Jinny fished in her pocket and tossed me the keys to the Tahoe. “You’re welcome to wait in the car.”
I looked around at my hive. “What are we doing here? Since when is this us?”
Jinny took a breath, eyes blazing. “We’re here because killing innocent babies is sin. And this is us.”
Zee backed Jinny up. “You don’t have to believe the Bible to know killing is wrong.”
“It’s about choice. A personal choice. You don’t get to decide for other people. You can’t see that, Zee?”
Jinny goes, “So if I get annoyed with you and borrow my mom’s pistol to shoot you in the head, it’s a choice?”
“Not the same thing.”
“Murder is murder, Rory.” She squatted down and opened the green garbage bag. I nearly puked when I saw what was inside. A dozen or so foam rubber fetuses, fake blood–covered and real-looking. Like they could have been used on a movie set. Fucking disturbing.
Jinny grabbed one by the teeny tiny hand and hurled it in the direction of the women being marched into the courthouse. The thing hit the young girl on the side of the head.
Then Zee dipped her hand into the bag and threw the fetal abomination as hard as she could, missing all three women because Zee has no aim.
I grabbed the heavy green garbage bag before Jinny could take another of those horrible things and started marching back to the Tahoe.
Fee followed me. Rather than head for the car, we sat down in a grassy area near the parking lot, under the shade of a eucalyptus. “Fee,” I said. “This is messed.”
“I know.”
“At the very least, she should have told us she was bringing us here.”
“True.”
“Did you see Zee? What was that?”
“I know. Gross. It’s just…”
“Just…?”
“Well, they have a right to their opinions, right?”
Fee? I mean, I know she was rattled by what we’d just seen, but why was she not offended? “So it’s okay to scream at those poor women and throw shit at their heads?”
“Not saying that. Just…I just want us all to get along.”
When the protest ended, Jinny and Zara and Delaney came bounding up to find us under the tree, all chatty and friendsy like it was all no big thing. “We’re twenty minutes from the field,” Dee said. “We gotta fly.”
In the car, Zee asked Jinny where she got the foam rubber fetuses because they looked so dead real, and Jinny said her dad imports them wholesale from China because they’re made of some substance that’s banned in America.
I couldn’t help myself. “So on top of how formally shitty that was, now those toxic things will just sit in a landfill polluting the earth? Ugh, you guys.”
“Oh my gosh. Here goes Planet Girl,” Zee said. Gosh. She stopped saying God—taking His name in vain—when she noticed it made Jinny Hutsall cringe.
“I’m not Planet Girl.” I couldn’t let it go. “It’s just, come on. Little kids make those foam thingies in sweatshops in China? So basically you exploit children as you protest to save children?”
“You worry about the Chinese people and their job benefits and I’ll worry about American children who’re being murdered by their own mothers,” Jinny said.
“Women are still going to have abortions. You get that, right? No matter the law. No matter you Crusaders. So they gotta go to Mexico? I mean, knitting needles in the basement like in our freaking grandmothers’ time? I’m glad there’s a Pink Market. I’m glad there’s an underground network with actual doctors and surgical instruments. Thank God.” I said that last part pretty emphatically.
“So you obviously won’t be coming with us to the next protest, right, Rory?” Jinny said. “The week after AVB there’s a really big one in Palm Springs. We can all stay the weekend at our desert place. And I know I’m going to sound like a brat, but my dad said he’d get UberCopter for us so we don’t have to sit in traffic.”
I closed my eyes because I felt sick from the driving, and the demonstration, and Fee’s attitude that this wasn’t worth rocking the boat over, and also because I couldn’t stand to see how excited my friends got about going to Jinny’s place in the desert. I definitely wouldn’t be joining them, but I also knew that if Fee went, I’d die.
Brooky won all of her events at the track meet except for long jump, where she took second. We celebrated her victories and took tons of pics,