I convinced some Mormon dudes to buy Tina and me beer. We got drunk with them in our hotel room.
Speech was the one thing I had been holding on to . . . and I felt like it let go of me. So I let go, too. I began to spiral.
I was fifteen when I got high and drunk and had sex with a guy who was eighteen, at least, and also high on ’shrooms. He was such an asshole.
The room was pitch-black. It was his room. I told him to put a condom on, please. He said okay. He walked over to his nightstand. He opened the drawer and then closed it. He paused, putting it on. Then he had sex with me.
A few weeks later I started throwing up in the mornings, and not because I was hungover. Fuck!
At the same time, I was playing the pregnant Virgin Mary in the school play. No joke. At rehearsals I had to wear a fake pregnancy belly over my actual pregnant belly. Talk about too real.
“Um, Laura, your portrayal of Mary is a bit more . . . anxious than necessary, perhaps?”
“Well, Mary didn’t ask for this baby, Mrs. Heiteen!”
I wondered if God had lied to Mary about putting a condom on.
I asked the guy who got me pregnant for three hundred dollars, half the cost of an abortion. I thought it was only fair that he paid for half of it. Even though there was nothing really fair about this at all.
The kicker is that he made me meet him at a White Castle restaurant bathroom and pee on a pregnancy test in front of him to make sure I wasn’t lying. He thought I was trying to get “abortion money” from him. He said that like it was a thing.
Since when is “abortion money” a thing? It’s NOT a thing. If a guy thinks there is a pattern of girls scamming him out of “abortion money,” then he really needs to reevaluate his actions. Like, damn!
He took a look at the two lines on my pee stick, handed me the money, and left. No words. I never talked to him again.
I added it to my own three hundred dollars and headed to Planned Parenthood with my friend Nicole. Nicole was another outcast with Jack and me. She was really smart, openly bisexual, very punk. I knew she wouldn’t judge me . . . and that she would be able to handle the protesters.
There were rows of them outside the clinic. Pro-life women yelling at me.
“You know your baby has fingers, right? It has a heartbeat!”
“How could you kill your own child? How could you be so selfish?”
I looked down as I passed them. Nicole stopped.
“Nicole. Come on.”
“Well, her baby’s actually, like, super gay, so you guys would probably want to abort that one, huh?”
That was the only thing that got me to smile that day.
I didn’t tell my parents, even though I was really close to my mom. I was too scared.
A week or so later, she found prescription painkillers in my room.
She asked me gently, “Did you get breast implants?”
I stared at her, confused. Then looked down. Oh. My boobs had gotten way bigger from all the pregnancy hormones. I thought up a lie.
I stuttered, “No . . . no I didn’t but . . . my friend Dani got an abortion and didn’t want her parents to find out, so I told her she could do it in my name.” The best lies have a grain of truth in them, right?
And yet, I know, not my finest work. Why would I have my friend’s pills? It’s idiotic. My mom just kind of looked at me sadly and nodded. Years later she asked if it was actually me who got the abortion. I finally told her the truth. She began to cry, and said, “I just wish I could have been there for you through that. I would have supported you. You didn’t have to lie.”
I wished I hadn’t.
* * *
A year later, when I was sixteen, some good news came. There was a new TV show holding auditions around the country. It was going to be like American Idol, but for acting! Contestants had to prepare a monologue and audition in front of the judges.
This was going to be my big break, the thing that launched my career! I mean, it worked for Kelly Clarkson and a bunch of other people whose names I don’t remember