Page 7

After walking six blocks to the pharmacy I’m informed that there’s a two hour wait. Since I don’t have a smart phone, unlike the rest of even the most destitute New Yorkers, I pick up an eight-month old magazine to pass the time. The celebrity gossip is as new to me as it would have been when this thing first came out. The time creeps by slowly. It feels like a lot longer than two hours before I’m finally called to the cubicle. I sit down nervously, my stomach pitching like I’m on a boat. The nurse practitioner looks at me with bored eyes and taps her pencil against the desk.

“What are your symptoms?” she asks.

“I think I have heat stroke or something. The last few weeks, I’m dizzy and nauseous all the time. Headaches. It’s not debilitating or anything, but I’ve thrown up a few times.” I scrunch up my face, trying to remember. “And thirsty. Oh my God, I’m thirsty. All the tiem.”

The nurse twirls the pencil around in her fingers. “When was the date of your last period?”

“What? Oh, I don’t… I don’t know. Last month I guess? The month before? Honestly, I’ve had a lot going on, and they’ve never been that regular. I guess I haven’t been keeping track. But why would that matter if I have heat stroke?”

The nurse gets up for her chair with a weary sigh and disappears down one of the aisles of the pharmacy. She comes back a moment later holding a box, and she hands it to me without a word. It’s a pregnancy test. I look at it nervously.

“I don’t need this! There’s no way...” I bite my lip. It was only one time.

“Have you had sexual intercourse recently?”

I feel my shoulders inadvertently slump. “Well. Yes. But…”

“Did you use protection of any kind? Are you on birth control?”

My mind starts spinning. I find that I suddenly incapable of understanding words. Where am I? What is protection? Birth control? Shit. She sees what must be an expression of pure panic on my face and softens a little.

“Honey, just take this and go in the bathroom. Bring it back out to me when you’re done. When we know the results, we’ll go from there.”

I take the box from her with a shaking hand and wobble my way to the bathroom at the back of the pharmacy. There’s a dick drawn on the wall, and I stare at it while I take the test. I keep staring at the wall for a long time after that. I’m not even sure how long I’m in there. Without looking, I shove the little cap back on the pregnancy test stick and hide it inside the box. When I finally get up and exit, the door to the bathroom slams a little too loud. The nurse looks up at me. It looks like she’s been drawing doodles on an old prescription pad, but I can’t be sure. She gestures to me, and I walk towards her. It feels like a mile instead of a few feet — that’s how unsteady my feet are. The queasy feeling in my stomach could be from anxiety. But it could be from pregnancy. I could look at the test, but I don’t. If I don’t look, maybe it won’t be real. Instead, I put the box down in front of the nurse, who sighs heavily.

She takes the box from me and points back at the chair.

“Have a seat. It will only be a couple more minutes. We should wait

the full three minutes to be sure.”

I don’t hear anything but the second hand ticking away on her watch. Time is moving in slow motion, and the bottomless swamp of chaos that is my life only seems to be getting deeper and more overwhelming with each passing second. Finally, I hear her tapping the desk with her pencil, trying to draw my attention back to the present.

“Honey, the test is positive. You’re going to need to make an appointment with an OB in the next day or so to confirm with bloodwork, but given your symptoms and what you’ve told me, I think it’s pretty likely you’re pregnant.”

I’ve had sex one time and one time only, and my luck, I get pregnant. Fuck. I should have known. I should have thought. All I wanted in that moment was him. And here I am.

Pregnant.

Pregnant.

The word is the last thing ringing in my ears before the spinning in my head becomes too much.

When did I eat? Was it this morning? Last night?

Bile rises in my throat, mixing with the cold, metallic taste of fear. I close my eyes to steady myself, but it doesn’t work.

My vision turns to black, and I pass out, collapsing onto the scratchy pharmacy carpet.

Pierce

Location: Classified, 2015

The rotor blade on The Nightstalker helicopter escorting us to our destination is humming quietly above, and I’m trying like hell to focus on the mission at hand. We were given almost no details before leaving our installation in Mina Salman, Bahrain. We were only told to prepare for a covert reconnaissance mission with limited human interaction. We were also outfitted with our underwater demolition equipment and given a dossier on hydrographic reconnaissance under an unnamed arms manufacturing facility. All of this adds up to mean we’re about to get into some crazy shit.

I am secretly grateful that Force Master Chief Wallace, my dad’s buddy from his days at Cornell, made it his personal mission at BUD/S to kick my ass.

I hadn’t been in Coronado for more than six hours when Wallace cornered me in the mess hall and told me he was going to break me like a horse. I fought him like the bastard I was, but by the time we got to Hell Week, half way through Phase One of physical conditioning, he could have saddled me up and ridden me like a pony. I tried to quit on at least seven different occasions. I was pretty fucking close to giving up when, after four hours of sleep, we were forced to lay on our backs in freezing cold water until it felt like we were going to die of hypothermia. But Wallace told me if I could survive Phase 1, I could survive anything. I kept that in my mind, pressing forward, keeping on. I was changing. I needed to change. For my dad. My mom. For Arie. Wallace said it was time for me to stop being a selfish loser. To prove I was more than the sum of my privileged parts, and commit to a greater whole.