Fall 2019

there. When I looked down, I noticed our hands are splattered with them. A cramp twisted my insides. Val must have seen the visible discomfort on my face, because she rose and reached into the medicine cabinet, taking out a bottle of ibuprofen and placing it in front of me.

“Are you afraid he would have wanted to keep it?” Val asked. I shook my head. Jason had joked for months about how, god forbid, he’d ever end up with a kid while in college. I had agreed, because the idea of having to care for something else, when I could barely care for myself was idiotic. I still ate cup of noodles at one a.m because Val and I would forget to get groceries. There were days when I’d miss class because I was behind on a group project or my period cramps were “too distracting”. Everytime we had sex, Jason insisted we use a condom because the idea of having a kid seemed idiotic to us. Seemed like a funny joke.

“You know he’s going to worry about you, if you don’t text him back. He cares about you enough to notice you weren’t in a class he doesn’t even go to. He texted me, and I’m going to be honest, I’ve never given him my number.”

“He asked me for your number once,” I whispered, “In case of emergencies.”

Val snorted and fell back into the stool, placing her hand on my leg.

“Talk to him, please.” she whispered. My eyes remained on her hand, but my mind wandered back to the incessant pain in my abdomen.

“Okay.”

The bleeding stopped after about six hours. I kept going to the bathroom and wiping and wiping, even when the toilet paper burned a light pink. The image of that dark red clot in the bathtub drain flashed into my mind, making me run to the toilet one more time, to change my pad and wipe again, just to see if anything had changed. Nothing. I was sore down there, and my abdomen still felt a pulse of contractions with the cramps. I waited until Val had left for her evening class before I grabbed my phone that had been 33