Girls on the Verge

by Sharon Biggs Waller

  “I can’t do this, Annabelle,” I whisper. “I’m sure he won’t let us have it. Let’s just go.”

  “If that old dude can get Viagra, I’m sure we can get the Cytotec.”

  I shake my head and back toward the door.

  “We’ve come this far! We can’t back out now. Look, I’ll go up and ask,” she says. “Hang out there and don’t worry.” She points to a rack selling Mexican candies. She picks up a bottle of aspirin and gets in line.

  I stand by the racks and stare at the unfamiliar candy, the little pucks of De La Rosa Mazapan, the plastic bags of Pica Fresa and Bubbaloo. Two little boys in blue jeans and T-shirts push each other for their chance to turn the rack. They grab packs and shake and squeeze each one before shoving it back into its slot and grabbing another. I remember doing that when I was a kid, spending my birthday money on candy, walking up and down the grocery store aisle while my mother shopped, weighing the merits of Starbursts versus Nerds and Kit Kats versus Twix, like it was the most important decision I had to make. And maybe it was.

  The memory of that, the cheerful packs of candy on the rack, the hopefulness of the boys sends a wave of sadness through me that feels like the worst homesickness I’ve ever felt. I’m going to cry. I’m going to burst into tears, and everyone is going to turn and stare at the hysterical American throwing a fit in the pharmacy.

  I step away from the rack and wait by the door, wanting to be anywhere but here.

  Annabelle’s turn comes. I try not to stare at her in case the pharmacist notices me freaking out and gets suspicious. My palms start to sweat. This is worse than the time I had stage fright during a production of The Winter’s Tale so bad that Mr. Knight had to physically push me onto the stage.

  Annabelle asks the pharmacist for the Cytotec.

  He pulls a box off the shelf, and Annabelle hands over the money. The pharmacist slips the box and the bottles into a paper bag and moves on to the next customer.

  We hurry out of the shop, and Annabelle exhales and hands me the bag. Her hands are shaking, too. We step into a little alley between the pharmacy and a market called Oxxo.

  I take out the box and slide out one of the packs. Each pill is packaged in its own little compartment. I should be happy that I finally have the pills. I’m terrified.

  “How many do you start with again?”

  “Four.” I try to take the pills out of the packet, but my hands are trembling too hard to get the foil off the back.

  “Here.” Annabelle takes the pack, pops out four, and dumps them in my palm. I put each one under my tongue. They taste so bitter, I have to resist the urge to spit them out.

  “How long do we wait?” she asks.

  I’m too scared to open my mouth to speak in case the pills come out from under my tongue, so I hold my fingers up in a three and a zero.

  Annabelle shoves the box in her tote bag and sets the timer on her phone for thirty minutes. And we wait, standing in the alley, leaning against a chipped adobe wall, not speaking.

  Thirty minutes feels like forever when you’re standing in a hot alley with abortion pills under your tongue. Annabelle must feel the same way because she keeps looking at the timer. My mouth is dry, and the pills don’t seem to be dissolving like they should.

  Two police officers come up the alley from the other direction, automatic weapons slung over their shoulders.

  “Shit,” Annabelle whispers.

  I suck in my breath. The policemen look menacing with those guns. I imagine them pointing them at us. I imagine them searching us, finding the pills, and hauling us off to jail.

  “They’ve seen us,” she mumbles. “Smile when they come up. Acting skills at the ready.”

  My heart speeds up. I nearly swallow the pills from fear.

  The policemen pass us. They don’t look at us. They are laughing at something, acting normal, like normal people.

  I let out my breath, and Annabelle closes her eyes.

  Annabelle’s phone alarm goes off. I spit what’s left of the pills out in my hand, like the instructions say. But they don’t look much different from when I put them in.

  “Should I put these back in for a little while longer?” I ask.

  Annabelle studies the pills in my hand. “Maybe the medicine is on the outside, like in a thin coating?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to put them back in again?” She sets the alarm. “Let’s do another fifteen minutes.”

