No Plan B

Originally published in New Feathers Anthology, July 2022

A woman walking her dog on the side of a road picked up a piece of trash nested among the high grass and dandelions. It was a broken pill casing with Plan B in black print on silver. She dropped it as if she had found a used condom, momentarily disgusted by the vision of sex and bodies and fluids this piece of plastic and aluminum foil implied. A choice had been made; one she did not have when she was a woman still able to have children. Or perhaps it wasn’t a choice at all. She tucked the discarded casing in her pocket and walked on.

Minutes before, a girl, a high school senior whose first name was a masculine last name, let the empty pill pack fly from the passenger window of her best friend’s car. The car was an early graduation gift, and the girl was jealous of her friend, but not in that moment. She had something on her mind. She pressed her finger on a clear plastic bubble forcing a small, white pill through the foil backing. Her nails were short. They were usually long and painted the same shade of pink as the azaleas over which her mom obsessed, but they had been picked bare and chewed raw.

Headache? Her friend thought she had taken a Tylenol.

Yeah. The girl popped the pill in her mouth and took a swig of her friend’s tepid Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with too much milk and six pumps of vanilla syrup. It was so thick she did not feel the pill go down, so she drank more for assurance. It made her stomach shudder with the same threat to throw up she felt last night, which she also felt this morning. When they got to swim practice, she would get water. She would drink it, be submerged in it, and hope the high-octane chlorine of the pool would kill anything her molten shower missed.  

Five miles before, the girl and her friend had stopped for coffee, their Saturday morning ritual before swim practice. The girl usually needed the caffeine to perform, but was already alight with nervous energy, and feared any more artificial stimulation would make her jump out of her own skin. They separated, the friend to get coffee, the girl into the pharmacy next door for something. They would meet back at the car.

The automatic accordion doors opened and the smell of discount circular ink and Band-Aids reawakened her nausea. The bright displays of REVLON, Maybelline, Wet n’ Wild failed to capture her attention from the Family Planning sign near the pharmacy. She walked the aisle cataloging opposite consequences. It was a terrifying collection. There were bulb syringes and tubes for parents to suck snot with their own mouths, bulk packages of ninety-six diapers stuffed as firm as her memory foam pillow, and bibs with smiling giraffes holding cutlery. Her jaw numbed and she turned away from the reminders of snot, poop, and drool.

There was no gap between bringing up baby and preventing baby. Teething remedies, grape-flavored pain relief, and ear-ache drops were next to Trojans and SKYNs and six-pack black and gold boxes promising pleasure as if not wearing a condom at all. These boxes lied if what her boyfriend said last night was true – that they were like wearing a plastic bag on his dick, a Hefty heavy-duty bag, not an ethereal grocers produce bag.

The shelf with the tag Plan B Emergency Contraceptive, $49.99, was empty. She peered into the almond-colored, spring-loaded opening roughly the size of a deck of cards like Alice looking through the key-hole of a locked door. She searched for an alternative, a generic, a knock-off that promised not getting knocked up. When she got too close to the faces of babies on formula cans and Huggies pull-ups, she darted back to the end of the aisle and started over. If she couldn’t find it, her swimming scholarship, her near perfect GPA, her award-winning feminist essay to the school’s newspaper, and her countless hours of volunteerism would all be worthless. As would be the acceptance letter to her first-choice university tacked on the kitchen cork board. No, she was going to that university. There was no plan B. There had to be Plan B.

Behind the pharmacy counter, a dark-haired man and a middle-aged mom-type wore white lab coats. The girl advanced slowly, forming a strategy to catch the woman and not the man as they went about scanning and searching their book-shelves of medications. They dropped orange pill bottles into white paper bags and stapled instructions to the side with a crisp crunch-snap, and filed them away alphabetically. When the man came close, the girl studied the banners about free flu shots and blood pressure tests with utmost interest. When the woman came close, the girl approached the counter.

May I help you? The mom-type’s blonde hair was coiled high and a wrist tattoo peeked from beneath her lab coat sleeve. When the girl asked for Plan B, the woman didn’t flinch, her eyes didn’t flicker to the girls’ stomach, but her smile loitered too long. We keep it behind here.

Thank God. Thank God, thank God, thank God. Scan. Beep.

Do you need a bag? The girl began to insert her mom’s MasterCard into the chip reader. That would be bad. She put it away and took out the cash her boyfriend gave her last night after the fact, smoothing out the bills before handing them over. Outside the pharmacy doors, she separated the pill pack from the box and jammed it in the overstuffed receptacle where mile-long receipts fluttered like streamers from its open mouth. She didn’t need to read the literature, she knew what the pill did, she trusted the science.

What’s taking so long? Her friend had come looking for her.

An hour before, the best friend honked from the driveway and the girl waved out her bedroom window. She pulled on her one-piece from the start of the season, the one she wore before she lost a few pounds, the one that didn’t separate her labia. Her boyfriend liked the tighter one, but she couldn’t think of pleasing him now, she didn’t want the synthetic fabric on her skin at all. She peed again, as she had four times already, to get everything out. She needed energy for practice and microwaved an instant oatmeal, but couldn’t eat it. After she left her boyfriend’s last night, dread settled in her stomach like a brick, or unwanted child, and the surge to throw up hadn’t subsided.

The night before, my parents are out of town was whispered in her ear. This was nothing new. They had had sex. Protected sex. They had been dating the whole school year. She had the green light to graduate. His light was yellow. Assignments due. He was figuring things out.

I’ll miss you. She’d miss him too. They weren’t breaking up; he would come to visit, if he had the time. He might take a year off, drive cross-country with his brother. His brother didn’t go to college and lived on his own and had a job. She had been to parties at his brother’s apartment and saw the appeal of freedom. But unlimited freedom bred limited choices, at least that’s what her father said. She wanted all the choices.

Why so far? Because. Because the reasons were reasons he did not understand. She wasn’t going anywhere, but her first choice, her dream school. She described to him the tall brick buildings with sandstone arches, the atriums where hundreds of student voices came together in a chorus of ideas and collaboration. The dorms left something to be desired, but she could see beyond the one-hundred-eighty square foot room with cement block walls and one window. She could get over living with a complete stranger, because it was a stranger who wanted what she wanted.

The boyfriend complained about her leaving, like he complained about the time she gave to her clubs, to swimming, to studying. He complained he didn’t like the way the condom felt. It was really bad for him. One time wasn’t a big deal. He didn’t know she was too scared to say yes when her mom asked if she wanted to go on birth control, because that would be admitting she was having sex. He didn’t know she was scared to say no to him now.

Printed anthology available for puchase at www.bookshop.org