by Laura Ruby
Ms. Godwin makes me chief set designer, no shock to me or anyone else. She doesn’t want any Venetian canals or medieval throne rooms, but she does want some sort of elaborate contemporary sets that we’ll have to put on dollies. I thought that it might cheer me up, but it doesn’t. I don’t have any urge to start drawing up plans, and I don’t feel like issuing any orders to my crew. All my usual set-design minions—geeky, pimpled boys, usually in the lower grades, who have weird geeky crushes on me (worse now that there’s that stupid picture floating around)—are disappointed. They want to know why I dyed my hair, they want to know why I don’t understand that blondes have more fun or are at least more fun to look at, they want to know if I plan on cutting my hair off, and they threaten to quit if I do. Minions don’t like change.
I don’t like change, either. My dad usually helps me with my drawings, usually takes me to pick up materials. I don’t even want to ask him. He’s so weird around me now, like a feral cat or something, all jumpy and ready to spit. He works even more, if that’s possible, and when he’s not working at the store, he’s working at home, doing paperwork or housework or stupid projects that keep him from having to see me. When I find him building a bookcase in the basement, I offer to tack it for him—that is, dust it with a tack cloth before he applies the finish. Gruffly, he says, “No, no, I’m fine. Don’t want you to get all dirty.” I’ve gone from being his honorary son—the fill-in for Henry, the real boy that should have lived to stand by his dad’s side—to this funky GIRL who does icky GIRL things that men—okay, fathers—can’t deal with. And I can’t deal with it, either.
“When is Dad going to start treating me like a person again?” I ask my mom on the way to the dreaded gynecologist’s appointment. I ask because I want to know, and also because I want to distract myself from the Ash disaster and from the stupid appointment. My stomach is hiding in my esophagus, and all of my other organs have switched places. I hate doctors, every kind of doctor. I hate their white coats and weird smiles and rubber gloves and sticks and needles and blank faces. I decide that if I ever have to give birth, I’m going to squat in a field like my ancestors did.
“You have to give Dad a little more time, Audrey,” my mom says. “He wasn’t prepared for this.”
“He must have assumed that I would have a boyfriend at some point in my life.”
“Yes,” says my mom, with a glance at me, “but no one assumed that you would be photographed in a compromising position with said boyfriend when you were only sixteen years old.”
“I’ll be seventeen soon.”
“And,” she continues, “no one assumed that the compromising photograph would be spread around cell phones and on the Internet.” She’s breathing sharply through her nose, so I can tell she’s annoyed and upset with me for being all ha-ha about it. “At least you can’t see your face. It seems like this photograph won’t haunt you forever.”
“That doesn’t seem to make Dad feel any better.”
“To tell you the truth, it doesn’t make me feel much better, either, and I’m not sure if you should feel better. What’s going on with you today?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I just don’t want to think about it the rest of my life. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.” This is not the way I really feel about it, but I’m trying. I change the subject. “How’s the new book coming?”
“Fine,” she says. Another sideways glance. “I’ve just introduced a new character, a delinquent teenage girl who drives everyone crazy. She chokes on an oatmeal-raisin muffin and has to be given the Heimlich.”
“Great.”
The doctor’s office looks like all doctor’s offices: that is, it’s got the white walls, the bad art, and the People magazines everywhere. I have to spend forever filling out endless medical history forms with questions about whether my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother ever had a stroke, or maybe a hangnail. Finally some nurse comes to get me. After I get weighed and blood-pressured, I have to get naked, put on this little paper cape that ties in the front and a teeny paper blankie over my lap, and sit shivering in a freezing office. Who thinks this stuff up?
There’s a knock on the door, and the doctor marches in. He’s followed by the nurse who took my blood pressure, a grumpy woman who looks like a giant potato with legs.
“Hello, Audrey. I’m Dr. Warren,” he says. “You already met Nurse Thrane.”
“Hi,” I say. He shakes my hand and I check him out. Dark, balding dad type. I decide that this is better than a blond, not-balding hot type, at least when it comes to gynecologists.
