Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,30

fingertips were pressed into her temples, and I could see her nails, the French polish on them chipping slightly, and her roots, a few shades darker than the blond of the rest of her hair. Logic was never going to save us, but I started talking anyway.

“If I took summer classes, I could graduate in August. Before the baby. I have good grades, I could get an OK job.”

Not a spy. You couldn’t spy with a baby. It would cry and blow your cover.

Laura looked the other way.

“I’ve done this before,” she said.

“This?” I asked.

“The waiting-room thing. With my older sister, when we were in high school. Twice. She wasn’t one of those people who got emotional about it, she just needed me for the ride home.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

“The doctors were sweeter to her than I was,” Laura said. “I was sitting there waiting for her, and I kept thinking everyone in that room knew someone who knew someone who knew me, and they were all thinking it would be me next, and I’d show them, it never would be.”

“It’s not you,” I said. I looked down at my scuffed red and black Pumas. I thought about kicking her, for reminding me where we came from, for reminding me that I used to think of her as one of us.

“Isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’s me. You might as well not even be here.”

“Then why’d you ask me?”

“Why’d you come?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do with a baby?”

“Love it,” she said. Her voice sounded like it was about to break. Love it. Like it was that simple. Like loving something ever paid anyone’s rent. I tugged so hard on the strand of hair I’d been twirling that it snapped off. Love it, I thought. Let it be mine. I took a breath.

“I’d need money, though.”

I ran through the numbers again. I thought of my baby like a doll, like one in a row of dozens and dozens of fancy toy dolls, all with price tags announcing that I couldn’t have them. The money was such an obvious problem that I didn’t even get to thinking about any of the others most of the time. It seemed wrong to me, that money should be the difference between a baby and not-a-baby. I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and Laura had things inside of her that she couldn’t afford not to sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies had betrayed them. Any way you looked at it, where there should have been a child, there was a math problem.

“At Financial Aid they’d probably cover my tuition for the summer,” I said. “But I’d need the security for an apartment, and something to live on till I could get a job. Plus money for doctors and stuff. Once I graduate I can’t get school insurance anymore.”

Laura turned and looked at me, and it was not exactly friendship on her face. More like resignation.

“I just got paid,” she said softly. “Take it.”

I didn’t care right then why she was doing it: guilt, or anger, or privilege. I didn’t care if she needed it or not. I didn’t even have the pride to reject the first offer and make her insist. It wasn’t that I’d planned it that way, and I don’t know when I knew what I was doing but all of a sudden it was done and I wasn’t about to feel guilty.

“All right,” I said. “If you can afford that.”

She pulled out her checkbook, like it was nothing. I thought of telling her to stop, watched her loopy cursive fill the space of the check. I wondered what I’d say to Rafael, what I’d do when the money ran out, what Laura and I would say to each other for the last few months of what was suddenly my last semester of college. I thought of telling her to stop, but like I was afraid of undoing the knot of cells growing into something alive inside of me, I was afraid of undoing what was happening.

When she handed me the check, I folded it into my wallet and didn’t say a word. I didn’t think I deserved it, not really, nor did I think she owed me. I thought the universe was a whole series of unfulfilled transactions,