  “These are so gross,” I say. I put them back in my mouth and I wait. Fifteen minutes later, I spit them out in my hand. They’ve dissolved into tiny chips.

  Annabelle empties the aspirin bottle into a nearby trash can and pops each Cytotec pill out of the pack and drops them into the aspirin bottle. She rubs the bottle against the building to make it look old, like I’ve been carrying it in my purse forever. I’m impressed that she knew to do that.

  I hide the bottle inside my makeup bag between my blush and mascara. We buy a sombrero and a piñata at a booth, head to the crossing. As we step over the line, taking us back to the United States, my phone dings with a message from Bea.

  I hope you’re okay. I wish I would have come now. Love you …

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Don’t touch that remote,” Bea says. I’ve just finished taking a shower at the dingy motel back in Alamo. “You don’t know what’s come across it. I watched this thing on Danger Land where they took swabs of hotel remotes, and you wouldn’t believe what they found. And I took the bedspreads off because they never wash them.”

  “Duly noted,” I say, lying down. “Where’s Annabelle?” She hasn’t said a word to Bea since we’ve been back. I think she’s still mad at her for ditching us at the border. I hate being in the middle like this, but I’m not going to try to fix it, either; that’s up to Annabelle and Bea.

  “Picking up dinner.”

  The beds are hard and the pillows flat. I stack two under my head and take out my phone. I need to text my mom, but I don’t know what to tell her. I put it down, and then I pick it up again.

  Hey, just checking in, I type. Having fun, learning lots. Willow is amazing.

  Mom immediately responds. Great. You have a good time. Daddy and I miss you. I don’t know about Chris, though! I think he’s already hoping to have your room for some sort of virtual reality video thing when you go off to college.

  Annabelle comes in holding a pizza box in one hand and a bag with salads in it in the other.

  That’s a big surprise. Gotta go! Dinner’s here.

  Enjoy. Love you, honey.

  We sit around the little table and pass around the salad. “It sucks that I can’t tell my mom,” I say.

  “It’s hard to talk to parents about stuff like this,” Annabelle says.

  “I tell my mom everything,” Bea says.

  “Yeah, well, that’s because you’ve never done anything like this,” I point out. “I mean, what have you ever done to make your parents mad? I can’t think of anything.”

  Bea takes a bite of her pizza and chews. “How about that time I signed up for twenty angels off the church Christmas tree? I didn’t think it would be that expensive to buy toys for twenty kids, but it was. My mom had to pay for them.”

  Annabelle stares at Bea, her slice of pizza halfway to her mouth. “Seriously? That’s the worst thing you’ve done? You volunteered to buy too many Christmas presents for children in need?”

  “Yeah,” Bea says, raising her eyebrows. “It was bad. My mom was really mad about it.”

  Annabelle puts her pizza down and wipes the grease off her fingers. “Wow,” she says. “Just … wow.”

  Bea shrugs. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d been there.”

  “What about you, Annabelle?” I ask.

  She leans her elbow on the table and cups her chin in her hand. “Well, let’s see. My parents weren’t too happy with me being a Planned Parenthood clinic volunteer. My dad wouldn’t talk to me for days after I told him.
He’s a huge Republican, just loves, loves Rick Perry. Isn’t all that fond of President Obama, that’s for sure. Plus he hates how open people are about sex now. He says Planned Parenthood encourages people to have sex. Or relations, as he calls it.”

  “My parents would kill me if I even thought about having relations,” Bea says. “We don’t talk about that kind of stuff at my house. I don’t think I’ve ever even said the V-word at home.”

  “The V-word?” Annabelle directs a long look at Bea.

  “You know.”

  “Do you mean vagina?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  I press my mouth shut hard so I don’t burst out laughing.

  “You can’t say it, can you?” Annabelle continues.

  “Yes, I can!” Bea says. She picks up another slice of pizza and crams it in her mouth.

  “So, say it.”

  Bea takes forever to chew and swallow. “Um … vagina,” she whispers.

  Annabelle puts her hand behind her ear. “What?”

  “Vagina!” Bea raises her voice. “There, I said it. I told you I could.”

