“Right. I was going to get it after school. There’s a Planned Parenthood in St. Davids.” I held my breath as I waited for his reaction. To my great surprise he said, “I’ll figure out a way to get us there.”

Liam secured us a ride with Dave, Bradley’s very own personal chauffeur, even though we could have easily taken the train, could have avoided one more person knowing about the humiliating turn my life had taken in the last sixty-four hours. Sixty-four hours—I still had eight hours left.

The trees were just starting to shed, and through their spare limbs I caught a glimpse of Arthur’s house as the car hiccuped over speed bumps, before making a right onto Montgomery Ave. I wasn’t so desperate for him now, not with Liam glancing back at me from the front seat, asking not once but twice how I was doing. Some very small, frenzied part of me wished that we were too late, that my period wouldn’t come next month, that the drama, the “What should we do?” that connected us now could last a little bit longer. I understood that, when it was gone, Liam would be too.

We maneuvered onto Lancaster Ave, and from there it was a straight shot. Dave made a right into the parking lot, but, instead of finding a spot, he just pulled up to the entrance of the clinic and unlocked the doors.

“I’m going to drive around for a bit,” Dave said as I climbed out of the backseat.

“No, man,” Liam said, nervously, stepping onto the pavement and next to me. “Just wait.”

“No way.” Dave pulled the gear stick into drive. “Crazy people always want to bomb this place.”

Liam slammed the car door shut much harder than he meant to, I’m sure.

The waiting room was mostly empty, save for a few sets of women scattered among the chairs along the walls. Liam found a seat furthest away from the nearest occupant, wiping his palms on his khakis and glancing around, accusingly.

I approached the receptionist and spoke through the opening in the glass divider. “Hi. I don’t have an appointment or anything, but is there someone here I could see?”

The woman pushed a clipboard through the opening. “Fill this out. Indicate the reason for your visit.”

I plucked a pen from an old 76ers McDonald’s cup and settled into the seat next to Liam, who peered over my shoulder at the form.

“What did she say?”

“I’m just supposed to write down the reason I’m here.”

I started to fill in the boxes. Name, age, DOB, sex, address, and signature. In the space next to the words “Reason for your visit today,” I scrawled, “Morning-after pill.”

When I got to the part that asked me for my emergency contact, I looked at Liam.

He shrugged. “Sure.” He removed the clipboard from my lap and settled it in his. Next to “Relationship to the patient,” he wrote, “Friend.”

I got up and passed the clipboard back to the woman at the front desk, now blurry behind the filmy pane of tears. The word “friend” was lodged in my stomach like a knife, like the paper-thin Shun I’d envision splicing my fiancé’s kidneys one day.

Fifteen minutes passed before the white door opened and I heard my name. Liam crossed his eyes at me and gave me a thumbs-up, a goofy expression, like he was distracting a small child from the tetanus shot she was about to get. I managed a brave smile for him.

I followed the nurse into an examining room and scooted onto the table. Another ten minutes passed before the door opened and a woman entered, blond hair fine and cropped close to her neck, a stethoscope draped leisurely around her neck. She frowned at me. “TifAni?”

I nodded and the doctor placed my file on the counter and paused over it, her eyes walking back and forth across my information.

“When did you have sex?”

“Friday.”

She looked at me. “Friday when?”

“Some time around midnight.” Apparently.

She nodded, lifting the stethoscope off her shoulders and pressing it to my chest. While she examined me, she explained what the morning-after pill was. “Not an abortion,” she reminded me, twice. “If the sperm has already implanted the egg, it won’t do anything.”

“Do you think it has?” I asked, my heart pumping harder for her to hear.

“There is no way for me to know that,” she apologized. “We do know that it’s most effective when taken as close to the intimate encounter as possible.” She glanced at the clock above my head. “You are on the cusp of the cutoff, but you did make it.” She slipped the stethoscope underneath my shirt and pressed it into my back. With a soothing sigh, she said, “Deep breath.” In another life, she could have been a hipster yoga instructor in Brooklyn.

