Girls on the Verge

by Sharon Biggs Waller

“Oh, Camille!” Bea drops the bag and the half-eaten cookie and throws her arms around me. I lean against her and cry, relieved that I’ve finally told someone, and that someone is my best friend. I clutch at her like she’s a life raft and I’ve been drifting at sea for days.

  “Don’t worry, Camille. I won’t let anything awful happen to you, you know that.” She reaches for her purse, pulls out a tissue. She dabs at the tears on my face. “So you’re pregnant. You aren’t the first girl to get pregnant on accident. You shouldn’t have had sex, but you did. I promise you, I’ll be there for you every step of the way, okay?”

  The knot in my chest unties itself for the first time in days. I had nothing to be afraid of after all. I should have known she wouldn’t judge me. I feel awful to have thought that. It will be okay. Bea will drive me to the clinic, hold my hand while I have the abortion, and then take me home after. She’ll be there with Oreos and Cokes, and we’ll watch dumb reality shows together. And then we’ll go back to the way things were.

  “I’ll go to every appointment with you,” she says. “I’ll be your birthing coach, like you see on TV. I’ll tell you to breathe and hold your hand and all that stuff. We’ll figure it out together.”

  I haven’t heard her right. “Bea … wait. I’m not having the baby.”

  Bea looks like I slapped her. “What do you mean, you’re not having the baby?”

  “I want to study theater like Annabelle. I don’t want to be a mother at seventeen. I would sooner die. I have an appointment next week.”

  “To do what?”

  “You know. Come on. Don’t make me say it, Bea.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know!”

  Bea is shaking her head. “You can’t. You can’t kill your baby.”

  “Stop saying baby! It’s not a baby, and it never will be. I gave up Willow for this. I’ll never know Léo. So that tells you everything, okay?”

  Bea won’t stop shaking her head.

  Mateo pulls up in the parking lot, rolls the window down, and calls out to us. “Hey, ladies. Your chariot awaits.”

  Bea whispers, “I don’t … I … Do your parents know?”

  “No. And I’m not going to tell them. I don’t want anyone to know. Please don’t tell.” I reach out, but she shrugs me away and stands up.

  “I won’t. I won’t tell.” She goes over to Mateo and stops in front of his car. Her arms are crossed and her shoulders are hunched forward. She’s crying.

  I’m frozen solid, stuck to the bench like it’s a theater seat and I’m in the audience waiting for the next scene to unfold.

  The door opens, and Mateo steps out of the car. He ducks down to make eye contact with her and brushes her tears away with his thumbs like an actor in a Nicholas Sparks movie. She says something, and he looks my way. I can’t see his expression, but he doesn’t wave me over. He talks to Bea. He hugs her. She shakes her head. He puts his arm around her, comforting her, and helps her in the car.

  I stand up. I start toward the car, and then I stop. No one is looking at me. I wait, like a dog that’s been left behind, unable to understand that she’s been abandoned. I sit down again and watch the car, hoping Bea will get out and come back. I picture her running toward me with her arms outstretched, wanting to help, wanting to comfort me.

  But she doesn’t, and the car pulls away.

  SIX

  JUNE 30

  I leave the souvenir shop and go out into the lobby of the restaurant and sit on a bench with other waiting diners.

  A few minutes later, Bea comes out of the shop. She leans against the wall by the bench.

  Annabelle comes in and tosses her cup into the trash. She gives us each a look. “Uh, what did I miss?”

  “Nothing,” Bea and I say at the same time.

  Finally, the hostess calls our name. We follow her to a booth, and she drops three menus on the table.

  Annabelle picks up a coffee mug. “Oh my god, hurry up, people. I need fuel here, stat.” She waves the cup in the air, looking around the room for a waitress.

  “You just had coffee, like, two seconds ago,” Bea says. “You must like it a lot.”

  Annabelle sighs and looks lovingly at her coffee cup. “So much.”

  “Did you drink tea in England?”

