Page 53 of The Long Way Home

“Magnolia—” she started, but my sister interrupted her, that beautiful little brat.

“What’s in the bag?” fourteen-year-old Bridget said with a pointed nose.

“Condoms!” I yelled and then darted up the stairs.

“Magnolia!” Marsaili growled after me. “She’s fourteen!”

“Yeah! Don’t worry! No one’s going to want to have sex with her anyway!” I yelled back, semi proud of myself for not allowing my present circumstances to inhibit my ability for a zingy one-liner.

I rushed back into the safety of my room and locked the door behind me.

About seven months earlier, Marsaili took the lock off my door because she thought BJ and I were having sex (we were) but my Mum went out and got a lock and put it on herself, so she claims, saying that I deserved privacy if I wanted it. Part of that story was most certainly embellished, but I didn’t question it because I was just pleased to have a lock back.

I gulped a tonne of water and then systematically peed on all twelve tests.

Every single one of them came back as positive.

As those two pink lines appeared on my last test, I dropped my head in my hands, took a deep breath and dug my nails into my hands. I still have a little crescent scar on my palm now from where a nail broke my skin. BJ used to trace it with his finger whenever he could.

I’ve always liked that scar, actually.

It would be strange to have no marks left on me after all that. I don’t have many other ways of knowing that any of what happened was real.

I needed a blood test, I knew that.

Even though twelve at-home tests was fairly damning, I wasn’t ready to be damned all the way without a doctor telling me I was.

I scooped all the evidence into a turquoise Moschino handbag I never used anymore, grabbed my coat again, and skittered back down the stairs.

“Staying at BJ’s tonight!” I yelled to anyone that was listening and ran out the door to my car.

A street away, I threw the bag into the bin (sorry Jeremy) and drove myself straight over to St. Thomas’s. It was late by then. About 11pm? Later, maybe?

I marched straight over to the front desk and smiled curtly at the woman behind the counter.

She looked about forty-five, very skinny, quite mousey.

“I need to see a doctor.”

“Okay,” she said, smiling at me. “Why?”

“It’s confidential,” I told her and she peeked up at me curiously.

“If you tell me why you need to see a doctor I can prioritise you faster,” she told me, possibly trying to be helpful, but it wasn’t too long before this that the papers had began to garner a bit of an interest in BJ and I.

Imagine that — following around fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds and selling their photos.

Someone from school filmed me taking something at a party a few months before this. They told everyone it was Molly but it was valium. I get nervous sometimes.

Mum said she’d rather everyone think it was MDMA, so they didn’t correct the rumours, and I didn’t really care either way.

I hadn’t experienced negative attention before. This was my first dalliance with it and it was a doozy. It made me look at the world differently and it made me trust people less.

“I can’t tell you why,” I said.

The mousey woman glanced over at her coworker who wasn’t paying attention to us.

“I can tell you though, this wing—” I pointed down the corridor to my left, “—is named for Linus Parks. My name is Magnolia Parks. Someday soon my grandparents are going to die and they’ll leave me millions. And I’ll have to give some away as a tax offset. My father likes St. Thomas’s because he was born here, but I like Great Ormond Street because of Peter Pan,” I told the woman without blinking. “And I will remember this.”