Chapter Nine #2
I couldn’t even hang out with Eunjin, because Annelise was demanding all of her attention.
Her arm was looped around Eunjin’s and she was pulling her around the room to introduce her to everyone.
I wondered why Annelise was so oddly enamored with my friend.
Of course, it probably had to do with how talented and pretty she was, but I also wondered if Eunjin’s whiteness, albeit partial, played a role in Annelise’s acceptance.
Acceptance, not integration; I knew that Annelise still saw Eunjin as exotic, as some form of an “other,” just to an acceptable degree.
Then my thoughts shifted to Laura. I wondered if she too would get along with Annelise.
I wondered if she would find herself mingling effortlessly with the rest of the crowd.
Laura was of course not at all white, but it appeared to me that her privilege in the form of a private school upbringing and familial wealth offered her a proximity to whiteness that would be equivalent to if not stronger than Eunjin’s actual whiteness.
If I were to try to quantify privilege, how much more money would Eunjin need to surpass Laura’s status?
I could safely assume Laura was in the top 0.
1 percent. Did that mean Eunjin would need to be in the top 1 percent? Top 2 percent?
I stood up to grab more food, but my stomach began to feel nauseous.
I immediately suspected the foie gras. I knew I should not have eaten so much of it; I knew there was probably a good reason it was banned in so many countries.
I rushed to the bathroom just as someone was exiting, cutting in front of a guy who clearly had been waiting for his turn.
“Sorry, I’m sick,” I managed to mutter before slamming the door and kneeling in front of the toilet.
After I had puked out all of the contents of my stomach and wiped the mess from the bathroom tiles, I made my way to Eunjin, who was standing with Annelise and a few other women who looked like different versions of Annelise. I told her I was going home.
“I just puked in the bathroom,” I whispered in her ear. “Can you check if it smells bad?”
“Oh my god. Are you okay? And sure, will do.”
“I think I’m fine. Must’ve eaten something bad. Did you have the foie gras?”
“Yeah. I had a ton of it. I feel fine though.”
“Weird.”
“Super weird. I hope you feel better, and let me know if you need anything.”
I clutched my stomach while taking the train back to campus.
I refreshed Laura’s profile on my phone.
No new updates. God, I felt like such a fucking loser.
What the hell was I doing? Constantly refreshing Instagram, enrolling in History of the Modern Middle East—all over a girl who couldn’t care less about me.
When I finally reached my dorm, I climbed into bed and immediately fell asleep.
—
When I woke up, it was already 10:00 a.m. I slept for almost twelve hours.
“Shit,” I said when I looked at my phone.
Alex’s capstone presentation was in twenty minutes and I had promised to attend.
And more than that—I wanted to attend. Alex had been preparing for this presentation for months, and it represented the culmination of everything they’d learned from their art history degree.
I scrambled around my room to make sure I had everything I needed.
While changing out of my pajamas, I skimmed through my unread texts from Eunjin.
Eunjin: hey, want to grab brunch before Alex’s thing? I was thinking Ferris?
Eunjin: just knocked on your door that would be ridiculous.
I had gotten my period pretty recently. Actually, was it that recent?
When was the last time I got my period? I pulled up my tracking app. It was six weeks ago. Fuck.
I stopped at Duane Reade on my way to Alex’s event.
I didn’t skimp on the pregnancy tests. I’ve made that mistake before.
A five-dollar stick from freshman year resulted in “Inconclusive,” causing me to waste two hours waiting for a walk-in appointment at the campus clinic the week before finals.
The doctor’s test came back negative, and my period arrived a day later.
The event was held in a building on 120th and Amsterdam.
I was on 114th and Broadway, six blocks and one avenue away.
I rushed past the slow walkers, and even some brisk walkers who, under different circumstances, wouldn’t have annoyed me.
Once I reached the building, I was out of breath, and felt my lungs burn even more as I sped up the stairs to the third floor, entering a classroom of about fifty students sitting on rows of metal folding chairs.
The first presenter had just started. A couple of students from the audience glared as I walked in.
My shoes were making too much noise, a characteristic that I inconveniently had not noticed until that point.
I took a seat close to the doors and near the back of the room.
Eunjin was sitting in the front row next to Leah.
I looked through old text messages with Alex to pull up the schedule of the event.