He pulls up a black stool and sits. “So it looks like we’re going to do a general exam today.”
“Great!” I say, weirdly. “I mean, fine.”
“Looks like your blood pressure is good. Any trouble with headaches?”
I shrug. “Not really. If I haven’t had enough sleep or if I have a cold or whatever, sometimes my head hurts a little.”
“Have you ever had a migraine? A severe headache?”
“No. Never.”
“Any relatives with migraines?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Problems with menstrual pain? Cramps? Backaches?”
“No.”
He scribbles something in a file folder.
“Any problems with your breasts?”
Like what? Having them sneak out at night? “No.”
“Are you sexually active, Audrey?”
Sigh. “I was.”
He doesn’t look up from the chart. “And when was that?”
“About a month ago.”
“This is intercourse? About a month ago?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Birth control?”
“I…he…we used a condom.”
“Have you ever been pregnant, or are you concerned that you’re pregnant now?”
To quote Ash: Jesus! “No,” I say.
“When was your last period?”
“Uh…” I mentally count the days. “Two weeks ago?”
“And how many sexual partners have you had?”
Oh, thousands. “One.”
“Okay.” He stands and goes to the sink to wash his hands. While he’s lathering up, he says, “I’m going to check your breasts first.” He dries his hands and then slaps them together, rubbing them, I suppose, to warm them up. Then he slips underneath the paper thingy I’m wearing with his scratchy fingers, and presses all around my boobs—quite possibly the strangest medical thing that’s ever been done to me. The nurse watches, yawning.
“Everything’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he says. He pulls two rubber gloves out of a box on the counter and puts them on. They’re exactly the same brand of glove, I see, that I bought at the beauty supply store. This seems all wrong to me.
“Now I want you to lie back on the table and put your feet in these stirrups.”
Put my feet up in what? Are you freaking kidding me? I do what he says, though, focusing hard on the ceiling. It’s one of those white cork ceilings with all the crazy pockmarks. “Audrey, I need you to open your knees.”
“Sorry,” I say. I’m blushing, but the nurse still looks bored as she hands the doctor what looks like a huge plastic salad server shaped like a duck’s bill.
“This is a speculum, Audrey,” he says. “I’m going to insert this and get a better look at your cervix, okay? You might feel a bit of pressure.” I feel something poking at me. “Audrey, try and relax.”
YOU RELAX!!! I take a deep breath. The salad server forces its way in. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but it’s weird and I hate it. “Ow,” I say.
“Are you okay?” he says.
No. “I guess.”
“You’re doing great, Audrey.” He looks around inside me for a while. “I’m going to take a swab of your vaginal secretions.”
Ew. “What for?” I say.
“Just to make sure there’s no infection. It’s routine.”
Infection. Right. How nic
e.
He pokes around some more. “Everything is looking healthy, Audrey. I’m going to remove the speculum now. Then I’m going to insert two fingers to check your ovaries and fallopian tubes, all right?”
NO! NO! NO! “All right.”
He stands and sticks his fingers inside me while pressing down on my stomach from the outside. He looks thoughtfully off into the air as he does this, as if he’s composing poetry or writing songs in his head. I think he’s a terrible person. Only sick and terrible people would want to do this for a living.
“Okay,” he says. He pulls his fingers out and whips off the gloves while Nurse Potato adjusts the stirrups and helps me to sit up again. “Though we’ll make sure of it with some tests, everything looks fine to me.”
Exhale. “I’m glad,” I say.
He plunks down on his trusty black stool. “Now, since you are sexually active, I do want to talk to you about a couple of things. You told me that you used a condom, and that’s good. Condoms can do a lot to protect you from a whole host of sexually transmitted diseases like chlamydia, gonorrhea, HIV, and genital warts.”
