Chapter 5 Willow
WILLOW
The first time I threw up, I blamed the peanuts.
Charleston in September is a humidity you can drink, and I’m old enough to know better than to eat bags of boiled peanuts from the Charleston market, their age and condition mysterious.
But one of the regulars at the market, who often trolls the place for local art, had offered a hundred dollars for something I painted—not a woven basket or a benne wafer or a duck call carved from a shell or whatever other tourist traps were available, but my art—and he had tossed in a bag of boiled peanuts to sweeten the deal.
Besides the kindness of the gesture, I was weak and starving after a day in the shaded, but not air conditioned, shotgun-style complex.
And so I took them and ate them, and by midnight, I was on my knees in my tiny bathroom, forehead against the cool tile and stomach in my throat, promising God or an oyster god if there was one or Poseidon or Bill Murray or whoever needed promises from someone like Willow Abel that I would pray or stop praying…
by the end of it I felt like I had no guts or liner inside me and all that was left was a series of desperate promises made.
This time, there are no peanuts to blame.
Cheyenne is sitting on the edge of my bathtub, scrolling on her phone as if my stomach isn’t staging a full-scale mutiny, her foot bumping the bottom of the toilet, too close to my head, with each laugh.
I look up at her, hoping my eyes are doing the growling, and Cheyenne slowly locks her phone and sets it face down on her lap. “Sorry,” she murmurs.
“It’s…fine,” I mutter between retches—Cheyenne dutifully leans forward and holds back my hair as I punctuate them by spitting. “I’m just fighting for my life here is all.”
She rubs my back in circles. “It’s probably just a bug. There’s something going around at Dylan’s office. And you’re around a lot of people at the market.”
I push off the floor, my hands so clammy they’re almost slippery, and make my way to the sink to rinse out my mouth.
Looking back at me is a face that I almost don’t recognize—a pallor so deathly it almost spooks me.
My hair is scraped into a knot, my eyes shadowed, and my cheekbones sharp with dehydration.
“Yeah, probably. I usually get over it faster than this…” I trail off, thinking about how long it’s actually been, trying to do the math.
She lifts one eyebrow. “How long have you been nauseated, babe?” she asks, appearing behind me in the mirror. I recognize a certain shimmer in her eyes that tells me she’s cooking up something in her head, something I’m not sure I even want to know about.
“Well, the first time I threw up was two weeks ago. I mean, it’s not constant, but it hasn’t really gone away since then,” I respond, splashing cold water onto my face.
“And you gagged when I opened the dishwasher.”
“It smelled like a swamp,” I say automatically, waving my hand at her, “Besides, what’s your point?
I have dishwasher-nausea disease?” Cheyenne doesn’t respond, pulling her lips together while she watches me in the mirror with a precision that seems to send her thoughts directly into my head.
Her quiet, ridiculous, earth-shifting thoughts.
I grip the edge of the sink so hard my fingertips turn white and I scrape the word out. “No.”
Cheyenne has been my best friend since I was a kid—she’s the only person besides my sister and my mom who has met my dad—and knows how I look when I deny things. “When was your last period?” she asks gently.
“Chey, I have an IUD in. There’s no way—”
“When.”
I count backward. The days slide and bump, slippery with work shifts, laundry, a busted AC unit, and the trades that people make with me at my booth.
The cruise feels like a dream I had in color—ocean and laughter and a suite that didn’t belong to me and three men with accents like music.
I didn’t count days on the ship. I didn’t count anything.
“Five weeks ago, I think. Seven. Eight?” My voice comes out small.
“Does that happen sometimes?” she asks, and I shake my head, not able to open my mouth to answer, feeling that tears will spill out if I do.
She doesn’t say I told you so. She doesn’t have to.
Instead, she closes her phone, stands, and tucks a curl behind my ear the way she does when I’m about to cry.
“Okay. We’re not spiraling yet. Like you said, you have an IUD. You shower. I’ll go to CVS.”