  “I tried to, but it didn’t take. I went straight back to my first love.” Annabelle points at a woman all alone, dressed in denim shorteralls and a plaid shirt. She looks like she could out-bench-press most of the guys in the restaurant. “See her over there? What do you think her story is?”

  Bea looks. “Oh, that’s Marge. She drives a truck.”

  Annabelle nods. “Like a boss.” She gestures with her head. “That dude at the counter with the clip-on tie and short sleeves.”

  “You mean Fred?”

  “Fred’s your man if you’re looking to buy…,” I say.

  “Baby dolls,” Annabelle says, perfectly deadpan.

  Bea and I look at each other and burst out laughing. She reaches out to take my hand, but I pull it away.

  A waitress comes by and fills Annabelle’s coffee cup. She looks at my mug, still upside down on its frilled paper doily.

  “Can I have a Sprite, please?” I ask.

  “Sure, honey,” she says. “Girls, our special today is waffles with bacon and a side of home fries.”

  “I’ll have that,” I say.

  “Same,” Annabelle says.

  “Make it three,” Bea says.

  The waitress picks up our menus, taps them square on the table. She winks at us and goes off.

  Bea sighs happily and sits back in her seat. “I love her.”

  “The only person I let call me honey are Waffle Factory waitresses,” Annabelle says. “Especially if they are named Flo.”

  “Or Alice,” I chime in. “Alice can even call me sweetie.”

  “Betty can call me toots, but only if I’m ordering pie,” Annabelle says.

  “And only if she has a pencil behind her ear and those really comfortable white shoes,” Bea says.

  Annabelle smiles. “Gotta love those sensible white shoes.”

  I realize that I have no idea what story Bea told her parents to be able to come on this road trip. “Bea, where do your mom and dad think you are?”

  “I told them I was going to look at some colleges with the two of you. So if we could maybe, like, drive by a college, I’ll feel better about lying to them.”

  My best friend never lies, especially to her parents. But she did so to be with me. I’m not sure what to do with that.

  “What about you?” Bea asks me.

  “Oh, uh, they think I’m at Willow.”

  A quiet falls over the table.

  A van pulls into a parking space by the window, and two adults and six kids get out.

  Annabelle nods toward the family. “See that family?”

  “The Funkweiler family?” Bea asks.

  “Those guys are hard-core Christians.”

  “Nah, they are in one of those German accordion bands—” Bea says.

  “No, I mean, seriously. They are as Christian as you can get. You can tell from the way they’re dressed—those awful calf-length denim skirts and sneakers. The girls always have French braids and the boys always have crew cuts.” She dumps two cups of creamers into her coffee and three packs of sugar. “It’s their jam.”

  Bea’s smile fades. She falls quiet.

  “The lady at the crisis center dressed like that,” I say.

  Bea shoots a look at me. “What’s a crisis center? When did you go to a crisis center?”

  I don’t answer her.

  “Crisis centers are Christian organizations that trick women into thinking the clinic is a real clinic, but in reality they are sham clinics that pressure women out of having abortions and treat them like shit to boot,” Annabelle says. “They lecture them on the Bible and spout all kinds of bullshit about pregnancy and birth control. It’s a trap, it’s m
eant to be a trap, and Camille fell into it.”

  SEVEN

  JUNE 23

  There are no other patients in the waiting room when I come in. It doesn’t look like a medical office at all, which takes away some of my nerves. It’s painted a soft pink and carpeted with a green rug, and a group of tall houseplants in yellow ceramic pots sits in one corner. A woman with a pixie haircut is behind the check-in counter. She looks like a lady from Bea’s church, Ruth … something.

  Please don’t let it be Ruth.

  She looks up from her computer and smiles when she sees me.

  “You must be Camille,” she says. “I’m Jean. We spoke on the phone. How are you doing, darlin’? Feeling any better?”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. “I’m okay.”

  “I was so worried about you,” Jean says. “My Bible study group has been praying for you.”

  What she says doesn’t bother me because so many people in Texas are religious. But it seems strange to me that someone like her would want to work in a family planning clinic.

  “How come there aren’t any protestors here?” I say. “I was worried about that.”

