“Are you—?”
“No,” she says, in a heated whisper. “But I thought I might be. But then I got my period on Monday.”
“So you did it…without protection?”
“You don’t exactly plan these things, you know,” Maggie says defensively. “And he’s always pulled out.”
“Oh, Maggie.” Even if I haven’t had actual sex, I know quite a bit about the theories behind it, the number one fact being that the pull-out method is known not to work. And Maggie should know this too. “Aren’t you on the pill?”
“Well, I’m trying to be.” She grimaces. “That’s why I have to go to this doctor in East Milton.”
East Milton is right next to our town, but it’s supposedly filled with crime, and nobody goes there. They don’t even go through it, under any circumstances. Honestly, I can’t believe there’s even a doctor’s office there. “How did you find this doctor anyway?”
“The Yellow Pages.” I can tell by the way she says it that she’s lying. “I called up and I got an appointment for twelve thirty today. And you have to go with me. You’re the only person I can trust. I mean, I can’t exactly go with Walt, can I?”
“Why can’t you go with Peter? He’s the person who’s responsible for all this, right?”
“He’s kind of pissed at me,” Maggie says. “When he found out I might be pregnant he freaked out and didn’t talk to me for twenty-four hours.”
There is something about this whole scenario that just isn’t making sense. “But, Maggie,” I counter, “when I saw you on Sunday afternoon, you said you’d had sex with Peter for the first time—”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I don’t remember.” She grabs a handful of toilet paper and puts it over her face.
“It wasn’t the first time, was it?” I say. She shakes her head. “You’d slept with him before.”
“That night after The Emerald,” she admits.
I nod slowly. I walk to the tiny window and look out. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, Carrie, I couldn’t,” she cries. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you, but I was scared. I mean, what if people found out? What if Walt found out? Everyone would think I was a slut.”
“I would never think you were a slut. I wouldn’t think you were a slut if you slept with a hundred men.”
This makes her giggle. “Do you think a woman can sleep with a hundred men?”
“I think she could, if she worked really, really hard at it. I mean, you’d have to sleep with a different guy every week. For two years. You practically wouldn’t have time for anything but sex.”
Maggie throws away the tissue and looks at herself in the mirror as she pats cold water on her face. “That sounds just like Peter. All he thinks about is sex.”
No kidding. Hell. Who knew nerdly old Peter was such a stud?
The doctor’s office should be fifteen minutes away, but thirty minutes have passed and we still can’t find it. So far we’ve nearly backed into two cars, driven over four curbs, and run over a handful of french fries. Maggie insisted we stop at McDonald’s on the way, and when we got our food into the car, she lurched out of the parking lot with so much force all my french fries flew out the window.
Enough! I want to scream. But I can’t do that—not when I’m trying to get one of my best friends to a crackpot doctor’s office to get a prescription for birth control pills. So when I look at my watch and see that it’s past twelve thirty, I gently suggest we stop at a gas station.
“Why?” Maggie asks.
“They have maps.”
“We don’t need a map.”
“What are you, a guy?” I open the glove compartment and look inside in despair. It’s empty. “Besides, we need cigarettes.”
“My goddamn mother,” Maggie says. “She’s trying to quit. I hate when she does that.”
Luckily, the cigarette issue distracts us from the fact that we are lost, we are in the most dangerous town in Connecticut, and we are losers. Enough to get us to a gas station anyway, where I am forced to flirt with a pimply faced attendant while Maggie takes a nervous leak in the dirty bathroom.
I show the attendant the piece of paper with the address on it. “Oh, sure,” he says. “That street is right around the corner.” Then he starts making shadow figures on the side of the building.
“You’re really good at doing a bunny,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “I’m going to quit this job soon. Going to do shadow figures at kids’ parties.”
“I’m sure you’ll have a huge clientele.” All of a sudden, I’m feeling kind of sentimental toward this sweet, pimply faced guy who wants to do shadow figures at children’s parties. He’s so different from anyone at Castlebury High. Then Maggie comes out and I hustle her into the car, making my hand into a barking dog shape as we peel out of there.
“What was that about?” Maggie asks. “The hand. Since when do you do shadow puppets?”
Ever since you decided to have sex and didn’t tell me, I want to say, but don’t. Instead I say, “I’ve always done them. You just never noticed.”
The address for the doctor’s office is on a residential street with tiny houses crammed right next to one another. When we get to number 46, Maggie and I look at each other like this can’t be right. It’s just another house—a small, blue ranch with a red door. Behind the house we discover another door with a sign next to it that reads, doctor’s office. But now that we’ve finally found this doctor, Maggie is terrified. “I can’t do it,” she says, slumping onto the steering wheel. “I can’t go in.”
I know I should be peeved at her for making me come all the way to East Milton for nothing, but instead, I know exactly how she’s feeling. Wanting to cling to the past, wanting to be the way you always were, too scared to move forward into the future. I mean, who knows what’s in the future? On the other hand, it’s probably too late to go back.
“Look,” I say. “I’ll go inside and check it out. If it’s okay, I’ll come back and get you. If I’m not back in five minutes, call the police.”
Taped to the door is a piece of paper that says, knock loudly. I knock loudly. I knock so loudly, I nearly bruise my knuckles.
The door opens a crack, and a middle-aged woman wearing a nurse’s uniform sticks her head out. “Yes?”
“My friend is here for an appointment.”
“For what?” she says.
“Birth control pills?” I whisper.
“Are you the friend?” she demands.
“No,” I say, taken aback. “My friend is in the car.”
“She’d better come in quickly. Doctor has his hands full today.”
“Okay,” I say, and nod. My head is like one of those bobble things truckers put on their dashboards.
“Either get your ‘friend’ or come in,” the nurse says.
I turn around and wave to Maggie. And for once in her life, she actually gets out of the car.
We go in. We’re in a tiny waiting room that was maybe the breakfast room in the original