No One Could Know

Following is an excerpt from my book, “No One Could Know.”

“I know you’re pregnant. I just know it.”

I didn’t believe him—how could I be? After some small talk, we hung up the phone and I somehow found sleep.

Lunch time again. This day was powerfully different than the one before. My caring friend drove me to the treatment center, and I was comforted that she knew the woman working there. I told the tall slender expert what had happened and she asked some very personal questions I did not want to answer.

She asked, “When was your last period?”
“Oh, everything’s fine … it’s been around two weeks since my last cycle—I’m only here to get on the pill,” I countered.
The hesitation and drop in her tone brought alarm to all my senses, and I listened intently as she explained the facts of life. I had not paid attention in biology class! All I remember, besides the art of dissecting frogs and their accompanying stench, was being jealous of how pretty Georgia Droycovich was.
Teenage pregnancy would never happen to me, right?

The clinician urged me to come back in several days because a pregnancy test during the initial visit could not be accurate so soon after conception. I did return for the test, still confident that everything was going to be fine and I could get the birth control I needed the next time I was there. We left and I tried to put it all out of my mind.

A few days or so later, I stood staring at the pay phone on the pole in The Quad at the center of our school. I had to muster up the guts to make that call to the clinic and find out what the future held in store for me. Would life go on like normal, or was I going to hang up the dull-gray, hard-plastic phone with very cold and very hard facts?

The woman on the other end spoke with a clinical tone; she sounded like one of those automated telemarketing calls, but, oh, I heard her loud and clear. She said frankly, “The test came back positive. You are pregnant.”

I looked down at my burgundy A-line skirt with the thick black elastic waistband and thought about how much I liked the fabric’s sheen and my coordinating black Bolero jacket with oversized buttons. I especially liked my black leather Mary Jane pump shoes and the way they looked with my printed pantyhose, kind of tap-dance style—kind of old Hollywood. My hair was in a chic up-do with a few wisps left down to frame my face. I felt “put together” in the ensemble—and I felt very, very, very old. I felt like I was thirty-seven. Where did my ‘sweet sixteen and never been kissed’ fantasy go? What had I done?

I asked the all-knowing Oz on the other end of the phone what my next move was, and she told me that I had to wait six weeks from conception before I could have an abortion.

She paused and asked, “What do you want to do?”

I wanted to run away. I wanted to go back to kickball when things were sure and the hardest things I had to process were multiplication tables and figure out how to do them backward and call it division. I wanted to “Make the World Go Away.”

For the first time, I took a surveyor’s look at my school and saw nothing but concrete, brick, and metal that boxed me in. Everyone else who had been rushing past me that December day was going on with their lives. The Quad cleared. Winter’s sting attached itself to the news in my ears and bound my mind, my heart and my body. I stood alone in the silent sterile courtyard … I was learning something dramatically different than I’d ever imagined there at my school that day.

“I’ll get back with you,” I told her, and hung up the phone as the final bell rang, reminding me I had another class.

Tick, tock.

What was I going to do? I could move to another state and live with my dad, stepmom, and other siblings; but I didn’t want to move away from my mom, stepdad, and younger brother. I had been “the new girl” at this school and it wasn’t so bad, but if I moved to a new place as “the pregnant new girl,” I was sure to be an outcast. I imagined a cold and clammy village in seventeenth century Boston with overgrown vegetation and a big scarlet letter on my chest. I might as well have shown up at school in a red suit with horns and a tail, carrying a pitch fork.

I speculated how challenging it might be to hide a baby under my clothes without drawing suspicion: I had a small waist, so surely a basketball bulge could be hidden. Maybe I could trade my A-line skirts with thick belts for outfits with empire waistlines—and no one would know.

No one could know.