She finished examining me, told me to hang tight. There had been a question burning in my throat for the last ten minutes, but it was her reaching for the handle of the door that forced me to say it.

“Is it rape if you can’t remember what happened?”

The doctor opened her mouth, as though she was about to gasp “Oh no.” Instead she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it, “I’m not qualified to answer that question.” She slipped out of the room soundlessly.

Several more minutes ticked by before the nurse, her peppiness especially noticeable in the wake of her cool, serene superior, returned, a brown paper lunch bag full of brightly colored condoms bunched underneath her arm, a prescription bottle in one hand and a glass of water in the other.

“Take six right now.” She shook six pills into my clammy palm and watched me chase them down with water. “And six twelve hours from now.” She looked at her watch. “So set your alarm for four A.M.” She shook the paper bag at me, teasingly. “And being careful can be fun! Some of these even glow in the dark.” I took the bag from her, all that careful fun rattling around inside, mocking me with its fluorescent futility.

Liam wasn’t in the waiting room when I returned, and the paper bag went damp and flimsy in my hand as it occurred to me that he might have taken off.

“I was here with someone,” I said to the woman at the front desk. “Did you see where he went?”

“I think he stepped outside,” she replied. I caught a glimpse of the doctor behind her, the blond hairs gnarled around her neck like a claw.

Liam was outside, sitting on the curb.

“What are you doing?” It came out shrill. I heard Mom in it.

“I couldn’t be in there any longer. I felt like they thought I was gay or something.” He stood and brushed dirt off his butt. “You get what you need?”

I would have welcomed some crazy’s bomb going off in that moment. One last tragedy that would anchor Liam to me. I pictured him rushing me, covering my body with his as fiery shards of building sphered through the air. No screams at first, everyone too stunned, too singularly focused on just surviving. That would be the most surprising lesson I’d learn at Bradley: You only scream when you’re finally safe.

CHAPTER 7

I feel like I’m in the south of France!” Mom lifted her champagne flute.

I almost didn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. “It’s Prosecco,” I sneered.

“So?” Mom set her glass on the table. A lipstick mark, so pink it was embarrassing, printed the rim.

“Prosecco is Italian.”

“Tastes like champagne to me!”

Luke laughed, and his parents joined in gratefully. He was always doing that, saving Mom and me from ourselves.

“And with this view you certainly can’t tell the difference between France and the States,” added Kimberly, our wedding planner, who corrected Mom every time she called her Kim, which was every time. She swept her hand out in a grand gesture, and we all turned to look at the Harrisons’ backyard as though we hadn’t seen it a million times before, the lime green grass that ended sharply at the ocean’s horizon, so that after a few Dark and Stormys, it appeared as though you could waltz straight out onto the water even though it was a thirty-foot drop to the sand. There was a splintered staircase embedded in the side of the earth, twenty-three steps to the bitter tongue of the Atlantic. I refused to wade in any deeper than my kneecaps, convinced it was churning with great whites. Luke thought this was hilarious and loved to swim deep, his perfect stroke taking him further and further out in the frosty water. Eventually, he’d turn, his head bobbing like a blond apple, raising one freckly arm in the air and beckoning to me. “Ani! Ani!” Even though terror was ripping my insides apart, I’d be a good sport and wave—he would only go out further and stay out longer if I revealed one iota of fear. If a shark got him, held him under until blood formed a film on the surface of the water like a magenta oil spill, I would be too afraid to go in after him. Afraid for my own life, sure, but just as much afraid of the carnage of his body, the leg missing beneath the knee, a jagged edge of bloody muscles and veins, the sweet, musky odor the body emits when it’s been opened like that. I smell it still, even though fourteen years have gone by. It’s like a few molecules have been trapped in my nasal passages, the neurons reminding my brain any time I almost forget.