“I need to ask you some questions before we take your blood,” she tells me.
“Questions?” My voice quakes.
“These are standard questions we ask everyone. It’s mandatory counseling before the test.”
I bite my lip. “OK.”
She looks down at the paper. “Are you currently sexually active?”
I nod.
She makes a mark. “Do you currently have more than one sexual partner?”
“No.”
“In your sexual history, have you had more than five partners?”
“Um, yeah.”
“More than ten?”
I bite my lip again. “Yes.”
She doesn’t look at me, just marks her paper.
“In your sexual history, was there ever a time when you had more than one sexual partner in the span of a month?”
I take a breath, let it out slowly. “Yes.”
“Are you currently using birth control?”
“The Pill,” I say.
“Good.” She writes that. “What about condoms?”
I shake my head. What must she be thinking of me?
“In your sexual history, did you consistently use condoms?”
I shake my head again.
She makes a few more marks. “OK,” she says. “I need to advise you to use condoms every time you engage in intercourse. It’s the only effective way to protect yourself from disease.”
“I know that,” I say. I want to tell her I’m not stupid. I know everything there is to know about protecting myself. I’m well aware of how HIV and STDs are transmitted. But I also know my behavior defies my knowledge.
“Listen,” she says, perhaps hearing my defensiveness. “You’re not the only one who comes through these doors and tells me about multiple partners without condoms.”
I smile slightly. “I’m not?”
“God, no.” She smiles too. “It’s frustrating, though. I mean, if you know to use condoms, why don’t you?”
She stares at me. She’s not being condescending. This is an honest question. There are many more like me, and she wants to understand. I shake my head. “I’m not sure,” I say.
After, another woman draws my blood and tells me to set an appointment for fourteen days from then— fourteen long days—to get my results. Driving home, I think about the first woman’s question, wishing I had said more. I do know why I haven’t used condoms when I should have. In the moment, when I’m busy trying to make some guy mine, thoughts about death or disease are furthest from my mind. I’m too caught up in desperation, in filling what I can never seem to fill. It’s a terrible realization that I’m willing to risk my life to get to that place.
I visit Leif in those fourteen days, trying to keep my mind off it. He brushes me off, tells me my anxiety is irrational. But he doesn’t know the truth about my past, those two random guys in Taos, all those nameless guys before them. When the day comes, I’m a wreck. I didn’t sleep much the night before. Then I drank too much coffee to compensate. I stand in the waiting room, too jumpy to sit. I feel like I might throw up. That same woman, the one with all the questions, comes to get me, and as we walk down the hallway I try to interpret the look on her face. Is she about to tell me I’m going to die?
She opens the door to the same stark room and sets a folder in front of her as she sits. I’m going to throw up right here, in this tiny white room.
“Your test was negative,” she says.
“Oh, my God!” I say, relief flooding me. Then, “You really shouldn’t act so stoic on the way in here. You might send someone into cardiac arrest.”
She smiles. “I’ll work on that.”
“So I can go?”
“Just use condoms,” she says. “OK?”
I smile. I think about telling her what I came to in the car, the answer to her question last time. But I just want to get out of here now. Out of this ridiculously small room and back into the world.
“I will,” I say.
And then I do what everyone must do in this situation. I tell myself I will do things differently from now on. If Leif and I should split, I’ll use condoms. I’m nobody’s fool.
In August, I drive to Vermont for my monthlong writing work - shop, and all the anxiety I avoided by not doing something like this, all my fear about leaving the world of boys, fills me. I’m not nervous about my writing or being somewhere new. I’m nervous about being away from Leif. Out of his sight, I’m afraid I don’t matter. I hate admitting it. I still experience myself like I did in high school. Without a man loving me, I feel like I don’t exist. He has promised to visit me for the third weekend, and I’ve already begun to count down the days. The Vermont campus is beautiful. Purple and yellow irises cluster near huge, heavy oaks. Maple trees wave leaves as big as my hand. Mountains hover in the distance. After I settle into my single room, I go for a run, a new activity I have taken up under Deirdre’s advice. I run along gravel roads, thick greenery on either side. The sky is a piercing blue, the air hot. When I return I feel enlivened, sharp. I can do this, I think.
That first evening I meet the other workshop participants at a welcome dinner. There are only a few of us who are young, so we gravitate toward one another. One girl, Kelly, slinks toward me and whispers, “Where are all the hot men?”
I laugh. “All the hot men are painters and musicians. Writers aren’t hot.”
She smiles. “Speak for yourself.”
Kelly is a few years older than me, though she seems even older. She scans the room, her eyes dark. She wears red lipstick that extends just beyond the lines of her lips, and she holds her lips in a well-rehearsed pout. Maybe she doesn’t realize how obvious this is, how it looks like she’s trying too hard. I don’t know her at all, but I feel both sad and scared for her, seeing those lips. Before the dinner is through, two older men approach her. She opens her body toward them, and when they speak she lowers her head and widens her eyes. Another practiced move. I squirm inside, aware I have my own moves: big smile, wide eyes, cocked head. Days, I work on my first short story. It is about a girl who is struck mute in an accident. In my critique, the teacher tells me the character remains undeveloped. Her muteness doesn’t go anywhere. It stays static, which makes the whole story incomplete. I work on it some more.
In between I go running, allowing the fresh, flowery air to clear my head.
I think about Leif. Only seven days to go. I call him twice from the pay phone in the dormitory lobby. The first time he’s not home, and I leave a message with his mother. The second time, he sounds groggy, like he just woke up. We talk briefly about the workshop and his gigs, and then he has to go.
“I miss you so much,” I tell him.
“I miss you, too.”
I want to make him promise, but I hold myself back.
“I’ll see you in just five days.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re still coming, right?”
“I just said I was.”
“OK,” I say, not wanting to let him go.
“Right. I’ll see you then.”
And he hangs up.
I find Kelly and a few others lying on a blanket in the grass, and I join them. They’re discussing the writing life, submissions and rejections, magazines with which they’ve placed work.
“What about you?” one of the girls asks. “Do you send your stuff out?”