  Annabelle picks up her slice again. “In England they made us yell all sorts of swear words onstage, one by one. It’s supposed to break through our inhibitions, they told us. We had to read them off a list. Really filthy words, too. Did you know fanny means vagina in England?”

  “I’m not sure I could say vagina onstage. Definitely not the C-word,” I say. “It seems too, I don’t know … embarrassing.”

  “That’s the point,” Annabelle says. “To break through all of that. Besides, people should be able to call a vagina a vagina, for fuck’s sake. Why be embarrassed about it? I mean, did you get pregnant through an immaculate conception?” she asks, teasing.

  “No.”

  “You can have sex with boys, so you should be able to talk about your vagina.”

  “Well, then, that lets me off the hook because I won’t have sex until I get married,” Bea says.

  “She made a vow of purity in her church,” I say.

  “Really?” Annabelle asks.

  “Show her your ring, Bea.”

  Bea wiggles her ring off her finger and hands it to Annabelle.

  Annabelle holds the ring between her thumb and forefinger. “I will wait for my beloved,” she says, reading the inscription on the front of the ring. “Did your parents make you do this or did the church?”

  “No one made me. The church won’t let us take the vow if it isn’t our choice. We have to come to the idea on our own, but our parents present the rings.”

  “Her church had a father-daughter purity ball,” I say. “Bea wore this beautiful white ball gown, and her dad wore a tuxedo.”

  “Our dads were our dates,” Bea says. “There was a big cake and everything.”

  “Gotta love cake.” Annabelle hands her the ring back. “Is your boyfriend religious, too?”

  “Mateo? No. His parents are Catholic, but he’s not interested, so they don’t force him to go or anything. I think he goes to Mass on Christmas, but that’s about it.” She holds her hand up, studying the ring like she’s seeing it for the first time. “Sometimes I worry he’ll get tired of waiting and go off with someone else. Sometimes I think he’s frustrated, like I’m letting him down if I don’t do it.”

  “If he pressures you into sex, he’s not worth having,” Annabelle says.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Bea says. “But still. Did you feel pressured, Annabelle?”

  “No,” she says. “Not at all.”

  “Didn’t you go out with Kai Nguyen?” I ask. “He was Romeo and you were Juliet, right?” No one could forget those two. They smoldered on the stage so hard, and they were always getting caught making out in the wings before they went on. Mr. Knight had to tell them to knock it off.

  “Yep. We lost our virginity on Juliet’s balcony.” She waits for our reaction, a huge grin on her face.

  “Juliet’s balcony?” I laugh. “How? It was barely big enough for you, much less two of you!”

  “We did it standing up, but it wasn’t easy. And in the middle of it, part of the scenery came off and we almost fell.”

  “Oh! I remember that!” Bea says. “Everyone blamed the theater ghost, but it was you?”

  “Yep, me and Kai, doing it on the balcony. Losing our virginity.” She reaches for another slice. “Man…,” she says between bites. “I haven’t thought about that guy in a long time. He was really nice.”

  We sit there quietly, each of us maybe thinking about nice boys and carefree hookups.

  TWENTY-THREE

  An hour after we eat, I take the second round of pills. I wait thirty minutes and spit the pills out. This time, they’ve dissolved better.

  We all climb into bed, Annabelle in her own and Bea next to me. Three hours later, I take the final four pills. I sit on the bathroom floor with the tablets under my tongue. After thirty minutes, I spit them out. And then I wait. I stare at the shower curtain. It’s torn on one side and it hangs from the pole. It reminds me of the torn roof lining in Dean’s truck.

  I wait.

  I pull my knees up and lean my forehead against them. I concentrate hard on my stomach, feeling for the cramps to come, even the slightest twinge.

  I check the website again. The abortion is supposed to start within four to six hours after the first dose, sometimes even an hour after. But it can take twelve to fourteen hours after the first dose, so maybe I’m in that group. I’m afraid I’ll start bleeding, so I put a bunch of towels under me and lean back against the tub. I think about waking up Bea and Annabelle, but they need to sleep, especially Annabelle.