“What about Dylan? Isn’t he expecting you back home soon?”
“I’ve known you longer.” She winks, closing the door behind her.
When she’s gone, I sink to the bathroom rug and lean my head against the cabinet.
Memories of the cruise roll through me—the deck at dusk, string lights against the sky, Sean’s smile cutting quick and wicked, Declan’s hands careful, Rowan’s eyes serious even when his mouth wasn’t.
The way I felt wanted, surrounded instead of consumed.
The way we laughed like we were getting away with something.
Then Miami, the bright slap of sunshine, and me walking with my chin up because looking back felt like breaking a rule I hadn’t read.
No numbers exchanged, because what would we do with them?
Text good morning across time zones? Rotate schedules and bodies and hope the world made space for something that felt like a secret language at sea?
I thought leaving would fold it all back into the category of reckless vacation decisions. A story we’d tell and then outgrow.
I didn’t plan on my body taking notes.
The shower helps. Hot water hammers my shoulders, and for a minute, I can pretend my life is just smaller than my thoughts—two rooms, thrifted furniture, a string of postcards on the fridge door reminding me to be brave.
My palms flatten against slick tile. My stomach churns once, twice, and then settles.
If I don’t move too fast, if I breathe through my mouth, I might make it to the next hour without kneeling to the porcelain god again.
Cheyenne returns like a hurricane through the front door, a grocery bag rustling, the sharp, clean scent of drugstore aisles sneaking down the hallway. “I brought options,” she calls. “Also, saltines and ginger ale because I’m an excellent nurse.”
I step out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. She lays the bag on my bed and starts taking things out like a magician unveiling a deck of cards. Two pink boxes. One blue. Digital. Manual. A paper cup. She’s thought of everything, and the thoughtfulness makes a lump in my throat.
“I can’t do this. Not alone,” I say, the words an exhale.
She looks up. “I’ll do it too.”
We take the test like teenagers. I sit on the toilet, pee squeezing out of me between laughs, and Cheyenne squats in the bathtub.
I keep stealing glances of her and folding over myself laughing all over again.
When our cups are full and the tests that have to be flat are peed on, we read the instructions carefully for each test and set timers.
We sit on the floor with our knees touching and our hands linked, and we don’t look at the counter.
“You know,” she says after a minute, voice too bright, “if it is positive, it could be one of those false things? Or a chemical thing? Or…are there false positives? I don’t remember.”
“I don’t know,” I say. Everything I know about fertilized eggs is from YouTube.
Our high school didn’t even have a sex ed class.
To me, it’s all just an astonishing audacity that the body makes anything at all.
I know it happens to other people. I never really imagined being one of those people.
I never imagined a man I could be pregnant by or raise a family with, certainly never imagined doing it alone.
When the timer goes off, we don’t move at first. We look at each other sideways like the other one started to tell a secret. Cheyenne draws in a steadying breath. “Okay. Ready?”
“No,” I say. She squeezes my hand and lets go to crawl over to the sink anyway. She looks back at me with a face that already tells me the truth. “No,” I say again, and that nausea I’ve been quelling starts to make an appearance again.
With shaky legs and the help of my best friend, I stand and peek to confirm.
Two lines on three of the tests. But the digital test is awful in its finality, the word “pregnant” glowing at me. “No,” I repeat again, and then it’s all I can say, over and over. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
My hands find Cheyenne’s waist and squeeze like I can borrow her solidity. A thought darts out, cruel and practical. Three men. Three. And me without a phone number for any of them. I pull back and press the heels of my hands into my eyes until stars spark. “Chey.”
“I know. We’ll figure it out.” She cups my face and makes me meet her eyes. “First step—doctor. You need bloodwork. You need someone to tell you something more than a strip can say.”
I swallow. “I’m not ready.”
“You don’t have to be ready,” she says. “You just have to go.”