  “Oh, they don’t bother us,” Jean says. She hands over a clipboard and asks me to fill in the information. I sit in one of the chairs. It asks the usual medical information, but I hesitate over the personal stuff like my address and emergency contact number.

  “Excuse me, Jean? How confidential is this form?”

  “No one will know but us, hon.”

  At the end of the form is a question: What do you expect from this visit? I write in: I would like to schedule an abortion.

  I hand it to Jean and sit down. I take my cell phone out to check my messages and Jean pipes up: “Darlin’, it’s clinic policy to turn your cell phone off. It interferes with our equipment.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I switch off my phone. A little TV across from me comes on and a video starts. A fetus floating in a uterus flashes on the screen. “Life is a miracle,” a man narrates.

  I stand up and pretend to be interested in the plants. They’re fake.

  A woman comes from the back dressed in pink scrubs. She’s holding my folder. “Hi, Camille,” she says. “I’m Lisa. You want to come with me?”

  I follow Lisa in her pink scrubs down the hallway.

  “How’s the weather out there?”

  “Um, it’s hot,” I say.

  She pauses by a scale and I set my purse down, take off my shoes, and stand on it. I’m ten pounds heavier than the last time I weighed myself. I flush with embarrassment, but Lisa doesn’t say anything. She makes a note in my file and leads me down a short hallway and into a darkened room. “Undress from the waist down and then sit on the table.” She hands me a sheet. “Cover up with this. I’ll be right back.”

  I take off my shorts and underwear. I hesitate over my socks. I don’t think it would matter if I left them on, but she said everything from the waist down, so I take my socks off, too.

  The tile floor is freezing, and my feet are cold by the time I sit down. The paper on the table rustles underneath me. I spread the sheet over my knees and tuck it around my waist.

  Lisa comes back into the room and sits on a rolling stool. She takes out a long plastic rod and rolls what looks like a condom on it. “You can lie down now. This won’t take but a minute.”

  “I … What is that?” I say.

  “It’s an ultrasound probe, hon. It’s the best way to confirm the age of your baby,” she says. “It has to go in your vagina, okay?”

  My heart starts to pound. “Do we have to do this?”

  She doesn’t hear me. “Put your feet in the stirrups there and lie back.”

  I do as she says. I lie back and set my feet carefully in the little metal hooks at the bottom of the table. They’ve covered them with baby socks—one pink, one blue.

  Stirrups used to mean horses and trail rides and friends. Now stirrups mean ultrasounds and god-awful-looking probes.

  “I’m gonna hand it to you, and you put it in. Just like putting in a tampon, okay?”

  I take it, embarrassed beyond words. I slide it in. It’s cold and gooey.

  She takes the handle from me and moves the probe back and forth; I can feel it swiping around. I stare up at the ceiling. There’s a sign up there that says JESUS LOVES YOU. The ultrasound machine is making this loud humming noise, and when Lisa moves, her stool squeaks. There’s a pineapple-shaped wax melter on the table next to me, and the fake tropical fumes wafting out of it are the kind that give me an instant headache. I turn my head away from it and try to hold my breath.

  Lisa swipes the probe around some more. She’s taking forever, and I hope this means she doesn’t see anything. I hope the pregnancy test is wrong. Maybe it will be okay. I cross my fingers and then uncross them. Stupid.

  “I love this job,” Lisa says. “It’s like opening a present at Christmas, seeing the baby for the first time. It’s such a miracle.”

  I wish she wouldn’t call it a baby.

  She taps something onto the keyboard on the machine. “There!” she says. “There’s your baby.”

  My heart sinks. It’s true, and there’s no running away from it now.

  She turns the screen toward me. “Here she is. Or he. We can’t tell the sex just yet. You’ll know that in a few weeks. Unless you want it to be a surprise when you deliver. Are you hoping for a girl or a boy?”

  I stare up at the ceiling. I won’t look. I don’t want to see it.

  “Look at that teeny little miniature baby.”

  I shrug.

  “You don’t want to see your baby?” she says in disbelief.