  I put my hands over my stomach. Go away. Please, go away.

  The minutes turn into hours, and I feel nothing. My body is exhausted, but my mind is racing, so sleep is not an option. Not a single cramp, not nausea, not chills or fever. I don’t need the bottle of ibuprofen. The box of maxi pads remains unopened on the bathroom counter. At five in the morning I get up, put on my pajama pants, and go into the bedroom.

  “Guys?” I say kind of loudly.

  “Everything okay?” Annabelle asks, her voice croaky with sleep.

  Bea sits bolt upright.

  “Nothing happened.”

  Annabelle sits up and pushes the blankets away. “What?”

  I grab the aspirin bottle off the nightstand and throw it into the trash. “It’s only eighty percent effective, and I must be that twenty percent of ineffective. Of course it wouldn’t work. Because why would it?”

  Annabelle gets out of bed. “Okay, don’t panic. So, we wait a while longer—”

  Bea runs into the bathroom and comes out with a glass of water. She holds it out to me.

  I take the water and sink onto my bed. “It should have happened already. It’s not going to work.”

  “Maybe we should try again,” Annabelle says. “Maybe we should get a different brand?”

  “I can’t! There’s a whole thing I have to do. I have to wait for three days before I can try it again. I don’t have enough time to wait. I’m already eleven weeks pregnant now, and I can’t take the pills after twelve weeks. Meanwhile I’m getting more and more pregnant, and I can’t take it anymore!”

  “Jesus, Camille, I’m so sorry,” Annabelle says. She holds out a tissue, but I don’t take it.

  “This whole thing has been a waste of time and money and effort. I missed Willow. I probably can’t go back to the Globe ever again. I want to throw this glass against the mirror and watch it crack into a million pieces and not give a crap how many years of bad luck I’ll get from it.”

  “Don’t do that,” Bea says. She takes the water glass from my hand. “Of course you can go back to the Globe again. Mr. Knight will be glad for you to come back.”

  “No way. I can’t show my face there again. I’m the girl who gave up Willow because she was too scared to go. Every single actor at the Globe wants to go to Willow, it’s like winning the lottery, and I threw it away. Who do
es that?” I’m totally babbling but I don’t care. It’s all piling on me again, that avalanche of shame and despair that no one can help me fix. “What are my parents going to think about me when they hear the entire story? God, it will be the worst thing ever.” I double over and clutch my stomach. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”

  Annabelle bites her lip. She doesn’t say anything else, and that scares me. Annabelle always has an answer for everything, but she doesn’t have a plan for this.

  “Maybe you aren’t pregnant anymore,” Bea says. “I’ve heard of women whose pregnancy disappeared.”

  “Another podcast?” Annabelle asks.

  “No, a TV show.”

  “Like that would happen to me.” I clench my hands so hard, I can feel my nails biting into my palms.

  They win—the crisis center people, the judge, the guardian ad litem, the protesters, even that Christian family in the Waffle Factory. They’ve all won, and I’ve lost. I imagine how happy they would be if they knew it, their realization that their prayers worked, their judgment worked. Think you can have sex? Well, think again.

  It feels like a knife in my heart.

  “First thing we have to do is see if you’re still pregnant. Maybe Bea is right.” Annabelle moves into action. She grabs her clothes from the bottom of her bed and starts to get dressed. “Bea, stay here with Camille. I’m going to buy a pregnancy test.” Annabelle leaves.

  “Maybe it’s time to tell your parents.” Bea sits on the bed and puts her hand on my back, rubbing in little circles.

  Tears gather into my eyes and spill onto my cheeks at the thought of it. I don’t bother to wipe them away. I don’t have the strength to lift my arms. To pick up my phone. To call my parents.

  * * *

  When Annabelle returns, I do the pee-on-the-end thing, and Annabelle takes it out of my hand, not caring that my pee is still dripping off it. She watches it for the three full minutes before throwing it in the trash. Her face tells me everything.

  I feel hope drain out of me. There’s nothing left in me. This is what giving up feels like. An empty feeling, like you could cross a street in the middle of traffic and not care if a bus hits you.