Page 30 of Badd Ass
“For realsies, I’m happy for you, pumpkin.”
I blinked at her. “Pumpkin?”
Claire laughed. “I’m experimenting with cute terms of endearment. I want to find one to use semi-ironically with this guy I’m maybe sort of not really but kind of almost seeing.”
“Yeah, don’t call me pumpkin. That’s weird.”
“Honeybuckets?”
“Uh, no.”
She tapped her chin. “Diddly-dinkums?”
I threw another sugar packet at her. “You need to be stopped.” I dipped my fingers in the glass of melting ice water and flicked it at her, repeatedly chanting, “The power of Christ compels you.”
She put her hands in front of her face, shrieking. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop!” When I stopped, she threw the sugar packets back at me. “And besides, you don’t say ‘the power of Christ compels you’ for an exorcism.”
“How would you know?”
She frowned at me. “Um, because I grew up Catholic? As in, I went to a private Catholic academy from pre-K through high school, attended mass every week, and was in the church choir?”
I sat in stunned silence. “Shut the hell up.” I pointed at her. “Yet another thing I didn’t know about you. What other secrets are you keeping from me?”
“It wasn’t a secret, it just never came up. Once I graduated high school, I stopped going.”
“Wow. So…what else hasn’t come up that I should know about my best friend?”
She paused, obviously thinking about how to reply to my question. “Um…I got my wisdom teeth out? I had an appendectomy my junior year because my appendix exploded and I almost died?” She looked at me in the eyes and then threw out one more, casually. “I had a D-and-C when I was twenty.”
I gasped in shock at the last one “A D-and-C? Like the thing they do after a miscarriage?”
She nodded. “Yep. I got pregnant and had a miscarriage. On my twentieth birthday, actually.”
“Damn, Claire. You’ve never talked about this before.” I sat in stunned silence for a long time. “Like, how did I not even know you grew up Catholic, much less that you had a fucking D-and-C?”
She shrugged. “I just don’t talk about myself, that’s all.”
“Understandable,” I said, although I was surprised she had not shared this, given our close friendship. “I just…I feel like I don’t even know you, in a way.”
“You’re still my best friend, Mara, that’ll never change. She sighed. “But yeah, the miscarriage itself was brutal. I hadn’t even really had time to process that I was pregnant, and then it was over. It was messy, too. Like in the movies where it looks like a Quentin Tarantino movie happened between the girl’s legs? That’s not an exaggeration.” She stirred her coffee again. “I, um, don’t talk about it because of the other effects the whole thing had on my life…and not just because of the emotional trauma of the miscarriage itself.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“My dad disowned me. My mom is super traditional and she refuses to openly disobey Dad, so the only way I can see Mom or my sisters is if they sneak out while Dad is working.”
“Damn, honey.”
She nodded. “Yeah, it sucks. Six years have passed, and I still have to be all sneaky and secretive if I want to see them.”
“He hasn’t relented?”
She shook her head. “Nope, and he never will. He forced the rest of them to have new family photos taken so I wouldn’t be in them.”
“Because you had a miscarriage?”
“Because I got pregnant out of wedlock.”
“That’s archaic.”