read it, although you may be the only person to read it quite as wrong as you do. Seriously, how the fuck did you miss the entire plot? Were you even reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles?"
I switch on the radio to avoid talking to her. Kate being Kate, she can't have it tuned to a normal station - oh no, she has to have it tuned to Emmett and The Bear, who are moronic even by DJ standards.
"...duuuuuuuuuuude it's like sasquatchtacular."
"I know right? Who knows what's lurking out there in the Cascades..."
"...what if there's like a colony of them."
"El Fupacabra? No way, man. That's a lone wolf. Or cat. Or fat chick. Whatever it is."
Kate glares at the radio. "El Fupacabra? Fuck them. That's my name for it. I'll fucking sue."
Her phone rings, flashing up Jesús' name on the screen. "Get that, will you?"
"Hi."
"Kate?"
"No. It's Hanna. Kate's driving."
"Can you put me on speaker?"
I look for somewhere to put the phone. Kate had one of those cradle things on the dashboard, but she claimed it broke when she tried to perform athletic sexual positions with some guy she knows only as 'Gredge'. She was wearing Dr. Marten boots at the time. I know this because she tried to claim the breakage on her car insurance.
Instead I eye the cupholder, but Kate shakes her head. "Thumbs, Hanna," she says. "Use 'em."
That's how I ended up being a phone holder for her majesty. Jeez. Like my life couldn't get any worse right now. "What up, Shitlord?" she says, which is delightful considering he's supposed to be her boyfriend.
"You know that coffee shop where they saw the thing the other day?" says Jesús.
"Yuh huh. What about it?"
"You know the book store round the block?"
"Sure," she says, looking over at me. "The one where Hanna hangs out so she can pretend to be literary?"
"I'm still here," I say.
"I know that."
"Shit's going down," says Jesús. "How soon can you get here? There was another Fupacabra sighting."
Kate groans. "What the fuck? Is everyone calling it the fucking Fupacabra now? I want royalties, goddamn it - I need royalties. Otherwise where else am I gonna find the time to write about Skunk Apes and alien sex attacks?"
"Dude, speaking of alien sex attacks, I got like fifty downloads overnight."
"Sex Queens of Boobulon Twelve?"
"Yep."
"Oh honey - remember me when you're rich."
"Sure. I'll buy you a gold p
lated dildo."
"Maybe, baby. I think I'd just prefer you to go to town in Victoria's Secret and give me a little fashion show, if you know what I mean."
I should not have to hear this. Dear God. What is wrong with them?
Kate turns the corner and pulls up outside the bookstore. I know this bookstore. What is Jesús even doing here? Is he going to start telling me he reads books again, because he so doesn't. I've never even seen him with a book, and those stupid downloadable porn things he writes aren't real books. You can't smell them or stack them or arrange them on shelves. He says the best thing about e-readers is that nobody can tell what you're reading, which takes all the fun out of it, if you ask me.
"Hey Jenny Olsen," says Jesús, leaning into the car. "You made it then?"
"Try and keep me away. Where's El Fupacabra?"
"Gone. I think. But there's an eyewitness in the store." He grins. "Hey Hanna. How was prison?"
"Awful," I murmur. "His mother accused me of being pregnant."
Kate removes the stick from the cup. "Well," she says. "She's a smart lady. Got a doctorate and everything." She holds up the stick. There are two blue lines in the window.
"No way," moans Jesús.
"Yes way," says Kate, with a monstrous grin. "I'm gonna be an auntie."
I stare uncomprehendingly at the twin blue lines. I blink, adding yet another pointless sentence to pad the word count. This cannot be happening.
"You're pregnant?" says Jesús.
"Apparently," I whisper, getting out of the car. Oh God. I need some air.
"How?" he says.
Kate snorts. "You put your right leg in, you put your right leg out...no wait, that's the hokey pokey." She shakes her head as if to clear it. "Is this a rhetorical question?"
"No, I'm genuinely curious. When was she last close enough to him to get pregnant?"
"After Florida," says Kate, in a deathly whisper.
Jesús stares at me for a moment and then crosses himself. "Dios mio. That's not right."
"Says the man who sexually harassed me in a parking lot," I snap, and stagger towards the bookstore. Maybe being around books will make me feel better. I'll be in my element. You can't expect a bookworm to exist comfortably against a backdrop of prisons, drugstores and smelly strip-mall bathrooms.