“Do you know if these are accurate?” I asked her.
She nodded again. “I’m pretty sure. Especially if you do all ten of them.”
I swallowed as I watched the dollar amount soaring, and I dug out my credit card.
“It will be all right,” she told me, and now I nodded back at her.
“I know,” I agreed. “I’m sure these will all be negative.”
“Well, no matter what, things will work out in the end.”
“Thanks,” I said, and picked up my bag.
“Miss?” she called, when I was halfway to the door.
I turned back, waiting for more kind words of wisdom.
“You have a pair of underwear stuck to the back of your coat,” she told me.
“Oh.” I swept my arm behind myself and located the panties hanging from my collar. That was where they had gone! “Thanks,” I said to the cashier. I hurried out to the car with my tests, and still suffering from the chafing, I drove off as fast as I could. I had to get back to work, but first, I had to do something about this underwear problem.
A couple of hours later, I sat on the lid of the toilet in my house with ten plastic test sticks lined up along the rim of the tub. Oh, Jesus and Mary.
“Camdyn! Camdyn, I have to go,” a voice called from outside the bathroom.
I just stared at the little windows on the test sticks. There were plus signs; double pink lines; double blue lines; double black lines; two dots; a smiley face; a big Y; and the topper, the one that just announced it: PREGNANT.
“Oh, no,” I breathed out. The little lines and symbols on the tests seemed to get bigger and pulse. Y, PREGNANT, they mocked me. The smiley face winked.
“Camdyn! Are you ever coming out of there?” My roommate Morgan pounded on the door again.
“Give me a minute.”
“What?”
My voice had been too weak for him to hear it. “Just a minute!” I said a little louder. I swept the sticks into the garbage can then covered them with a layer of toilet paper so that my roommates wouldn’t see. There, it was like they were gone. They had never existed…
But wait a minute. I stared at the trash. Maybe they were false positives! I had drunk at least a gallon of water before doing this, and maybe I had overworked these tests. Maybe they needed to rest some—to recharge, like a phone. Then the notifications in the little windows would change over to only one line, one dot, or the magic words: NOT PREGNANT. In the mental state I currently occupied, this seemed to make sense to me. I grabbed the toilet paper, wrapped up the tests, and shoved them in the back pocket of my jeans, which was now over my butt where it belonged.
“Finally,” Morgan gasped, and pushed past me when I opened the door. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? I could have gotten kidney damage!” He was already whipping it out, so I turned my head and went into my bedroom. I spread out the toilet paper from the garbage can and lined up the test strips on my dresser. I lay down on my bed, covering my eyes with my arm, and I tried to think, to be sane and logical. But even though it was only six o’clock, I fell asleep instead.
I woke up the next morning, 12 hours later, and my eyes lit right on those damn plastic sticks balanced on top of my sock drawer. That meant that my first word of the day was not a pretty one, but sometime in the night, my mind must have come to terms with the fact that those results were not going to change from positive to negative. All the pluses, lines, and other symbols of the truth were still there, and I was past the point of trying to deny them. So, yeah, I was…I sat up and swung my feet onto the floor, groaning. Holy shit, I was pregnant. It was real.
But I wasn’t one to run from a fight, not ever. I tossed out the tests, done with them. It was time to move on. I threw up and then got dressed, because I had a lot to get done before I went to work. Like finding the guy who’d had a hand in this—or more accurately, a sperm. We had some things to go over.
“Camdyn, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s January third,” my roommate Kaya told me when I came into the kitchen. This was her house, and Morgan and I owed her rent.
“Yes,” I said. I was breathing through my teeth because her bacon smelled so bad, so incredibly noxious, I wanted to open a window and heave it outside. “I’m going to give you the money on Friday.”
She looked up at me and sighed. “Cam…”
“I know! I know, and I swear, I’ll have it for you. Things last month got tighter than I expected, with the holidays.” Money was going to keep being tight, with a baby…my vision got a little grey around the edges and I grabbed the counter until it cleared.
Kaya didn’t notice, and she didn’t look appeased as she finished the last strip of bacon from her breakfast, crunching it loudly. The unfortunate smell still lingered in the air. “Ok, it’s fine if you get it to me Friday, but this is the last month that I’m going to be able to give you a grace period.” She looked at me. “You were never late with your rent before November.”
Some things had happened in the fall, but I hadn’t mentioned them to Kaya, and I wasn’t going to now, either. “I’m sorry, and I’ll get it to you,” I promised her. “For sure.”
“Ok,” she said again. She got up and brushed some crumbs from her hockey jersey. “I gotta go, I have a game later. If Morgan drags his lazy ass