“Warts,” I say. “I don’t like the sound of warts.” My hands twist in my lap, crinkling the paper blankie. I know about warts and about a lot of other stuff, mostly from books and the Internet, but also from Mrs. Hurtado, our ninth-grade Sex Ed teacher. Mrs. Hurtado was fearless. She showed us a movie of a live birth that looked so bloody and painful it had every girl surrounding her desk afterward, carefully examining all the methods of birth control she’d brought with her. She would answer any question we had with complete seriousness, no matter how dumb, like Isn’t birth control the girl’s job? or, You can’t get pregnant your first time, right?
“Warts are one thing,” the doctor is saying. “But there’s also some evidence that condoms might offer protection against something called HPV, human papillomavirus, that can cause cervical cancer down the road if it’s untreated. I want you to keep using condoms, Audrey, whenever you have sex. Nonlubricated condoms for oral sex, too. And I want you to have regular checkups.”
He makes it sound as if I were having sex every other day. I’m not sure I’ll ever have sex again. “Okay,” I say.
“Now, condoms are fairly effective in deterring pregnancy, up to ninety-seven percent. But only if they’re used correctly. Make sure you read the package yourself; don’t leave it up to your partner to figure everything out. And I’d recommend another form of birth control for you to use in conjunction with condoms. You’re young and healthy, so I think the birth control pill would be an excellent choice. You can also consider Depo-Provera shots. Ninety-nine point seven percent effective.”
Shots? I need shots? “I don’t want shots,” I say.
He smiles at me, a bland, just-giving-you-the-facts smile. “You don’t have to get shots. You don’t have to get anything. But I do want you to remember that no single birth control method is one hundred percent effective, okay? Not condoms, not pills, not anything. Only total abstinence works all the time.”
Duh. “I know.”
“So then you can understand why we think it’s a good idea for you to select a birth control method to prevent pregnancy and pair that with condoms to prevent STDs.”
“Yes,” I say.
“The nurse will give you some information to take home, and you can think about it. Are your parents with you?”
“My mom is here.”
“Then maybe you can discuss it with her to come up with the best option for you.”
“Okay,” I say. Now I think he’s terrible and insane.
“Do you have any questions?”
Yeah, when can I get out of here? “I don’t think so,” I say.
“If you have any problems or any questions, I want you to call me right away. We’ll be happy to help you.” He smiles again, this time in a friendly and sort of fatherly way, and he doesn’t seem so terrible. “We’ll leave you to get dressed now. The nurse will be back in a few minutes to take you to the waiting room. Remember, you can come back or call at any time if you want to discuss birth control options or if anything else comes up. Other than that, I’d like to see you in a year for a checkup.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Good.” He shakes my hand one last time, and then he and Nurse Potato are out the door. I rip off the flimsy outfit and throw on my clothes. My head is spinning with visions of condoms and warts, swabs and shots. When the nurse takes me back to the waiting room and I see my mother sitting there and I hear her murmur “How was it?” I realize something. If every teenager had to have this exam, if guys had to have some giant duck-billed salad server shoved up their butts on a regular basis, if every high schooler had to hear the words WARTS and GENITALS and CANCER in the same freaking conversation while wearing nothing but a couple of napkins, no one would ever have sex again, and that could be the whole point.
The Slut City World Tour
When I sat down with Pam Markovitz and Cindy Terlizzi and sampled their fries, I never thought that it would become a habit. But every day, I walk into the lunchroom and see Ash turn from me as if I have human papillomavirus, see Joelle look faint and theatrical. Then I scan the room and see Pam clearing a seat for me. One thing leads to the next, and then I’m sitting with them all the time.
At first we don’t talk much. We order cheese fries, split them three ways, and eat them, occasionally complaining about a teacher or some stupid guy who said some stupid thing. I tell them that Ash thinks I’m a slut and I don’t want to hang out with her, and they don’t ask for the gory details.
