acute angle pointing down and circle the upper two angles. “Here and here,” I say, tapping the right and left sides with my pencil. “So you end up with scar tissue forming—”
“At the juncture where the Fallopian tubes enter,” Ruby Jo interrupts from the window. “It’s basically a barrier method. But a permanent one.”
Lissa is still all business. “Side effects?”
I blow out a massive puff of air. “Cancer. Ectopic pregnancy. Uterine damage. Central nervous system fuckups. Burning in your vagina. The stuff was banned after a few test subjects suffered uterine perforations and went into septic shock.” The thought makes me shiver. “Not a nice way to die.”
“Reversible?” Lissa says. She’s gone a shade paler now.
“Not without invasive surgery.” I tap the left and right edges again. “And you’d have to undo the scarring on both sides because you can’t predict which ovary is going to produce the egg that ends up fertilized. But yeah, it’s technically reversible. So is messing around with gene drives, I guess, but that’s newer research.” I explain, as simply as I can, the technology behind altering trait transmission from parent to offspring through genetic engineering. I don’t add that there’s plenty of room for screwing it up, especially when I remember Alex’s paperwork noted the insertion method as “TBD.” It might as well have said “No fucking clue yet.”
By the time I’m done walking Lissa and Ruby Jo through selective gene propagation and DNA tampering, through the manipulation of genetic patterns that can be passed down from one generation to the next, it’s four o’clock.
Time to go see Alex. Time to find out what I have to trade for a ticket out of State School 46.
“You have to find a way, Elena,” Lissa says. “I’d do it myself”—she looks down at the flat front of her uniform—“but something tells me you’ve got better odds. I’ll stay here and write up something for you to take with you.”
When I leave, she’s at the table drafting notes, her mouth moving and vocalizing as she works through our talk.
FIFTY-NINE
I reach Alex’s apartment door feeling more like Mata Hari than a demoted biology teacher in her early forties. Ruby Jo straightened out my hair, unleashing it from a ponytail holder and arranging waves of blond over my shoulders, fixing them so they lay in long curls above my breasts. One look in the mirror and all I could see were those horrible Q tails waiting to trap some unsuspecting failure and whisk it into state school hell.
I’m hoping the curls and the breasts and the makeup will be enough.
A girl in my fourth-grade class was the first person to tell me about sex. She had a big sister who had filled her in on everything.
“And the boy gets all hard and then he sticks it in you,” she said, as we nestled into sleeping bags in her parents’ den. I went wide-eyed at this revelation. “And then he shoots this stuff out and it’s all over. No big deal. Except you don’t want to get pregnant.”
To me, it sounded like an enormous deal. It sounded disgusting and terrifying at the same time. “Has your sister done it?” I said, not really wanting to know, but this seemed like the grown-up thing to ask, something she would like.
“Not yet. But two of her friends almost did. They’re fifteen.”
That night I lay in my sleeping bag, unable to stop thinking about this new, unexplored territory called sex. My friend told me where they put it, and I let my hands find that place, careful to not rustle the sheets in case she woke up and caught me. Certain things, like teaching yourself about sex for the first time, are better done without interruptions.
None of what I discovered that night sounded appealing, let alone possible. Years later, when Joe and I went at it in the backseat of his Mustang, I discovered it was possible, and more than appealing, if I was with the right man. But the idea of Alex’s hands and mouth on me, the thought of him pushing into my body, takes me back to that age of sexual latency and fills me with dread.