She chose me and I'm not leaving her now. Maybe I have a little bit of stubbornness in me too.
I learned that from her.
“I'm gonna go sit with her,” I say.
“Okay. Good. Good. Yeah.”
I give his hand a quick, subtle squeeze, and then pick up my tray and go over to her table. She doesn't look up until I've plunked my tray across from hers.
“Hi,” I say.
She smiles at me with watery eyes as I sit down. “Hey, firefly.”
“I'm gonna take you on Saturday, okay?” I say.
“Okay.”
24
I tell my mother I have a tutoring session with Lucas and she lets me borrow the car. Friday night, I sneak out and pack the backseat with some blankets and pillows and a box of granola bars and some bottles of water. Nobody knows what I'm doing, not even Theo, though he'd have to be pretty stupid not to have some idea, given that ever since I talked to Josey at lunch neither of us has voiced any concern about her doing this alone. She told him he didn't want her involved and he's listening, and I just want to knock their heads together or hold them up at each other and make them kiss like they're my little Lego people at one of my little Lego weddings.
Which is so backwards, because I've never intentionally seen them kiss out of anything but the corner of my eye in my entire life.
I pick Josey up at 9 AM; she scheduled the first appointment of the day, of course. She has a thermos full of coffee and she offers it to me when she gets in the front seat, and I almost say something about how you're not supposed to drink coffee when you're pregnant—not to be snarky or anything, just because that's the first thing that comes into my head. I really hope the day comes when I won't look at her and immediately think pregnant pregnant pregnant. That would definitely require that this not be the last time we really spend time together.
And if the past few months have proved anything it's that I really can't predict what's going to happen in my life. At least that's not as traumatizing a realization for me as it has been for her. Probably still would have been better off to be Theo, who I don't think has ever had any delusions of being able to see where anything is going.
“Do you think Theo will be okay?” I ask her as I start driving, following the directions to the clinic that I pulled up earlier on my phone.
She doesn't ask what I mean, thankfully, since I don't really know anyway. “I think so,” she says. “He's got his little brother, he worships that kid. Any hint that he's letting him down and he snaps into place.”
“Well, hopefully Louis will want him to have a good education and a steady career.”
“Sure, that's what all six-year-olds want,” she says, and sips from her thermos.
We pull up to the women's health clinic parking lot and she walks ahead of me inside. It isn't until the doors jingle when we walk in that I realize I'd been imagining some sketchy Dirty Dancing-style set-up, with rusty knives and doctors with no last names, but it looks like any other doctor's office I've ever seen. I zoom in on the one girl who's crying, but everyone else is mild and fine, filling out paperwork, reading magazines, talking in low voices to whomever they came with. Boyfriends, a lot of them, looks like. Some of them mothers. I know logically that they're not all here for abortions—women have other health needs, Taylor—but I'm completely assuming all of them are anyway.
Josey gives her name to the woman at the front desk—she had to come in a few weeks ago for blood tests and everything, so they know her—and she nods and tells her to sign in with just her first name. She gives her intake paperwork, but as soon as we sit down Josey looks very tired, so I fill it out for her. It's just easy stuff: birthday, medical history, home address. I know all of it. I meant to put myself in as her emergency contact, but I realize halfway through the phone number that I'm writing Theo's instead.
“It's okay,” she says, softly, so I finish writing it.
“Sign here,” I tell her.
They call her name in about ten minutes, and she follows the nurse down the hallway like she's been here a hundred times and I trail behind again, continuing to feel completely useless, or worse, like I'm the one being shown around. Between me doing the paperwork and Josey taking charge, everyone who's seen us probably assumes I'm the patient and she's the caretaker, which is sort of Josey's problem in a nutshell.
I need to step up, here.
The nurse beckons Josey over to the exam table and gives her a gown to change into. “And you want her to stay?” she says.
Josey nods.
“Okay! The doctor will be in to see you in just a minute.”
“Thank you,” Josey says.
She takes her clothes off unceremoniously and I help her tie the gown around her back. She gets up on the exam table and I cover her up with the paper sheet in
