reassure herself, sometimes because she was bored, sometimes because she thought it seemed adult. Cleo thought maybe she bought them in bulk.
If Cleo ever breathed a word that maybe she was worried, Violet would offer her a test and encourage her to take it. “Don’t you just want to know?” she’d always ask. Cleo always refused. To take a test would be too final—you might get the answer you were dreading. If you didn’t take it, there was always the hope that things were still okay. And so Cleo preferred to lie in her bed at night and pray and imagine that she would get her period the next day. It had always worked.
AFTER SHE LEFT HEALTH SERVICES, Cleo walked for a while. She left the campus, because she couldn’t look at all of the students, just walking around with their stupid backpacks, thinking that they had real problems because they had a paper due or a test to take, when really none of it mattered at all.
She walked into town, and then around the neighborhoods, winding in and around streets, hoping to get lost. Just then, she missed Monica so much that it was a little bit like a stabbing pain in her stomach. She wanted so badly to find her, to be able to tell her what had happened, to cry hysterically on her bed, while Monica rubbed her back and said, “What are we going to do?”
And the strangest thing about it was that she missed Monica so much in that moment that it seemed to override everything else. Cleo didn’t want to tell Max. It was embarrassing or shameful or something. What if he got mad or broke up with her or thought she’d done it on purpose? Even if he wasn’t that kind of person, you had no idea how someone was going to act when he was in a situation like this.
Cleo ached to be able to tell Monica, but she knew she couldn’t. The day she packed up her stuff, she knocked on Monica’s bedroom door. “I’m sorry about this,” she said. “I don’t want things to be weird between us.” This of course didn’t mean much, since things had been weird between them for a while now.
Monica had shrugged. “It’s pretty shitty, but I guess I understand.”
She’d felt awful then, leaving her best friend who wasn’t well. What kind of a person was she? To give up on a friend when she hit a rough patch. Well, she was paying for it now. She had no one. No friend to talk to, no safe place to go. And so she walked up and down the streets, hoping that maybe she’d wake up and it would be one of those dreams that you talked about for days, saying, “It was so real, you wouldn’t believe it.”
CLEO WENT BACK TO THE APARTMENT, and took a cigarette out of the pack that Max had left on the table. Max was a drunk-smoker, as he put it, buying packs when he was out at night, and then letting them sit untouched until the next time he was out drinking. Cleo had never really liked smoking all that much. Usually, if she got drunk enough to smoke a couple of cigarettes, she threw up the next morning.
She opened the window and leaned over the back of the couch. The lighter was running out of fluid and she had to click it a few times before she finally got it to light the cigarette. She inhaled and coughed, then inhaled again.
Of course, she wasn’t supposed to smoke. But she wasn’t supposed to drink either and she reasoned that drinking was worse. Maybe the cigarette would jostle the pregnancy, cause a miscarriage. She could smoke this baby out. But that was stupid. If that was the case, anyone would just smoke a cigarette when they were pregnant and no one would ever have to get an abortion.
Was that what she was going to do? She couldn’t imagine it. But imagining a baby, a creature that was going to grow inside of her and then come out of her, was even harder. She was so screwed.
When Cleo got nervous, she balled up her hands into fists and played piano exercises from memory. It probably made her look strange, if anyone noticed the way her fingers pulsed, how her mouth sometimes counted. She explained it to Max once, and he’d said it was something you’d think an autistic kid would do.
She