We start to talk. Things that I didn’t know about Pam Markovitz: (a) she’s funny; (b) she’s smarter than everyone thinks she is; and (c) she’s sworn off guys. She says she’s had enough of them to know that they just aren’t worth it, at least not at this age. “Do you know that the last guy I went out with was trying to get in my pants in the car on the way to the movies? He didn’t even wait for me to get my seat belt on, just ‘Hey, how are you, you look nice,’ and wham! right for the fly. I’m like, Whoa! And he’s like, What? As if normal people always ram their hands down each other’s pants on first dates.” She waves the air in front of her face as if there’s a cloud of smoke, which of course there isn’t, because we’re in school. “I’m not wasting any more time with boys. What do they know about pleasing a girl?” she says. “Nothing. That’s what they know. I’m saving myself for a man.”
“Seems like a good plan to me,” I say.
She nods at me. “You get it. You found out the hard way. Heh. No pun intended.”
It’s the first time they’ve said anything about the picture or about Luke. I’m tempted to ask Pam if she was with him, too, but I don’t, because I know she was and because I really don’t want to hear about it. “Yeah,” I say. “I found out the hard way.” And, to be mean, because I am feeling mean lately, I say, “Or the not-so-hard way.”
“The never-hard-enough way!” says Cindy. She laughs, open-mouthed, and then covers her mouth with her hand. Cindy’s bottom teeth are crooked, and she’s really self-conscious about them. Pam told me that the first thing Cindy wants to do when she turns eighteen is to audition for Extreme Makeover or one of those other plastic surgery shows, like maybe something on MTV. She wants the works: teeth, boobs, cheeks, other cheeks, etc. I think that those shows make everyone look like the talking robots at Epcot Center, but what’s the point of telling her that? People don’t listen.
“You guys should try Pam’s Boy-Free Plan,” Pam says. “I feel great. No hassles, no stupid phone calls at midnight, no begging. No telling me that rubbers ruin the sex for them. Poor, poor babies. Please. Give me a break.” She glares out the window, as if the boys who said these things to her are chained up outside, just waiting for her to come and kick the crap out of them for fun.
“I think things used to be better for women,” Cindy says. “I’m reading this book where this woman gets kidnapped and has to be harem girl for this guy?”
“Which book is this?” I say.
Cindy digs around in her bag and pulls it out. The woman on the cover is wearing gauzy, see-through pants and a spangly bra. A guy with long, windblown hair and a windblown white shirt stands behind her, pulling her elbows back in a way that could not be comfortable. The book is called Slave to Love.
“Oh, yeah,” says Pam. “She looks like she’s having a great time. Is he trying to dislocate her shoulders?”
“You didn’t let me finish!” says Cindy. “This girl? Her name is Vienna? She gets rescued from the harem by this guy, Rafe, before anything bad happens to her at the harem. And then Rafe falls in love with her. I’m just at the part where he asks her to marry him.”
“Sweet,” says Pam. “And?”
“What I’m trying to say is that guys used to be gentlemen, didn’t they? Some of them, anyway.”
“Cindy,” I say, “I don’t think that those romance novels are historically accurate.”
Pam bites the tip off a fry. “Plus, they’re rotting your brain.”
“Uh-oh,” says Cindy, lowering her voice to a hiss. “Don’t look now, Audrey, but here comes your little friend. And your other little friend.”
I look up and see Ash stomping toward the table, Joelle right behind her. Joelle has a pleading look on her face, like, Please, don’t blame me, I couldn’t stop her, you know how she gets. I do know how Ash gets, but I don’t know how she got this way this time. It’s been two and a half weeks since our fight. I broke down and called her right after it happened, but she was furious and wouldn’t budge. You screwed up, she told me, you need to admit it. I got mad all over again, hung up the phone, buried my face in Stevie’s fur. My mom wanted to know why I needed a ride to school all the time, and I made something up about before-school play rehearsals. To keep my mind off the whole thing, I studied even harder. When I aced my latest essay test (Pride and Prejudice, 101 percent) Mr. Lambright pulled me aside and told me that whatever I was doing, it was working. Ron the Valedictorian folded his own test (98 percent) and gave me a dirty look.