  I shake my head.

  “You have to look,” Lisa says with warning. “It’s Texas law. If you don’t look, then you have to pay for the exam, and it’s four hundred dollars.”

  I look. The picture on the screen is black and white. In the middle is a round blank space with a white shape, which Lisa points to. She smiles.

  “This is your baby here. You can see she has little arms and legs, and her heart fluttering, that means it’s beating. Isn’t that exciting?”

  I stare at the ceiling again. “Not really,” I say.

  “A heartbeat, it’s a love beat, we say in the clinic. Just like that cheesy old seventies song.”

  “When can I schedule it?”

  “Schedule what, hon?” she replies.

  “The procedure.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine at all. I don’t know whose it is.

  Lisa says nothing.

  “And I’ve never heard of that song,” I whisper.

  Lisa prints out a copy of the ultrasound and puts it in my folder, but her friendliness is gone. I pull out the probe and hand it to her. She does whatever she has to do with it to make it ready for the next person, hands me a washcloth, and leaves.

  I sit up and wipe myself off.

  I get dressed. There’s a butt-shaped wrinkle in the paper on the table where I was sitting. I tear it off, bunch it into a ball, and cram it into the trash can.

  No one comes back in, so I pick up my purse and go out in the hall. I stand there. After a few minutes, Lisa appears and gestures for me to follow her into an office. She leaves the folder on the desk, steps back into the hall, and closes the door behind her without saying a word to me.

  I hear whispers in the hallway. I make out Lisa saying something about me being determined to have an abortion. There’s a rustling of paper and then footsteps walking away.

  I didn’t do a good enough job cleaning the ultrasound goo off, and I can feel my underwear sticking to it. I cross my arms over my chest. It’s cold in the office. What’s taking so long? I’m the only one in the clinic. I’m going to be late for work, and Iggy will yell at me.

  A silver digital picture frame sits on the corner of the desk. I watch as a photo of a couple and two elementary-school-age boys dissolves into a photo of the family standing in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Disneyland castle.


  I reach for my phone for something to do, but I remember I’m not supposed to turn it on. There is a stack of pink and blue pamphlets on a table next to me, so I pick one up. The information inside is about all the side effects of an abortion, things like breast cancer, suicide, and hysterectomy from a punctured uterus. I put the pamphlet down.

  Finally, a woman comes in—it’s the lady from the pictures. The rims of her flesh-colored peds are visible inside her black patent leather flats. Her chin-length soccer mom bob is hair-sprayed perfectly in place.

  “Hello, Camille.” She sits down at the desk. “I’m Susan Clark, your pregnancy counselor.”

  “Hi.”

  “So we know you’re pregnant, that’s definitely positive from the ultrasound.” She speaks carefully, trying to meet my eyes, but I won’t look at her.

  “Do you want to tell me how this happened? Sometimes it’s very comforting to tell someone.”

  “I…” I glance at Susan. “Do I have to?”

  “It’s important,” she says. “It gives us a picture of who you are and how we can help you. What you tell me stays here in my office. This is a safe place.”

  I clear my throat. “Um … well, I was dating this guy, and we hooked up. We used a condom, but I don’t know what happened to it.”

  “Unfortunately, condoms don’t work very well. Condoms fail at least fifty percent of the time, so I’m not surprised it broke.” She pulls my folder toward her. “Most birth control does fail, including birth control pills. The only one hundred percent way of being sure you’ll never get pregnant is to wait to have sex until you’re ready to have a baby, right?” She nods, her eyebrows raised, as though I’ve done something really wrong. “You know the mistake you made, right?” Again, the raised eyebrows and the nod.

  “I don’t think that’s right about condoms,” I say quietly. I try to think back to tenth grade when we had sex ed, but no one talked about contraception.

  She stares at me.

  I feel stupid, but more than that, I feel shamed.

  “Now you know. And now you can do better going forward from here, right?” Susan finishes all her questions with the word right. Like I agree with her completely.

  Susan opens my folder and goes through the information. She’s taking forever. I shift in my chair.