Fifteen students, all members of the honors program for the art history department, would each be presenting a five-minute summary on their work.
The first person just finished to a round of applause, and the second student was setting up her slides on the projector.
Alex was third on the list. There was always the chance that the second one would end early, and Alex would be on in just a couple of minutes.
I wanted to stay and pay attention to the presentation, but the pregnancy test sitting inside my backpack was burning a hole in my willpower.
I squirmed in my seat and fidgeted with my hands until I finally couldn’t take it anymore.
The women’s room was located just next to the classroom, close enough that I could still hear the speaker.
By the time the student presenter had introduced herself as Madeline, I was already sitting on the toilet seat in the handicap stall.
As she began to thank her advisor, I was tearing open the cardboard box.
As she started talking about Bruegel’s influence on late-sixteenth-century Flemish art, I was already pulling out the plastic stick.
As she said to the audience, “I’m sure everyone here is familiar with The Hunters in the Snow,” I was already reading through the instructions in the manual.
Easy enough. I emptied a fraction of my bladder on each of the three sticks.
All three manuals said fifteen minutes, but I couldn’t stay in the bathroom for fifteen minutes.
I exited the stall. There was a shelf underneath the row of sinks filled with stacks of unopened toilet paper.
I moved a couple of rolls to the front and placed the sticks behind them, checking from all angles that they wouldn’t be visible to passersby.
I set a silent timer on my phone for fifteen minutes.
By the time I returned to the classroom, the crowd was applauding for Madeline.
Alex stood up from their seat in the front row and began to set up.
I paid enough attention to their presentation that I knew it had something to do with queer identity in Renaissance art, but I couldn’t tell you the particular artists they mentioned or the pieces of art.
The timer counted down in my pocket like a bomb.
—
The next day I purchased three more pregnancy tests.
It was a waste of money. I had spent the morning sitting inches away from the toilet on the cool linoleum floor, clutching my stomach in anticipation of the next round of puking, praying no one would walk in.
Thankfully, no one had. My breasts felt tender, swollen, almost numb.
I spent thirty dollars to confirm a result that my body itself had already confirmed.
Three sets of twin lines, six if you counted the ones I’d taken the day before: a mundane announcement to an extremely undesirable fate.
The same unpleasant sight that had greeted me the day before. Positive. I was pregnant.
It was just another example that things weren’t working out the way they were supposed to.
I didn’t get into Harvard, and now it turned out I was pregnant.
If my life were a book, this chapter would be written in passive voice.
I was rejected by Harvard. I was cursed with a pregnancy.
I no longer did anything; things were done to me.
I tried to imagine my body as a vessel for human life.
I pictured the seed, mucus, whatever you wanted to call it, growing inside my abdomen, nurtured by my own bodily functions.
The food I ate, the water I drank, were no longer mine, but partly diverted to sustaining this new creature.
It was a biological function that I understood from high school anatomy class, but not one I could wrap my head around in practice.
I felt far more akin to a child than to a mother.
When I imagined a doctor extracting these cells from my body, I felt no hint of pain or remorse.
It didn’t appear to me that I would be losing something fundamental to who I was, or who evolution had dictated I would be, but that I would be receiving treatment for a condition to return my body to its default state.
The object growing inside me didn’t feel natural, but the idea of its removal did.
It felt counterintuitive to everything I had learned about abortion growing up.
Of course, the town I grew up in was predominantly conservative, and in eighth grade, when we were asked to present an opinion on a controversial topic, everyone who picked abortion was arguing on the side of why it should be banned.
But even pro-choice media seemed to imply that though the choice belonged to women, it was not an easy choice—that it’d have lasting psychological and physiological impact, that it’d require navigating internal and external turmoil.
From a biological standpoint, the object inside me was far from a living being.
It was barely an object, just a cluster of cells that would continue to multiply, which could just as well disappear without conscious interference on my end.
There was no scientific justification for why someone would think of this as human life.
As a result, I always treated this consideration as an emotional one.
But my own emotions weren’t making this consideration.
As I researched abortion centers in my area, I never once felt that I was making a decision about human life, or even the potential of one.
Perhaps if my pregnancy were later-stage I would feel differently, but in the present moment, my decision was unambiguous. I would get an abortion.